Category Archives: Europe

Brexit and the Rue Daru Break-Up: How Politics Strangely Mirrors Church Life

Brexit and the USA

For nearly fifty years it was virtually impossible to get a job in the British diplomatic service if you were anti-Common Market (later called the EEC, then the EC and finally the EU). When the alien UK Establishment turned its back on the English people and the English-speaking world and finally joined the then Common Market on I January 1973, Ireland and Denmark, whose economies depended on the UK, were also reluctantly forced to join it. Today we live in a different world. When a crassly undiplomatic (not to say inept and stupid) British Establishment diplomat in Washington insults the US President, he has to sack himself. The world has changed. Britain has turned to the USA and the stodgy old pro-EU diplomats are lost. They have not seen the way the tide has turned in the last ten years. This is a sea-change but also a return to the past; the European flow has ebbed.

The UK is about to have a Prime Minister who was born in New York and was until recently a US citizen. Shades of the half-American Churchill? The UK is about to dissolve, as the purely artificial Northern Ireland at last returns home to form the long-dreamed of United Ireland. As for Scotland, it will inevitably regain its independence after over 300 years, leaving Wales to become independent. As for England, enslaved to upper middle-class Norman Britain for nearly 1,000 years but the eighth largest economy in the world, it is about to abandon Continental Europe after the Establishment’s disastrous fifty-year flirt with the EU and return to itself. Where does this leave Continental Europe? It will inevitably return to Eurasia – from which it cut itself off. It will increasingly come under the influence of the Russian Federation (China standing behind it), a Russia which is also European.

The Two Parts of the Russian Orthodox Church

All of these present events have been foretold by events in the Russian Orthodox Church. Here an American bishop from the USA has been appointed from the Russian Church in New York to Great Britain and Ireland to replace a Continental European bishop: it is a Church brexit. And so a whole diocese has been reborn under the wise direction of the Canadian-born Metropolitan Hilarion of New York. It is clear that the future of the Russian Orthodox Church here is with the New York-based ROCOR, which over the last twelve years, since Moscow and ROCOR were reconciled in 2007, has become an American-Russian Church, the Church of the English-speaking world and countries in the US ‘backyard’, like Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Haiti, other countries in Latin America, countries of Australian Oceania and now also Great Britain and soon to be reunited Ireland too.

Meanwhile, in Continental Europe at the end of 2018 the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow established an Exarchate, centred in Paris, only last Wednesday opening another new parish, this time in the Faroe Islands. (Eurasian in its double-headed essence, the Church also added nine new parishes to its South-East Asian Exarchate, in Myanmar (one), Vietnam (two), South Korea (two) and the Philippines (four)). Already with some 200 parishes, the Russian Orthodox Exarchate, dependent on Moscow, with its six bishops in Continental Western Europe, is expanding with Rue Daru priests (like the elderly and senior Fr Jean Gueit) and Rue Daru parishes joining it, as they leave the sinking Rue Daru ship. Here there is nothing new: this process has been going on for thirty years already. In the coming months there will be several more newcomers/ returnees.

This tiny group, hopelessly divided, with the ‘liberal’ side insulting its lone bishop in the true intolerant anti-episcopal Rue Daru tradition, has to choose: to be faithful to the Russian Tradition, which it used to claim to belong to, or join the ‘Euroliberal Tradition’ of Constantinople, which the Institut Saint Serge and the Bussy Convent have already chosen. That suicidal and schismatic path is for those who have no tradition, typical of the equally suicidal EU, which has abandoned the Christian Tradition and so has no tradition. Those who choose the Russian Tradition will live and prosper. And this is true for Continental Europe in other senses too. The choice has become clear: either return to your Christian roots or become an irrelevant schizophrenic secularist/Muslim backwater. The EU ship, like the Rue Daru ship, is sinking: stop rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, it is too late.

 

75 Years Since D-Day

I well remember how on the 22nd anniversary of D-Day, 6/6/66, my mother told me that on that day in 1944 she saw the skies of southern England turn black with aeroplanes. This was D-Day, the greatest naval operation and invasion, 6,000 vessels and 9,000 aircraft, of all time. Tens of thousands of young men were to die in the following three months, together with 20,000 French civilians, tragically killed, mainly by notoriously indiscriminate Allied bombing.

This Allied invasion did liberate Western Europe from the Nazis, a liberation which would have happened anyway, but by the Red Army. Instead of fighting its way from Stalingrad only to Berlin, it would instead inevitably have fought its way from Stalingrad to the shores of Normandy, no doubt by the early summer of 1945 after its conquest of Berlin in early May 1945. Thus, with D-Day, instead of being occupied by the red star of the Soviet Union (SU), Western Europe was occupied by the white star of the United States (US).  The speed of  Allied success after D-Day was greatly helped by the hugely successful Soviet Operation Bagration which began, as had been agreed in Teheran, on 22 June and greatly weakened Nazi resistance in Normandy. It can be said that the real political aim of D-Day for the US was, after having achieved its priority of domination of the Pacific, its desire to prevent the occupation of Western Europe by the victorious Soviet Union, which is why that invasion took place so late in the war.

Today, as Great Britain prepares to leave Western Europe through Brexit, pragmatically and warmly backed by the half-Scottish President Trump who has just visited London, we prepare not for an Anglo-American invasion of Western Europe, but for an Anglo-American retreat from Western Europe. Three generations have reversed the situation of 1944, but the old relationship has been renewed. What is to come is not sure, but the hand of history is upon us.

Fr Andrew

Southern England, 6 June 2019

Theresa May Not

Like a rudderless ship, the British State is once more Prime Minister-less. Soon a new leader is to be chosen, not of course by the people of anti-democratic Britain, but by 100,000 members of the Conservative Party. The myth that we have a representative democracy is over: The elitist and anti-democratic Parliament even refused to implement Brexit, the long-frustrated will of the people. If Mrs May is replaced by the ironically-named Russophobe Boris Johnson, as many expect, then two similarly-names European countries will be run by comedians: The UK and the Ukraine.

Some sentimentalists feel sorry for Mrs May. After all, as a Remainer, she showed a sense of public duty, stubborn integrity and exhausted herself in trying to implement Brexit. Perhaps. However, we cannot forget her support for oil-greedy, imperialist genocides in Iraq, Afghanistan Libya, Syria and the Ukraine, the crass and very expensive errors of her period as Home Secretary, her support for the MI5 cover-up in Salisbury, when Russians were accused of attempting to murder a young woman, the daughter of a retired (and now kidnapped and concealed from the media) British spy, who was playing with British-supplied nerve-agents in his attic, and the fact that the ambitious Mrs May, after all, wanted to become Prime Minister in the first place.

Brexit has not happened. But then the British, EU and US Establishments never wanted the people’s will to happen. Theresa May’s day turned into Theresa’s Mayday. It does not really matter. Eventually, Brexit will happen, together with Frexit, Grexit, Nexit, Dexit and every other sort of Exit, as the post-War emergency created EU inevitably breaks up. Quite simply, Britain pressed the button first: the others, having seen through the myth in their turn, will follow in time. There has only ever been one European Union and only ever will be one European Union. It is called Switzerland. The rest is political myth.

 

 

The Great Betrayal: Three Entries of Europe into Britain and Two and a Half Brexits

Yesterday the peoples of Britain were betrayed by the corrupt elite who do not represent them in Parliament. Not for the first time. In history, there have been no fewer than three invasions by Continental Europe of the main parts of or of all of the Anglo-Celtic British Isles, eventually also involving Ireland, but so far only two and a half exits of Britain from Europe (‘brexits’). These were:

43 The Political-Economic-Military Entry of Europe into Britain. (The Roman invasion of most of the island of Britain).

410 Political-Economic-Military Brexit. (The first brexit, when what is now England and Wales left the provincial fragments of the Western Roman Empire).

597 The Spiritual Entry of Europe into Britain. (The official mission of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Western Europe to convert the still pagan English).

1535 Spiritual Brexit. (The second brexit – the process of separation by Henry VIII from the new provincial Western Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic religion, a very different faith from that which had arrived in 597. This process reached its culmination between 1534 and 1536).

1066 The Political-Economic-Military Entry of Europe into Britain. (The invasion of England, later entailing all the British Isles and Ireland, by the Normans, who were purposely sent and directed by the new and highly centralized Western European control system of ‘Roman Catholicism’, the new provincial Western Roman Empire).

1940 Military Brexit. After the German rout of the hopelessly poorly-equipped British Army, the men of the latter were evacuated in an emergency operation from Dunkirk. (True, most of the troops in the US-led 1944 D-Day invasion of Europe were British, but this time they had far better and far more abundant US equipment).

2019? Political-Economic Brexit. (Supposed to have happened on the feast day of the apostle of Britain, St Aristobulus, 29 March, nobody now knows when this is going to happen. However, it will happen because the EU, ultimately created out of the US invasion of Western Europe exactly three generations ago in 1944, will inevitably collapse, for it is merely the third successor in the series of failed Pan-European control systems, or provincial Western Roman Empires. (Some never learn). The first was the provincial Western branch of the Roman Empire which collapsed during the fifth century. The second was its successor, feudal Roman Catholicism, which began its long drawn-out collapse from the sixteenth century on and whose collapse continues to this day. Now we are at the third collapse, that of the neo-feudal political-economic fantasy of the Western European elite, who are US vassals).

Civilization or Anti-Civilization, Patriots or Globalists, Christians or Anti-Christians?

 

Introduction: From Civilization to Anti-Civilization

All Civilizations are founded on spiritual inspiration. To suggest that Civilizations are founded on some natural or national principle is absurd. Such atheistic ideas, which first appeared clearly in the eighteenth century, gave rise to pantheistic nature-worship (Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ myth which led to the French Revolution) or nationalism (which led to countless wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Thus, the rejection of the spiritual always leads to the decline of a Civilization. We can see this clearly in the last 150 years in the case of Christian Civilization, supplanted by the idolatry of money in consumerist Capitalism (Mammonism). This worship of material things led to the destruction of belief in the Creator, of human-beings in genocidal wars and of nature: to an Anti-Civilization of division.

The First Division 1871-1918

After the proclamation of the Second Reich in 1871 (the First Reich had been proclaimed by Charlemagne in 800) Europe was divided between four imperialist nations: Great Britain, Germany, France and Austria-Hungary. Their nationalist and imperialist rivalry led to the German and Austro-Hungarian attack on the Russian Empire and then on Belgium and so to the First European War, known as the First World War. Their blasphemous and atheistic apostasy from the commandments, ‘Love God’, and, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, led to the deaths of millions of young men, ‘the flower of Europe’, not to mention the fall of the Russian Empire and the fall of the Germany and Austria-Hungarian monarchies. And finally this great European suicide led to the Dollar-god of the United States becoming the World Power.

The Second Division 1918-1990

After this War Europe divided into three fundamentally atheist groups according to the beliefs from which it had apostasized: the Protestant countries gave themselves up in full to the atheist worship of Mammon (Capitalism), rejecting the warning of the Holy Scriptures against worshipping God and Mammon, which Protestants had claimed to follow; the Roman Catholic countries gave themselves up in full to atheist totalitarian Fascist leaders, rejecting the totalitarian Papal leader whom they had claimed to follow as infallible; the Orthodox countries, beginning with the Russian Lands, gave themselves up to atheist Marxism, rejecting the possibility of acquiring the Holy Spirit as the aim of Christian life by destroying the monasteries, churches, clergy, monks and nuns which had dispensed the sacraments and spiritual life.

Post-Catholic Fascism was eliminated in 1945 by the post-Orthodox Communist usurper of the Russian Empire, but this was achieved not through the inhuman, bloody Georgian dictator Stalin with his insane military blunders, but through sacrificial Russian Orthodox patriotism. However, this victory took place only after the Great Holocaust, carried out by the atheistic Western ideology of Nazism. This massacred 30 million Slavs after the other atheistic Western ideology – Marxism – had already massacred many millions of Slavs, again mainly Russians. And having defeated Fascism, Marxism continued to enslave the former Russian Empire and now most of Eastern and Central Europe. Therefore, after the defeat of Fascism, the division between Communist left and Capitalist right continued for another 45 years up until 1990.

The Third Division 1990-2019

After the fall of Communism in 1990, division in Europe did not stop. However, today’s division is between the Globalists (also called Elitists) who support the so-called ‘New World Order’, first announced in 1990, and the Patriots (also called Sovereignists). The Patriots are maligned by the Globalists as ‘populists’ who look down on them sneeringly as racist xenophobes and ignorant semi-Fascists. In reality, this is only true of the extremist fringes. But the patronizing condescension of the elitists is not much concerned with truth and reality. Thus, the elitist ex-Rothschild banker and Globalist President Macron, not content with being the most unpopular President of France in history as he faces the fifteenth week of violent rioting against him, has called the Patriots ‘lepers’.

Nicknamed ‘Pharaoh’ and ‘Jupiter’ in France, this ruthlessly ambitious young man is intent on becoming the first ‘President of Europe’ after the retirement of Merkel. He is now redecorating his Paris Palace at a cost of millions of euros. If his people have no bread to eat, perhaps he will tell them ‘to eat cake’. It is against this background that the by then 27 countries of the EU will face elections in May (only 27, because in the UK Brexit was chosen by the people against the elite – in the UK, the richer you are, the more likely you are to be against Brexit; indeed both the UK and the EU elite still reproach Cameron for having offered the people the choice). Patriots are also in charge in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Malta. And now an Italo-Polish alliance has been created to challenge the Franco-German atheist alliance.

Elsewhere, EU-ravaged Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus are bankrupt. Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Belgium face huge problems with mass Muslim immigration. (Finland and Estonia refused immigrants). Spain faces the departure of Catalonia from the oppressive centralism of Madrid. (Great Britain will also soon lose Northern Ireland, but the historical injustice of that absurd division of Ireland almost a century ago would have been resolved without the EU). EU expansion to the ‘Western Balkans’ has stalled. Poverty, crime, corruption and injustice ravage the US-invented puppet-states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, (Northern) Macedonia and also Albania. These states are patrolled permanently by US NATO vassal troops, as otherwise they could not survive.

Conclusion: Whose Side Are We On?

Spiritually speaking, it has often been difficult to know with whom to side in these divisions, both past and present. Where were the Christians and where were the Non-Christians? All too often, especially in the First World War, all sides behaved like atheists. However, in the present case, the Globalists are clearly the forerunners of the coming global rule of Antichrist. And although only partial and token fragments of Christianity may remain among many Patriots, it is surely they whom we should support, for at least they are willing to defend Christianity. For us the spiritual question arises: Are we part of the Worldwide Patriotic Mission of the Russian Orthodox Church Tradition or part of the Globalist, Elitist and Patriot-hating Phanariot and spiritually empty ‘Ortholiberalism’, subsidized and propagandized by the US State Department?

 

No God’s Land

During my temporary stays in Norwich, on Sundays I used to walk from Eaton to one of the two Orthodox churches in Norwich: the Russian Orthodox Church of St Alexander Nevsky, the “Matchbox Church” and the Greek Orthodox Church of the Mother of God, the “ Two Sundays Church” (two services per month). And what do I see on Sunday mornings on this 40-minute walk to church?

People – I suppose Christians or former Christians- jogging or taking dogs for their morning walk, playing with them, or going to cafés/bars for breakfast with friends, or for some shopping or just walking, without any purpose, and looking captivated at an iPhone, a smartphone… In fact, modern man wakes up in the morning and rushes to the toilet with his phone gadget. A friend told me, joking seriously, that these people do not harm the environment, because, instead of toilet paper, they recycle old on line news screens, magazines, books…

I am passing by offices for psychiatry, hypnotherapy, crystal therapy, shiatsu, life coaching, tattooing…Such offices do not lack patients/clients…

Then follow very old churches, initially Catholic than Anglican, now closed. Motionless, silent ghosts in the daylight…There are a few exceptions: old churches still alive but the few parishioners, mostly old,  are like… ghosts!

It’s Sunday morning and I have the strange feeling of going through a no God’s land!

Our Europe, once Christian, is full of such no God’s lands and these lands are continuously multiplying, a sign that the salt is losing its savour, from West to the East, from North to South: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot by men.” (Matthew 5, 13-KJV)

Tasteless salt, our intellectuals, politicians, ministers, prime ministers, presidents, kings and queens (to the extent that they are allowed to give their opinion) and journalists, all suffer from a  continuous delirium, talking and talking of human rights, defending diversity ( diversity of sins), security, peace, money, projects, general welfare…They don’t see ( and people are following them) that indeed “… now also the axe is laid to the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.” (Matthew 3, 10- KJV)

Through a no God’s land, a Christian, conscious of his status, can pass spiritually unharmed only having permanently as companions Jesus Christ, the Mother of God, the Saints, prayer…

God help us!

Nicuşor Gliga

Norwich, 21st January 2019

 

Can the European Union Survive Until 2034?

In 1985 an island-country larger than the whole of today’s European Union left the European Community: this was an island in the Atlantic Ocean called Greenland. However, for the then European Community the departure of this then Danish colony, with a population of 50,000 and technically part of North America and not Europe, had little significance. However, the departure of the UK, now in the grip of media-encouraged panic-buying of food before Brexit, which is also an island-country in the Atlantic Ocean although far, far closer to the European mainland than Greenland, is very different.

It comes at a time when the Franco-German couple which in reality runs the European Union, under US guidance (NATO headquarters is almost next door to EU headquarters in Brussels), is in trouble. France, torn by continuing violent internal strife for over two months, is going bankrupt. Immigrant-full Germany is on the brink of recession. Both face the UK’s Brexit, caused by the extraordinarily intransigent and self-satisfied Franco-German refusal to reform the corrupt and dictatorial EU. Both now face a national and eurosceptic government in Italy, which is fed up with uncontrolled immigration from Africa, triggered by the US-sponsored Franco-British destruction of Libya.

Neither has been able to stop the civil war in Europe, in the Ukraine. They encouraged this under strict US instructions, even though they never had the slightest intention of taking the Third World Ukraine into the EU. Both face the problems of national identity-conscious Eastern Europe, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Lands. They refuse to admit any Muslim immigrants from the catastrophes inflicted in Syria and Afghanistan by US greed for oil and gas and its obsession for total control of the whole world. Eastern Europeans all lived under the tyranny of Soviet Union Mark I and do not want to live under the Soviet Union Mark II, even though it may be called the EU.

Neither has been able, with US backing, to do anything about what they call ‘the western Balkans’, whose countries it has long been hoping to recruit into its EU club. Here, Macedonia (FYROM) has been forced into changing its name to North Macedonia to stop its membership being boycotted by Greece, but this is still disputed; Serbia and so-called Kosovo are being encouraged to swap territories, but bloodshed is threatened daily; the Italian-named Montenegro is, like the largely unrecognized Kosovo, becoming a US-run colony for bandits, smugglers and illegal organ-transplanters. As for Bosnia-Herzegovina, it remains an artificial state which, like Kosovo, will depend eternally on NATO troops for its survival.

Greece and Cyprus are both bankrupt. With phenomenal rates of unemployment, the young leave. As for the three Baltics, like Romania, Bulgaria and equally corrupt Non-EU Moldova, nearly all of whose citizens have $10 Romanian or Bulgarian passports, they long ago had their factories closed down by Germany as a prerequisite to entering the EU. Only the old, who bitterly regret the collapse of the Soviet Union, and civil servants remain; the young have been forced to emigrate to Italy, France, Spain, Germany, the UK and anywhere they can make a living to survive.

What is the future for a politico-economic club, which exists only because France and Germany spent exactly three generations, seventy-five years, fighting three bloody wars against each other between 1870 and 1945? As we approach the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1945 end of their last quarrel in 2020, does the European Union make any more sense? We are not of course suggesting yet another round of tribal and xenophobic strife as in the European Wars of 1914 and 1939, but surely there must be a better way than the corrupt, overcentralized and dictatorial EU. Can the EU survive until 2034, the fiftieth anniversary of 1984? May God show us the right way out of this mess.

Three Generations and Three Approaches to Orthodox Europe

Foreword

Although this brief article concerns the future of Russian Orthodoxy in Western Europe, it also concerns any nationality of any generation in the Orthodox Diasporas, for example, in the Americas and Australia, since human psychology and human nature are the same everywhere. The only difference is that historically the Diaspora in North America is a generation older than in Western Europe, which in turn is a generation older than in Australia.

Generation One: The Ghetto

The first generation of the Russian emigration, which was born before 1917, formed the ghetto. It therefore died out. This is a suicidal mentality, common to all the Russian jurisdictions. Thus, I saw ROCOR in England destroy itself and die out between the 1970s and the 1990s. I saw the Rue Daru jurisdiction in France do the same and that of Moscow too. The first generation dreamed of returning to an idealized Russia, which no longer existed – if it ever did. As a Non-Russian I, like the descendants of this first generation, was never going to move back to Russia.

This generation lived in Europe, but in no wise associated with it, it was in no wise ‘of’ Europe. Thus, I can remember the aristocratic Parisian mitred archpriest, Fr Alexander Rehbinder (+ 1980) condemning the use of French in France not just in church, but also at home! And he was typical of tens of thousands of others, who have now gone the way of all flesh. Their churches have nearly all closed, disappeared off the face of the earth. You have to live in the real world, not the ghetto, otherwise you will lose your children and grandchildren and certainly fail to convert the natives.

Generation Two: ‘European’ Orthodox

These are the children of the first émigrés. These are the rebels (‘soixante-huitards’, as the rector of Saint Serge Fr Alexei Kniazev (born 1913) termed them in 1979 to their face). These are those born in the emigration in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, who in revolt formed the OCA and tried and failed to do something similar in Paris. They wanted to conform to and integrate the world around them, rejecting their parents’ ghettoes. In France they were almost Uniats, in the USA almost Protestants. They have stood in the way of progress of Orthodox and of the next generation, dismissing them and chasing them out, rejecting authentic Orthodoxy (calling it Russophilia, which they so despise) and especially monastic life as relics of their parents’ age. Instead, they claim to be ‘relevant’, ‘modern’ and ‘European’, though they do not have a drop of Western European blood in their veins! Thus, they reject us, the real Europeans and also Orthodox! And they want to be ‘European’ Orthodox!

In reality, no new Local Church can be born if it is not based on Orthodoxy, the real thing. The rest is intellectual fantasy and dreamers’ folklore. In the case of the Rue Daru members (now aged mainly between 70 and 90 and, excluding the Moldovans and new Russians, less than 1,000 individuals), the only logical future is to do what the Greeks want them to do: they must integrate into the Greek dioceses of the countries where they live, mainly in France. Having two Constantinople bishops in Paris is uncanonical! They must get over their psychological complexes towards their parents’ generation and their illogical ideology, which is basically built on their own psychological problems. Either lose your imagined self-importance and superiority complex racism and go to the semi-Uniat and now uncanonical Greeks (they already have the ‘new’ (= Roman Catholic) calendar and Greek vestments), or else be assimilated and go straight to the Roman Catholics. You cannot be ‘of the Russian Tradition’ and yet hate Russia and the Russian Church.

Generation Three: Orthodox Europeans

This is the generation that wants to remain Orthodox, confessing a grounded Orthodoxy, with roots, that is, without compromise, but which also wants the services in the local languages and venerates the local saints of Europe. We are Orthodox Europeans, not ‘European’ (i.e. semi-Orthodox) Orthodox. This is the way ahead because this is the way of the coming generations, our children and grandchildren. This is Orthodox Europe, the path of Orthodox Europeans. And this is the way of the new Exarchate under the new Metropolitan John of Paris and Western Europe, following in the footsteps of his missionary patron, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe.

It is this which is called on to become the Autonomous Church of (and not ‘in’) Western Europe and in due course the Autocephalous Church of (and not ‘in’) Western Europe. The Exarchate of the future, composed of 23 countries (Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, France, Switzerland and the UK), is our future, regardless of our nationality and background. Let us leave the past to the past, for we leave the dead to bury the dead and look to the future of our children and grandchildren.

 

St John and What is Above Conservative and Liberal

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Einstein

There is nothing new in being conservative and being liberal. Some by nature will always prefer the old, others the new, some will always be pessimistic, others optimistic, some will always be negative, others positive, some will always be closed, others open, some will always be individual, others social, some will always be introverted, others extroverted, some will always be cautious, others visionary, some will always be literal, others allegorical, some will always be passive, others active, some will always be turned to the past, others to the future, some will always be turned to the Divine, others to the human.

In the time of Christ there were Pharisees (fundamentalist conservatives) and Saducees (syncretistic liberals). The former detested it when good was done on the Sabbath day, the latter rejected the Resurrection and miracles. After Christ there were Monophysite conservatives who saw Christ as God alone and liberal Arians who saw Christ as man alone. Then there was the literal school of Antioch and the allegorical school of Alexandria. Later, in Catholicism, there were liberal Scholastics and conservative Scholastics, and in Protestantism there were doom and gloom Calvinists and liberal protestors who rejected all authority.

In our own times, the Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds have long been much divided between conservative and liberal. This has become particularly clear in recent years with the appearance of the question of attitudes to homosexuality, but it has in fact been clear since the 1960s. It is a sad fact that such a division has also appeared in the Orthodox Churches, most obviously in the USA. Here there are old calendarist sects and new calendarist sects, even though the latter often infiltrate and hide behind the Church. They all claim to be Orthodox but, out of communion with the Church of the Tradition, they are not.

Even inside the Church, there are dioceses (‘jurisdictions’) of Local Churches that attract conservative Roman Catholics and Protestants and others that attract liberal Roman Catholics and Protestants. However, the conservatives are shocked when they learn that Orthodox have as a norm married priests, as well as allowing Church divorce, Church remarriage and allowing non-abortive contraception. The liberals are shocked by standing for long services, fasting, prayer rules, modest dress and saints’ names. All of them forget one thing and, if they do not recall it, they too will eventually find themselves outside the Church.

What they forget is the Spiritual. And the source of the Spiritual is the Holy Spirit, which unites both conservative and liberal, as it is beyond, higher than, both of them. We can see this in the life of St John of Shanghai. The ecumenist liberals hated his asceticism, the source of the grace he acquired, his love of the services, the saints, in a word, his love of Orthodox Tradition. Anti-missionary conservatives hated his missionary work, his consciousness that the Tradition of the Holy Spirit is for the whole world. That is why they, clergy and laity, nationalists, right-wing politicians and CIA agents, put him on trial – and lost.

As for us, we follow St John and the Tradition of the Holy Spirit, Holiness. Our spiritual father, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, was the spiritual son of St John (who was born in the same year as my grandfather) and so we are St John’s spiritual grandchildren. Many forget that St John was Archbishop of Western Europe (1951-1962), for far longer than he was Archbishop of San Francisco. Here in Western Europe he is our patron saint. He stands far above the anti-missionaries and nationalists, the intellectuals and modernists. He stands far above petty conservatism and liberalism, for he was and is inspired by the Holy Spirit.

It is on this basis alone that we can look forward to building an Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe and from there a new Local Church. No Local Church can be built without the urge to acquire the Holy Spirit, that is, without the search for holiness. The quest for holiness means monastic and ascetic life, fasting, prayer and almsgiving, repentance, that is, confession and communion, and the veneration of the saints, including the local saints, who acquired the Holy Spirit.  And so we come back to St John of Shanghai, who all over Europe rejected both the ghettoes of the Pharisees and the Halfodoxy of the modernists.

 

The Mystical Meaning of the Establishment of a Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Europe (ROME)

‘Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, all of Europe, which will decide the fate of the world’.

President Charles de Gaulle, 22 November 1959

Introduction: Holy Rus

Having accepted the Orthodox Christian Church and Faith, Rus, the Russian Lands, became known as ’Holy’, for, alone out of all  other lands, holiness was its ideal. As a reward for being faithful to holiness, the Lord gave the Russian Lands immense territories, as far as the Pacific and even beyond, with great natural wealth and, above all, holy men and women. Indeed, after the final spiritual and physical fall of the Second Rome in 1453, its successor was this Holy Rus, the Third Rome, the last bastion of Universal Uncompromised Christianity. This last Christian Empire was called on to restrain the spread of global evil which has prepared the coming of Antichrist. For this reason, the Russian Lands have had many enemies. Some coveted her lands and resources, others wanted to destroy her Church and Faith, but always first by destroying her Sovereign Monarchy (Samoderzhavie, deliberately misleadingly translated by anti-Christians as ‘autocracy’).

The Overthrow of Holy Rus

Thus, nearly 200 years ago, Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855) tried to cleanse and restore the Sovereign Monarchy of the atheist tyranny of anti-Christian absolutism, with which it had been stained by its enemies in the century before. He also knew that serfdom, introduced as such by the same Westernized absolutists in the same century, was not Christian, and began preparing its abolition. However, from 1908 on, the British elite began planning to overthrow the Sovereign Monarchy and replace it with a Protestant-style Constitution, thus enabling it to dismember and exploit the Christian Empire. From 1911 on, Germany similarly began planning to destroy the Russian Lands and colonize them. From 1915 on, the financial centres of Britain and Germany and of the USA began plotting against the Sovereign Monarchy, financing masonic liberals and atheist revolutionary allies to disrupt the Empire’s infrastructure and distribution system.

The Fall and Rising Again of Holy Rus

Indeed, by the early 20th century the Christian Faith had much weakened in the Russian Lands and with it the mystical sense of awe before the Lord’s Anointed, the Christian Emperor. ‘Treason and cowardice and deceit’ were all around, as Tsar Nicholas wrote in March 1917. And so, Christ-like, he went to his Gethsemane and then to his Golgotha, accepting God’s Will. As those who had risen against the God-given Tsar had risen against God, so the Christian Empire fell through apostasy. Without the Orthodox Faith, there could be no Sovereign Monarchy. However, the Lord had destined the Russian Lands to be the last bastion of Universal Christianity in the time of general apostasy before Antichrist. Thus, He has begun restoring the Russian Orthodox Church, which is called on to preserve the purity of the Faith before the Second Coming, in order to lead the repentant remnant of mankind to Christ, thus meeting the mission of the Third Rome.

The Russian Role in Restoring a Sovereign Europe

In 1959 the French statesman President De Gaulle had spoken of a united Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, seeing Europe as an alliance of independent, sovereign states. He was right in that he fundamentally rejected a supranational character for Europe as ‘a supranational Europe is a Europe under American command’, a ‘Europe of the Americans’. Indeed, on 15 May 1962 he clearly declared that ‘there cannot be any Europe other than that of (nation) states, apart from in myths, fiction and parades’, which is precisely the present EU. However, he was wrong in that he identified such a Confederation of Sovereign States stretching only as far as the Urals: it must stretch to the Pacific. And here is the mystical meaning of the establishment of a Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Europe. It means that the still for the moment Tsarless Third Rome may stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, uniting East and West, overcoming Europe’s self-imposed isolation.

Russia and Europe

The pure Christian roots of Western Europe can still redirect it to salvation from its present apostasy. But these roots have been conserved ecclesially only by the Russian Orthodox Church, which stretches to the Pacific and even across it. It is a mistake to try and isolate the culture of Europe, in the extreme western corner of Northern Eurasia, from its roots in Christ. The European attempt to isolate and nationalize Christ from Asia, to claim Him for itself, first resulted in the deformations of Rome and Geneva. Then apostate Europeans replaced Christ with anti-European ‘European values’. Among others, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Lands, Slovakia and Poland are now resisting this attempt. However, spiritually they can do little without Russian Orthodox support. Before the great European suicide of 1914-1918, there was hope that Paris-Berlin-Saint Petersburg could be united. Now, 100 years after the First War ended, we have the same hope again.

The Self-Annihilation of Europe

Today European peoples face their spiritual annihilation, imposed on them by the two-edged sword of the choice of the atheist European elite. On the one hand, there is its self-imposed abortion holocaust (2-3 million European children slaughtered each year for decades). On the other hand, there is its self-imposed, massive Muslim immigration of cheap labour, which will result in a generation’s time in large parts of Western Europe being peopled by a 25% Muslim population. Since renouncing the fullness of Christ’s Church 1,000 years ago, Europe has fallen prey to a host of self-imposed isms, from Catholicism to Protestantism, from Secularism to Communism, from Fascism to Capitalism, from Atheism to Globalism. Obsessed by its barbaric pagan past, whether Roman or Germanic, it renounced the Holy Spirit. It has forgotten the glory of its saints, its holiness, which blossomed in Europe for the first millennium and then dried up.

The Repentance of Europe

Only by appealing to the glory of these, its own saints, and repenting and returning to the Church and Faith in which they gained their holiness, the grace of the Holy Spirit, can Europe be saved. Western Europe must renounce its self-isolation that it so fatefully chose in 1054 and tragically repeated in 1914. Otherwise it will disappear into the abyss of its suicidal isolation. In order to do this, it must make its peace with the remains of the Christian Empire in the Russian Lands. Western Europe has continually attempted to destroy this Empire, most notably in the four multinational invasions that it so aggressively and barbarically launched against it in the space of only 130 years between 1812 and 1941. In order to do this, it must repent for continually attempting to undermine its Faith and Sovereign Monarchy and commit genocide against its Peoples and those of other Orthodox Christian lands. This is going on right now, from Kosovo to the Ukraine.

Conclusion: The Salvation of Europe

The mystical meaning of a Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Europe is the opportunity for salvation, the return to the Church of God of the living souls of those Europeans still spiritually sensitive and not yet zombified by EU bread and US circuses. A Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Europe (ROME) (not just in Europe) is, in the words of its former Patriarch, the foundation of a future Local Church, which will be reborn, as soon as Europe is worthy of it. It can gather together not only the Orthodox of all nationalities who already live and pray in Western Europe now, but also can gather together all the saints of Europe, those who lived and prayed here in the distant past, and their descendants. All this is in order to prepare for the future. This will be a Europe cleansed of its atheism and of its spiritually impure institutions, polluted by their refusal to accept the Holy Spirit Who proceeds from the Father. This will be a Europe that can seek – and find – holiness, the Spirit of God.