Category Archives: France

The Temptation of the Borderlands, the Collapse of Globalist Western Europe and the Resovereignisation of the Western World and the Church

Foreword: The US Empire (1917-2024) and the Third European War

The so-called World Wars have always been Great European Wars, into which the then European Empires dragged their worldwide colonies as useful cannon fodder. The First War, begun in Sarajevo in 1914, was joined late by the USA, in 1917. The Second War, begun exactly one generation later in Warsaw in 1939, was joined late by the USA, in 1941. However, the Third European War, begun by the USA exactly four generations after the first, in Kiev in 2014, was abandoned early by the much-weakened USA, in 2024. This left Western Europe, which had backed the USA to the hilt, with responsibility.

However, the elite of a deindustrialised, demilitarised and impoverished Western Europe, could only provide the Kiev regime with war rhetoric and hundreds of billions of euros in bribes, in which that corrupt elite could share. Thus, in the UK, the warmongering elite, which takes a generous cut from wars, found that only two from tens of thousands of reservists were prepared to volunteer to fight against Russia. Similar patterns have been observed everywhere else in Western Europe, not least in Germany. Indeed, the present Europe-wide riots can largely be considered to be anti-war riots.

The Temptation of the Borderlands

Hitler’s Third Reich was delusional. So is the Fourth Reich EU, which has been sending its tanks, guns, drones and armoured cars to be destroyed by Russia on the steppes of the Ukraine, just as it destroyed those of the fuel-thirsty Third Reich. The EU attempt to expand its impoverished Fourth Reich eastwards to the mineral- , fuel- and food-rich Ukraine is in fact Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable, delayed from 1945 by US opposition. It is the Operation to destroy and dismantle Russia. Since 2014 the neocon gerontocrats of the US and its NATO vassals have been implementing the 1945 Operation Unthinkable. They have been living in the past, for their post-1992 unipolarity is dead and Russia has won.

The results are indeed unthinkable. This Operation, the ultimate attempt to expand Europe by aggression in order to plunder valuable resources and conquer Russia through its vulnerable borderlands (in Russian, ‘ukraina’), ends the millennium of aggression. This means the collapse of the culminating, Western unipolar ‘End of History’ project to dominate the world as the unique centre of power and culture. Having lost its spiritual and moral values, Western power and culture is coming to an end. As after the collapsing pagan Roman Empire, only museums remain. As for the defeated USA, it will have to retire to lick its wounds and dismantle the all too expensive neocon CIA which ran the USA with impunity for over 25 years.

The flat and fertile Russian Lands, difficult to defend, have attracted all sorts of bandits over the centuries. First there were Scythians and Turkish Pechenegs from the east. From the west came the ever power-greedy German Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII, with his flattering letter of 17 April 1075 to try and seduce Kievan traitors in the Russian borderlands (ukraina), which are especially hard to defend, unlike the Slav home in the marshlands of Belarus. Hildebrand’s successors sent the Teutonic Knights to slaughter, plunder and conquer in the north, but they were pushed back by the hero St Alexander of the Neva. At the same time there were the Tartar-Mongols, from whom he defended the Russian Lands. In the early 1600s came the Poles, again via borderland Kiev, but they were chased out of Moscow, and in the early 1700s, again via borderland Kiev, came the Swedes, defeated at Poltava.

Next time there came more organised, collective invasions from the West. In the early 1800s the French and the twelve tribes of Europe invaded under the antichrist Corsican bandit Napoleon. They were followed in 1854 by the British, French and Turks, who invaded the borderlands again, this time through the Crimea, which they attack today in the Second Crimean War. Every hundred years at least, the West has invaded by Russia’s soft sidebelly borderlands. In 1914 came the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, supported by Judas-fed British and French spies, who led to the rule of the still unrepentant Georgian bandit, and in 1941 came many nations under the antichrist Austrian bandit Hitler. After Napoleon and Hitler in 2014 came the US-led Collective Western (EU/NATO) invasion, which paid Ukrainians huge amounts to die for them in their millions and tried and failed to take the Crimea and Ukraine again.

Revolutionary France

In 1789 Revolution broke out in France. This was as a result of the debts incurred by the French King Louis, who spent huge amounts of money fighting German-ruled British and Hanoverian mercenaries, who were attacking settlers in the future Republic of the USA. The French King wanted to ensure the defeat of his hated rival German kings of London and the victory and independence of the mainly English-born refugee colonists. As a result of the enormous expenses entailed, debt-ridden France collapsed, its people rioting for lack of bread, and the King literally lost his head. Hatred is very expensive.

In 2026 Revolution is breaking out in France again. It is a result firstly of the huge amounts of money that the French King Macron has given to the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. This was installed by the USA after overthrowing the democratic government in 2014. Secondly, it is a result of the urgent need to subsidise French energy bills since 2022, after the King had cut off cheap Russian energy and imposed illegal sanctions on Russia, as he hates Russia, including its energy, and replaced it with US energy that costs three times more. He did this on orders from the US Empire. Hatred is very expensive.

The debt that has come from trying to expand the West means that France may default. Debt-ridden France is collapsing, its people rioting for lack of bread, and the King may lose his head. Since France gave up its sovereign currency for the German-run euro – just as the now rejected EU leaders of Bulgaria also recently did against the people’s wishes – France can no longer print money, even if that causes inflation, to pay off the interest on its debt. Moreover, that debt is mainly in the hands of foreign investors. And they can at once disinvest in France, to which they have no loyalty.

So the USA has bankrupted France twice. However, both times this was the choice of French rulers. The first time was the attempt by the French Empire to found a Republic in the future USA. The second time was the attempt by the French Republic to support the US Empire in the Republic of the Ukraine. King Macron (called ‘Napoleon’ and also ‘the Pharoah’), a former Rothschild banker, whom many believe to be married to a transgender a generation older than himself, clearly hates French people. He prefers to give their money to others. That is why his popularity rating in France hovers between 10% and 15%.

Totalitarian Western Europe

Not only is France exploding because of State bankruptcy, leading to very high taxes and very high prices, so also are Italy, Albania, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Greece, Serbia (for now free of its pro-EU and Kiev-arming leader and traitor), Bulgaria, and the UK (in illegal immigration protests). In Germany the EU wants to ban by far the most popular political party, AfD. Will they assassinate its leader? The Supranational EU has put its unelected dictators into power, but not into authority. There is the unelected Burnham in the UK, who has been set up to drag the UK back into the EU and who has just given Kiev another £10 billion without any mandate, which may yet cause civil unrest. Or else there are leaders who are hated by the popular masses, like Blackrock’s Merz, who stands at 10%-13% of support in Germany. The four countries that border the Ukraine are in an even worse position.

Nationalists in those four countries want to get back their lands which the Georgian bandit took from them in 1945 and added to the western end of the Soviet Ukraine conglomerate. In order to prevent the irrendentist, national forces from claiming back their stolen territories from their Ukrainian idol, the EU wants to set up anti-national puppet governments in all four bordering countries. Thus, Poland had a now failed coup d’etat against the President of Poland, planned by EU Brussels through its puppet Tusk. This is similar to Romania, where the highly popular future leader, the patriot Georgescu, was removed by the EU in 2024 and replaced with yet another despised EU puppet. As for Hungary, with help from huge doses of propaganda, the EU overthrew its leader Orban. And as for Slovakia, the supranational powers sent a Ukrainian hitman to assassinate its democratically elected leader, Robert Fico. They may yet try again.

All the EU-appointed dictators and gerontocrats all over Europe are Globalists, Anti-Patriots. They support the bankrupting climate change ideology, the covid lock-up and vaccination manipulation, the Zionist genocide in Gaza and the Lebanon, and imprison those who oppose it. However, their loyalty to the Soviet-style EU is above all expressed by their loyalty to the ultra-corrupt, Neo-Nazi Kiev regime, and its dreaded, CIA-trained secret police, the SBU. There the hated Globalist actor, who in 2022 had to begin learning Ukrainian and English in order to perform his role as President and read the scripts of his minders, is intent on killing Ukrainians to the last Ukrainian, as his totalitarian sponsors proclaim. And when he cannot kill them, he has them tortured.

After all, the gerontocratic European elite, stuck in the past, is itself intent on killing its own peoples, by starting a war against what is easily the world’s fourth economy (its real GDP is over $10 trillion by PPP) and greatest nuclear power, the Russian Federation, ‘by 2030’. Through the mouths of crazy NATO armchair generals and greedy Lithuanian and Polish politicians, the elite has several times declared its intention of invading Russian Kaliningrad to start with. In order to make sure that this will happen, the elite is setting up the EU surveillance State to silence, debank and imprison all who oppose its tyranny and lies. However, the European elite is being regime-changed by its catastrophic support for Neo-Nazi Kiev and its torture-houses and camps.

Multipolarity and the Holy Trinity

The EU, better called the USSE, the Union of Subjugated States of Europe, is the last example of a multinational State, exactly like the old USSR. Centralised to the core, its elite refuses to accept that the age of Unipolarity, World Dictatorship, a One World Empire, is over. The beloved post-1945 project, of Rockefeller and all his followers, like the senile Biden and the demented Trump, regime-changed by Iran after his unprovoked aggression against Iran, is over. Though octogenarian US Presidents cling on to their imaginary superiority, the world has left the 1950s and is in the Age of Multipolarity, multiple Civilisational Centres, as seen in the Sovereign Nations of BRICS. Centralised, Unionist dinosaurs like the EU/USSE/UK/USA/and those nostalgic for the USSR (all have the letter U in them), which want to desovereignise all the nations, must catch up with reality. Their dinosaur delusions are being destroyed by the asteroids of reality.

Desovereignisation is also the desire of the Soviet KGB and unipolar CIA figures (they are the same), who dominate the various departments of two of the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches – centred in Moscow, New York and Istanbul. They too have to stop living in the past and catch up with the non-imperial, multipolar reality of the fourteen other Local Churches, which has always been the Catholic reality of the Church. Their Unipolarity is in the image of the Old Testament God of Papal, Imperial, Unionist and Uniat (the letter U again), tyranny. Our Multipolarity is in the image of the Holy Trinity, Unity in Diversity, the Catholicity and Confederation of Sovereign Orthodox Churches. A new age is dawning, with the purging of many corrupt bishops and Resovereignisation, the restoration of the Confederation of the Orthosphere, united by the Holy Spirit, expressed through faithful pastors, free of the unionist tyranny of faithless politicians.

There is a large white church on a hill on Military Road, in a city that was the first capital of the Roman province of Britannia. This church, built to prepare mercenaries to fight in the first British invasion of Russia, known as the Crimean War, nearly 200 years ago, is now an Orthodox church. It is dedicated to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, a recent saint born in what is now called the Ukraine, and to All the Saints of Western Europe. Among its parishioners are many Russians and Ukrainians. I have been its rector from the start of its Orthodoxy. From there, with thousands of Orthodox and others in the churches we have founded from this centre, we proclaim the Orthodox Christian Faith without ‘princes of the Church’.

This means that we proclaim the love of God and the love of our neighbour. This means that we believe that the way forward for our lands is through the Holy Spirit, to Christ, His Mother, His Angels, and to His Saints, who have lived from the beginning in Western Europe and who have given us a multitude of examples of this love. We say: Enough of the millennium of invasions and the plundering of the lands of our neighbours. We call for this love to be incarnate in all the Ancient Peoples and Lands and Tongues of Western Europe. Firstly, this will be in the soon again-to-be Sovereign Lands of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, without political and secular ideologies, cleansed of extremes, in freedom from compromise and sect alike.

 

The Tragedy of Unions: Follow the Money – But Only If You Want to Understand Why It Is All Happening

The actor Zelensky, who has loyally played his role and read his Hollywood scripts as an illegal President for over two years, has stated that 43,000 Russians are being killed and injured in the CIA-organised war in the Ukraine every month. This figure is exact, but it is for the number of Ukrainian troops being killed and injured every month. In other words, Zelensky has projected the Ukrainian figure onto the Russians. As far as we know, there have so far been at least 2.4 million (some say far more) Ukrainian casualties and about 200,000 Russian casualties (Western source: BBC Mediazona), a ratio of 12 to 1. The proportions of dead to injured are unknown to us.

The reason for this ratio is not because of a lack of Ukrainian heroism, or effort, or the huge quantities of NATO equipment supplied to the Ukraine, but because of the massive superiority of Russian tactics and firepower, artillery, drones, missiles and planes, over the obsolete NATO weapons which the Ukrainians have to fight with. The figures are confirmed by the regular exchanges of bodies (ratio: 36:1), the numbers of huge new Ukrainian cemeteries, the numbers of missing and surrendered, the declarations of Ukrainian officials like Budanov and Mendel, who demand 30,000 new replacement troops per month, as well as by the official Russian figures.

However, this figure does include mercenary casualties, hundreds of French, British, Germans, Americans, Georgians, Latvians and others, thousands of Colombians and 10,000 dead Polish soldiers, who changed from Polish uniforms into Ukrainian ones in order to receive generous pay in dollars and die. The Western media account for the missing with all the usual obituary tropes for NATO officers: ‘He suffered a heart attack while climbing’ (a la Robin Cook); ‘he committed suicide’ (a la David Kelly); ‘he died unexpectedly in his sleep’ etc. However, the Ukrainian war is only one element in the vast international and interlinked chaos of today’s world.

There is the Israeli-US war against Iran, the long-running war between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, in which the Saudis genocided the Yemenis, the war in Syria, in which the CIA runs and supports the terrorist beheaders of ISIS, the countless anti-colonial wars in Africa etc. Conspiracy theorists like to blame some particular group for all these wars and catastrophes at this present turning-point in world history. Thus, some accuse ‘Bilderberg’, others the ‘Trilateral’, some the ‘Americans’, others the ‘British’, some the ‘CIA’, others the ‘Zionists’, some the ‘Freemasons’, others the ‘City of London’, some the ‘Jews’, others the ‘EU’, some the ‘Rothschilds’, others ‘Soros’ and so on.

All these groups and individuals belonging to them may to some degree be responsible for the chaos, but all of them and others too have one thing in common: these new Globalist aristocrats, whoever they may be, and they are all only pawns in the game, are defined by their lust for money, or to give it its Biblical name, their idolatry of Mammon. ‘Follow the money’. And ‘you cannot serve God and Mammon’, for ‘either you will hate the one and love the other, or else you will hold to the one and despise the other’. As a result of the present world disorder caused by Mammonism, many recently-constructed, artificial and even parasitic countries will disappear.

In their present form these include: Saudi Arabia, its genocidal leader and friend of Epstein, already on the run and hiding in bunkers, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrein, Dubai, Oman, Qatar, Jordan, Syria, the Lebanon, Kosovo, Bosnia, the Ukraine…As a result of foreign interference, crowds from Pakistan to Romania are protesting for the release of their for now imprisoned or arrested leaders whom the people voted for, and not the puppets imposed by US or EU diktat. Civil unrest, often very violent, is under way in France, in the Unionist UK (threatened by break-up into its component parts), in the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Spain, Catalonia, Albania, Canada….

It is all the fault of the centralisation of power, whether on the part of the USA, the EU, the UK, or of some other centralised, ‘United’, State. Centralised authorities have, ironically in the name of ‘Democracy’, imposed the myths of wokeness, LGBT, the climate change ideology, covid, and Russian aggression against the Ukraine. All in the name of the clinging on to power and money of the neo-feudal Western aristocracy. They cannot live without an enemy, as a pretext to start the distraction of a World War III, in which tens of millions of the non-elite ‘plebs’ would die in order for the elite, who are only satan’s pawns, to become even stronger and richer and more evil.

These centralised states or Unions (European, American, British etc) are reproducing the disorder that occurred after the break-up of the Yugoslav Union and, above all, of the Soviet Union, in the 90s. After the dissolution of the USSR, millions, not least Russians, died prematurely in the anarchy that followed, from hunger, despair, oligarchic mafia crime (‘privatisation’), alcoholism, drug addiction and the futility of life, which had been built on the illusory ideology of Marxism. With the failure of Marxist ideology, which had justified everything, there was no longer any justification for anything. As a result, lawlessness and death by mafia prevailed.

Here it is worth stopping to consider why the Soviet Union fell. There is a myth that it was defeated by the West, the Western consumerist capitalist system, or ‘superior Western technology’. This ‘End of History’, ‘West is Best’, thesis is of course complete nonsense. The Soviet Union fell because of its Trotskyist universalism – ‘we are universal’. This is exactly why the ‘American Union’ is falling – because it too claims to be universal, under the influence of the Trotskyist neocons. (Let us recall that Trotsky, real name Bronstein, came from a wealthy family in the eastern Ukraine – only fifty miles from the birthplace of his co-religionist, a Jewish atheist, Zelensky).

The problem of Union is now affecting France. Having entered monetary union through the euro, which put the French economy into a straitjacket, depriving it of its economic sovereignty, France is now suffering. France cannot be an economic Germany, the homeland of the euro. The only way monetary union can work is if there is first political union, in other words if all countries are ruled by the Brussels Politburo. France is now repeating the path of Greece, and the problems are spreading to Belgium and Italy. The French problem will either destroy the euro or destroy the EU. The tragic fall of the European Union will resemble that of the Soviet Union.

The fall of the Soviet Union continues in the main successor State to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation. Even currently, it is said that up to twenty generals and the former Defence Minister of the Russian Federation are being detained for corruption – after several other generals and the criminal oligarch Prigozhin had previously been arrested. My knowledge of the profound, systemic and ingrained oligarchal corruption in the Russian Church confirms this. Again, this corruption, even 35 years after the fall of the USSR, comes from Soviet centralisation, precisely from ‘Unionism’, which has contributed to the tragedy of the persecutedUkrainian Church.

 

 

 

Patriotic National Conservatism and Social Justice or Anti-Patriotic Cosmopolitan Elitism and Social Collapse

Introduction: The World

Nowadays the exclusive US-led club of G7 countries have to meet in an isolated huddle. They have been overtaken by the far greater and inter-civilisational BRICS Alliance. According to the US World Bank, three of the four largest economies in the world are members of BRICS. These are China, India and Russia. The latter, although under 16,000 Western sanctions, has overtaken the Japanese and German economies (both members of the G7) and is rapidly catching up with India, which the USA is going to fall behind, as real economic figures for it appear.

Other members of the G7 have seen their economies overtaken by countries such as Turkey, Indonesia and Vietnam, which all want to join BRICS, but not to join the irrelevant G7 club. It is the intercontinental BRICS Alliance that has become the de facto United Nations. This is mirrored by the elitist huddle of the WEF (or rather WWEF – Western World Economic Forum) and the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum, which finished last week, attended by 136 countries, though it was almost completely unreported by the globalist Western media.

The Example of England

A long time ago Norman invaders ‘established’ their capital of aggression in the mercantile City of London, where there was money. (Later this would become the location of the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange). Having massacred or expelled the Old English nobility, they formed an alien, foreign and anti-patriotic ruling class. From this ‘Establishment’ they and their descendants created the UK, with all its exploitation and crimes. The Norman royal family replaced English royalty, brought their Norman Church with them and demolished all the Old English churches. After that, foreign royal families, French, Welsh and Scottish and their aristocratic supporters, were in control of the country.

In the 16th century this alien royalty reinvented yet another Church, murdering, torturing or exiling any who opposed it. In the early 18th century the London merchant class imported easy-to-manipulate royalty from Germany (they had previously imported royalty from the Netherlands, having beheaded and then overthrown the previous Franco-Scottish dynasty). Then they could do their will, which was to get even richer by expanding overseas. In so many ways a fake country, fake royalty and a fake Church had been evolved. Similarly, when the time came, the elitist structure developed political parties, in fact the two sides of the same Uniparty. So they invented fake political parties too.

It used to be said in the 1950s that Britain was in genteel decline, like a once prosperous relative who was now forced to wear shabby clothes for lack of money. Since then the decline has clearly accelerated. Today the ‘Norman’ political parties of the London Establishment are sinking like the Titanic, as they have betrayed the country in favour of globalist corporations. Despite their almost total control of State propaganda outlets like the BBC and the newspapers, the so-called ‘media’, they have lost control of the ‘narrative’, as they call it.

All around in the UK we see collapsing public services and infrastructure, like the vastly underfunded health and education systems, millions of people eating out of food banks, hugely overpriced and failed privatised utilities, cowboy-run electricity and gas suppliers, heavily-polluting water supplies, bankrupt local administrations, third-world roads, degraded and absurdly expensive railways, lies about Brexit so there is now even less control of borders than before, and pathetic armed forces which cannot even find recruits to run the small amounts of their often broken down military equipment.

After the Suez humiliation in 1956, Britain officially became a US satellite, a vassal. Although, at the time in the face of Communism, there was no alternative, this has turned out to be an error. The post-War settlement of the victorious industrial Superpower of the USA established itself and its allies, to become known as the G7, as the world leaders. Even the UN was set up in New York with all kinds of supposedly ‘international’ organisations, like the World Bank, the IMF, GATT (now the WTO), the ICC (International Criminal Court) and the EU, were completely under its control. But this is the past.

Conclusion: The Western World Elite

The catastrophically failed Project Ukraine has led to chaos in Western Europe, not least after the EU elections of 9 June. This is changing its highly-aggressive and Russophobic, pro-Nazi Establishment elite, which is so hated by the European peoples, who are in turn so despised by that Atlanticist elite. The globalist Sunak, a bank-teller sent by the US, and Macron, the Great (Narcissist), the new Napoleon with his globalist agenda, but in fact a bank-teller sent by the Rothschilds, in love with himself and the Parisian elite, are discredited. Meanwhile, the German Scholz is very weakened. All are self-delusional and consider that their peoples did not understand their genius. Sunak is said to be heading to the US after his forthcoming defeat and Scholz retiring to the Bavarian Alps. As for Macron, perhaps he should buy a villa on Elba or St Helena? The Western elite, which tried to export its ideology to the Ukraine is now desperate. This all compares strangely with the landslide election victory of President Putin. The ideology of the Western elite is unexportable. It is, after all, rejected even by many native Western people. For we are the source of Patriotic National Conservatism and Social Justice.

As for the equally narcissistic USA, it is now a crusader state, just like its genocidal vassal, Israel. Everywhere the elite tries to impose its ‘liberalism’ by force. However, there is nothing as intolerant as liberalism. The result is the thoroughgoing ruination of culture in the Western world and its fast collapsing Civilisation. The culprit has always been the pure pride of supremacy and infallibility. This was first proclaimed in about the Year 1075, when the Pope of Rome attributed them to himself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatus_papae). This ideology pf infallibility and supremacy has been handed down in history to various Western leaders, at present to the US President and the Western world which he lays claim to. He lays claims to this narcissist, Darwinist pride of supremacy and infallibility, which claims that ‘we are the ‘fittest’, the exceptional, the exclusive, the indispensable. In Christian language this is called pride, which is evil. For they are the source of Anti-Patriotic Cosmopolitan Elitism and Social Collapse.

 

 

Towards a Map of Western European Holiness

By origin the word Europe means ‘the land of the sunset’, that is, the west, for it lies at the western tip of the 54.5 million square kilometres of the Eurasian Continent. Measuring 10.5 million square kilometres, only one fifth of the whole of Eurasia, Europe from a Church viewpoint can be divided into three parts. Over 50%, or 5.5 million square kilometres, 4.5 million square kilometres in Russia and just over 1 million in the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, is canonical Russian Orthodox territory. The second part covers 1.4 million square kilometres and is the territory of various Local Orthodox Churches, the Romanian, Serbian (whose territory includes all of ex-Yugoslavia), Greek, Bulgarian, Polish, Czecho-slovak, and Albanian. This is two-thirds of Europe. There remains the final third of 3.6 million square kilometres.

This may be called Western Europe, even though it includes Central Europe, Hungary and Finland. The name can be justified because this part of Europe has for nearly one thousand years been isolated from the Church. This was as a result of the spiritual delusions, and so intellectual and political disaffection, jealousy and hostility towards the Church, of the governing elite of Western Europe. In other words, this is ex-Catholic and ex-Protestant Europe. Going from west to east and north to south, this means the 25 countries of: Iceland, Ireland, the British Isles (the three countries of Wales, England and Scotland), Norway, Denmark (and the Faeroes), Sweden, Finland; the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany; France, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Hungary; Portugal, Spain, Andorra, Italy, San Marino and Malta.

There exist many maps of this Western Europe. Some show the borders of the various states and the main cities; others show seas and lakes, hills and mountains; others show population density; others show the main roads and railways; others show the longevity of the population. And yet, although a millennium ago this Western Europe had a history of holiness, that is, of Orthodoxy, because this history has been forgotten, there is as yet no map showing the places hallowed by its saints who received the holiness brought to it from the east. If we drew up such a map of its saints, we would find huge variations. For example, in the very sparsely-populated Nordic countries, over one third of the area, we find little holiness, with no known native saints in Iceland and Finland and only a handful in Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

However, in the rest of this Western Europe we find a very different situation. The centre of its holiness is what is now Italy (and San Marino), close to the source of the Faith in the East with the capital of Rome. From here holiness spread north to Gaul, now France, the second centre of holiness, to southern England and from there to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and from there to Austria and Hungary. From Gaul holiness also spread east to Switzerland, south and west to Andorra, Spain and Portugal, and north to what is now Belgium and above all to the thebaid of saints in Ireland, converted by the monastic life brought to them from Egypt via Gaul. Their influence spread back to east and south, to all the Celtic lands, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, and also to northern England, Belgium, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

The first saints of this First Western Europe are of course the leading apostles, Peter and Paul, together with St James the Apostle in Galicia, as well as a huge number of internationally-venerated martyrs, especially in Rome, like St Pancras of Taormina (1st cent.),  St Clement (100), St Ignatius of Antioch (c. 107), Sts Sophia, Hope, Faith and Love (2nd cent.), St Tatiana (225), St Cecilia (230), St Hippolytus of Rome (c. 235), St Agatha (251), St Lawrence (258), St Eugenia (262), Sts Chrysanthus and Daria (283), Sts Sebastian and Comps (287), St Maurice of Agaunum and the Theban Legion (287), St Anastasia of Rome (304), St Lucy of Syracuse (304), Sts Agapia, Chionia and Irene (304), St Vincent of Spain (304), St Eulalia of Barcelona (304), St Januarius of Pozzuoli (c. 305), St Alban of Verulamium (c. 305), St Pancras (early 4th cent), St Agnes (c. 350).

It includes Church Fathers like St Justin Martyr (165),  St Irinei of Lyon (200), St Hilary of Poitiers (368), St Ambrose of Milan (387), St John Cassian (433), St Vincent of Lerins (445), Blessed Jerome of Stridon (c. 420), St Leo the Great (461), St Gregory the Great, called the Dialogist (604), St Maximus the Confessor (662). It includes pious bishops with Gallo-Romans like St Martial of Limoges (c. 250), St Saturninus of Toulouse (257), St Julian of Le Mans (Cenomansis) (3rd cent), St Paulinus of Nola (431), St Germanus of Auxerre (448), then later St Remigius (533), St Germanus of Paris (576), St Gregory of Tours (594), St Leander (601), St Valery (621), St Fulgentius (633), St Isidore of Seville (636), St Eligius (660), St Omer (670), St Amand (675), St Julian of Toledo (690), St Lambert (705), St Hubert (727), St Gregory of Utrecht (776).

It includes monastic founders like St Martin the Merciful of Tours (397), St Genevieve of Paris (500), St Benedict of Nursia (550), St Martin of Braga (580), St David of Wales (589), St Columba of Iona, Enlightener of Scotland (597), St Columban of Luxeuil (615), St Hilda of Whitby (680), St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (687), St Odile of Alsace (720). It includes confessors who evangelized whole stretches of this Europe, like the Roman-Britons St Ninian, Apostle of the Picts (450), St Patrick, Enlightener of Ireland (461), the English St Willibrord-Clement in the Netherlands (739) and St Boniface of Fulda, martyred in Frisia (754), St Anschar of Hamburg (865). It includes pious kings and queens, St Bathilde (545), St Oswald (642), St Clotilde (680), St Edmund of East Anglia (869), St Edward the Martyr (879), St Olaf of Sweden (950), St Olaf of Norway (1030).

The list of saints is immense. There are some ten thousand names of saints of Western Europe, martyrs and confessors, men and women, internationally-venerated and only locally-venerated, some with highly detailed lives, others little more than names. Forty-five years ago we began work on the Saints of England, despite the lack of any encouragement. Then thirty-five years ago we began work on the Saints of what is now France. However, that work was interrupted by the negativity of the then Exarchate in Paris and other concerns, one of which was work on the Saints of Iberia twenty-five years ago. That work helped lead to their recent adoption into a feast of the Diocese of Iberia under Archbishop Nestor. Now with a real Russian Exarchate for Western Europe in Paris, we will be turning our attention back to the Saints of what is now France.

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?

 

Revolution in France

The three-week old revolt of the French people against their young Rothschild banker President, the anti-populist favourite of the rich EU elite, is intensifying. Insulted by Macron’s arrogant contempt for them and his blinding narcissism, his decision to delay fuel tax increases for only six months has only poured oil onto the flames. Little reported by the State-controlled media either there or here, the rioting concerns not simply a few streets in the rich quarter of Paris which have been ransacked, it is the revolt in the real France, dans la France profonde, outside the capital, that counts.

Here supermarkets and fuel distribution centres have been blocked. Many have nothing but bread and pasta to eat. The retail sector is heading for bankruptcy. The police refuse to break blockades because they too sympathize with the protests of the ‘yellow vests’. Roads are blocked and high schools are on strike. So now the great democrat Macron is considering calling in his Army to crush the people. France’s situation is like that of other EU countries in that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. However, on top of that France has a rigid class system and social mobility is virtually non-existent.

Whereas in the UK the people were allowed (though only by elitist mistake) to vote for Brexit and in Spain, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere anti-EU parties are gaining control, in France they are not allowed. Hence, the frustration of the disinherited masses. In France, which is run by five-year long virtual dictatorships of its presidents who control the media, the only way to get your voice heard is by street protests. Parliamentary representation is totally ineffectual and therefore elections are boycotted, since the gilded political elite and State-paid journalists have no time for the people.

Meanwhile, the Paris Exarchate in Rue Daru has declared that it does not recognize its dissolution by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Here we see that its controlling elite seems to think and act like secular French people, with little understanding of how the Church works. In yesterday’s declaration, the Rue Daru elite boasted that it has adopted the Western mentality and ‘democratic values’. Unfortunately, if your Patriarch dissolves you, that is it. You cannot go on strike or go into the streets. When your boss sacks you, you are sacked, and although you may say that you do not agree with your sacking, you have no choice. Your words are not heard.

We feel sorry for those in Rue Daru who have been let down by their Patriarch. When we others went through the same trauma decades ago, we simply joined the Russian Orthodox Church, even though we were derided and slandered for it by the Rue Daru elite. Today, no-one will deride you or slander you for taking the only logical and canonical course of action available.

 

On the French Elections

The possible next President of France, Emmanuel Macron, is a young, naive and politically inexperienced Rothschild puppet. A Blairite narcissist, he is easily manipulated once his ego is flattered (‘every man has his price’, as the elite knows), with no programme of his own, neither left nor right. He has no depth, merely image. However, he is clearly programmed by the Brussels and EU banking and industrial elite to implement their globalist policies. The elite had despaired of the Obama-sponsored hater of the French people, President Francois Hollande, with his popularity ratings of 4% (compare Vladimir Putin’s at 84%) and in 2016 found Macron and groomed him with its media in time for the 2017 elections. He represents the global elite and the oligarchy, with its control of the EU media. If he is elected, Macron will be used, manipulated and thrown away once he has served his purpose, his moment of glory over.

On the other side of the contest is Marine Le Pen, much slandered and vilified by the elite-controlled French media. She represents sometimes ugly French xenophobia and nationalism, as well as patriotism, independence and sovereignty, she is of the people (a ‘populist’, as the slanderers say). She is a Gaullist, like the anti-US and anti-NATO De Gaulle, who was overthrown in the CIA-run French coup d’etat of 1968. She is against the EU and against the euro and represents the wave of anti-EU sentiment that has swept all EU countries, resulted in riots in Greece, Brexit and the rise of anti-EU parties in all EU countries. There is a very clear choice here, between globalism (with all its dangers) and nationalism (with all its dangers). Nevertheless, whoever wins in France will face parliamentary elections; it will be hard for any President to do anything without a majority in the Parliament. But this is not the problem.

The problem is that whoever wins, the much favoured Macron, or the much maligned Le Pen, Brussels and the global elite must understand that the peoples of Europe are deeply unhappy. The mere fact that the anti-EU, pro-Frexit Le Pen has enough popular support even to be a second-round Presidential candidate, means that the EU is over. Whoever wins, the EU project must disappear – at least in its present form of wanting to destroy every single national identity and culture in the EU and making Europe into a colourless and cultureless imitation of the USA. This concerns us here, because the EU in its present form is anti-Christian, hysterically refusing and rejecting the Christian roots, values and culture of Europe in an attempt to commit suicide. Nobody knows the future, we can only pray that Europe may yet survive through repentance.

Christ the Invincible Power

Answers to Questions from Recent Conversations and Correspondence

Q: When did you first become conscious of the Russian Orthodox Church?

A: My introduction to the Orthodox Church was through the local saints of England in my native north Essex, notably St Edmund, but also St Albright (Ethelbert), St Cedd, St Botolph and St Osyth. However, as regards the Russian Orthodox Church as such, my first encounter was almost fifty years ago, just after my 12th birthday, in August 1968. As a result of that revelation, I began teaching myself Russian in October of that year in Colchester because I already knew that the Russian Orthodox Church is my spiritual home. However, I had to wait nearly another seven years until I could take part in Russian Orthodox life, as in those days (it is not much better now) there were so few Russian churches anywhere. I only managed to visit any Russian churches in 1973.

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

A: Having been told by two of its members that the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) would not allow me to join it because I was English (I had no idea at that time that my great-grandmother was Russian, I only discovered that distant link much later), I had no alternative but to join the Moscow Patriarchate. They may have been many things in those distant days, but at least they were not racists.

Q: What was your path to the priesthood after that?

A: A very hard one. First of all, since I could not live and work in Russia on account of the Cold War at that time, for my first job I went to live and work in Greece. I thought that was the next best alternative. After a year there and visiting the then Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, I understood that the Balkan Churches were no solution to the need for a Local Orthodox Church in the West. They were all inward-looking, culturally very narrow and hopelessly nationalistic. Later, contacts with Romanians and Georgians told me the same about them and in the Romanian case there is the huge problem of simony. So, with Russia closed off, in 1979 with the blessing of Metr Antony (Bloom) I went to study at the St Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, which I had in my ignorance imagined to be a Russian Orthodox seminary.

Q: What was it in fact?

A: It was the remains of a Russian Orthodox seminary mingled with an institute of philosophy and, frankly, of heresy. It openly preached modernism or Renovationism, which is Protestant-based, and is therefore not even remotely interesting to someone coming from a country like England with a Protestant culture, so alien to me. One English priest, rather harshly, called St Serge a Methodist Sunday School. Very harsh, but there was some truth in it.

Q: Why did you not think of going to Jordanville in the USA?

A: For the same reason as before. I was repeatedly told by members of ROCOR that they only took Russians. Remember in those days there was no internet, no advice, you had to make your own way, you went by what local representatives told you, even if it was incorrect.

Q: What happened next?

A: In 1982 I was offered the priesthood by the Moscow Patriarchate on terms which I can only describe as scandalous. I walked out, never to return, and enquired again at the Church Outside Russia. I got the same answer as in 1974, though I noted that this time there were actually a few ex-Anglicans in a separate branch of ROCOR in England. However, these rather eccentric conservative Anglicans seemed to have no interest in the Russian Orthodox Church, but only in being anti-Anglican and they had a huge interest in fanatical Greek Orthodox sects. Never having been Anglican and having lived in Greece, I had no interest in either. This was all the more frustrating since ROCOR had just canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors and naturally I had their icons and venerated them. Nevertheless, in 1983, I decided to emigrate to France and join my wife’s jurisdiction, the Paris Jurisdiction.

Q: Wasn’t that foolhardy? I mean you already knew about the problem of modernism there?

A: What you have to understand is that in Paris in 1981 they had elected a new Archbishop. Under the very elderly and saintly old one, renovationists had come to the fore, taking advantage of his old age, but the new Archbishop promised us personally that he would sweep them away and return his jurisdiction to Orthodoxy and canonical Russian practice. So this was a time of great promise and even excitement. Patriarch Dimitrios of Constantinople even said at the time that the Paris Jurisdiction would be returned to the Russian Church as soon as it was free. So, with hope in a promising future, in January 1985 I was ordained deacon there.

Q: What happened next?

A: in May 1985 I was offered the priesthood providing that I would become a freemason. I refused, scandalized. Then we became witnesses to the complete takeover of the jurisdiction by renovationists. The new Archbishop ordained them one by one, completely breaking his promise – not because he was a liar, but because he was weak. It was the same problem as Metr Evlogy, the first Paris Jurisdiction ruling bishop; he had never wanted to leave the Russian Church, but he was a weak man surrounded by powerful laymen, mainly freemasons and those who had betrayed the Tsar and organized the February Revolution. It was the end of the possibility that that jurisdiction would ever return to the freed, restored and reunited Russian Church. But I only understood that the meaning of that bitter disappointment afterwards.

Q: Why did you not leave such a masonic group?

A: Not all by far were freemasons and I felt that I had to labour on until God’s will for me should be revealed.

Q: When was that?

A: Without doubt it was in summer 1988 when the Paris Jurisdiction celebrated the millennium of the Baptism of Rus. Instead of inviting the Russian bishops in Western Europe to the Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and returning to the Russian Church in unity, they railed against the Russian Church and invited the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Paris. I was not only scandalized but spiritually distraught. I was an eyewitness to treason and apostasy. It was the last straw. They preferred heresy to Orthodoxy.

Soon after, I met Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR, who told me that he would be happy to receive me and that I had no need whatsoever to labour on in such anti-canonical conditions. I jumped at the opportunity. 17 people left with me, including a priest. So we all joined the Church Outside Russia in January 1989. That was a transforming moment because previously I had only known the Church Outside Russia in England. On the other hand, Vladyka Antony, heir to Vladyka John of Shanghai, though traditional, was not racist or fanatical, but missionary-minded. He lived in a different world from the fanatics in England and we freely concelebrated with other Orthodox.

I remember him telling me about the extremists who were trying to take control of ROCOR in New York. He said: ‘But there’s nowhere else to go’. I have not the slightest doubt that he would have returned to Russia, if he had had the chance. I also remember conversations with him about Metr Antony of Kiev (Archbp Antony came from Kiev), whom he had known well in Belgrade and whose name he had taken. He was the real ROCOR. Real Russian Orthodox. At last. It had taken me 20 years to get to that point! 20 years of facing illusions, lies, broken promises and corruption. You would think it would have been easy, but nothing of the sort. All hell was against the Russian Orthodox Church, a sure sign of truth.

Q: What happened next?

A: Well, I was at last living as a proper Russian Orthodox. Nearly three years later, in December 1991 I was ordained priest for the new ROCOR parish in Lisbon in Portugal.

Q: What was your attitude to the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: We were all just impatiently waiting for it to become politically free and free of renovationism. That happened officially with the Jubilee Council in Moscow in 2000.

Q: So why didn’t the Church Outside Russia join up with the Patriarchate straightaway in 2000?

A: It is one thing to proclaim the truth at a Council, but another for the decisions of that Council to be implemented. For example, after that I can still remember how at the London Patriarchal Cathedral they refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs and also, incidentally, they refused to sell the books of Fr Seraphim (Rose) or anything traditional. Priests and people coming from Russia were persecuted by the renovationists because they were ‘too’ traditional. We had to wait for the Patriarchate to free itself from such Renovationism.

Also, it must be said, we had to wait until the fanatical elements that had done so much harm to ROCOR since they had started infiltrating the Church in the mid-sixties had left us. When the extremists did finally leave, almost at the same time, there was a huge sigh of relief, because then we could get on with being Orthodox. So it was we had to wait until 2007.

Q: How do you know that people are free of Renovationism?

A: Easy: The yardstick is veneration for the New Martyrs, especially the Imperial Martyrs. The renovationists hate them.

Q: How do you know that people are free of sectarian fanaticism of the sort you describe as having infiltrated ROCOR?

A: Easy: The yardstick is the willingness to concelebrate with other Orthodox Christians.

Q: What is going to happen in the future? At present there are countries like England where there are two parallel jurisdictions of the Russian Church, one dependent on Moscow, the other dependent on the Church Outside Russia?

A: According to the 2007 agreement, where there are two parallel jurisdictions, ROCOR should, in time, absorb the Patriarchal jurisdiction. This will probably take a generation, so that no-one will be under any pressure and everything will take place naturally, organically. However, in reality, already nine years have passed and we can see that in certain areas, like North America and Australasia, ROCOR will indeed clearly take over responsibility for those territories, whereas in other areas the Patriarchate will take over, as in South America, not to mention South-East Asia. The problem comes in the mixed area of Western Europe, including the British Isles and Ireland. In this area, only time will tell, clearly it is the more competent of the two that will take responsibility.

For the moment we shall lead parallel lives. There is in any case so much to do. I could start 12 parishes tomorrow, if I had the money to buy buildings and get candidates for the priesthood ordained. The state of Orthodox infrastructure and the general pastoral situation here are so appalling as to be scandalous; no wonder so many Orthodox lapse or become Roman Catholic or Protestant. All we pastors meet with is indifference. Those in authority should hang their heads in shame. Why is there not a church, our own property in every town over 100,000? This should have been done a generation ago. For example the teeming millions of London only have two small churches!

Colchester is the 50th largest town in England (and incidentally the 500th largest in Western Europe). It has a church that belongs to us. But want about the other 49 larger ones? Only five of them have their own churches: London, Manchester, Nottingham, Norwich, Birkenhead-Liverpool. That is a scandal. There is no missionary vision at all. Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK with a population of two million. And where do the faithful of the Patriarchate have ten liturgies a year on Saturdays (that’s all the priest can manage)? In the Ukrainian Uniat chapel. The next time you hear some naïve Orthodox boasting about his Church, tell him that. Orthodox should be ashamed of themselves.

Q: So is there competition between the two parts of the Russian Church locally?

A: No, not at all. It all depends on who has the priests and the buildings. A concrete example. I was asked to visit a prison in Cambridgeshire. Now, since there is no ROCOR presence in Cambridgeshire (because through incompetence it refused to set anything up there in the 1980s), I gave the prison authorities the references of the Patriarchal priest who lives in Cambridgeshire. On the other hand, when there was question of the Patriarchate setting something up in Norfolk (it had lost what it had had there a few years before, also through incompetence), but knowing that ROCOR had a presence there dating back to 1966, it was referred to me. So here is a territorial division. Now, where there is a double jurisdiction, as in London (the only case), something will have to be sorted out. But, as you can see, that will be as a result of competence. Only time can settle such matters. The more competent part, the more spiritual part of the Russian Church will prevail and form a united jurisdiction.

Q: So there is no rigid territorial division in Western Europe?

A: No, nobody wants to impose such a system. Let everything be done freely, let the people choose. Though, having said that, we can observe a tendency for ROCOR to dominate in the English-speaking world. Canada, the USA and Australasia are clear examples. For example, with Archbishop Mark of ROCOR retiring to Germany and the ROCOR Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland being taken over by Metr Hilarion of New York, we can even talk about a sort of ROCOR Brexit. Metr Hilarion will in fact be Metropolitan of New England and Old England. That is an exceptional event, historically speaking, and may be significant, a turning-point.

So it is possible that in a generation from now ROCOR will only exist in the English-speaking world, but will unite all Russian Orthodox there. ROCOR will become ROCA – the Russian Orthodox Church in the Anglosphere. That is one quite organic and natural possible scenario, a united Russian Orthodox Metropolia for the Anglosphere, the English-speaking world. The Patriarchate will look after everything else in various Metropolias, in Latin America, in Alaska, in Western Europe, in Asia etc.

Q: So Western Europe would completely go to the Patriarchate?

A: That is the way that things are developing at the moment. All the young bishops and all the dynamism in the Russian Church there is Patriarchal. ROCOR only has three ageing bishops and is not opening any new churches.

Q: Is there a difference between ROCOR churches and Patriarchal churches?

A: I think there is a small one, in general. Strangely enough, ROCOR is at one and the same time more Russian, but also more local, more integrated. We have done the translations, we print in English, we speak the local languages and know the local laws, we were born here. At the same time, however, we are utterly faithful to the best of the Tsar’s Russia, never having endured the Soviet period and Renovationism. ‘To quote the saintly Metr Laurus: ‘We are for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy’. We are Imperial priests and people.

Q: What about your own relations with the Russian Church inside Russia?

A: We are very close to all those who are Churched in Russia and they feel close to us. For example, in Moscow one of the closest friends of ROCOR has always been Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov), whom some have even suggested will be the next Patriarch. (Bp Tikhon has been in the news recently, since he outraged the British Establishment by inviting students from Eton College to experience Christianity in Russia; not something the atheist Establishment likes). In general, those who especially venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors at once feel at home in ROCOR. I have this nearly every Sunday. People from different parts of Russia, from the Ukraine, from Moldova and elsewhere say that they feel at home, whatever the language, the atmosphere is like at home. In my native town of Colchester, that is a great thing that we have such an oasis of Orthodoxy.

Q: Who are the unChurched in Russia?

A: You find all sorts of people. There are those on the right hand side who mingle superstition with Orthodoxy, for instance, those ritualists who think that holy water is more important than holy communion, who mix in pharisaic sectarianism, puritanism and judgementalism, or, on the other hand, those on the left hand side, who mix in Soviet nationalism, love of the tyrant Stalin, or modernism. But all that is superficial, the majority make their way to the Church sooner or later. You do not waste time on the convert fringes of the Church – otherwise you might end up thinking that that is the Church! A terrible delusion!

Q: Why have you stayed faithful to the Russian Church despite all the difficulties that you have faced over nearly fifty years?

A: Because the Russian Orthodox Church is the Invincible Power. History since 1917 proves it. The gates of hell have not prevailed – and shall not prevail – despite all the enemies and traitors, both external and internal, we have faced. Judas betrayed, but the other apostles triumphed. So tragedy becomes joy. The stone that was rejected is become the headstone of the corner. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!

Whose Temple Are They Building?

Over the last two weeks France and Germany have been deeply troubled by revolting murders carried out by Islamist psychopaths. In the latest tragedy, a devout 86-year old priest, ordained 58 years ago in 1958, had his throat slit while celebrating the mass. One of his assailants had been encouraged by the campaign of the Western media and politicians not so long ago to go to Syria and fight against the government there – a campaign now recognized as an error, though still not apologized for by the culprits. Their unpunished irresponsibility has now brought terror to their very doorstep.

The Middle East from Afghanistan to Libya is indeed littered with failed ‘democratic governments’, built in the ruins of stable but undemocratic countries, as created by Western meddlers. As one Iraqi citizen put it recently: ‘Before there was one Saddam Hussein, now thanks to the West there is a thousand’. More than this, the slaughter of Christians, ultimately caused and tolerated by the West all through the Middle East, has now arrived in Western Europe. Tonight, atheist French politicians, many of them lapsed Jews, most of them freemasons, have attended mass at Notre Dame in Paris.

We can only hope that they may one day be brought to repentance for the refugee crisis that they have created. However, at present these selfsame leaders are still backing the daily and unreported terrorism of the Kiev Army against Ukrainian civilians in Donbass, so there is little realistic hope. These leaders belong to the Western world of smartphones and smartbombs, which they do not know how to use wisely, as their ‘smart civilization’ has failed to invent wisephones and wisebombs. Before they act, they should first think what they are building – the Church of God or the Temple of Antichrist. We fear that when they reflect, if they ever reflect, they will find that it is the latter.

About Ionan Orthodoxy: An Interview with Archbishop George of London

12 May 2041

Q: What is the territory of your Archdiocese?

AG: As you know, our Archdiocese is part of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe under Metropolitan John. This stretches from Ireland to Austria and Iceland to Sicily and includes the Latin, Germanic, Celtic and Basque peoples of Western Europe. Our Archdiocese includes the four now sovereign nations of England, Ireland (which was finally reunited five years ago, if you remember), Scotland and Wales. At present we have four bishops, myself, Bishop Patrick in Dublin, Bishop Andrew in Edinburgh and Bishop David in Cardiff. For our Local Synods we always use our premises on the Isle of Man, the only place from which all our four nations are visible.

Q: Why did you take the name Ionan for your Archdiocese?

AG: Originally, the name ‘Diocese of the Isles’ was suggested for the Archdiocese, but this was considered too vague, since there are isles all over the world. Then the name ‘Isles of the North Atlantic’ was suggested, so forming the acronym I.O.N.A. This conveniently refers to the Ionan Orthodox monasticism of St Columba, which originated in Egypt and came to Ireland via Gaul. Since St Columba’s monastery on Iona spread to England via Lindisfarne and from there Orthodoxy went south, converting much of England, and authentic monasticism had always been the one thing missing here, we felt that this was a good name.

Q: How did ‘Ionan Orthodoxy’ come into being?

AG: As you know even into the early 21st century there were two forms of Orthodoxy in Western countries. The first was that which looked back to the ethnic homeland, which meant that in each Western European country there was a multitude of dioceses, called jurisdictions, each living in a sort of divisive ethnic ghetto and using mainly a language other than English. This was all right for first-generation immigrants, but it did not work for second and subsequent generations, who were simply assimilated into the Non-Orthodox milieu. And after three generations, 75 years, abroad, the first generation always died out and so the Church with it. It happened to the Russians in England (arrived by 1920) who had died out by 1995 and to the Greek-Cypriots in England (arrived by 1960) who had died out by 2035.

Q: What was the second form of Orthodoxy in the West?

AG: Seeing the obvious short-sightedness and failure of the above form, there were second and third-generation Russian intellectuals who by reaction took the opposite stance. Their second form of Orthodoxy consisted of merging all Orthodox, whatever their background, into a melting pot. Their common point was the lowest common denominator, that is, the ethnic identity of the (Non-Orthodox) host country. Their policy was then to sell this as the new and substitute ethnic identity of a new Local Church. This second form only developed in full in North America, where immigrants had begun arriving much earlier than in Western Europe, at the end of the nineteenth century, and where people were far more cut off from the roots of Orthodoxy than in Europe. In Europe we did not want to repeat that mistake.

Q: What was that mistake?

AG: It was the attempt to create an ‘American Orthodoxy’. That was a mistake because it put a culture, Non-Orthodox at that, above the Church. This was not a theological movement, but merely a sociological movement of adaptation and conformism. For example, through the inferiority complex of immigrants, most Orthodox churches in the US adopted pews and many of them organs, one institution tried to use a guitar accompaniment to the Divine Liturgy and adapt the theme tune of the cowboy film ‘Shenandoah’ to it. In other places the Divine Liturgy would be stopped at Christmas in order to sing Protestant Christmas carols!

Someone at the time drew a cartoon of an ‘All-American Patriarch’, a clean-shaven man in a clerical collar with a foolish grin on his face and a glass of coca-cola in his hand, like an advert for toothpaste. Of course, this was only a carton, but it did sum up the situation. At that time when the USA still ruled the world, there were actually individuals in the US who arrogantly and blindly imagined that this second form of Orthodoxy there was the only true form of Orthodoxy, that it was at the centre of the world and that it was their duty to colonize the rest of the world with it! In reality, of course, it was a mere provincial backwater experiment, to be allowed to die out quietly because this experiment simply pandered to the weaknesses of the host country. It placed the Church of God below heretical culture. That was blasphemous, which is why it was racked with scandals.

Q: But did the same temptation not occur in Europe, even if it did not have time to develop to the same extent as in the USA?

AG: Yes, of course, it occurred; human nature is the same everywhere, it was just that it took on different forms according to the local heterodox culture. The same thing has happened among unChurched, semi-Orthodox people in Greece, Romania and Russia. It is simply the heresy of phyletism. And make no mistake, it is a heresy because you can lose your soul in it – that is what a heresy is.

For example, in France a whole jurisdiction catered for a kind of ‘philosophical and aesthetic Orthodoxy’, ‘l’Orthodoxie a la francaise’, as one might say. This theory of Orthodoxy, or theorizing about Orthodoxy, did not present the Church as the Christian way of life, but as a complex and highly intellectual philosophy, full of long words and isms, which no-one really understood. Of course, it could have been expressed in very simple language, which everyone knew already. But as long as it sounded theoretically and philosophically fine, ‘cosmique’ as they used to say, all was fine, but of course, it was not fine and that jurisdiction died out, as it was built on sand, not on the Rock of the Faith. This theorizing was about the god of the philosophers in the language of philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the language of the fishermen of Galilee. You simply cannot build a Local Church based on Non-Orthodox culture! That is common sense, but you could not say that out loud to those who were taken up by such delusions.

Q: What about in other countries in Europe?

AG: It happened everywhere, not just in France. For example, in Germany the first liturgical book to be translated was the Typikon. In other words, Orthodoxy there was confused with the Non-Orthodox German mindset and produced an Orthodoxy of rules, a stubborn, black and white system, without any flexibility, any understanding of the human component, which is what it is all about. They lost their way by confusing the means (the services) with the ends (the salvation of the soul). For instance, I remember one German priest refusing to give a woman communion because she was dressed in trousers. Well, she was of course wrong, but a few decades ago there was a fashion for women to dress in trousers (fortunately, long since over now). That was bad, but what right did the German priest have to excommunicate that woman? Suppose she had died in the night after she had been refused communion? That sin would have been on the conscience of that priest.

Q: And in England?

AG: It was the same thing again. The national weakness here was not theorizing or creating a book of rules, but it was to adapt Orthodoxy to the British Establishment, to create a compromised ‘Establishment Orthodoxy’, a ‘British Orthodoxy’. This State-controlled and State-worshipping Orthodoxy, that of converts from Anglicanism, was of course just a repeat of the Anglicanism that had long ago been invented by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. There were even two whole but tiny jurisdictions dedicated to this State-approved pietism. It was all salt that had lost its savour. Some such people used the treacherous, half-Norman Edward the Confessor as the mascot of their ‘Establishment Orthodoxy’. Of course, it all came to nothing and has died out now, largely a fantasy of the late-twentieth century and the curious personalities who reigned supreme in the bad old days then. It was very oppressive because, as they were emperors in new clothes, you were not allowed to contradict them!

All these examples show the danger of compromising the Faith with local culture. And all those who did so have now died out, as withered branches. And that is the answer to your question, how did ‘Ionan Orthodoxy’ come into being. It came into being as the only living alternative to the two false alternatives – the ghetto or worldly compromise.

Q: So what do you base ‘Ionan Orthodoxy’ on?

AG: Simply, we put the Church and the Faith first. If we put the Kingdom of God, Orthodoxy, first, then all will fall into place, including the language that we use in services, which today is for about 90% in English, regardless of the ethnic origin of the parishioners, regardless of how well or how badly they speak another language. We are united by Orthodox Christianity, not by ethnic origins, and we are carried forward by the faithfulness to the Church and Her Tradition of the younger generations, who are all primarily English-speakers.

Q: You now have over 350 parishes in the British Isles and Ireland, all established quite solidly and with their own clergy and premises. Every city and town over 50,000 and the area around it is covered. This is quite unlike even 25 years ago, when the Russian Church, a small minority at that time, had mostly tiny communities with services once a month, borrowed premises and a suffered from a huge shortage of priests to go out and do vital missionary work in the area surrounding their churches. What about the other jurisdictions, which collectively still have over 50 parishes outside the Archdiocese?

AG: We live with them as good neighbours. People are free to join us and free to remain outside us. As you know, the parishes outside our jurisdiction are composed mainly of elderly people who settled here from various countries 50 years ago or more and they use very little English in their services. Virtually all the young people come to us. Time will show which way things will go. Live and let live.

Q: What is the future? Do you think of autocephaly?

AG: The Western European Metropolia, with just over 2,000 parishes now, is united, with six archdioceses, Iona, Scandinavia, Germania, Gallia, Italia and Hispania. True, the Metropolia has autonomy, but at the present time there is no desire at all for autocephaly. True, 2,000 parishes is more than in some other Local Churches, like the 700 parishes of the Hungarian Orthodox Church which recently became autocephalous, but a lot fewer than in others. Take China for example. That is still also an autonomous part of the Russian Church, even though it now has over 25,000 parishes. And the Russian Church Herself did not become autonomous for centuries, only after the Empire had fallen in New Rome. At present, I cannot see any reason to become autocephalous. That situation may of course change, especially in China, but not yet. It all takes time.

Q: Are you saying that autocephaly granted prematurely can be dangerous?

AG: Definitely. And especially in Western Europe.

Q: Why?

AG: Because Western Europe has for over a millennium veered between extremes which we do not want to repeat.

Q: Which extremes?

AG: The first is that of despotic centralism. This was the extreme of the pagan Roman Empire, which Charlemagne foolishly tried to revive and fortunately failed to, but it was indeed revived after 1050, causing Western Europe’s schism from the Church, and that lasted until the anti-Latin nationalist outburst of the Germanic Reformation. After that, despotic centralism was tried again by warmongers like Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, and then by the EU Fourth Reich – and we all know how that ended.

Each time there was a reaction to this despotism – nationalism, and that led to terrible fratricidal wars in Europe, like the so-called ‘Wars of Religion’ in the 16th century, just as centralism created the World Wars. We do not want those extremes, we must follow the golden mean of unity in diversity, which is what we have in Ionan Orthodoxy and in the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe in general. Europe has to be a Confederation of Nations, not a Union, a United States of Europe, but not a series of warring, nationalist states either.

In the same way, the Tsardom of Rus, as it is now called, successfully overcame provincial Ukrainian nationalism a generation ago and reunited huge territories, one sixth of the world. However, it only did this by rejecting the old centralism of the Soviet Union, which had done so much damage to its credibility. Once it had done that, again on the basis of unity in diversity, all of Eastern Europe joined in a free and mutually beneficial economic confederation with it, throwing off the shackles of the old European Union, which was in fact just a repeat of the Soviet Union.

Q: Will you drop the word ‘Russian’ from the name of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe? Most of your faithful are either not Russian or else do not speak it.

AG: In the bad old days of Western nationalism, for example in North America in the Cold War, they detested the word ‘Russian’ and dropped it. Now we are more enlightened and we all understand that ‘Russian’ does not mean nationalism and means uncompromised, unsecularized Orthodoxy. We exist because we have been helped to exist by the Russian Orthodox Church, the only multinational, Imperial Orthodox Church. I think we should keep it. Do you remember the old Roman Catholic Church, as it used to be called? Well, there were hardly any Romans in it!

Q: Why has the Western European Metropolia been so successful?

AG: Without doubt because of the sacrifices made to underpin it in the twentieth century and since. The Church is built on blood, sweat and tears. We should remember with gratitude the prayers and work of those who went before us. For example, I can remember decades ago, how people wanted more English in the services. So, one bishop said yes, do the service in English. What happened? The people who had been clamouring for more English could not even put a decent choir together to sing just the Liturgy! Some of them said that the singing was so bad that they preferred the Liturgy in a foreign language, in which it was properly sung. In other words, you have to make sacrifices in order to achieve anything. We owe a great deal to those who sang properly in English, showing others that the Liturgy in English could be just as beautiful as in Slavonic. Actions speak louder than words.

Yes, mistakes were made in the past, but we learned from those mistakes. Take for example our English translations which stretch back to the turn of the 20th century, nearly 150 years ago, those made in the USA with the blessing of the holy Patriarch Tikhon by an Episcopalian Isabel Hapgood and by Orlov in England. Those were foundation stones. Yes, those translations have been improved and on the way we have seen archaic translations in a Latinate, Victorian style like those of Hapgood or even with 16th century spelling, we have seen those made into street English as well as into soulless, jarring academic English, all sorts, but today we have definitive translations, avoiding all those extremes. It is easy to criticize, but the fact is that without those tireless efforts of the past, however mistaken they sometimes were, we would not be where we are now.

Let us first of all thank our recent fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters in Christ who went before us, who built our Church, our parishes and our souls. Our Metropolia, in effect, the Church of the Old and the New Europe, would not exist without them. But let us also thank the saints of the first millennium. Through venerating them, we have earned their prayers and because of their prayers we are here today. We are built not on dead souls, but on spiritually alive souls, whether of the distant past or of the recent past. Always on spiritually alive souls: Remember that.