Category Archives: Freedom

In Montenegro on the eve of the vote on joining NATO the victims of the NATO aggression of 1999 are remembered in prayer

The service was led by Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montenegro and Primorje. On the eve of the vote in the Parliament of Montenegro on the issue of NATO membership, on April 27 2017 in Podgorica was made a remembrance liturgy for the victims of the NATO aggression in Montenegro, Serbia and the world. The Liturgy was celebrated by Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montenegro and Primorje, who concelebrated with Bishop Budimlsko-Nikshichsky Ioanniky, said the official website of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

After the Divine Liturgy, both the bishops and the clergy did a memorial service for the victims of NATO. The memorial service was attended by many, including leaders of the opposition parties in Montenegro.

Before the service,Metropolitan Amfilohije said: “Just as at Easter 1941, Belgrade was bombed and was destroyed in 1999, the capital of Serbia. In celebration of the Easter period the capital of Montenegro, Podgorica also became the object of bombing of the so-called “allies”. Thus, it was chosen as a new bombardment at Easter, a day of joy, of light, of peace, of reconciliation between God and men, the day of mutual forgiveness, both in the family and in society and in the international community. ”

Metropolitan Amfilohije said that it is our duty as members of the Church of God – to remember those who died during the bombing in 1999 and previous bombings. “We have to do this and we must do it here, in front of the shrine with the relics of St. Petrer of Cetinje, the right hand of St. John the Baptist and the fragment of the precious Cross of Christ, our God [these relics are kept in Cetinje Monastery nowadays], in which the Lord showed that only those people and those people who sacrifice themselves for the sake of others, for others, for the welfare of mankind and the world, only these people and the people – real people and real peoples “, – added the bishop. Metr Amfilohije also noted that there are other people – “those who are like the wicked thief, those who, like Herod, Pontius Pilate, and those who then was the head of the Jews, who sacrifice others for their ideas, their ideology and their interest “,” who sell God for earthly honor, fame and fortune. ”

Metropolitan Amfilohije also remembered on the holy Prince John Vladimir and Aleksanere Nevsky, who taught their people that God is not in power but in truth. “And it is this always lived and breathed Montenegro and our people”, – said the Bishop. “We are holding on to each other before the shrine of St. Peter of Cetinje, in order to learn from it, and we encourage others to it – this is the way, which should go to Montenegro. If we want to go on this way, it is the way of St. John-Vladimir, who sacrificed himself in the short-term “, – said the Metropolitan, adding that to follow this path and were guided Serbs and Montenegrins Nemanjic – St. Simeon and St. Sava. “St. Sava taught us that Christ is the way that leads to eternal life. We followed this path in the XIII century, and we go to them to this day “- said Bishop Amfilohije.

“Get the servants of the tyrant – is something that can be done only by those who deviate from the path of God’s justice and truth. Saint Peter of Cetinje instructs and reminds everyone, both for us and for those who are currently managed by the State, his way of suffering between Asian and European tyranny, as it is called by his nephew Peter II Njegos. And nothing has changed to this day, “- the Metropolitan warned.

The First Hierarch of the Orthodox Church in Montenegro, said that the violence associated with the imposition of an agreement to join NATO is the continuation of Nazi violence. It would be good to those who today refer to their anti-fascism, we understood that those who were killed in the battles of the Yugoslav partisans against the Nazis, those who died in the concentration camps in Croatia during the Second World War, did not sacrifice themselves and their human dignity for the sake of their descendants today carried out violence and coercion, said Metropolitan Amfilohije, referring to pressure on Montenegro in terms of its entry into NATO.

“We urge the people of Montenegro and those who are destined to resolve these days its fate, we encourage them to look again at the way which we are taking: Use the injustice and violence, robbery of others, the satisfaction of their earthly interests, or to sacrifice themselves following the example of St. Peter of Cetinje”, – concluded Metropolitan Amfilohije.

Source: http://www.sedmitza.ru/text/7165136.html

On the Liberation of the Three Romes

Introduction: On Reversing Historic Injustices

Life is unfair. Life is full of injustices, both for individuals and for whole nations. No doubt, many examples come to mind, both personal and from history. On a national level, only in recent times, we can think of terrorist outrages, like that a few days ago in London, but we can think also of the unjust fates of Serbia, Iraq and Syria over the last generation. Or we can think back to the unjust outcomes of the First and Second World Wars. And we can think of more distant historic injustices, like colonialism, the first example of which took place in England 950 years ago after 1066, and many other examples.

For us, however, the greatest terrorist outrage and injustice, costing the lives of tens of millions, unbalancing the whole world and causing a Second World War and then a potentially nuclear Cold War, was the coup d’etat which took place in Russia exactly 100 years ago through the treachery of its elite and overseas meddlers and destroyers. As a result, for 100 years we have been in exile, whether physical, as in the case of subjects of the former Russian Empire, or spiritual, as in the case of all other Orthodox, who have suffered because of that treason that caused the fall of that Empire, our spiritual protection.

The Liberation of the Third Rome and the Restoration of Imperial Rus

For 100 years we have fought for the righting of that injustice, carried out by overseas evildoers and internal traitors. And so we have fought for our existential rights as Christians, the possibility to be with Christ, for the restoration and liberation of that Empire, the Third Rome, the Centre, the last remaining bastion of Christianity in the world. At first, deprived of the Centre, all we could do was preach the Faith, in its integrity, and work for a worldwide, if tiny, Empire, formed of oases in the desert, and only distantly hope for the coming Tsar, in faithfulness to our motto, ‘For the Faith, the Tsar and Rus’.

However, by Divine Providence and human repentance, since 2000 the Russian Federation has largely been liberated and voices have also been raised there in support of our Civilizational values, won by spiritual warfare, the worldwide Rus that we have worked for and for the coming Tsar. Only recently, among many, many others throughout the Russian Orthodox world, Metropolitan Benjamin of Vladivostok and Bishop Mitrofan of Severomorsk and Umbinsk have spoken of the inevitability of the restoration of the monarchy in at least the Russian Federation. Bishop Mitrofan has summed up our feelings in this way:

‘The Emperor is the litmus test on the basis of which we can verify if people have been cured of the poison of the 20th century or not…it is precisely the name of Nicholas II which is the test to see to what extent people have been cured and to what extent they are still sick’. Vladyka explained why people react less violently to scoundrels like Napoleon and Hitler than to the Tsar, saying that: ‘We are speaking of sacral, mysterious matters, of the destinies of the world, whether human history is to continue or to end, will there be another who restrains evil now or will there be no-one to restrain evil?…’.

‘On this cause stands resistance to the final attack of the power of the prince of darkness over humanity….If this cause is from men, it will fail all by itself, but if it is from God, then take care that you do not become apostates….We are doing God’s work, we are withstanding and resisting, in us beats the faith that Russia does have a future, that there will be a Tsar. There will be! We feel this in our hearts and there is nothing that can be done against it because this is God’s Work. Amen’.

http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/03/22/v_nas_betsya_vera_v_to_chto_u_rossii_budet_car/

Conclusion: The Liberation by the Third Rome of the Second and First Romes

If the Third Rome is restored, then its first task will be to liberate others, notably liberating the Second Rome from its fall into spiritual decadence, which has led to its disincarnate philosophizing, freemasonry, ecumenism and modernism. This we clearly saw at its 2016 meeting in Crete, which was boycotted by the Third Rome and all the spiritually free. Such liberation by the Third Rome will lead to the spiritual restoration of the Greek Orthodox world, much, but by no means all, of which has fallen so far from spiritual purity and is losing its soul to the prince of this world through Westernization.

Its second task will be to liberate the First Rome. This is a far greater task. This is not a matter of reversing the fall into spiritual impurity of a hundred years ago, but of the gradual but inevitable fall from Christ of a thousand years ago by the rejection of the Holy Spirit in favour of the things of men, of man-invented structures and ideology. However, this is the source of long-standing worldwide injustices and the world cannot survive unless they are righted. For men this is impossible, but we trust in the mercy and righteousness of the Just Judge, Who will do this Himself, if we should fail to do it in His Name.

Towards the Post-Western New World Order

Since the dissolution of the failed Marxist experiment of the Soviet Union in the last days of 1991, the US elite has had its quarter of a century of fame. As ‘the only Super-Power’, it barged its way into the internal affairs of many countries, creating havoc either directly or through its NATO terrorist wing, in ex-Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, the Ukraine, Syria and the Yemen, or else economically and politically. In a word, the slogan ‘let’s bomb them back into the Stone Age’ went to the heads of the neocon elite, infected by the hubris of the absurd ideology of dependence called ‘The West is Best’ with its power craze for universal control.

Now the whole world has seen the results of its terroristic ‘we shall bomb them into democracy’, as today in Mosul. With seventy years of CIA ‘regime changes’, corrupt puppet regimes and rigged elections, in Latin America, Asia and all over Western Europe, especially in Italy, France and Eastern Europe, and its recent history of hacking into other countries’ computer systems, the world has seen its double standards and spiritual and moral bankruptcy. Many are now abandoning the Western fantasy, recognizing that different countries have different identities and need independence from the ‘one size fits all’ West. In other words, we are moving to a post-Western New World Order.

Here there is a challenge for the neocon-founded European Union especially. Deserted by the Brexit British and by the new American administration, which praises Brexit and sees the EU and Cold War vestige NATO as urgently needing reform, and rejected by hundreds of millions of Europeans, the old EU elite will have to abandon its neocon New World Order, launched by Bush Senior a generation ago. This was invented, as explained by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, at the International Security Conference in Munich last weekend, by an elite group of Western States in order for them to dominate the rest of the world, to create dependent vassal nations worldwide.

In other words, the present new Cold War, aggressively launched by transnational arms merchants and failed ideologues like Clinton, Blair, Bush and Obama, just like the old Cold War, must come to an end. A bankrupt United States and puppet European Union simply cannot afford the bloody games and arrogant meddling of yesterday’s men. Not so much peace at any price, but peace for economic and human survival. The terroristic, anti-international neocon class and its paid media hacks, ironically calling themselves ‘the international community’, is being forced to opt for peace, freedom and justice. This is the post-Western New World Order. We welcome it.

The Christian Empire, not Zionist Imperialism

Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: Even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve. (Matt 20, 27-28)

For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all people, let us pray to the Lord.

Petition from the Great Litany of the Church

The hope for the global unity of all humanity in the Church is expressed in the above petition. For we believe that the voluntary union of all people in unity in diversity can only come through peace in the whole world and the good estate of the Local Orthodox Churches. This is the opposite of the globalism of the New World Order. This presumes the war of the whole world, the bad estate of the Local Orthodox Churches and the forced union of survivors in a global electronic concentration camp, in which all diversity will be destroyed and sameness imposed. All will be forced into speaking the same language, dressing the same way, watching the same images and listening to the same voices. All dissent will be ruthlessly crushed by imperialism.

Like all isms, this imperialism is infected with the secular, that is, with spiritual pride. It does not matter whether an ism started with a Christian motivation, any word ending in ism is so tainted, including Catholicism, Papism, Protestantism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, messianism, traditionalism, conservatism, liberalism, old calendarism, new calendarism or any other ism. The words Church, Christianity and Orthodoxy are not so tainted because they are not secular, they are not spiritually proud, but humble. Thus, although we belong to the Christian Empire on earth, for nearly one hundred years without an earthly head, our head for now being the Mother of God, we reject imperialism, which is the demonic spirit of imagined superiority.

Imperialism means self-serving domination over other peoples and their cruel exploitation. It is the belief of imperialists that they are a chosen people, exceptional, as in the messianic Jewish exceptionalism of the ideology of ‘the chosen people’ of the Pharisees in the first century AD, today known as Zionism, the papal exceptionalism of the Crusades all over Europe and in the Middle East, (‘Kill them all, God will recognize His own’), the Spanish and Portuguese exceptionalism of the conquest of the Americas, the British exceptionalism of the Victorian Age, French exceptionalism, the German exceptionalism which started two World Wars against the Slavs, and today’s American neocon exceptionalism with its Trostkyite ethos.

Making itself exceptional, imperialism frees itself with impunity from common human morality and laws. All is permitted, from carpet bombing to dropping atomic bombs on civilians, from napalm to Agent Orange, from shock and awe to ‘collateral damage’, for the end justifies the means. Imperialism means the will to dominate others, not the will to serve others. A similar thing has happened in the history of the three imperial centres of the Orthodox Christian peoples. All three have at times been infected with the spiritual pride of Zionism, which destroyed Judaism and brought it to crucify Christ, as He had upset its plans for domination of the whole world, as expressed by the most Zionist, the Pharisees, the neocons of their age.

Thus, Old Rome was infected by the spiritual pride of imperialism and domination, using military force to achieve its aims, starting in southern Italy, Iberia and England (later in the Middle East, Ireland and Russia), and so fell away from the Church in the 11th century. New Rome (Constantinople) was infected and undermined by the spiritual pride of provincial Greek nationalism (Hellenism), which led it into compromises in Florence, bringing about its downfall in 1453, which nationalism is still alive today. And the Third Rome (Moscow) was at times also infected with Russian nationalism, as can be seen in parts of the history of Russian relations with Georgians, Finns and Poles, with the native peoples of Siberia and Alaska, and others.

The roots of exploitative Russian nationalism go back to the Lutheranized, absolutist Peter I, who invented a national Russian flag, replacing the old, multinational, Christian emblem of the double-headed eagle, introduced Western-style bureaucracy, as seen in his Table of Ranks, thus separating the Tsar from the people, and brought in Western feudal enslavement (serfdom), which lasted some 150 years. This is why the Soviet regime adored Peter and violently reintroduced his serfdom, which it called collectivization. Its first victims, just as Peter’s first victims, were the Russians themselves. For the Leninist and Trotskyite Soviet Union was also a Zionist-style Empire, an Empire without Christ, Messianism without a Messiah.

Superimposed on the already betrayed and undermined multinational Christian Empire of Old Russia, the Soviet Union was resented by western Ukrainians, Poles, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Tartars and many other peoples through its centralized will for domination. All such imperialism is opposed to the beliefs of the Christian Empire. The Christian Empire exists not to serve itself by exploiting the peoples who voluntarily desire and ask to belong to it, nor to promote greed for profit and ecologically catastrophic consumerism, but to fight evil. If you do not fight evil, you are in no way messianic, in no way a chosen people. A chosen people is one that lives for Christ, fights evil, serves others and defends the weak.

The Christian Empire has no desire to conquer and subjugate other peoples, making them its inferior, second-class citizens, belittling their languages and cultures, exploiting their resources. It desires only to serve, defend and respect them, seeing them as brothers and sisters, equal because also created by God, telling them of the Goodness, Truth and Justice of Christ and the acquisition of the Holy Spirit by example. In a word, the Christian Empire is the Empire of the Spirit. The Christian Empire in Russia, as in all its incarnations, fell because its treacherous and self-serving elite, largely no longer Christian, had ceased to do these things, being infected in the last two and a half centuries by exploitative imperialism which had been imported from the West.

Nearly one hundred years after the fall of the Christian Empire in 1917, which was the real aim of the First World War, and then the attempt in 1941 to destroy its territorial integrity, which was the real aim of the Second World War, but which was achieved only in 1991, we are now at a turning-point in history. We are faced by the ravaging of the planet by the messianistic imperialism of the Zionist neocon elite with its Soviet-style ‘bright future’. As it attempts to subjugate and control all humanity, the only thing that stands between us and its Antichristic ethos is the hope for the restoration of the Christian Empire. This is the Empire, freed of provincialist nationalism, ready to fight evil, defend the weak and serve the spiritual needs of humanity.

1916-2016: Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’.

Exalt the Lord our God and worship at His footstool; for He is holy.

Psalm 98, 5 (Septuagint)

Rus is the footstool of the Throne of the Lord.

St John of Kronstadt

Foreword: Personal

However absurd it may seem, including to myself, I have long felt and observed signposts to my destiny in my heritage and the life of Tsar Nicholas II. For example, the future Christian Emperor Tsar Nicholas II was born in the Alexander Palace in the Imperial Capital of Saint Petersburg on the feast-day of St Job the Much-Suffering in 1868. At the same time my great-grandfather Thomas was born in the poorest conditions of the workhouse in a provincial village in Eastern England. However, fifty years later, in 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, whose emblem was the double-headed eagle uniting east and west, the Imperial Family and their faithful servants were murdered in Ekaterinburg, a city in the Urals on the confines of Europe and Asia, uniting east and west. As for my great-grandfather, he died in the same village as he was born in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands. That invasion ended four years later with the liberation of Vienna, where my father went in 1945, and of Berlin by those whose homeland had been so treacherously and bloodily attacked with death, rape, fire and pillage.

I was born on the 19th July, the day in 1918 on which the assassins of the Russian Imperial Family ritually finished destroying their earthly remains. As a child, I collected postage stamps: only one stood out from the 3,000 others – that with the face of Tsar Nicholas II seemingly calling to me to serve his cause. Almost exactly fifty years after the Tsar’s martyrdom, in 1968, 100 years after the birth of the martyred Tsar and 50 years after his sacrificial martyrdom, in a Scottish city almost on the same latitude as Saint Petersburg, I was called to learn Russian and three months later, in a message coming from the east, called to serve the Russian Orthodox Church. Then there was the tutor to the Tsarevich, Fr Nicholas Gibbes, the first English Orthodox priest in almost a millennium, like me a man from the provinces in an Orthodox country as a teacher and becoming a Russian Orthodox priest. Fr Nicholas served in Oxford, where I studied in the same college as Felix Yusupov, the murderer of Tsar Nicholas’ holy elder. And in darkest 1974, when there seemed no hope of it at all, I was called on to write of the coming resurrection of the Russian Church and Empire (1). I never sought any of this, and yet this has been my calling and my destiny.

1916-1981: The Fall of the Christian Empire and of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire

On 30 December 1916, Anglo-Zionist spies in Saint Petersburg, sent by those who by then had in 1916 taken control of the bankrupted British government and aided by decadent, anti-Christian, Russian aristocrats, carried out the assassination of a much-slandered Russian Orthodox holy man and spiritual counsellor to the Imperial Family. Exactly as foretold by its victim, this would begin the process that would lead to the overthrow in 1917 of the Tsar, then on the very point of victory and so of ending the vile and atrocious First World War that was slaughtering the flower of Europe. His overthrow would lead to almost two more years of vile war, millions more of victims, and unspeakable bloodshed throughout the Russian Empire, exactly as the Mother of God forewarned innocent peasant children in distant Portugal in 1917. This meant the collapse of the Christian Empire after 1600 years and its replacement by two false Empires, both founded on Western materialism by those who had engineered that collapse. These Empires were the Bolshevik Atheist Empire and the Western Atheist Empire, the first centred in Moscow, the second in New York.

In 1981, 64 years after the 1917 coup d’etat in Saint Petersburg, the only remaining free part of the Russian Orthodox Church, that outside Russia and centred in New York, carried out a heroic act. This was under the leadership of the ever-memorable Metropolitan Philaret (+ 1985), once an exile in China, who had been chosen as Metropolitan by Archbishop John of Shanghai, once also an exile in China (+ 1966). The Metropolitan’s surname was Voznesensky, also the name of the street of the Ipatiev House, where the Imperial Family was martyred in Ekaterinburg. (In 1998 the Metropolitan’s earthly remains were found incorrupt). As for Archbishop John, canonized a generation later (2), he had been slandered, persecuted and even taken to court by false Russian brethren in exile. This heroic 1981 act was when the Church of the emigration at long last canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors. At their head stood Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family and servants, faithful to the end. This act was an act of repentance on behalf of all Russian Orthodox and those Russian émigrés whose ancestors had vilified and betrayed Tsar Nicholas.

This repentance of part of the Russian emigration, living in apparent freedom, had taken a scandalously long 64 years. St John of Shanghai had called for it almost fifty years before. Nevertheless, it represented the long-awaited repentance by descendants of those in the emigration who by treason had abdicated from the Throne and brought about the February 1917 coup d’etat. They had then fled for their lives into an often impoverished and harsh exile, blaming the Tsar for their foolishness, treason and poverty. For that February coup had in turn led to the October 1917 seizure of power by satanic atheists who then ritually murdered the Tsar, his Family and faithful servants. This 1981 canonization led to the rapid deaths of three Soviet leaders from 1982 on, and to the end of stagnation. And in 1991, 75 years almost to the day after its founding act on 30 December 1916, the Bolshevik Atheist Empire, centred in Moscow and which had murdered the Tsar collapsed. Thus, the murders of the Tsar and Imperial Family, ordered from New York in 1918, were literally reversed by an act ordered in New York in 1981. The first part of the curse had been lifted.

In 1988 we wrote that what had begun in New York must be completed in Moscow, that is, by the vast majority of the Russian Orthodox Church, inside Russia. We did not know then that the Bolshevik Atheist Empire would, so painfully for its peoples, finally dissolve in 1991, 75 years almost to the day after the December 1916 assassination by British spies. This is what we wrote then: ‘Our hope is from the living and suffering faithful on Earth and in Heaven, the Martyrs and Confessors of Christ, the One Lord and Saviour. Is then the seventy-year Babylonian captivity of the Russian Church now coming to an end? As yet we cannot know for sure. We shall be certain only when all those many Martyrs and Confessors are venerated without exception, openly, officially and universally in the Russian lands, when the work begun in New York is brought to its fullness in Moscow; this will be the ‘True Pascha’ of which St Seraphim prophetically spoke…The canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors is a gift of God made through the Church for the spiritual enrichment of the whole Orthodox Church, of all the Orthodox Christian peoples…’.

ReChristianization and DeChristianization

When in June 1941 Nazi tanks invaded the Soviet Union, in the western Ukraine (formerly eastern Poland), naïve Ukrainian peasants greeted the Nazis as liberators from Bolshevism, because the peasants saw crosses on the Nazi tanks. They soon learned of the evil of the Nazis who sadistically slaughtered all who stood in their way. Paradoxically, the Nazi invasion brought about a measure of repentance in the Bolshevik Atheist Empire and the reinvigoration of the implicit Christian values of pre-Revolutionary culture that had been preserved, in terms of the provision of social justice (in the Tsar’s Russia you received free health care for the payment of a stamp costing one rouble per year) and also of ‘socially conservative values’, of normal family life. There dawned on some the realization that the liberation from Nazism of Vienna and Berlin in 1945 could have happened in 1917 under Tsar Nicholas II. That would have been far less bloody, far more disciplined, like the Russian liberation of Paris in 1814, with concerts of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin in the main squares of those cities to celebrate Christian culture, as in Palmyra this year.

The story of the slow but gradual reChristianization of the Russian Lands after 1941, increasing especially rapidly fifty years later, after 1991, is the reverse of the Western story. If the red star of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire became ever more cross-like, the white star of the Western Atheist Empire became ever more satan-like. The two became like two trains on parallel tracks, but heading in opposite directions, to heaven and to hell. Unlike the Bolshevik Atheists, who did not reject their inheritance of social justice and socially conservative moral values from the Tsar’s Empire, Western Atheists have rejected Christian culture. True, anti-Christianity had been inherent in Western history from the Crusades to Wars of ‘Religion’, from Colonization to the French Revolution, from the French and British siding with Islam to invade Russia in 1854 or the German siding with Islam against Russia in 1914. But in the 1960s, 50 years after the Western-orchestrated ‘Russian Revolution’ of 1917, the West entered into a frenzy of deChristianization, rejecting all Christian values implicit in its culture, even male and female roles in the family, resulting in today’s gender hysteria.

1981-2016: The Fall of the Western Atheist Empire

So, in August 2000 the far greater part of the Russian Orthodox Church, that inside Russia, was at last freed, completing the work begun in New York 19 years earlier, canonizing the New Martyrs and Confessors, at their head Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family. This has led in turn to the process that is now reversing the second part of the blood-soaked pattern of catastrophic 20th century and early 21st century history. In other words, since 2000 Russia has been rising and the Western Atheist Empire, centred in New York, its myths of ‘freedom and democracy’ spread like tentacles throughout the world, has been falling. Just as New York freed Moscow between 1981 and 2000, so since 2000 Moscow has been freeing New York. This is the fall of the Empire founded on the ruins of the Christian Empire by traitors in 1917, bringing US troops into the Great War, just as demoralized Russian Imperial troops left it. That ensured 100 years of worldwide bloodshed, just as the Mother of God had warned peasant children in Fatima in Portugal in 1917, though those children would be bullied into silence and their revelation utterly deformed by men of the Vatican machine.

Thus, on the feast-day of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, 11 September 2001, we witnessed the attack on the New York Twin Towers, the beheading of the Western Atheist Babylon. Engineered in secret by forces still unknown, though much suspected, this murderous attack with its 3,000 victims foretold the beginning of the collapse of the Western Atheist Empire that stretches throughout North America, Western Europe, Australasia and to vassal states like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. It had come to power by financing from New York and organizing the collapse of the Christian Empire eighty-four years before, in 1917. 1917 to 2001: 1984 had indeed come. For the collapse of the Twin Towers did not lead to repentance and the questions, ‘Why is this happening to us?, and, ‘What have we done to deserve this?, as did the collapse of the Tower of Siloam (Lk 13, 1-5), but to illegal, unjustifiable, vengeful, bloody and chaotic invasions of innocent Middle Eastern and Islamic countries. These have in turn bankrupted the indebted US branch of the Western Empire and led to unbearable anarchy and unspeakable misery for the peoples in those lands.

Why did these invasions take place? For oil and gas? For strategic advantage and to set up ever more US military bases? For the usual neo-colonial, Western bullying and asset-stripping of weaker countries, unable to defend themselves against sophisticated arms of ‘shock and awe’? Yes, superficially, all this was the case, but this was only a superficial reason, to keep greedy banksters and military industrialists quiet. In reality, these bloody invasions of Islamic countries, carried out by the neocon elite against the interests of ordinary, hoodwinked and now bankrupted Americans, zombified by their corporate media, took place for another reason. They were designed to weaken the Muslim world, so that the Temple in Jerusalem can be rebuilt by the Zionists in the place of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and there the representative of their chief, the prince of this world (Jn 14, 13), can be enthroned. This is why the possible election of the nationalist and populist Trump next month is feared as a huge setback to their plans by the ‘Anglo-Zionist’ neocons. For whatever he may be, he may at least put US internal affairs above meddling in other countries’ internal affairs.

These invasions are also causing the collapse of the European branch of the Western Empire, called the European Union, a weak group of vassal puppet-states controlled by the American Union and heir to the Soviet Union in terms of its tyranny. This absurd, overstretched and bankrupted Union, never wanted by its peoples but only by its moneyed elite, and used to extend a Fourth Reich of German political and economic hegemony over all Europe, is now being overwhelmed by the invasion of Islamic refugees, resulting in divisions everywhere. This leaves only a weakened Western German core, set up to lead Europe under US control at the end of the Second World War, when it was occupied and colonized by US troops. However, if the countries that make up the present EU can regain their freedom and sovereignty, Europe could be saved by returning to its cultural roots. It could return not to recent human and political manipulations and cheap surrogates like Protestantism and Catholicism, but to its real Christian first millennium roots, so long lost, forgotten, scorned and despised, to Orthodoxy Christianity, to the Church of God.

Afterword: The Christian Empire May Rise Again

Today the Russian Federation, once the centre of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire which was dissolved 25 years ago in great pain for its peoples, collapsed through treason and cynical lack of belief in anything except self-interest, so-called Communists becoming Capitalists overnight, is starting to save itself. The Soviet Union had to die if it were to turn its back, however hesitantly, on the Bolshevik heritage of alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce. Thus, the restoration by patriots of the Christian Empire after the 100-year long nightmare that began at the end of 1916 now actually looks possible. In this way the Russian Federation can start to save the ever more fragile European nations of the Western Atheist Empire, bringing them back to their senses, back to true freedom (not the ‘freedom’ to murder millions of children in the abortion holocaust or the freedom for sexual perversion), to true culture (not the Coca-Cola culture of feeble imitations of imported cowboy culture) and to their own national sovereignty (not national degradation). A spectre haunts Europe – the spectre of freedom, sovereignty and national restoration, which are spelled Brexit.

But why is this process of salvation, which is now beginning, nowhere yet complete? Because nowhere is repentance yet complete. St Seraphim of Sarov said: ‘I will glorify the Tsar who glorifies me’. Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’. But for the Tsar to be glorified, we must first be brought together into Rus by full repentance, by understanding the sin of regicide and all that followed and by accepting the Christian values which he and his family incarnated. This will mean those in the dead Bolshevik Atheist Empire, and at least some in the Western Atheist Empire, which is also to die, overcoming their treason, lies and prejudices about the Christian Empire of the last Tsar. Only when this has been done can the Lord raise up the still unrevealed and unknown man who is to become the next Christian Emperor, the next and perhaps the last Tsar. He alone will resist him who is to be enthroned by our enemies in Jerusalem, as St John of Kronstadt prophesied. But the next and coming Christian Emperor will not appear until the masses are first ready to accept and glorify the last Christian Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. Yea, come, Lord!

Notes:

1. ‘Beloved Land, soon to be made fragrant and all-holy, shone through and warmed by the love of so many martyrs’ blood, there is an unknown redolence and radiant light in thy still brightening churches; we neither ask why nor question how, but we know and feel and have Faith’. (From ‘Premonition’, Chapter I of ‘Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition’, English Orthodox Trust, 1995, 1997 and 2014).

2. St John was the first saint of the Church Outside Russia. Two others have since followed: Bishop Jonah of Hankou (Hangchow – also in China) (+ 1925) canonized in 1996, and Archbishop Seraphim of Sofia (+ 1950), canonized in 2016. Will Metropolitan Philaret be the fourth? His possible canonical canonization under discussion.

“This article also appeared on Katehon.com http://katehon.com/article/1916-2016-today-tsar-nicholas-ii-says-i-will-glorify-those-who-glorify-me”.

The Lost Empire and the Future of Europe

A few miles from where I write these words, there is a small town called Rendlesham. Over 1500 years ago it was named after a man called Rendle, which in the Anglian language meant ‘small shield’, indicating a military man. Thus, although there is no proof, Rendle could have been an Anglian soldier of the Roman Army who settled here in about AD 390. When the Romans left in 410, he settled down in an abandoned Roman administrative settlement by the river and gave it his name – Rendle’s home. Towards the end of the sixth century this became the palace of the East Anglian royal house and an important centre for some 150 years, its kings being buried at nearby Sutton Hoo. Recently archaeologists working there have found a bowl and coins from ‘Constantinople’. For Eastern England was once part of the Christian Empire.

Indeed, when St Bede the Venerable completed his work ‘On the History of the English Church and People’ in 731, he dated his entries by the reign of the Roman Emperor, who lived far away in what was until recently called ‘Constantinople’. Even distant Iona in the north-west was in spirit part of that same Sacral Empire, just as India in the south-east, Georgia in the north-east and what is now Portugal in the south-west were part of the same Empire. What happened to this lost unity of this lost Empire, forgotten and even hidden from Western eyes, its coins and artefacts now being uncovered? The answer is in the misdeeds of an individual and a superiority complex mentality that has since become collective like an epidemic. This individual is nowadays called Charlemagne in English, but in his own time he was called Karl the Tall.

He was a semi-literate, provincial Frankish king, made a Roman patrician by the Imperial Court in Christian Rome, set between the two continents of Europe and Asia, in recognition of the relative order that he had created in his barbarian chaos of a corner of Western Europe, which was called ‘the First Reich’. It was indeed only a corner because it did not include Scandinavia or the British Isles and Ireland, only a minute part of the Iberian Peninsula and only part of the Italian Peninsula, and of course not Central and Eastern Europe. (Even today in that part of Europe, the ‘Vysegrad Four’, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, are all resistant to the successor of Karl’s First Reich, the EU Fourth Reich. Why? Because they were all Orthodox Christian before their conquest by the anti-Christian adepts of Charlemagne).

Charlemagne wanted to rival, overthrow and usurp the authority of the Christian Emperor in Christian Rome. So he claimed the authority of the emperors of pagan Rome instead, and, in order to make himself Emperor, he then accused the real Emperor of his own Trinitarian heresy, appointing his right-hand man in Rome as the source of the Holy Spirit. He was of course derided for his incredible narcissism and megalomania in the Imperial Capital in New Rome, but four centuries later his spiritual descendants had become so important and powerful that they sacked and looted the Imperial Capital, thus leading to a part-Muslim Eastern Europe. Likewise, ten centuries later, Napoleon crowned himself and accused any dissidents (in his case, England and Russia) of heresy and attempted to slaughter them for preferring freedom.

A century later another successor, the dictator of the ‘Third Reich’ (the ‘Second Reich’ had been founded by Bismarck in 1871), Hitler, also crowned himself, not with a literal crown, but with a Fascist ideology, murdering all ‘heretics’, especially those who had a universal, messianic philosophy (notably 27 million East Slavs and 5 million Jews) to rival his own. And today’s neocon Anglo-Zionists do the same, crowning themselves with being ‘Western’. Any lack of ‘Western values’, that is, any sign of different, that is, non-secularist, cultural values, is for them a heresy and those who confess them must be bombed into oblivion. This is the same old arrogant self-justification once again. Thus, the infamous Italian, neo-Carolingian Berlusconi infamously declared that the unprovoked Western aggression on oil-rich Iraq in 2003 was a ‘crusade’.

That invasion was indeed a crusade, but not by the Carolingian usurpers, Roman Catholics, against real Christians as in the Middle Ages, but one against anyone who stopped the greedy West from getting its hands on the mineral riches of Iraq. However, in reality, this was little different from the jealous Western looting of the Imperial Capital, wealthy New Rome, almost exactly 800 years earlier in 1204. So the ‘Charlemagne syndrome’ has repeated itself through Western history. And yet the Sacral Christian Empire, though for the moment without its Emperor and much endangered, is still here, stretching from Montenegro to Vladivostok and Murmansk to Jerusalem, but with outposts all around the world, from Japan to Chile and Alaska to New Zealand. If Europe has any future – outside darkest Islamism – the Christian Empire is it.

The EU: A Story of Hubris

Introduction: Recent Examples of Hubris

The recent saga of Patriarch’s Bartholomew’s conference in Crete, organized and patrolled by the CIA and billed as ‘Great’, ‘Holy’ and ‘Pan-Orthodox’, but which was in fact small and unholy and involved representatives from only 20% of the Orthodox world, is a classic story of hubris. This event was marked by the intellectual arrogance, insults of Orthodox as ‘fundamentalists’, vanity, pomp, self-importance and failure to listen that affects all who suffer from the delusional megalomania of hubris, ‘Blairism’ as it can be called, such as the fact that the Patriarch had erected a statue to himself. From it we can see the spiritual importance of the seemingly forgotten Christian virtue of humility. But a far more tragic story of hubris is the generational parable of the USA over the last 25 years.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communist Eastern and Central Europe in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The end of the very expensive Cold War and its very bloody proxy wars, from North Korea to Northern Ireland, from South Vietnam to South Africa, should have been a wonderful opportunity for the USA and its allies to disarm, disbanding NATO. Instead, power went to the head of the New World Order-obsessed US elite. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union, it had invaded Iraq and embarked on aggression worldwide. We now know that this hubris ended – with Clinton, Bush, Blair, Obama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and millions of dead and refugees. Another tragic story of hubris is that of the European Union (EU).

Four Errors

The predecessor of the EU was founded through the Treaty of Rome by the US and its European puppets (like Monnet and Adenauer). It basically re-established a faithless medieval Roman Catholic Empire, a post-Catholic trading organization and antidote to continual wars between Germany and France and satellite countries in Western Europe. Having formed a Neo-Carolingian Empire of six countries, its proud elite then began to imagine some far greater, pan-European, political entity. Flattered and urged on by the US, this, they thought, could become a United States of Europe. This first error appeared in the 1970s when the power-crazed elite began to try and take over excluded (that is, ‘economically excommunicated’) Protestant Europe to the north.

The second error came in the 1990s after the dissolution of the Communist bloc in Central and Eastern Europe, when the EU elite began to dream up a universal ‘European Union’. On 1 January 1993 it by diktat changed the name of their bloc to this. Megalomania began in earnest with the Treaty of Maastricht (called by some ‘Mass trick’), as the EU nomenklatura stamped the passports of its once-sovereign, unconsulted citizens with the sign of the beast, ‘European Union’. It also encouraged civil war in ex-Yugoslavia, whose markets and territories the EU elite wanted to take over. By bullying, bribes, blackmail and war crimes it planned the absorption of ex-Communist Europe into the EU with its US-run military arm, NATO. The Soviet Union had been reborn as the European Union.

Thus, although already having failed to take over Protestant Europe, in their hubris the blinded and megalomaniac EU elite actually imagined that they could take over not only Catholic Eastern Europe, but even Orthodox Eastern Europe. This second error meant absorbing those who had at least in part preserved the Faith from the 1960s materialist consumerism and spiritual degeneration of Western Europe, ironically thanks to Communism. In order to further its hold throughout the Union, the elite then began imposing on its subject peoples a single currency, in effect, a one size fits all Deutschmark straitjacket, regardless of the many differences between the various nations. A German Europe, not a European Germany, was the order of the day. This was the third error.

Next, even after the collapse of naïve Greece, bankrupted by EU, ‘easy-money’, consumerism and enslaving itself to cheap euro credit from German banks become expensive, and even after the risk of Grexit, such was the hubris of the elite that in 2014 it proceeded to its fourth error. Urged on by the US neocon elite which was violently sweeping away the democratically-elected government in Kiev, the EU elite gave naïve Ukrainians, impoverished by oligarch corruption, the idea that the Ukraine too could be forced into the EU straitjacket. A pro-Nazi Galician regime in Kiev (like that in Zagreb in the 1990s) which began another bloody civil war in Europe, with perhaps two million refugees fleeing in despair, was installed; blood was on the hands of the US and of the EU elite.

Brexit

But now Brexit has come to destroy the elite’s fantasies of ‘ever-closer Union’. And they, the ‘democratic’ EU elite, are enraged: the people were never supposed to have their say, only the elite knew better. After over 40 years of oppressive captivity, post-Protestant Europe in the form of the UK has now begun to free and relieve itself from the post-Catholic, centralized EU straitjacket. (Sensibly, Protestant Switzerland, Norway and Iceland never even tried on the straitjacket of rule from ‘Rome’). Now the peoples of post-Protestant Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are also thinking of Swexit, Denxit, Fexit, and Nexit and there is much support for Dexit, the Alternative for Germany, notably in the cities of post-Protestant, former East Germany.

In the UK itself the repercussions are huge. The fourth largest political Party, the tiny, largely upper-middle class Liberal Democratic Party, has all but disappeared, virtually wiped out by its own pro-EU suicide, and become a joke. The third Party, the anti-EU protest Party (UKIP), can now disappear with its embarrassingly rude leader, who has already resigned. The second Party, the Labour Party, is split by champagne-socialist, pro-Iraq War MPs, installed by the megalomania of Blair (and Brown), whom many consider a war criminal. These MPs have nothing in common with the grassroots membership, which rightly views them as traitors to the real Labour cause of social justice and to their burning desire for a non-Third World national health service and public transport system.

As for the largest Party, the Conservative and Unionist Party, to give it its full name, it has largely become the Party of Eton toffs, City banksters, big business and neocon Russophobes. It too has been traitorous to its core of working-class patriots, some of whom founded UKIP as a result of the toffs’ betrayal. It anti-democratically signed up the UK to the EU in all its incarnations in the first place. Therefore, it too is utterly split. It is only right that its Establishment elite, in its hubris and conviction that it could easily win the EU referendum, now has to find a ‘Brexit strategy’, that is, a plan for escape from the 43-year old mess that it created. Perhaps it could begin by making a Minister for social justice and a New-York born Foreign Minister for relations with a post-neocon USA and the Commonwealth.

However, more than this, Brexit may not only signal the end of the ‘European Union’, as cracks develop further, not only in Hungary, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, but also in Scandinavia, France, Austria, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and elsewhere. It may also be the end of the ‘British Union’ (the UK), an oppressively united and centralized British Isles and Ireland, an invention of the alien Norman ruling elite that has occupied and ruled the country for 950 years. We may finally be moving towards the reconfiguration of the Isles, into a Confederation of an at long last independent England, an offshore Switzerland, and also an independent Scotland and Wales and at last a united Ireland. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be now? Perhaps we are indeed turning full circle.

Conclusion: Towards a New Europe

One of the myths of Brexit, repeated in the mendacious and outrageous pages of the pro-globalist British Establishment press like The Financial Times, is that those who voted for freedom were stupid, rural, traditional, old and racist. As though 52% of the electorate could be fitted into this tiny category! You cannot disabuse and trample underfoot the sense of justice of the people for 43 years and expect them not to resist and fight to return freedom. The chaotic EU is collapsing. Bankrupt Italy may be next to break free. Moreover, elections are due in the US in November, where if the anti-neocon, pro-British, maverick and provocative Trump, defeats the anti-US neocon Clinton, all is possible, perhaps a new golden age of Anglo-American relations and even freedom for the Ukraine.

In 2017 there will be elections in France and Germany, which come 100 years after the 1917 Western-engineered coup in Russia. This destroyed the Christian Russian Empire, which, after the previous incompetent military leadership, under the inspired leadership of Tsar Nicholas II was on the verge of victory over the hubristic Kaiser. This victory would have restored the sovereign Germanic states, destroyed by Bismarck’s Second Reich, ended the Austro-Hungarian enslavement of the Slavs, freed Western Europe from genocide, the Balkans from masonic German princelings, Constantinople, Jerusalem and Palestine from the Ottomans and avoided the evil Third Reich and today’s tragic Middle East. Instead, the coup created the horrors of the anti-Christian Soviet Union.

Now the freedom-loving peoples of Europe may be able to restore their sovereignty. At last a Europe of independent, sovereign but co-operating nations, as envisaged by Tsar Nicholas II, is possible. EU propagandists lie: the problems of Europe never came from the nation states that they have dismantled, but from the nationalist, anti-patriotic aggression and will of large Western Europe countries to dominate all the others. As the anachronistic EU and so NATO collapse, perhaps it is time for this Westernmost corner of the Eurasian Continent to stop its navel-gazing. Its nations could yet join the Confederation of Nations of the much broader and more successful Eurasian Economic Union, ceasing to be vassals of the neocon elite and so recovering their own identities.

13 July 2016

The Meaning of our Life is to Postpone the Coming of Antichrist

The last two weeks have brought a series of very important pieces of news.

Firstly, there has been the failed Crete meeting. Far from being a ‘Pan-Orthodox Council’, let alone the ‘Eighth Oecumenical Council’, it turned into disagreements about a series of narrow ‘Zizioulasisms’, philosophical modernisms approved by the US State Department that runs the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Many of the most respected bishops present in Crete, let alone those representing the other 80% of the Orthodox world and not present, refused to sign the documents proposed. This meeting, so secretive that most media were excluded from it, has no authority or acceptance anywhere in the monasteries and parishes in the real Orthodox world. The mismanaged forum, fortunately largely unreported by the mass media, turned it into little more than a damp squib. It does, however, mean that the Church has resisted the secularization that the powerbrokers of this world wanted to impose on Her, as they had imposed on the Vatican. She will not merge with the world in order to welcome the coming Antichrist.

Secondly, there has been the Brexit vote, the people’s bid for freedom from the dying European Superstate and the corrupt Unionist British Establishment which was so enthusiastic about the EU that it had imposed it on the people. And this was in spite of, or perhaps because of, the manipulation of the assassination that preceded the referendum. Some believe that other countries and institutions, even religious ones, may also wish to escape the straitjacket of the EU. Amid all the new opportunities this opens up there has, however, also been much insecurity and even panic and chaos. Freedom comes at a price. The whole UK political Establishment, as usual totally out of touch with the people it was supposed to represent, not least the Labour Party infiltrated and stuffed with careerist Blairite MPs, is being transformed with the resignations and eliminations of several well-known politicians. Brexit, so much resisted by the bullying of Obama and Merkel, has delayed the move towards One World Government by Antichrist.

Thirdly, there has been the long-delayed publication of the Chilcot report which makes clear that the whole of the British Establishment was guilty of the war crimes in invading and occupying Iraq. Its arrogance and hubris have been revealed for the whole world to see. This opens up UK responsibilities for other recent disastrous massacres and chaotic injustices in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and the Yemen. In the Ukraine British Army equipment is now being used by the Kiev puppet regime in its massacres of the population in Eastern Ukraine. Moreover, the UK Establishment is actively participating in the meeting in Warsaw of the US-led and financed NATO. Russians nervously fear a NATO invasion, as German and other tanks once more mass on the borders of Russia, just as they did 75 years ago. If such a threat did take place, which does seem highly unlikely, it would be one step nearer the One World Government that the neocons in Washington have so ardently been working for ever since they came to power under Clinton in the 1990s.

Two steps forward, one step back? Perhaps. Perhaps there will be a real Orthodox Council that will reject the compromises of Crete. But perhaps not. Perhaps the elite will not allow the UK to leave the EU and the electorate will be browbeaten, bribed and blackmailed into voting again and again until it gets the ‘right’ result. But perhaps the Unionist EU – and the Unionist UK – will collapse and relatively soon. And perhaps then England, freed from the Norman yoke after 950 years, will take its rightful place as an equal among the nations. Perhaps the old Norman-British habit of arrogantly invading, enslaving and exploiting other countries of the world, not least England itself, because it is ‘in the national interest’, that is, in the interest of the elite, will forever pass into the dustbin of history. Perhaps NATO will collapse as the antiquated Cold War structure it is. Perhaps the Christian Emperor will be restored in Russia. But perhaps NATO will invade Russia. There is no point in predicting. We do not know what will happen. What we do know is that if we wish to influence the future, the only thing we can do is to pray – for the meaning of our life is to postpone the coming of Antichrist.

English People, I have fallen in love with you again!

06/24/2016

The well-known Russian Orthodox philosopher Victor Trostnikov is glad that the English have despised material benefits by voting for a way out of the dying European Union.

Under the rule of Margaret Thatcher, I had for some time to live in the provinces of the UK, amid the purple-covered heather of South Wales. Of all my experiences overseas – and they apply to America, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland – it was the most powerful and stable and touched the soul the most. I saw wonderful people, courageous, discreet and not just hard-working, and thousands of the population who did not have a slacker. In it, I felt an echo of the great nation that gave the world Newton, Shakespeare and Francis Drake, that gave humanity the Pacific Ocean and its own language, which has become a means of planetary communication. At the same time I caught in this kind of people the “Stockholm Syndrome” – surrender to the incoming of people from former colonies – Pakistanis and Africans. This surrender so upset me that I wrote an article similar to an epitaph, called something between the “English, I have loved you”, and “where once lived the British.” The article was immediately translated into English and the first Briton who examined it said: «It is exactly what I think».

Since then the years have passed. The sadness for a bygone great nation gradually weakened. Well done – I thought – everything comes to an end. Take, for example Norwegians. What people they have! – Abel, Grieg, Nansen, Amundsen! And now – Breivik …

And a referendum. In a pragmatic sense, for England to leave the EU is not very profitable, it is threatened by economic crisis. But the British, whom I had given up on, have despised material benefits and do not want to continue to be mixed up with migrants and infected by the poisonous corpse of a dying Europe. It turns out that I hastened to bury the British – they are still alive and want to continue to live. In this they are similar to us. Politically, we have always been antagonistic, not counting a brief stay in the Entente. But this opposition is led by our inner relationship. British politicians have always said: “We do not have friends, we have interests,” – and the same was repeated by Alexander III: Russia has no friends, except for the army and navy.

The English nation, who have a unique sense of humour, have played a joke with everyone who had buried her, including me, but I am very happy.

Viktor Trostnikov , Orthodox philosopher, theologian, writer

http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2016/06/24/anglichane_ya_snova_vas_polyubil/

Multinational Council or Isolationist Sanhedrin?

Soon there will be a great council, called ‘holy’, but this will be precisely the Eighth (Impious) Universal Council.

St Kuksha of Odessa (+ 1964)

Now that, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and to the great relief of all faithful Orthodox worldwide, the ‘Great and Holy Pan-Orthodox Council’ has been reduced to an Inter-Greek monologue with 24 Romanians, whose presence has been ordered by the US ambassador in Bucharest, what lessons can be learned?

The first lesson is that if there is to be some meeting of all the Local Churches, then it must be carried out by consulting the faithful, listening to their wishes and talking about the issues that really matter, in an Orthodox way, rather than imposing some irrelevant top-down ‘agenda’, in a secular way, like some transnational corporation.

The second lesson is therefore that hubris and Eastern Papism are dead (was it ever alive?) and have been replaced by humility and the Holy Spirit.

The third lesson is that threats and intimidation from the US State Department, or anywhere else, do not work with free Orthodox.

The fourth lesson is that all Orthodox bishops must be invited to any Council, as is the Tradition. That half of the world’s approximately 700 Orthodox bishops present would be from the Russian Orthodox Church would be just a fact of life. After all, of the world’s 216 million Orthodox, 164 million, over 75%, belong to the multinational Russian Orthodox Church.

Therefore, the fifth lesson is that if you want to be a big Church, do not fall into flag-waving phyletism (narrow nationalism) and then you will find that other nationalities will want to be with you – over 60 nationalities make up the Russian Orthodox Church. Flag-waving phyletism is for football hooligans, not for Orthodox Christians.

The only beneficial result of the Crete meeting so far is that the Patriarchate of Constantinople has promised not to interfere in the Ukraine, unlike as it sadly did in Estonia. If we can learn the above lessons as well, perhaps this whole affair will, by the Providence of God, turn out to have been positive.