Category Archives: Homosexuality

Questions and Answers (January-May 2025): On Pastoral Work, the Church and other Christians, Miaphysites, Homosexuality, the Russian Church, Sister Vassa, the Suicide of ROCOR, English and England

Pastoral Work

Q: On the internet you have been called ‘popular but controversial’. Do you think that is fair?

A: That question again! My answer is that I don’t know if it is fair. It is not for me to judge. Popular? Our church is always packed with hundreds, but many other Romanian and Greek churches in this country are also packed in the same way, so that does not mean anything. Controversial is a more interesting comment. Let me explain why.

My priority over 40 years as a clergyman of the Church has always been pastoral work. Therefore, I have always been ideology-free and nationality-free. All are welcome. And for some that may be controversial. For instance, I have always said that if tomorrow 1,000 Chinese people turn up wanting to be baptised, then I will set about that and learn some Chinese on the way. This is exactly what we did when 1,000 Romanians and Moldovans turned up some 12 years ago. I learned some Romanian and found a pious Romanian who was able to become a deacon and then a priest. Since then he has completed seminary and is now completing his masters.

Another example. During the covid scandal (for that is what it was), all the bishops closed down their churches. Not a single one resisted the fraud or went to prison for remaining open. I kept our churches open. True, we hid as in the catacombs, we forbade parking in front, entrance was by the side door, we did not turn the lights on and did not ring the bells and people came in and went out in twos and threes. People of all nationalities came from all over the eastern side of England, from up to 150 miles away. I also went to give people communion in their houses in that area, including all over London, which had turned into a church desert. The others were hiding, ‘for fear of the Jews’. Western and Westernised secularist and atheist governments had achieved what Stalin had not achieved. I suppose my actions were perhaps ‘popular but controversial’.

Some will say that that was irresponsible, I could have spread covid. I did not. I told those, and nearly all of our people are under 40, who felt ill or had weak health to stay at home. But that was only common sense, I am sure they were doing that anyway. Just like ‘social distancing’, which in fact was anti-social distancing, which was also common sense. When we are ill or risk falling ill, we stay at home, we avoid others, especially the vulnerable. We don’t need governments to tell us that! We are not zombies.

Throughout history the Church authorities have had to make up their minds whether they are with Christ or with the State. So it is today. I am with Christ. So were the fools in Christ in Moscow and Saint Petersburg (the capitals where the State authorities did not allow other saints), like St Basil the Fool and St Xenia. St John of Kronstadt worked in a port with its bars and brothels. The snooty aristocrats did not want him, a dirty peasant, in Saint Petersburg.

Likewise, St Seraphim of Sarov lived in the middle of nowhere with bears – the authorities did not want ‘a dirty peasant’ among them and when the pious Tsar had him canonised, the atheist aristocrats, who later overthrew the Tsar, mocked the Tsar’s ‘obscurantism’. Bears liked him more than aristocrats. As for the very recent Elder Nikolai (Guryanov), the Soviet and also post-Soviet Church authorities not only kept him away from towns, but exiled him to a tiny island on a lake, as far away as possible from where large numbers lived. Contempt and persecution by furious bishops who love money and power over Christ have always been our lot, they have never wanted us in a large city. Popular but controversial?

The Church and Other Christians

Q: Where is the True Church?

A: The True Church is where there is Love. Wherever there is hatred, there is no True Church and so no Orthodoxy.

Q: Which Christian group is closest to the Orthodox Church, the Catholics or the Protestants?

A: Neither! Let me explain.

There is an absurd black and white belief, usually adopted by self-justifying converts who know very little and understand even less, that outside the (Orthodox) Church there is nothing. If, on the contrary, we are to make a very broad generalisation, perhaps we could say the following in answer to your question:

The Miaphysites, who are made up of the six groups known as Ethiopians, Eritreans, Copts, Armenians, Syriacs and Malankara Syriacs, totalling some 50 million people, are by far the closest to us. Very crudely speaking, we could say that they have three-quarters of Orthodoxy, whereas the Roman Catholics (who do have the concepts of bishops, priests, saints and sacraments) have only half, and the Protestants (who have only the misinterpreted Scriptures) have only a quarter of Orthodoxy.

The Miaphysites (Non-Chalcedonians) believe what St Cyril of Alexandria also expressed, that Christ has One Nature (‘mia physia’), which is both Divine and human. This was refined by him and all Orthodoxy into the Dogma of the Universal Council of Chalcedon in 451 that Christ is One Person in two natures, Divine and human. For some Orthodox, that seems like the same thing as Miaphysitism, the difference is only semantic.

For many others, however, this is much too vague and unrefined. Apart from the central questions of the Miaphysite attitude to the Council of Chalcedon itself, to the following three Universal Councils and the issue as to whether for them Christ is fully Divine and fully human, with Divine and human souls, minds, wills and energies, there are questions of the Canon of Scripture, the recognition of saints, circumcision etc. These issues divide the Miaphysites from Orthodoxy.

Thus, Miaphysitism disagrees with Orthodoxy about the Person of Christ. Official Roman Catholicism disagrees with Orthodoxy about the Holy Spirit, through Whom the Head of the Church, Christ, is present, replacing both Christ and the Holy Spirit with the Pope of Rome, then the ‘leader of the West’. And Protestantism has no Church, it does not know the Body of Christ, which is why it says strange humanist things like, ‘the Church is wrong’, ‘the Church made a mistake’, ‘the Church has to change’, ‘we must reform the Church’ etc

Q: The new Pope has taken the name Leo XIV, apparently since he wanted to balance conservative and liberal forces in his Church. What do you think of him, and if you were elected Pope, what name would you take? And what would you change, if you could?

A: Your second question greatly amused me, as there must be several billion people who could become Pope before me!

I had obviously never thought about it, but maybe on reflection I would take the name Zacharias II, as Pope Zacharias (741-752) was the last Greek Pope of Rome. Above all, he is an Orthodox saint. I would certainly start by reverting to the Creed, that is, abandoning the filioque, and allowing married men to become priests, stamping out the perversions caused by compulsory celibacy.

As regards your first question and what I think of the new Pope, I don’t know. He may wear a Russian priest’s cross and have an appreciation of liturgies other than the new Roman mass, but that does not mean anything. Actions speak louder than words. Give him a year.

Q: What went wrong with Catholicism in the 1960s? Why did it abandon so much from before?

A: I was not there, but I have understood the following from eyewitnesses.

In the 1960s, rationalist intellectuals seized hold of Catholicism and decided that it needed ‘updating’, as though it were some sort of corporate secular organisation that needed rebranding. They forgot, or probably never even knew, that the Church services are made to inspire prayer, contact with the other world, and so must have the sense of the sacred, the mystical, the otherworldly, the numinous. Instead, they made their Church resemble the world, destroying any sense of the sacred. And so they discouraged prayer and people stopped going to their churches. Why go there? It resembled the world around them. It was no longer different, ‘special’.

But let us not get it out of proportion. There was much that was wrong with it centuries before the 1960s.

Q: Who do you hope will become the next Archbishop of Canterbury after the pedophile scandal with Welby?

A: I have no idea. I just hope the next one actually believes in God, unlike the last one

Q: Why is there so much homosexuality among the Orthodox episcopate today?

A: Homosexuality always come in times of decadence. That is your reply.

As Fr John, the rector of the very large Mayfield parish (3,000 Orthodox) in the USA, explained to me in 2007, the worst thing is when bishops form a gay mafia (in the US, this is called a ‘lavender mafia’) and then gang up against married priests and their solid families. Closet homosexual bishops are jealous of their common touch, experience and knowledge.

In those days, this concerned the OCA, today it concerns the Russian/ROCOR and Constantinople Churches. Thus, in the Russian Church inside Russia, another three bishops have just been deposed, though it is not clear whether this was for embezzlement of money or again for perversion, as in the Grindr scandals previously.

Q: Why did the Orthodox Easter coincide with the Catholic Easter this year?

A: What you mean is that in 2025 the Roman Catholic Easter coincided with the Orthodox Easter. This happens every five years, when Catholicism observes the Paschalia and the canons.

Q: What do you think of the icons that have been displayed in recent years in a great many Non-Orthodox Churches?

A: Sadly, they are used only as superficial decoration and you cannot venerate them. The Non-Orthodox would not venerate them, do not even know how to venerate them or actively prevent Orthodox from venerating them in horror at our veneration. Icons there are only a fashion from the 1970s, but it has gone no further than a fashion.

Q: What for you is religion?

A: Religion is State manipulation, as Marx said in his definition that ‘Religion is the opium of the masses’. (What he did not mention is that mass murder is the opium of the Marxists).

As a priest, I am not a man of religion, but a man of faith, for faith is defined as the perception of spiritual reality.

Q: Do Orthodox accept conspiracy theories?

A: Some surely do. But the problem with such theories is that they always identify a human enemy – the Jews, the Freemasons, the Catholics, the Trilateral, the City of London, the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese etc. Therefore, they are all wrong, because they have partial or temporary truths. There is only one enemy; the devil, and he can and does work through all and any of us or them, not just through one group.

The Russian Church

Q: Should we pray for Patriarch Kyrill, inasmuch as he has stated that the Russian war against the Ukraine is a ’holy war’?

A: Your question contains so many misunderstandings that I hardly know where to begin!

Firstly, we should all pray for each other and especially for our enemies, if you consider that you have any. Secondly the Ukraine and Russia have been at war with each other for years, since 2014, when the Kiev regime began its genocide of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. It is above all a Kiev regime war against Russia. It is catastrophic, for it is a civil war.

However, this war was only possible because the mass of both Russians and Ukrainians have lost their faith. Real Orthodox Christians do not kill one another. To present the war as a war between an Orthodox side and a Non-Orthodox side is absurd. Neither is Orthodox, the masses are atheists, with abortion rates twice that of ‘decadent’ Western countries, divorce rates at the same level and social decomposition and an ultra-low birthrate current. This is in reality a proxy war, a geopolitical struggle which pits US-based atheist Globalism against Russian-based Nationalism, which nobody except Russian nationalists can support.

The conflict is only a religious question inasmuch as the Kiev regime, strongly supported by the Globalists, persecutes the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and, on the other hand, inasmuch as certain priests inside Russia have been persecuted and exiled for having different political opinions to the warlike Russian nationalist views promulgated among others by certain Russian bishops. The grounds for the persecution in the Ukraine could have been avoided, had there been a canonical, autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its autocephaly granted by Moscow. For thirty years nationalist Moscow refused to grant this autocephaly, thus creating the Kiev nationalist accusation that the Ukrainian Church is a slave of Moscow and to some making it appear true.

Our sympathies naturally go to the persecuted, not to the persecutors, wherever those persecutors are. However, that does not mean that our prayers do not go to the persecutors too. Indeed, quite the contrary. For example, we pray publicly at every liturgy ‘for this land, all the Royal House, all those in seats of authority and the armed forces’, with whom we may not at all agree. Prayer for others does not mean that we agree with them! That is a purely secular, not to say atheistic, understanding. We pray especially for those who disagree with us so that their hearts may be softened. That is why the first Orthodox prayed for the pagan Roman emperors, such as Nero. Such prayer is good for us too, as it protects us from ill feeling. All the more do we pray for those who persecute us. We do that all the time.

There is no such thing as ‘a holy war’. In that Sister Vassa Larina and all the other liberals right. Why do they have to persecute so cruelly such an innocent and harmless, if misled, head in the clouds idealist as Sister Vassa? The ‘defrocking’ of her and experienced pastors, outside Russia, where ROCOR is systematically purging itself of all the old traditional ROCOR and replacing them with crazy lickspittle converts, fobbing the experienced off with meaningless medallions and then retiring them, however young they are. This is the same as inside Russia, where experienced pastors are ‘defrocked’ for holding different opinions to narcissistic bishops is sacrilegious. In Russia and in the Netherlands they even threatened pacifist clergy with criminal courts. However, whether inside and outside Russia, it is exactly the same Stalinism.

For the bishops who defrocked Sister Vassa were not forced into persecuting her by Moscow – it was worse than that, they did it voluntarily. With their greed for money and power, they too are merely Sergianists, like those in the USSR who persecuted the New Martyrs and Confessors. That is spiritual suicide. ROCOR bishops pressed the self-destruct button some years ago, in about 2017, when they cast aside Metr Hilarion in an internal coup d’etat and the crazies took over.

However, Sister Vassa, who has quite rightly called the attitude of the new ROCOR ‘Neo-Sergianism’, has now made the mistake of joining those who, financed by the CIA, want to invade Russia and also openly persecute the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Since Sister Vassa is American, does this mean that she too supports the CIA and is anti-Russian, like the ROCOR bishops? Some ROCOR bishops and priests are CIA – is she also CIA? That too is Sergianism – putting pro-Ukrainian political beliefs above the Church. Sergianism is not only Russian. Its origins are after all in Protestant Holland, whose Erastian attitudes were taken to Russia by Peter I. We must pray for Sister Vassa that she will come to understand. To be anti-Russian is the same as being anti-Ukrainian. We must be pro-Christ.

Q: What did the Church of the Russian Emigration have to teach the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: Very simply, that we must always put Christ above the State. This includes the pre-Revolutionary Russian State (all too many in the Emigration suffered from cultural nostalgia for that uncanonical and unjust system, but it too was also in part run by practical atheists – 90% of the emigres simply wanted the old, corrupt system, and their money and land, back), as well as the Soviet atheist State or the post-Soviet atheist State. We render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

That is what we teach them, that is what St John of Shanghai, the greatest saint of the Emigration taught and still teaches today through his life. Even less universal and even somewhat controversial figures from the Parisian Emigration, like the locally-venerated Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), who had nothing to do with Essex (I know, I was born in Essex!), Mother Maria (Skobtsova), and Metropolitan Antony (Bloom) taught this, the first as a rather inaccessible art nouveau period philosopher, the second as one who like so many others sacrificed her life for someone younger, the third as a conscious convert presented the logic of Orthodoxy to other converts.

Instead of teaching that Christ is above the State, after 2007 many of the remnants of the Russian Emigration and their naïve converts did the opposite. They copied the Sergianist vices of the Moscow Patriarchate (which had their roots entirely in the uncanonical, Protestant-style, Erastian administration of the pre-Revolutionary State), falling prey to the love of power and especially of money. It is very, very sad. The ‘Church-Business’ inside Russia is why even in the last six years Church attendance there has halved from 2.6% to 1.3%. They have restored the pre-Revolutionary Church – yes, the worst of it!

The reconciliation of ROCOR with the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) in 2007 was absolutely vital as ROCOR was on the verge of becoming a sect, already many in ROCOR were saying that they would join the MP in any case, if there was no reconciliation. Some had begun leaving in the 1990s. The new ROCOR shows utter disloyalty to St John, about whom one new, very effeminate, luxuriously dressed, ill-educated ROCOR bishop, who does not know even the basics, told us that he walked without shoes only because his shoes were uncomfortable!! It is interesting to see how such bishops today persecute the legacy of love of St John even today, trying to close churches dedicated to St John, persecuting and bullying his spiritual descendants, threatening them with incredible violence and rage (‘Cut their heads off’) and only paying lip service to St John, as his relics are a source of income. ‘By their fruit ye shall know them’. And these people call themselves Christians…

Today we see resistance to the State above all only in the Ukraine through the heroism of the much-persecuted Metr Onufry of Kiev. But Tsar Michael will come and sweep the old post-Soviet vestiges in both the Russian Federation and the Ukraine away.

Q: Why does the Russian Church have relatively strict practices?

A: We must recall that Russia was converted by Byzantine monks, so it lacks the parish tradition, which is so much alive in Greece and Cyprus and is much freer and easier than the monastic tradition and its practices. Today, the Russian Church is often obsessed by rules and a certain militarisation, for nearly all there today are converts. This is also a sociological phenomenon.

Q: Why in Russian churches in Russia are there women who come around and clean the icons with cloths every few minutes?

A: This comes from Soviet accusations about hygiene, that Orthodox are dirty. So the Church in the USSR reacted to it with this over the top hygiene obsession.

Q: Who do you prefer of the two sister-saints, the Tsarina Alexandra or the Grand Duchess Elizabeth?

A: Both were converts, but the Tsarina went further into Orthodoxy than her sister, who got stuck in the convert politics of trying to mix Orthodoxy with a Western mentality, hence her ‘reforms’, specially designed nuns’ uniform, deaconesses, and her support for murder. However, Elizabeth was finally purified by her sacrifices for the poor and, above all, by the blood of her martyrdom.

Q: What exactly is a mass baptism?

A: For me, it means the baptism of hundreds or thousands. When it is just a matter of a ten or twenty, or fewer than a hundred, that is a group baptism.

English and England

Q: What version of the Bible do you recommend for home reading?

A: The Revised Standard Version, or RSV, as blessed by some Orthodox bishops back in the 1960s.

Q: In English do you write matins or mattins?

A: The English word comes from the Latin ‘matutina’, which does have two ts, but I think that matins with one t is the most common spelling.

Q: As you appear to dislike the House of Windsor, do you consider that you are a Jacobite?

A: I support only one Royal House, the House of Wessex. All the others came after the Schism and the near-millennial Norman Occupation.

Clericalisation Comes From Corruption

Photographs of many Orthodox services from around the world more and more show pictures of services at which virtually only clergy are present. This clericalisation was not the case previously. Although it is more obvious among minor groups in the Diaspora, especially among those who have difficulty in recruiting members because of their schismatic rather than unitive ethos, such photographs can be seen in very many places. Since such clericalisation is clearly an effect, not the cause, where has it all come from? Let us first look at Roman Catholic clericalisation.

The Case of Roman Catholicism

In the case of Roman Catholicism, the clear cause of its clericalisation was institutionalised obligatory clerical celibacy, which is another way of saying corruption. Introduced by force and even violence from the second half of the eleventh century on, obligatory clerical celibacy was inherently divisive and created a class or caste of woman-hating men who were different from and, as they imagined, superior to ‘the people’. Clericalisation, that is, the claim that the clergy are ’the Church’, which is a widespread peculiarity of the Western world, had the counter-effect of creating anti-clericalism and anti-episcopalianism. This in turn gave rise to congregationalism and eventually to Protestantism. In reality, the Church is the whole body of the faithful, clergy and people together and not apart.

However, even worse, obligatory clerical celibacy also gave rise among Roman Catholic (and Anglican) clergy to widespread bisexuality, homosexuality and pedophilia. I remember being advised by an old Russian priest in France some 35 years ago that if ever I had to meet a Roman Catholic priest, I should first ask him outright, though discreetly, if he was married or not. In France, at least, nearly all the best Catholic priests are married – about 20% of them. They have to keep it secret, of course, but, frankly, as Roman Catholicism is dying out in France for lack of priests, even if their bishops found out that they were married, they would probably turn a blind eye, as they have long done in Southern Europe, Latin America and Africa.

With Anglican clergy one must also be very careful. As we know, the British Establishment (not just the Anglican Church) has been full of pedophiles ever since William Rufus, and the Anglican Establishment full of them, like the notorious Bishop Ball and all the other criminals who have been protected by Anglican bishops, as did the scandalous former Archbishop of Canterbury. As regards Anglican clergy, even the married ones can be bisexual, especially in the so-called ‘High Church’. The Church has to be very careful about receiving Anglican clerics. Having said that, many are fine, some are admirable, but you have to check very carefully for misogyny etc.

The Orthodox Church

Wherever clericalisation is found in the Orthodox world, the cause is always the same: the lack of monastic and pastoral life, which is also another way of saying corruption. I have always thought that no man should be considered for the Orthodox episcopate until he had spent at least five years living under obedience in a monastery and/or five years living as a parish priest. This would be a ten-year long apprenticeship for the episcopate. Instead of contact with monastic and pastoral reality, what do we inevitably get? We get the same phenomena as in Roman Catholicism:

Firstly, there is homosexualisation (thank God, pedophilia is very rare among the Orthodox episcopate – I only know of two cases). Here are the bishops of many nationalities who like to visit with their ‘subdeacon’, as one senior cleric told me. He could supply a full list of names. Secondly, I have noticed that closet homosexuality also tends to go hand in hand with alcohol abuse. Thirdly, alongside the homosexual bishops are the overdressed, lickspittle careerists, who love bureaucracy and protocols. Petty bureaucracy makes them feel good, as it gives them power, the ability to humiliate others, who are often far senior to them. These careerists love centralisation and encourage it, because that gives them even more power and, above all, even more money.

All know about the Greek metropolitan who had to move from one city to another because of his notorious frequentation of gay bars (this was back in the 1970s). All know about the ultra-conservative and schismatic CIA ROCOR bishop and his sex-obsessed and money-obsessed son, ‘the six million-dollar man’, as he was called in the 1990s. All know about the recent Antiochian Archbishop of America. He is one of many – and far from the worst. The scandal is that he was defrocked, not because of his mistresses or because he was extremely rich (how?), but only because he took his own Church to court about money. All know about that Metropolitan-oligarch, who was so keenly and publicly denounced by Metr Antony of Sourozh already twenty years ago. But they are merely the tip of the iceberg, there are many others, whom we have seen, both fifty years ago and recently. But they are all absolutely alien, indeed absolutely unthinkable to real Orthodox.

We are the generation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, ready to die for the Church of God. Now instead of arkhimandrity, as they say in Russian, we have arkhibandity. In the old Soviet times, the Church was infiltrated by the Party with its atheist ideology. Now it is worse. The Party is still there, but it does not come from outside, the new Party and the new ideology, born in the 1990s, are inside the Church and they are called ‘Business’. Christ called it Mammon (money) and yet those ‘churchmen’ who are involved are told specifically by Christ that they cannot serve two masters. Sadly, the clergy involved are soldiers who owe utter obedience to corruption, for part of the episcopate has been militarised. And yet the Church is not an army, but a voluntary organisation. Here is what happens with clericalisation – militarisation of the clergy.

As one Russian told me, ‘I need no managers between me and God’, thinking of the old Protestant slogan, ‘I need no mediators between me and God’. Sadly, there is now a collective narcissistic mafia, as nobody is allowed to reveal the truth about this pharisee class of ‘effective managers’. We believe with the prophets and fool for Christ that Orthodox Russia may yet become the last bastion of Orthodoxy against Antichrist. However, this is clearly not the case now, for Orthodox Russia does not exist. What exists now is Nationalist Russia. For now the last bastion of Orthodoxy is the hearts of all the faithful, who resist Antichrist, who wants to come here and be enthroned. He will not be in our hearts.

Some who reject the new Party and its ideology make the great mistake of giving up the fight against clericalisation and corruption by joining the enemy and appearing on CIA-financed radio and television to scandalise and criticise, painting the whole Russian Church black. This is quite untrue and it is also either naïve or else foolish. These critics are playing into the hands of the CIA-financed politics of those who persecute the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and discredit their cause and themselves, for they have chosen an episcopate no less corrupt than the one they left and one no less political than the one they left.

They too, consciously or, as I would like to think, unconsciously, become traitors to Orthodoxy. This is not the way. You cannot defeat politics with politics. We have to be aware of politics, but we do not get involved in political intrigues. Just as we are aware of the demons, but we do not get involved in demonic intrigues. Just wait, those who have compromised themselves morally and financially in military-style clericalisation and corruption, whether inspired by the ‘Church as a Business’ ideology or by CIA money, are coming to their end. Desperation and panic are their sign. Their time is clearly up.

On Former Archbishop Welby

The resignation of the ultra-woke Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, for covering up the crimes of a sadistic pervert is not a surprise. Anglican bishops and certain Anglican clergy have for generations been suspected of being perverts, as was finally portrayed in the 1968 film ‘If’. Surely, the Archbishop’s resignation will be only the first of many more. And there will surely be trials and imprisonments. Justice demands it.

However, their perversions are only some among the many of the whole British Establishment, for example, the pedophiles so far disclosed in the BBC – for the three so far are only the tip of the iceberg. The reason for the Establishment promotion of wokeness is the self-interested impunity of perverts. Now, slowly, the perversions and identities of various ‘queer’ members of the government are being disclosed.

Apparently, there are still as many as 25 million baptised (‘christened’) members of the Church of England, though they are rapidly dying out. However, only some 500,000 of them attend church on Sundays. This means that the proportion of practising is about 2%. This is very similar to the rates of practice in Roman Catholicism and in the Orthodox Church in England, as well as in most of the Western world.

Some Roman Catholics appear to believe that the way out of this scandal is for scandalised members of the Church of England to join Roman Catholicism. This is absurd. The Church of England is profoundly Protestant, anti-Roman Catholic and was founded on enmity towards it. And what about the profound and scandalous pedophilia among Roman Catholic clergy? What would attract Anglicans to perhaps even worse?

In any case, every bishop of the Church of England is a political appointee, not a parish priest with pastoral experience, but an Old Etonian who worked in the oil industry – like Archbishop Welby. No surprise then that Church of England bishops appear to have no spirituality whatsoever. Therefore, surely, there is even less excuse for Roman Catholic bishops, who are not appointed by atheist/Hindu/Jewish Prime Ministers of the UK?

There is even less excuse for Orthodox bishops in the UK, who are not appointed by the UK Prime Minister either. And yet some neophytes to the Orthodox Church appear to think the same as Roman Catholics, that members of the C of E should join the Orthodox Church. This is equally absurd. It is doubtful if even one in a thousand of the practising members of the Church of England (that is, 500 in all) are interested in Orthodox Christianity.

For them Orthodoxy is unProtestant, and ‘full of foreigners’, as one of them told me. (It seems that he did not know that Christ is also ‘a foreigner’ – a brown-skinned Asiatic from the Middle East. He thought that Christ is a middle-class Englishman and Rotarian – like himself). And then there are all the perverts among the bishops of the Orthodox Church. Take the one decades ago who used to ordain his boyfriends.

Then take the one who decades ago was sacked from teaching in Edinburgh for his perversion and was forced to teach in Glasgow. Or the one in Europe who was exiled to Siberia (though his priest-boyfriend went unpunished). We will not go into detail about the two who were deposed in Russia and sent to monasteries. Nor will we say anything further of the recent scandals in Paris and Budapest on the part of bishops of two different Local Churches.

The real problem here is the gay mafias of Orthodox bishops, not just in Eastern Europe, but also in Western Europe and the USA. As gays, they will punish any whistle-blower, who discovers that his bishop has the ‘Grindr’ app (like one of those in Russia too) and spends Saturday evenings drinking in bars with his boyfriend. When the whistleblower discreetly asks for the Grinder addict to be removed, the mafia punishes the whistleblower. It was ever thus.

Their hatred for you comes from the fact that you are more popular than they are, because you have compassion for the people, you are a pastor, a shepherd. Their jealousy comes from the fact you have a normal family life, whereas they are perverts and so do not and cannot have a normal family life. We have had enough of wolves in shepherd’s clothing. Archbishop Welby is only the tip of the iceberg. Orthodox – sort out your own house first before you criticise others.

Holy Rus in High Suffolk: An Interview with a Russian Count

Over the last fourteen years I have got to know particularly well a couple who are spiritual children and whom I call the Earl and Countess of Orthodox East Anglia. Nobles of Russian extraction, they have made their home in England and chosen to live in the mystical heart of our local East Anglian Orthodox Church and Kingdom. Count (Earl in the English system) Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, agreed to this extensive conversation after I interviewed his wife over a month ago. With his permission we have slightly edited his words, though his English is excellent.

On the table in the oak-beamed living room, where we conduct the interview, stands a golden samovar, bought in St Audrey’s Ely, alongside a portrait of the Tsar’s Family. Nearby stands a lovely vase with a bouquet of fragrant roses, which the Countess has picked from the garden of their thatched farmhouse in High Suffolk, near the Norfolk border. The Countess has served us tea from her favourite Royal Albert service, the doors to the garden wide open before us. Such is the setting for this second conversation, the recording of which stretched on into the lengthening shadows of the English summer evening.

Q: Can you please tell us something about your family?

A: In 1775 the Benckendorff family was awarded an estate of 8,000 acres in Sosnovka in the Tambov province of Russia for services to the Crown. After the Revolution most branches of the family, like ours, remained inside the USSR, but we had to change our name for fear of being murdered by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, one priestly ancestor is a New Martyr. At first, we remained in Russia, but after 1945 we moved to what had by then become the eastern Ukraine, though that region is now back in Russia again after 100 years of Soviet-imposed exile.

After 1917 one branch settled in England. This was the family of Count Alexander Benckendorff, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain between 1903 and 1917. His family found itself stranded in the White Russian emigration, as Alexander had passed away in January 1917. Unlike his brother Paul, who was very close to Tsar Nicholas in Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander was never Orthodox. He had become a Catholic by conviction from Lutheranism and is buried in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral in London.

Q: Where did you meet the Countess?

A: In the Ukraine. There I, a Benckendorff, met and married another Benckendorff, though the Countess was previously quite unknown to me and her branch of the family had also assumed another name. Some time ago I worked out that we are eighth cousins. The way we met was quite extraordinary, neither knowing that the other was of Benckendorff descent and yet feeling that we were kindred souls. Both of us were divorced, having made bad marriages when we were far too young, like so many who were brought up in the Soviet Union. The marriages did not last very long and there were no children. Some years after we met, in 2008, we left Russia and settled in the West.

Q: Did you know about the English Benckendorffs then?

A: No, we did not know anything about the ‘English’ branch of the family until five years ago. To our surprise, we discovered that they had lived in south-east Suffolk, very close to where we first lived before we moved here. Their choice was because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Ransomes farm machinery, made in Ipswich, was used on our estate and there were also contacts with the Suffolk Fisons fertiliser company, which later came to own a very large property called Harvest House in Felixstowe.

And so the family story turned full circle. In any case, Suffolk is where we have made our home and we in no way regret it. This is the land of St Edmund, the patron saint of Suffolk and of England, and we fly his flag here. You introduced us to him and to the other local saints. We respect the Local Church and honour the local saints. That is our Orthodox duty. We had thought of calling our Suffolk home ‘Sosnovka’ from the name of our estate, but we agreed that we must be local and so we named it ‘St Edmund’s House’.

Q: What did you study as a young man?

A: In the 90s I studied history at the University of Kiev and then some years later theology at St Tikhon’s University of the Humanities in Moscow. However, I never taught history, because in the 1990s we had to practise commerce in order to survive. We were fortunate in business because of my knowledge of English and French and my wife’s knowledge of German. We did very well. That is how I came to study as a mature student at St Tikhon’s in Moscow and then we moved to the West in 2008 and England in 2010. Nearly six years ago we bought this old farmhouse. Now I still study theology and the history of the Russian Church and I have also written a novel in Russian under a pseudonym. We also breed roses which involves travel to many places, including to Germany. Financially we have been helped by the investments we made in the past.

Q: As you know, I come from the Suffolk-Essex border where the dry and sunny climate and the soil are ideal for seed growing, which was my father’s profession. He was a sweet pea expert and even has a sweet pea named after him. How did you come to breed roses and not, for example, sweet peas?

A: Like you, Fr Andrew, we love sweet peas, also lilac and many other flowers and shrubs, but both of us have always loved roses more, already in the Ukraine, where in the east the black earth is so fertile and the climate is so good. Some twenty years ago my wife fell in love with roses in a monastery there, where she had the obedience from her spiritual father of maintaining the monastery rose garden. A huge variety of roses is available in Russia and the Ukraine with sturdier stems than in England, even though you have David Austen roses. One of our favourite roses is ‘Zephyr’ from Turchinov. We also love lilacs and again there is a Russian lilac called ‘Beauty of Moscow’. We are introducing Russian roses, lilacs and others into England. This seems to be our mission!

Strangely enough, we discovered that my great-great-grandfather’s cousin, the ambassador Alexander Konstantinovich, and his wife, Sofia Petrovna, who was a Tolstoy, also grew roses. Then their grand-daughter, Natalia Konstantinovna, who passed away only in 2018, grew them. Her husband, Thomas Humphrey Brooke, who was a friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, became an internationally acknowledged expert on roses. He was a close friend of the rosarian Peter Beales at his gardens in Attleborough in Norfolk. Humphrey cultivated over 500 varieties of rose. I know Peter Beales’ son, who has just retired. Roses must be in the Benckendorff genes.

Q: Let us turn to Church matters now. As you follow Church affairs very closely, you know much about the schism between Moscow and Constantinople on account of the Ukraine. Do you see a way out of this?

A: There is always a way out. It is called repentance, the antidote to despair, the antidote that Judas did not take. Beware, he did not take the antidote and hanged himself. What must be done to undo this schism is to work in reverse. This means going back to what caused the schism and reversing it. This means that Constantinople must abandon its pretensions to the territory of the Russian Church in the ex-Soviet Union. These pretensions were formed because the Patriarchate of Moscow refused to grant anyone outside the Russian Federation autocephaly and because Washington paid Constantinople to commit the crime of setting up a fake Church in the Ukraine. Still, if Moscow had given the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly years ago, creating a national Church there, Constantinople would never have meddled, because the Ukrainians would have been satisfied already.

Next, or preferably before that, Moscow must immediately stop its schism with Constantinople, start concelebrating and abandon its excommunications and defrockings, freeing people to act according to their conscience. The schism was quite unnecessary and just brought Moscow into exactly the same isolation and disrepute as Constantinople, losing it all sympathy. Two wrongs do not make a right. How do you say that in English, when both are equally guilty? There is an expression with six and six in it.

Q: Six of one and half a dozen of the other?

A: Yes, that’s it. Anyway, Moscow must also negotiate a canonical solution to the African problem. Either Africa belongs canonically to the Patriarchate of Alexandria or to Moscow, or else the territory must be divided and different geographical regions will belong to one or the other. For example, Egypt, or even all Muslim North Africa, could remain under Alexandria and Moscow could take Black Africa, where it has a lot of political support, though only if it is prepared to set up a real, local, independent African Orthodox Church. You cannot have overlapping jurisdictions on the same territory. We must support the canonical order of the Church internationally.

Q: Is this realistic? Look at the Diasporas, where we have had overlapping jurisdictions for over a century.

A: Things are changing. Look, the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine will be over soon. The Kiev regime is collapsing. Some even say it will all be over for the Dormition, on 28^th August. Perhaps not so soon. In any case, the USA is giving up on its Fascist friends in the Ukraine, who have failed. Americans hate failure. What is the way out? One way is if Trump, who is already the real President – some even say that Biden is literally, not just metaphorically, dead – could perhaps denounce the whole Ukraine project. He could say that it was all a fantasy of Biden, ‘Genocide Joe’, as they call him.

Trump must abandon the fake OCU Church that Constantinople set up in the Ukraine with US dollars, denouncing it as created by those who deceived him in Washington in 2018. President Putin will make the freedom of the Church a condition for peace anyway. The Church must be free from the persecution of the OCU, which must return the thousands of churches it has stolen. Trump must give up the illegal sanctions against Russia, release frozen Russian assets and return the stolen interest on those assets.

In this way President Trump can get a photo opportunity of the Two Presidents. He will be shaking hands with President Putin in Moscow (Trump loves having his photo taken) as the great hero, peacemaker and dealmaker, unlike Biden the warmaker and failure. Why, Trump could get a Nobel Prize – those prizes are funded by the CIA anyway, as we saw with Solzhenitsyn. Trump and Moscow can sign an agreement, stating that Washington has no claims to the Ukraine and that Moscow has no claims to the Baltics, Finland, Poland, Romania, or anywhere else west of the Ukraine. This will be historic, but should all have been done 33 years ago in 1991.

Q: What about Moldova?

A: This agreement would include Moldova, unless some minorities who live there along the border with the New Ukraine or Russia vote by democratic referendum to transfer, for example, the Transdnistrians and the Gagauzians. Most of Moldova will eventually go back to Romania. It is historically inevitable. The Patriarchate in Moscow has lost the loyalty of most Moldovans through its centralising racism and many there are already joining the Romanian Church.

Such a deal of the Two Presidents would give both Russia and Western Europe security, making NATO entirely redundant, which is what both President Trump and President Putin want. Such a new security agreement for Europe could be presented as a triumph for Trump (the Americans are experts at PR) and Moscow will be fully satisfied. Russia will set up the third Union State in the New Ukraine, which will be a second Belarus, perhaps also landlocked, as all the south and east of the old Ukraine, which are Russian, as I know, may well rejoin Russia. The Ukraine will be demilitarised and denazified, as Moscow needs. With such a deal both sides will save money and, above all, both will save lives.

Q: Do you think the New Ukraine will retain the western borders of Stalin’s Ukraine?

A: Moscow may well give some extreme western parts of Stalin’s Ukraine, for Stalin’s borders are what Biden and the EU Commissars have been fighting for, back to Poland, Romania and especially to Hungary, our ally. This would be seen as a great victory for the USA and as a great victory for Russia, though it would not be a victory for the Western European elite. But that elite does not count for anything internationally and can be ignored. Moscow negotiates only with Trump, neither with the sick old man before Trump, nor with the Western European puppies who lie and cheat.

With peace in the Ukraine, the Patriarchate in Moscow will also have to negotiate a new relationship with the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kiev, under which I began my Orthodox life. And probably also a new relationship with other parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. Otherwise, Moscow will lose everything there too. A wave of autocephalies must follow. The age of Soviet central planning is over. It was over with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, only the Church authorities did not keep up with changing times.

Q: Why do you say that this will not be a victory for the Western European elite?

A: The Western European political elite, its ruling class, has for eighty years been living off the USA, licking its heels and barking when told to. It has become dependent on the USA, not only a drug-addict enslaved to the USA, but also a vampire that sucks its blood. As in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, that elite does not want freedom. But Western Europe is a very expensive slave to keep and the now bankrupt USA can no longer afford it, just as one day it will no longer be able to afford to keep its other vassals, Israel, Japan and South Korea.

The American Empire is like the Roman Empire which in the early fifth century could not afford to keep Britain and had to abandon it. Western Europe will have to find its own way, control its own destiny, defend itself. Actually, it will be able to slash its futile military spending once the new security agreement or non-aggression pact with Russia has been signed. That is also what Russia wants. It is tired of being invaded by the West.

Today the USA is letting go of Western Europe. This means the UK and the EU, minus Hungary, Slovakia, others like Serbia and maybe later many more like Romania, Greece, and perhaps even Italy. The first three have already more or less negotiated their way out of the EU into BRICS. Freedom from the USA will undermine the parasitic globalist Western European elite of puppies and puppets, banksters and gangsters, unprincipled and hypocritical pawns all of them. They backed the Kiev Nazis even to their own detriment, allowing prices for their peoples to double and letting the Americans blow up the Nordstream pipeline.

That ruling class of perverts will have to resign, if they are not first voted out, or better arrested, because they no longer have the protection of Trump’s Washington. The Western European swamp will be drained. That is why they and their globalist media propagandists like the BBC feel betrayed and hate Trump. As a result of all this, we shall at last see new Western European rulers, hopefully far more respectful of the wishes of the native peoples of Western Europe. Then can be abandoned those satanic and blasphemous pagan festivals like Eurovision and the 33^rd Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, which openly mocked Christ, Who was crucified when He was 33. No wonder French cathedrals burn down. If that is Western Civilisation, then there is nothing left to defend.

All these countries can then be at peace with the eastern half of Europe, comprised of Russia, the New Ukraine and Belarus. Importantly, this eastern half stretches on into North Asia, to the Chinese border and the Pacific Ocean. Russia is the gateway to Asia, the future, where three of the world’s four largest economies thrive. We are at last seeing the Gaullist vision of a natural unity which stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Western Europe will no longer be unnaturally cut off, but will rejoin the whole of Asia, of which it is only a north-western peninsula.

All this is possible, though if and when it happens is another story. It may all take many years and I trust more in Vance than in Trump. These are just my thoughts and hopes. We shall see.

Q: Will England take part in this New Western Europe, which will at last become a real part of Eurasia, which geographically it always has been?

A: Ah, dear old England. A good question. I really hope so. If the USA rejects England, it will have to leave the USA. It will not be the fifty-first State of the USA. And with the very fragile, violent and divisive situation in the present fifty States with their 35 trillion dollars of debt, that is not an enviable position to be in. I think England should ally itself with the new, post-American, Eurasian Europe of the BRICS Alliance. Ireland, Scotland and Wales surely will. May St Edmund and the English saints guide England towards this.

But for England to become sovereign again, the oppressive British Establishment ruling class will first have to be removed, with its private elite schools, Oxbridge, Westminster, BBC, Financial Times, Economist, tabloid press like the Guardian, the Telegraph, all those other Daily State propaganda mouthpieces, and the Blairs, Camerons, Sunaks and Starmers. As you have very often written, Father, that elite is alien, not Norman by blood, but Norman by mentality, spiritually Norman, made up of spiritual invaders.

Q: We have got into political affairs. To come back to our question, what in your view was the essential error behind the Greek-Russian schism?

A: Lack of communion. It is vital to remain in communion with everyone. It is a great, great sin to break communion, because if you do this, you cause division in the Church. And the Moscow bureaucrats who surround the Patriarch committed this sin, weaponising communion. And look where they are now: isolated, feared, unloved and scandal-ridden. It is all so Soviet. They have lost all their best friends – they even lost you, Father, who spent all your life fighting for communion and the reintegration of the Russian Church.

Q: Why do bishops break communion?

A: It is always because they want more power. And what do they do once they have power? They introduce novelties in order to justify themselves. This was exactly the case of Rome in the eleventh century. All the innovations they introduced after they had broken off communion from the Church were self-justification for breaking communion. And self-justification is the opposite of repentance.

A thousand years on and the Popes of Rome and the Vatican machine have still not repented, still claiming to be rulers of the Christian world, and so they are still out of communion with us, who follow the principle of the Local, which is the principle of Catholicity. They instead imposed the Centre, that is, Rome. Can you imagine, they tried to impose their barbarous Latin on the descendants of the Civilisations of the Incas, Maya and Aztecs! No respect for the Local!

We must be very strict about keeping in communion. The way back, the return, is in respecting the canonical territories of each Local Church. That is what Rome did not do and instead tried to impose itself by the sword on Orthodox territories, with their crusades, inquisitions and so on. Now Constantinople is trying to do the same, imposing centralisation in imitation of Papism. And Moscow Church bureaucrats tried to do the same, but God has intervened, its Soviet Empire over Non-Russians is crumbling.

Q: I would like to come back to my original question, which we did not answer. Do these considerations give us a solution to the divisions in the Diasporas, where there have been several overlapping jurisdictions for over a century?

A: In the Diasporas, where there are mixed Orthodox populations, responsibility for organising new Local Churches lies with the majority ethnic group, but that majority must respect all the customs of the minorities. This is what Bishop Tikhon, the future Russian Patriarch and Saint, did when he headed the multinational Northern American Orthodox Church before the Revolution. Then Carpatho-Russians and Russian-converted Alaskans were the majority, but minorities like the Syrians, Serbs and others were together with them.

Today the Greeks are the Orthodox majority there, as also in Australia, but unity is blocked because of the political and imperialist style of the Greeks. As long as they have that Hellenist style, unity will be impossible. Only when the Greeks have a Non-Greek Patriarch, will they be taken seriously. As regards Western Europe the Romanians are the majority. Here I am hopeful, because respect is what our Romanian Metropolitan Joseph gave our Russian and Moldovan parishes with our calendar, languages and customs, when we had to flee to his canonical protection from pseudo-Russian episcopal persecution. And we in turn greatly respect and love the Romanians. I love their singing and their simplicity! Mutual respect is vital.

Q: One well-known Russian Metropolitan said that the Moscow-Constantinople schism is as big and as permanent as the 1054 Western Schism. What do you think?

A: That was nonsense. This schism is all about personalities and they are temporary. Here today, gone tomorrow, as you say in English. Neither Moscow, nor Constantinople has renounced or changed the Creed, unlike Rome in 1054. So this schism is not at all on the same level as 1054, it is not a dogmatic issue, but a vulgar issue of territory and personalities. And personalities change and are replaced. In any case, the Metropolitan-oligarch who said that, the bureaucrat was in part responsible for the whole fiasco, is now suspended and completely discredited. Nobody is listening to him any more. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Q: Can other Local Churches play a role in healing the Moscow-Constantinople schism?

A: Of course, and a vital role. The Churches of Jerusalem, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland and perhaps others like Antioch, Czechoslovakia and America, and of course the canonical Church of Metropolitan Onufry in the Ukraine, will play a vital role. Even some bishops in Greece and Cyprus are sufficiently non-racist to understand the reality. Some Local Churches are already playing that role, stressing the Conciliar principle, the principle of Sobornost, that is, Catholicity, which, by the way, is the exact opposite of Catholicism and it is precisely the spirit of Catholicism, that is Papism, which caused the schism. Read the interview with the new Bulgarian Patriarch, who was elected after the American candidate lost and was humiliated and the Greeks had to go home like whipped dogs. His words are inspired.

Q: Do you know Metropolitan Onufry?

A: Not personally, only by sight, but I do know Metropolitan Agafangel of Odessa and Archbishop Diodor quite well and they have the same spirit. The further you are from Moscow, the more you find that spirit.

Q: You mention that the essence of the schism is the lust for power on the part of bishops and the spirit of Catholicism or Papism which lies behind it. Can you expand on this?

A: We are all waiting for the restoration of canonical order in the Russian Church, but this cannot happen until the end of what some Russians call ‘Philocatholicism’. This means the fawning admiration by some Russian bishops of the Vatican power-structure, which is the concept of a Church-State, a Church which is a State, or is even more powerful than a State, as history saw at Canossa. However, I am completely against this word because I respect ordinary Catholics, who are Catholics only because they were born in a certain country and I would never insult or disrespect them. The disease inside the Russian Church is not Philocatholicism, the disease is ‘Philopapism’. That is the real heart of the issue, And, by the way, it has nothing to do with ecumenism. Some of the worst Philopapists are anti-ecumenist.

Q: In that case, can you define ‘Philopapism’ for us?

A: Yes, but first understand that Philopapism is not just a Russian disease, it has long infected Constantinople, where it is called ‘Eastern Papism’, and before that it infected Rome, where it has always been called Papism. In Rome the problem was and is Western nationalism, in Constantinople it is Greek nationalism and in Moscow it is Russian nationalism. In Russia, it is not at all a recent Soviet disease, ‘Sergianism’, unlike as some very politicised, anti-Communist emigres used to imagine, it goes back centuries in Russia too, long before Communism.

It existed, for example, just before the Revolution in the awful persecution of the so-called ‘Name of God’ monks on Mt Athos. It was Tsar Nicholas who stopped that persecution, which had been instigated by Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky), who later became the first leader of the émigré ROCOR. The persecution was carried out by bureaucrats who were more or less atheists. The First World War followed it. And most of those very same bishops who had persecuted simple piety, then abandoned Tsar Nicholas at the Revolution and even rejoiced at his overthrow. Later they had to repent, redeeming themselves at the price of martyrdom or of exile. They had to pay the price for their earlier vile persecution.

Q: What about the Soviet form of Philopapism?

A: The post-Revolutionary bout of Philopapism goes back to Metropolitan, later Patriarch, Sergius, who wanted to ‘save the Church’, just like the Popes and the recent Patriarchs of Constantinople. How can you ‘save the Church’? Christ is the Saviour! The Church does not need saving, it is we, including bishops and patriarchs, who need saving. Who do they think they are? The problem is that the Philopapists see the Church as a purely worldly organisation, just like the Popes of Rome, who used to lead armies in order to defend their Church. In order to defeat the barbarians, they themselves became barbarians! Who then was the gentleman?! From Patriarch Sergius this infection spread down to personalities like Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov), who characteristically died in the arms of the Pope. Some say that he was a secret cardinal. Maybe. That is not the point. From him the disease has contaminated further to this day.

This disease is the mentality that bishops are ‘princes of the Church’, in fact they are perverted oligarchs, just like the Borgias in Renaissance Rome. This is poisonous. It is why I refused to go to many churches when I lived in the Ukraine and Russia. They were an immoral business operation and many bishops there are immoral, chosen only because they know how to make money, not because they believe in God, pray, or are monks. I think many of these new Russian Borgias should go to prison. The current Metropolitan Hilarion affair is only the tip of the iceberg. Others must be trembling now too. The truth is coming out and judgement is coming to them all.

Q: You said that Philopapism goes back centuries in Russia. When did Philopapism begin?

A: It came in after the fall of Constantinople, the Second Rome, in 1453. So began the idea of the Third Rome. Fighting against St Nil of Sora and the hesychast Non-Possessors – St Sergius of Radonezh had been one of them earlier on – the situation came to a head at the so-called ‘Raskol’, that is, the Old Ritualist schism 200 years later. Then the administrative centre of the Russian Church in Moscow was contaminated by Philopapism, which was also encouraged by the idea of the Third Rome, which maintains that Russia has a messianic mission. Russia does have a mission, but it takes place within the multilateral Alliance of Civilisations, which is what BRICS is about.

In other words, Philopapists think that Russia is exceptional, indispensable to the world and therefore anything its rulers do is justified. The antidote to this was in the concept of Moscow as a Second Jerusalem, but that option was cruelly rejected by the Moscow bureaucrats. It is not that I am in favour of Old Ritualism, which was a form of ignorant nationalism, but I am against persecution. What difference is there between the State persecution of the Old Ritualists in the seventeenth century and the State persecution of Orthodox in the twentieth century?

The Philopapist mentality creates pharisees and ‘high priests’, as Christ called them in the Gospel, those who like ‘the first places at table’. Philopapists consider that they are the chosen people and so above the law, above the canons, ‘exceptional’. But this mentality is why the pharisees crucified Christ, Who called them to order, what we call canonical order, and told them that our Kingdom is not of this world. He overturned the tables of these new moneychangers, which is what you did, Fr Andrew, when you chased out the new pharisees who were threatening you and screaming at you in 2021 and 2022. All those who persecuted you are one by one being removed. Bishops are not above the canons.

It is the Holy Spirit Who chooses us for mission, not pharisees. Pharisees think only in worldly terms of money and power, and camouflage themselves with messianism as self-justification for their lusts. It is simply lust for money and power that contaminates these people. Once they have money, they want power. It is always the same old sordid story of corruption and perversion. That is Philopapism.

Q: But Phariseeism itself is universal, isn’t it?

A: Yes, of course. It was this same missionary, messianic mentality which inspired the atheist Jew Bronstein-Trotsky, who wanted to spread the Communism of the Third International (which replaced the Third Rome) worldwide. He also persecuted, leading the Red Army and causing the deaths of millions. But it is not only Jewish, it can be Frankish, Norman, Venetian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, German, Soviet, American, or anything else.

For instance, Soviet messianism strangely resembles American messianism. This is because the struggle between Washington and Moscow is in fact the struggle between the First Rome and the Third Rome, for the USA is the heir to the infallible Popes of the First Rome. ‘We are the exceptional people, the indispensable nation’, the infallible US have been saying of themselves ever since the collapse of the SU (Soviet Union), though its collapse had nothing to do with the Americans. (See how even the initials US and SU and their symbols, the white star and the red star, are the same, just the other way round).

Communism collapsed because it is unrealisable and went bankrupt. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union went to the heads of the US elite. They claimed absurdly: ‘This is the end of history and we have won. As the victors, we can set up a World Empire, called Globalism, we have exceptional authority, therefore no laws apply to us, we can carry out genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Libya and Syria, in the Donbass and Gaza, we can ignore the International Criminal Court. We can do whatever we want’. In reality, this is just the same vulgar old imperialism, absolutism, immorality, cloaked in their smug Protestant self-righteousness and infallibility. It is Philopapism.

In reality only God is exceptional. No human being or country is exceptional.

Q: What do you think of what some call the ‘liberal opposition’ in the Russian Church, clergymen like Protodeacon Andrey Kuraev and the popular pastor Fr Alexei Usminsky? They are also opposed to these Vatican-adoring, ‘money and power’ Russian bishops, the pharisaic Philopapists, as you are.

A: The dissident liberals are opposed to the Philopapists, but not for the same reasons as I am. The liberals are opposed to such bishops because the liberals are in reality rationalistic and modernistic Protestants. Like all Protestants, they are naturally anti-Catholic, anti-Papist. However, like all Protestants they are also generally pro-Western and some are traitors to Russia, just like their corrupt enemies whom they fight and are also traitors to Russia (I make exceptions for some who are just extremely naïve and not very intelligent). We disagree with the liberals because we are not Protestants and we follow the historic Orthodox Faith.

We are not traitors, we are patriots of Russia, that is, of the real Russia, of Orthodox Rus. President Putin is preparing the way for that, for the coming Emperor. He took on not just Paris and Berlin, but the whole West and won. We hope that God gives him time to help cleanse the Church next.

However, I do disagree with the appalling way that the liberals have been treated, with their so-called ‘defrockings’ by the selfsame corrupt bishops. You cannot defrock a clergyman because he has different political views from his bishop under the absurd pretext that he is being ‘disobedient’. The threat of defrocking forced them and many others, in the Netherlands, Lithuania, Spain, USA and in Russia into joining Constantinople – they had no alternative. This is yet another example of the Moscow bureaucracy weaponising a sacrament, this time not the eucharist, but the priesthood. But grace is given by the Holy Spirit, not by pieces of paper signed by jealous or wicked bishops. Thank God, Patriarch Kyrill is beginning to remove them, suspend them or retire them. He has a lot of work to do.

Q: How is authentic Orthodox missionary work different from American missionary work?

A: If you have a missionary message to spread to others, the message of Christ, then you do not spread it by violence and threats. This is what the ‘Roman Union’ of the Vatican did. This is what the ‘Soviet Union’ did. Now this is what the ‘American Union’ (which is USA and NATO – basically the ‘European Union’) does. They have all used violence and threats. This has guaranteed the downfall of all of them. It is what is happening now.

The American Union, usually called ‘The West’, is collapsing, it too has gone bankrupt. They have done it to themselves, just like the Soviet Union. As someone from the Soviet Union, I can see very clearly how the European Union has become the same. The commissars, mentality and lies of its politicians and journalists are exactly the same. But the Godless are always defeated because they are all from Babylon. Their Tower always collapses.

Authentic Orthodox missionary work does not use violence and threats. I have recently discovered the Russian saint, German of Alaska as an example. What a great monk! And how he has been ignored by Church authorities and was resisted by Russian State authorities (long before ‘Sergianism’!). He is unknown in Russia. St German lived among the Inuit people ‘as one of them’. Not even a priest, he did not impose his language or customs by violence or threats against the people. He did not try and steal their property. He was their servant and defender, not their persecutor or a ‘prince of the Church’. He was the real Apostle of Alaska. He was able to convert people, because he was Christlike.

In this he was just like Sts Cyril and Methodius, Apostles of the Slavs, St Stephen of Perm, Apostle of the Zyrians, St Nicholas, Apostle of Japan, or St Macarius, Apostle of the Altai, he respected others. That is the problem of the Moscow Patriarchal bureaucrats today, lack of respect for others, for the Local. And that is why they are losing everything, they put politics above the Church. If I may paraphrase St Matthew’s Gospel: Seek ye first the kingdom of man, and all these things will be taken from you’. They do not deserve to keep it. God will take it away from them because they are unworthy, just as He took Constantinople away from the Greeks in 1453 because of their racism. St German of Alaska’s way is the only way that Russia could convert the world and in no other way. Any other way is Philopapist.

Q: Whenever we talk, I feel nostalgic, as though I am talking to one of the old Russian emigres I knew in the 1970s, like my godfather, Nikolai Zernov. I would sit in his apartment in Northmoor Road in Oxford and look at the huge picture, almost fresco, he had of the Kremlin ‘before the deluge’, as he called it. Then there were Princess Kutaissova, Elizabeth Lopukhina, Dimitri Obolensky, Nadezhda Gorodetskaja or Lydia Slater, Boris Pasternak’s sister. They all had the same mentality. Why is this?

A: This is because we are Russian emigres like them! But I take your remark as a compliment. All I can say is that though we lived in the Soviet Union, we always kept our family traditions from before. Above all, we never, never accepted any Sovietisation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has increased this Philopapist corruption and perversion today. This has made it and those who are too closely allied with it, like those crazy ROCOR Protestant converts in New York, into pariahs. It is so sad and so unnecessary. They have painted themselves into the corner with their notorious scandals, as you say. Now they are complaining because the rest of the Church at best ignores them and at worst openly mocks them. But how else are you going to treat psychopaths?

Q: Do you have any words of hope for our readers?

A: Yes, there is one thing. You know, I never used to like Trump. I thought he was a clown as well as a criminal and a narcissist. He was also a Russophobe and armed the Neo-Nazis against us and sanctioned us. But recently, he said something very Orthodox, no doubt for the first time in his life and without knowing it. He said: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! I even wanted to buy a picture of this moment, but my wife stopped me. She has no interest in politics and says it is all a waste of time. She prefers gardening and our two cats to politics. She says cats are far more intelligent than politicians.

She may be right, she so often is. But I still maintain that the concept of ‘Never surrender’ is Orthodox, because Christ never surrendered. If He had surrendered, there would never have been the Resurrection. So I say that Trump was saved for a purpose by the grace of God, the bullet missed him, but hit Biden instead and stopped World War III, and we should all repeat: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! Another American said something like: ‘Only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world do change the world’. This is in fact the definition of our fools for Christ. They change the world, corrupt and perverted bishops do not. Why, they cannot even change themselves.

July 2024

The Bulgarians Rout the ‘Phanar Lobby’: Next in Line – the ‘Lavender Lobby’

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2024/07/03/bolgary_razgromili_fanarskoe_lobbi

The following article is a translation of the above Russian article, published in Moscow on 4 July by the well-known Church journalist Anatoly Stepanov. It clearly outlines how by choosing a new Patriarch, the Bulgarian Church has come to support the canonical Church in the Ukraine under Metropolitan Onufry. Thus, it has for the moment defeated the pro-Phanariot lobby and its fake and schismatic ‘Church in the Ukraine’ (OCU), whose main sponsor is the atheistic US State Department. However, it also shows that the US-controlled liberal/ecumenist/pro-Catholic/pseudo-intellectual/celibate lobby which is trying to split the Church is also profoundly homosexual. This is not news for some of us, but it will be to many.

Moreover, this split is not a Greek-Russian split, for apart from the very well-known homosexual metropolitans, archbishops and clerics within the Patriarchate of Constantinople, there are also many others of other nationalities, such as Bulgarians and Russians. Such are also part of this homosexual (‘lavender’) lobby, for instance the notorious but only recently defrocked Moscow Abbot Peter Yeremeev. He was allowed for years and years to continue his activities quite openly in Moscow to the scandal of the faithful. As the article hints, but does not dare say openly, he and others were and are protected by powerful clerical friends of the same narcissistic ‘variety’, who, moreover, as we well know, are also very active outside Russia in corrupting Church life with their boyfriends and persecuting the faithful. Here is a translation of the article:

On Sunday June 30, the election of the Primate of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (BOC) was held. This attracted the close attention of Orthodox observers and the public not only in Bulgaria. And no wonder, because the fate of not only the future of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, but also the future of all world Orthodoxy was being decided.

On the eve of the elections, we witnessed open interference in the internal affairs of the BOC by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. On May 19 an extraordinary event took place: a group of Bulgarian hierarchs headed by the most influential in Bulgaria, Metropolitan Nicholas (Sebastianov) of Plovdiv, visited the Patriarchate of Constantinople and openly concelebrated with representatives of the schismatic Orthodox Church in the Ukraine (OCU).

This was not only a challenge to the Bulgarian Church, which, as you know, does not recognise the legitimacy of the OCU, but is also a revelation of the future course of the BOC. And then Patriarch Bartholomew was invited (it is not clear on whose behalf, since there was no decision of the Synod) to take part in the ceremony of the election of His Holiness the Patriarch of Bulgaria and his enthronement.

It was a public act of interference. And how many behind-the-scenes attempts to exert influence, which, for sure, took place both on the part of the American embassy and on the part of ‘our overseas partners’, as the Russian Department of External Church Relations (DECR) has long called Constantinople, which has long been under the control of the United States.

Therefore, many anxiously awaited the decision of the Council of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which was supposed to elect its Primate. On the eve of the final voting, as is known, the Synod of the BOC elected three bishops as candidates for the post of Primate of the Church – Metropolitan Grigory (Tsvetkov) of Vrachansky, who acted as Locum Tenens, Metropolitan Gabriel (Dinev) of Lovech and Metropolitan Daniel (Nikolov) of Vidin.

According to all forecasts, experts gave preference to Metropolitan Gregory, who was considered as a kind of compromise figure, albeit a conditional compromise, since his sympathies for the Phanar were well-known. However, unexpectedly, in the second round of the final voting, Metropolitan Daniel (Nikolov) of Vidin won, for whom 69 members of the Council voted, Metropolitan Gregory received 66 votes in his support. In the first round, Metropolitan Gregory received 64 votes, Metropolitan Daniel – 51 votes, and Metropolitan Gabriel – 19 votes (several ballots were declared invalid).

The decision of the Council became a sensation for many, a joyful sensation. It testifies to the fact that the supporters of canonical Orthodoxy, and it was from these positions that Metropolitan Daniel always spoke, turned out to be in the majority in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and preferred to have as their Patriarch a person who, on the eve of the elections, again clearly and unequivocally outlined his position on the rejection of the Ukrainian schismatics. Moreover, he was the only candidate for Patriarch who spoke directly on this key question

Of course, the results of the vote testify to the shaky balance of power in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church: 69 votes against 66 is the clearest evidence of this.Nevertheless, the decision of the Council is final, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church has a Primate who will defend canonical rules and norms and will not allow the Phanar to establish control over the BOC and deepen the schism in world Orthodoxy.

However, it is clear to everyone that the new Patriarch Daniel is receiving a very difficult inheritance, and his unequivocal rejection of the schismatic actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople will not go unanswered. And we are already seeing the latter answers in the form of dirty tricks. Patriarch Bartholomew, apparently dissatisfied with the results of the choice of the Bulgarian Orthodox, refused to serve the first Divine Liturgy with his newly elected brother, went home, demonstratively leaving his representative, an archimandrite, to concelebrate.

Moreover, he is one who has a very dubious reputation – Archimandrite Kharalampy (Nichev), who was once a cleric of the BOC, but was expelled after a scandal, but was accepted in his present rank in Constantinople. At the same time, this same Archimandrite Kharalampy has a reputation as a person who belongs to the ‘lavender lobby’. Moreover, during the first Divine Liturgy of Patriarch Daniel, Archimandrite Kharalampy, being the senior priest by consecration, led the service as a representative of the clergy.

There will certainly be many more such dirty tricks on the part of the Phanar. But they do not pose a danger, but an attempt to provoke a schism in the BOC from among the bishops and priests dissatisfied with the election of Patriarch Daniel is a more terrible danger. And given the results of the vote, almost half were dissatisfied. It is clear that there is a long distance from discontent to a change of jurisdiction and an attempt to split, but the problem is serious. His Holiness Patriarch Daniel will obviously have to exert a great deal of effort to prevent a split in the BOC. Therefore, it is very likely that he will take some conciliatory actions and steps first of all.

It is very likely that the opposition to the new Patriarch will be led by the already mentioned and very influential Metropolitan Nicholas of Plovdiv, who has extensive connections in political circles (there are rumours that his father served in the security service of the Communist leader of Bulgaria Todor Zhivkov, i.e. he was not the least person at that time). Metropolitan Nicholas has recently become a leader of the pro-Phanar policy in the BOC.

Metropolitan Nicholas is a visible embodiment of the failures of the policy ‘of an Orthodox direction’ of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate, which for a long time banked on him. And it seems that there were reasons for this, in addition to the family ties of the Metropolitan of Plovdiv. He was educated at the Moscow Theological Academy and for a long time demonstratively supported pro-Russian positions in the Bulgarian episcopate. In addition to the DECR, as far as we know, our Embassy also banked on him. So this is proof of the failure of all Russian diplomacy, not only ecclesiastical. As a result, we have now received a deafening slap in the face since Metropolitan Nicholas has become the main propagandist of the Phanar in the BOC, and the DECR and the Russian embassy seem to have got it all wrong.

Moreover, Metropolitan Nicholas not only changed his political orientation, but also committed openly offensive actions against His Holiness Patriarch Kirill. We are talking about his arbitrary restoration to the ecclesiastical dignity of the former hegumen Peter Yeremeev, who was banned in the Russian Church, who has recently been seen several times at the Divine services of Metropolitan Nicholas. And this is not just an insult to His Holiness Patriarch Kirill personally, who approved the decision to defrock the former hegumen Peter, but also in fact the creation of a serious problem in relations between the Bulgarian and Russian Orthodox Churches…..

Hegumen Pyotr Eremeev is a notorious personality. In addition to the fact that he held high positions in the structures of the Russian Orthodox Church, being the abbot of the historic Vysokopetrovsky Monastery in the centre of the capital and the rector of the Russian Orthodox University, he is widely known in narrow circles as one of the most prominent faces of the so-called ‘lavender lobby’ in the Russian Orthodox Church. Believers whispered about this and spoke with sorrow. And his ban from serving was perceived with great satisfaction by many Orthodox believers as a sure sign of the cleansing of the Church from the ‘lavender filth’.

Therefore, the story of the former abbot Peter testifies to the fact that the new Bulgarian Patriarch, in addition to the ‘Phanar lobby’, has another dangerous and influential opponent – the ‘lavender lobby’. It is no coincidence that in Bulgaria they whisper about the non-traditional sexual orientation of Metropolitan Nicholas of Plovdiv. It is also surprising and sad that Russian Church diplomats considered him to be the main supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church in Bulgaria.

By the way, as informed people say, the strange inclinations of the former hegumen Peter began to manifest themselves after his studies in Bulgaria, where he met and became friends with the then vicar of the Bulgarian Patriarch, Bishop Nicholas (Sebastianov) of Znepol. These unhealthy inclinations led Pyotr Yeremeev into a scandal with students of the Moscow Academy, which was the reason for his exile from Moscow to Khabarovsk in the Far East. But then he returned to the capital, supposedly cured of the sodomite disease, a story which turned out to be untrue.

Of course, we rejoice at the election of the new Bulgarian Patriarch, especially realising that we are witnessing the manifestation of the action of Divine Providence in history, which inspires us with hope in these desperate times. But let us be aware that Patriarch Daniel faces the most difficult trials ahead. Therefore, it would be right for all of us to at least sigh before God for Patriarch Daniel of Bulgaria, who is embarking on the difficult path of struggle for the Church of Christ and for the unity of world Orthodoxy.

Four Steps to Decadence

Introduction: The Church

The Church on earth is composed of the faithful people, the faithful parish clergy and faithful monastics (some of whom are also faithful bishops). Among all of them are prophets and fools-for-Christ, who are not afraid to tell the truth and shame the devil, who is the father of lies. The faithful are opposed by the four following highly overlapping movements, which have been assigned by the evil one to take over the administration of the Church:

Homosexualisation

This movement of immorality has brought into the Church administration pathologically ill homosexuals, and to a lesser extent bisexuals and, thank God, rarely, pedophiles. Whether repressed or not, they have formed gay mafias, called in the US ‘lavender mafias’ and persecute monastics and married clergy, of whom they are very jealous because they have normal lives. They have literally perverted the administration of the Church.

Intellectualisation

This movement has brought into the Church administration intellectuals, whose god is the god of the philosophers. Their faith is generally very weak, for they place the intellectual above the spiritual, the theoretical above the practical, the university above the monastery, the complicated above the simple. This has also perverted the administration of the Church.

Financialisation

This movement has brought into the Church administration ‘administrators’ and ‘effective managers’, like Paul of Samosata who in the third century was a good financier, but a bad theologian. (Yes, the third century – there is nothing new under the sun). These financiers are interested almost only in raising and collecting money, putting their love of material things and love of luxury above the salvation of souls, for whom they even close churches! This has perverted the administration of the Church.

Secularisation

This movement has brought into the Church administration the political extremes of this world and resulted in heresies and schisms. These are always the result of Secularisation, which itself is always caused by immorality. These extremes claim that all others are impure, whether the extremes they confess are Neo-Donatist conservatism, with its fanaticism and phariseeism, or else Neo-Gnostic liberalism, with its modernism and syncretism. Through their spiritual impurity they have politicised and perverted the administration of the Church.

Conclusion: Reserves of Glory

Nearly fifty years ago, on 23 December 1976, after a series of difficult meetings at the seminary, the late Fr Alexander Schmemann noted in his diary:

‘My point of view is that a good half of our students are dangerous for the Church – their psychology, their tendencies, a sort of constant obsession with something. Orthodoxy takes on a different, ugly aspect, something important is missing, and the Orthodoxy that these students consciously or subconsciously favour is distorted, narrow, emotional – in the end, pseudo-Orthodoxy. Not only at the seminary, but everywhere, I acutely sense the spread of a strange Orthodoxy’.

A year earlier he had written: ‘What used to be an organic, natural style became stylisation, spiritually weak, harmful. The main problem of Orthodoxy is the constraint due to style, and its inability to revise it; a prevalent absence of self-criticism, of checking the tradition of the elders by Tradition, by love of Truth. A growing idolatry’. Seminarians and clergy, he said, wear their cassocks and beards as an armour against life and thought. A pseudo-Orthodoxy. A strange Orthodoxy. A growing idolatry. These are hard words. Yet, against those who attacked Orthodoxy, Fr. Alexander came to its defence. ‘I feel myself a radical ‘challenger,’ but among challengers I feel myself a conservative and traditionalist’. He could never feel wholly at home in any one camp. ‘I cannot identify with any complete system with an integral view of the world or an ideology. It seems to me that anything finished, complete, and not open to another dimension is heavy and self-destructive. I see the error of any dialectics that proceed with thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, removing possible contradictions. I think that openness must always remain; it is faith, in it God is found, who is not a ‘synthesis’ but life and fullness’.

What can we say? We prefer a theological and poetic view. Thus, we quote the words of the Russian poet, Vladimir Dixon (1900-1929): ‘God has reserves of glory for inglorious times’.

The Globalist Empire or an Alliance of Sovereign Civilisations

Introduction: Missionary Work and Repentance

Missionary work among heterodox Christians in the Western world has had very limited success, because it needs millennial repentance to become Orthodox Christians. By ‘millennial repentance’ I mean not just the realisation that the West has been in a state of apostasy for a few decades, as nostalgic and conservative old people have it, or even a few centuries, as anti-Protestants have it, but for a full thousand years, for the whole second millennium of Western history. There must be a realisation that the apostasy began in the eleventh century, with ‘The Making of Europe’ (1). Between the year 1000 and the year 1100 the old Western European Civilisation of the Saints was usurped, revolutionised and replaced with a Feudal Empire of power and wealth (2). For example, the First Crusade did not begin in the Holy Land in 1096, but in England in 1066, though organised Western violence actually began in 1030. In other words, Western Europeans were the first victims of those who had usurped the Western Civilisation of the Saints, Americans are only the last. Newcomers to Orthodox Christianity have to grasp this.

Only once those who have shown an initial interest in the Church, have been to real services and have grasped this point, can newcomers start casting off their old mentality. This is vital because otherwise newcomers will come to the Church with their old negative baggage, try to impose it, naturally fail, and then lapse and disappear. It is not enough to join the Church, they must become Orthodox, taking on the Orthodox Christian mind and so way of life. Here there is a great difference with the heterodox mentality, which contents itself with abstract agreement, but there is no conversion of words into actions. Orthodox Christianity, as shown in the Gospels, the Acts (not Thoughts) of the Apostles and the Epistles is a way of life, not some intellectual abstraction or ideology. We are judged on our actions, not on our words and thoughts, for only actions incarnate words and thoughts. The most important witness to this is the Lives (not Thoughts) of the Saints, especially in our context, the Lives of the Saints of Western Europe, all those who are in communion with All the other Saints of Orthodoxy.

A Competitive Empire or Co-operating Civilisations

The contemporary world of eight billion human beings is divided into two parts, which are not at all halves. One part is a small, but extremely powerful and uniform minority and the other is a vast, until recently not powerful and diverse majority. The first part can be called ‘unipolar’, as it has only one centre, it is unicentric, imperial and anti-civilisational. The second part can be called ‘multipolar’, as it has many centres, it is polycentric, ’non-imperial’ and multicivilisational. For the sake of argument, we shall simplify the numbers involved and call them one billion and seven billion, though probably even a division into 5% of the world population and 95% of the population would be generous to the minority, given that so many of us who were born in Western countries have no sympathy for our elites and refuse to be brainwashed and zombified by their endless propaganda. On the one side is the Globalist Empire, and on the other side is the Sovereign World, an Alliance of Independent Civilisations, at present known as the Russian-founded BRICS. What exactly is meant by these two opposing realities?

The Empire: Western ‘Liberal Democracy’

One the one hand, there is the Empire, which is now centred in Washington. It consists of Northen America, the USA and Canada, and Western Europe, which at the moment can be defined as stretching as far as the borders of the Russian Lands. However, it also includes post-1945 vassal-states like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel. Although the Empire calls itself ‘democratic’, in reality, it is run by oligarchs (e.g. Trump) or the candidates of oligarchs (e.g. bank clerks like Macron and Sunak, Biden, Scholz and Starmer). People have to vote for one or other of them – no others are permitted, no free choice is allowed. The Empire is ruled by banksters and financiers, hence its system is called Capitalist. In other words, the Empire is ruled by the love of capital, venal and mercantile interests and banks. Although the first great bank, the Bank of Venice, was founded only in 1582, its history began among the merchants of Venice (fifteen years before Shakespeare wrote a play by this name), long before, for their bandits and thugs had already plundered and looted the Christian Capital in Constantinople in 1204.

The financial centre was transferred from unsafe and declining Venice to Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 1609, from there to a newly purged England in 1694 (the wars of Cromwell, the murderer of the King of England and a million Irishmen, had been financed from the Netherlands and the old line of monarchs replaced in 1688 by a false monarch, financed by Isaac Israel Suasso from the Netherlands). Finally, in the twentieth century the centre was transferred to New York with the Federal Reserve, established in 1913, not by coincidence one year before the First European War in 1914. The Globalist Empire is obsessed by finance (even the GDP of the Empire is unreal and is based only on finance, not on the production of goods), law of the jungle, ‘dog eat dog’ competition, stock exchanges, share prices, exchange rates, credit ratings etc. The essence of the Globalist Empire is Nazism, the power of the few over the many, regardless of how many hundreds of millions of people, especially, Non-Western Europeans die as a result of its ruthless imperialism and exploitation. Its only ‘value’ is inhuman – it is money.

The Sovereign World: The Alliance of Civilisations

In 1914, the only countries in the world which remained uncolonised by the Globalist Empire were monarchies: Russia, China, Ethiopia, Thailand, Morocco. Since monarchies ensured popular sovereignty in every sense, including religious, political and financial sovereignty, clearly, the Empire had to overthrow them, especially the Russian, which was by far the largest and by far the richest. However, even the overthrow of the Russian Monarchy by its globalist agents in 1917 and then the murder of the Tsar and his Family, ordered from New York, did not lead to Russia’s colonisation by the Empire, though various Western countries did attempt invasions of the former Russian Empire. Later, the same attempt to colonise China also backfired. Today, both Russia and China have essentially returned to being monarchies, even though President Vladimir Putin does not have the title of Tsar of All the Russias, he is that, and even though President Xi does not have the title of the Emperor of China, he is that. For they rule out of national interest, out of patriotism, they want their countries to be sovereign and independent.

With independent extractive, industrial and agricultural production and services, the economies of the Sovereign World are regulated by their States for the benefit of all the people, not just for a small number of ultra-wealthy oligarchs, as in the Globalist Empire, which is patterned by ‘trickle up’, not by ‘trickle down’ economies. The Empire laughably calls these countries ‘autocracies’. They are not, they are part of the Non-Colonial, Sovereign World. Many therefore want to join these ‘autocracies’, indeed, the whole conscious and still free world. The essence of the Sovereign World is Anti-Nazism, the power of the many over the few. This is attractive to the countries of the ‘Global South’, to all whose countries have been taken over at some point by the Globalist Empire. The Denazification of Europe is now under way, with the freeing of the occupied and Nazified Ukraine from the Empire. As for Hungary and Slovakia, they are escaping EU tyranny by themselves. Others, at first in Eastern Europe, then elsewhere, including in the so-called USA, will follow, as the peoples rise and take control of their own destinies.

The Cleansing of the Orthodox Church from Traitors to the Globalists

Of the many faiths and philosophies in the Sovereign World, such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Orthodox Christianity, it is the last that I have known very well for fifty years and from inside. Without the slightest doubt the main problem of Orthodox Christianity and the Orthodox Churches is the corruption of its episcopate, some of whom are traitors to the Faith of the Church. Some who know history will say that this has always been so and think at once of the notorious Patriarch Nestorius, always a politician, never a churchman. That is true, but never to such a vital degree as today. Episcopal corruption follows the same pattern as in the Empire’s founding ideologies of Non-Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, many of whose leaders are careerists and were corrupted long before these individual Orthodox leaders. Here I will speak only of the largest Local Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, some 70% of the whole Church and which I know best. Two ideologies are promoted by these traitors and often by the selfsame individuals. These ideologies are:

Extremism

Extremism in the Church is represented by two political and secularist, that is, anti-spiritual, currents: ultra-liberalism/modernism/ecumenism and ultra-conservativism/traditionalism/sectarianism. The first is pro-Western, not traditional and likes to change or ‘reform’ the ways of the Church according to the latest secular fashions. The adherents are often intellectuals and appear to put greater trust in the delusions of their own intellectual powers than in the bimillennial Tradition of the Church and the piety of her people. The second set of individuals are often narrow, pharisaical, ghettoish, attaching huge importance to tiny details, erecting national, local or personal customs into vital and saving universal traditions. In other words, these provincialist people are intensely inward-looking and do not see the world around them. However, the differences between the two extremes are mostly ultimately irrelevant. This is because both are founded on and patterned by exactly the same psychology, not by theology, the Word of God. It is the same psychological deformation of the imposition of self.

Many of these individuals from both sides are easily exploited by the Secret Services of various States, though most notably by the richest and most powerful, the American CIA. Several of these treacherous individuals are, (if they love money especially much) consciously or (if stupid, naïve or particularly subject to flattery) unconsciously, CIA plants, infiltrated into the Russian Church in order to destroy her unity and oppose the liberation of the Ukraine, actually calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces! These individuals are flawed personalities, very weak in faith, and so are easily manipulated by payments of money, illusions of power or just by flattery, all of which they love. The liberals are pro-Protestants, promoting congregationalism and confederations of parishes. The conservatives are pro-Roman Catholics and promote centralising clerical power as they think that they are ‘princes of the Church’. Both are anti-Orthodox, anti-missionary, for their ghetto-like and self-centred narcissistic mentalities are sufficient for them. They both put their hope not in Christ, but ‘in princes and in the sons of men’.

Homosexuality

I know perhaps 100 members of the 400-strong Russian episcopate. I know of 12 who are homosexual, both in the lands of the former USSR and in the West. There was always such a small minority and indeed their names are known from the Middle Ages, though one of the best-known is the notorious Greek Paisios (Ligarides) in the seventeenth century. Well-known contemporary cases are Bishop Gury in Paris, who in the 1990s had an affair with his boyfriend priest and was exiled as punishment to freezing Magadan, then two very young bishops, both called Ignaty (Buzin and Tarasov), both sent to monasteries (none of these three was defrocked), then Bishop Flavian (Mitrofanov). As a priest in London only a decade or so ago, he was notorious for his orgies and when he was made bishop after returning to Russia, it caused a huge scandal here. How could they do that? The Russian security services discovered that his boyfriend had a drugs laboratory in his apartment. This now defrocked bishop fled to London, where he had previously obtained British citizenship and where he is protected from justice.

Here are four cases. I will not speak of the other eight cases here. However, each of them is well-known for his disgusting perversions, as well as for his persecution of married clergy, women and children, whom they detest out of jealousy, and their narcissistic love of luxury, fancy houses, cars and money. Perhaps their existence and impunity are why there has only been a muted Orthodox reply to the new and shocking Roman Catholic decree of Papal blessings for homosexual couples? So far only the Metropolitan of Budapest, Hilarion (Alfeyev), has stated in an excellent interview with The American Conservative that the blessing of LGBT couples, confirmed by the Papal Fiducia Supplicans document, renders talks about the unity of Orthodox and Roman Catholics impossible. This is logical and consistent, for the introduction of the ‘marriage’ of LGBT couples led to the ending of conversations between the Russian Church and certain Protestant sects. Why not break off talks with Roman Catholics as well? It is disturbing to think that compromises with the Vatican may be impeding the statement of the Christian truth.

Conclusion: The Cleansing of the Unprincipled Traitors

Among Russian people there is a saying that when a man is ordained priest or consecrated bishop, a demon comes to him. When I first heard this saying in my teens, I was shocked. However, after a few years of experience, I came to understand it. What it means is that when a man receives grace, the demon also tempts him according to his weakness, whichever that may be. The non-ordained only undergoes ordinary temptations, as the demon is not too interested in him. However, the demon tempts a priest ten times more and a bishop a hundred times more, as a result of the spiritual potential they have gained through ordination or consecration. We can see this in the Gospels, where Christ overturned the tables of the moneychangers, which were not in someone’s house, but precisely in the Temple, and where we hear of the pharisees who love sitting ‘in the chief seats’ and being honoured (Matt. 23). And which bishops do the people love? The humble ones – like the slandered St Spyridon, St Nicholas, St John Chrysostom, St Nectarios of Aegina and St John of Shanghai, the bishops of the people.

When you have a destiny, you are driven, single-minded, for you know that you have to do the Will of God. You will not want to do what you are called to do by Him, because you are all too human and you want to live loosely like others. However, you cannot do otherwise, but you are inwardly compelled to follow the law of your being, which God planted inside you and which drives your conscience. You cannot do other than this, because otherwise you will die and you will kill your own soul. Do not mess with those who have a destiny to fulfil, they are always tougher than you because God has sent them, quite unworthy though they are. Like the prophets of old, we know what will happen in the future – it is inevitable, so we are not afraid, not intimidated by individuals who block the path to the fulfilment of God’s Will, whose Will must be done, sooner or later. You cannot live like others and so you follow the Royal Way, beyond extremes. In time, God will put everything and everyone in their place. The traitors who punish faithfulness to God will be cleansed by Divine Justice. I have long trembled for them.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

2 February 2024

Notes:

For example: The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350, Robert Bartlett, 1993
For example: The First European Revolution c. 970-1215, R.I. Moore, 2000

Nationalists or Christians?

Introduction: Two Generations Ago

When I at last (I had been waiting for five years) managed to find an Orthodox church to attend, exactly fifty years ago, it was a Russian church. This was because in those days there were very few churches and all of them, except some of the Russian churches, were completely closed to other nationalities. Hardly any English people had any attraction to Greek, Serbian, Ukrainian or Romanian churches. (There were no others at that time). They were all, in other words, nationalist ghetto churches. Moreover, the Greek churches were well-known for being compromised politically through the alliances of their bishops with Western politicians and freemasons. However, there were a few Russian churches which were open to others. Moreover, at that time the Russian Church was very attractive as it was the Persecuted Church, the Church of the Martyrs and Confessors. For any who sought food for their souls, here it was.

Failure

Despite the large number of churches here fifty years on, the situation is in some regards even worse. Here is what the internet reports about one very senior Greek bishop.

His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of America Delivers Historic Address to the US Intelligence Community at The National Intelligence University in Washington, DC – Ορθοδοξία News Agency (orthodoxianewsagency.gr)

Of course, we draw no conclusions about ordinary churchgoers and clergy of Greek churches, but this is what one, among others, of their ‘leaders’ does. It does not bode well.

Some would say no change here as regards the Greek Church run from Constantinople, but the various branches of the Russian Church have now also fallen. The Russian Church is no longer the Persecuted Church, but the Persecuting Church. Who wants to support that? Unprincipled yesmen and careerist clergy on the make? In Russia they have now ‘defrocked’ Archdeacon Andrei Kuraev. We never agreed with his ultra-liberal, almost eccentric and really unspiritual views. But that is not the point. ‘Defrockings’ now take place because of different opinions. However, you cannot take grace away with bits of paper. The bishops who issue such bits of paper only defrock themselves. They alone lose grace by their own political actions. This is all control freakery.

Given the behaviour of Greeks and Russians alike, persecuting the humble, the devout, the zealous, the apostolic, today the biggest Orthodox jurisdiction has increased in size again. It consists of those who do not go to any church. Why should they, when Greek and Russian bishops behave like this?

Success

However, not all is black. Here is a report from one parish:

‘Our life in … is unfolding in a surprisingly peaceful way, despite the upheavals of the last year. Perhaps a quarter of a century of stubborn insistence on openness to all cultures, services in many languages, welcoming minorities and so on has achieved some modicum of success: we managed to alienate all the partisans of various national ideas, who fled and that left an open field to those interested in Christ and the Gospel’.

This repeats our own experience, except that we have been doing the same thing not for a quarter of a century, but for nearly forty years. And the partisans of various national ideas have fled. Thank God!

Conclusion: Real Bishops

Today the Church is dominated by bishops who choose to live in posh suburbs in the rich world (sic), loving bling and power, constantly trying to grasp property and demanding with threats and slander from their faithful clergy and craving ever more money. They try and close down churches like vulgar Communist commissars, despise and mock women and children (for obvious reasons – it shows what sort of ‘men’ they are), and cannot be bothered to listen to the confessions of the faithful. We know such bishops only too well. The Persecuted Church has indeed become the Persecuting Church. But we the new New Confessors fight against them, and unto blood if it takes that. We are not afraid of you, for God is with us.

There is a story from seventh-century Orthodox England of how a certain bishop, known now as St Chad, used to visit the faithful on foot, not on horseback, and had to be lifted onto a horse so he could continue his ministry more effectively. Such was his humility.

In our own sad twenty-first century, it is related how just a few years ago the late Patriarch Irenei of Serbia, who was presiding a Synod of his bishops, took a look out of the window and saw a car park full of expensive cars. When he asked who they belonged to and was told that they belonged to his bishops, he said to his bishops: ‘Just think what sort of cars you would have had, if you had not taken a vow of poverty’?

Such are the times we live in. Corrupt and persecuting bishops are now begging Antichrist to come into the world. We know your names. So does he.

Questions and Answers March 2023

Orthodoxy

Q: It is said that Patriarch Bartholomew intends to establish a common Easter calendar with the Catholics in 2025. What do you think?

A: The Roman Catholics and the Phanariots have been talking about this for at least the last fifty years. The point is that if the people do not follow, they can say and sign whatever they want, it is all irrelevant. Thus, the first who will not obey their Patriarch are his very own monks of Mt Athos. How then could others outside his jurisdiction follow? This common calendar idea is just a recipe for more divisive schisms.

Q: Why are most German Roman Catholic bishops (38 against 21) in favour of blessing homosexual ‘weddings’?

A: Because most of them are homosexuals. Just like many an Orthodox bishop, like one recently reposed Greek metropolitan who made no secret of his support for homosexuality. (See below).

Q: Why is Scripture not the only authority for the Orthodox Church?

A: It is the Holy Spirit that is the authority and the unity of the Church. When the Holy Spirit is rejected, then the Church on earth suffers from a lack of authority and a lack of unity – as we can see today. The Holy Spirit is expressed in Scripture, Tradition, Councils, the Saints etc. As the Holy Spirit wrote Scripture, it requires the Holy Spirit to interpret it. As Shakespeare wrote over 425 years ago: The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose (The Merchant of Venice Act 1, Scene 3, l. 96).

Q: It is said that Judas did not repent and therefore is considered to be a traitor. But in the Gospel, it says that he did repent. How do you answer that?

A: I am afraid you are reading a poor translation! The archaic meaning of ‘to repent yourself’ is to regret’: ‘I repent me of all I did’. This is why the King James translation in Matt 27, 3-5, which relates that Judas ‘repented himself’, returned his pieces of silver and ‘went and hanged himself’ is not helpful. Those who repent do not go and hang themselves, but they do regret.

Q: What happens to those who try to take advantage of sincere Christians?

A: Sincere Christians are always kind. The evil-minded try and take advantage of us because we are kind, but then discover that underneath kindness we have rock-solid principles, which we shall never abandon. If we are asked to do something demeaning to ourselves, we will obey. But if we are asked to fall into schism or heresy, we will refuse to obey. Underneath we are as hard as nails. This is humility – very different from the wishy-washy woke nonsense that the world imagines humility to be. And the enemies always break themselves on our principles, just like a ship that wrecks itself on the rocks.

Converts

Q: Will Non-Orthodox be saved?

A: Ask God.

I would be very cautious in even asking such a question. Why do some experience a need to condemn others because of their own choices?

Q: What are the characteristics of convert churches in the USA?

A: The first is tithing. It simply does not happen in Orthodox churches, though the voluntary custom is not wrong in itself. Then there are reader services. Again it does not exist in our churches, although in itself there is nothing wrong with it. The problem is rather that it leads to clericalism, whereby for example, when you ask someone their name, he may tell you ‘Reader John’ etc. We do not use this title and certainly readers should never wear cassocks outside the services.

Russian Psychology

Q: A Russian has told me that if children are disabled, it is because their parents conceived them on a fasting day. What should I think?

A: You should think that this poor and unchurches Russian soul has plumbed the depths of phariseeism.

Q: Why are Russians so divisive?

A: On this subject there is the old Russian émigré story about a Russian who has been shipwrecked and lives alone on a desert island. When after many years he is rescued, his rescuers are astonished to see that he has built three churches on his island. When he is asked why, he answers that he built three churches so there would always be two which he did not have to go to.

I think such sectarian divisiveness comes simply from the fact that some unChurchly Russians confuse politics with Church life, rendering to Caesar what is God’s, putting the personalities of this world above Christ.

Q: Is it true that Russian Orthodox are superstitious? A Protestant friend told me that in his view that are not Christians?

A: Well, is your Protestant friend Christian?!!

You have to remember that today’s Orthodox in Russia are nearly always converts from Sovietism. Therefore, they often bring with them superstitions, ignorance, prejudice and hangovers from the Soviet period, which betray a almost magic, ritualistic phariseeism, belief in the letter over the spirit. These include: clericalism such that you should not pray for yourself, for only a priest is allowed to pray for you, belief that the evil eye is stronger than the cross, a ritualistic and magic understanding of confession before communion, a superstitious belief in the power of holy water, that it is greater than holy communion, that baptism is important only because it prevents babies falling ill etc

Q: Given the evil of Western governments, their encouragement of sexual perversion and even Satanism, would you think of moving to Russia?

A: I have often thought of it over the last fifteen years for myself. If I were single, I would have done it long ago. But only as I speak the language. For others I would certainly not recommend it, if you do not speak the language. And certainly not if you have older children who do not speak the language. (Who will your children marry?). And not if you do not work in Russia and get your income locally (living in a virtual world, getting income by working on computer is harmful spiritually). In principle, God put us where we were born for your salvation. We should beware of the romantic fantasies of escapism. I know too much about the harsh realities of life in Russia, especially in the Church, to entertain any illusions. Why do you think so many Russians take refuge here?

The Gay Mafia

Q: Do you really think that your battle against the ‘lavender mafia’ of homosexual bishops can be won? They are so powerful.

A: Yes, of course it can be won. Because God is on our side. This is not arrogance, this is simply a fact. Surely you don’t believe that God is on the side of the homosexual and bisexual bishops in the Church?!!!! And the Patriarchs are with us, because they have protected us. This is a Conciliar process and history is on our side. We never sought this battle, but we obey God, Who put us in front of this scourge. The Church must be cleansed of them. We, like others, must take part in this end-time battle.

For years I recall how we tried to fight against their takeover – it all began in 1994. I remember how the latest phase of the battle began two years ago. Our profound suspicions from the beginning had been undermined by the fact that we could not prove anything. Then, one of our parishioners heard about the case of the Russian bishop Ignaty who had been found out by parishioners who were convinced he was homosexual. So they went on to an international homosexual dating app called ‘Grinder’. There they found compromising photos of him. The Patriarch deposed Ignaty at once and sent him off to a monastery.

So to check on the bishop in question, of whom this parishioner, like us, had had the same bad impression, though no proof, he put the ‘Grinder’ app onto his mobile phone. Apparently, this app shows at what distance you are standing from a member of the dating site. It went off only once – when that notorious bishop visited us, indicating that the dating app had picked up that he was standing just two metres away from the phone. There was only one person it could have been. We had received the confirmation of our impression. We could clearly identify him. Since then he has gone on to scandalise many, destroy the church, supported by another seven homosexual and bisexual bishops and priests, rejecting the offer of a monastery, scandalising a monk to whom the bishop made an advance and who then, quite naturally, ran away, tried to close churches, and ordained a homosexual and a bisexual. And yet such people are actually defended by others in the same mafia. But God is not mocked. You will see.

English History

Q: In your opinion, who was the best and who was the worst figure in the history of England?

A: The best: The holy King Alfred the Great, the Truthteller, England’s Darling.

The worst: Either Duke William the Bastard, or else Cromwell. It is difficult to choose between them. One was a Catholic tyrant, the other was a Protestant tyrant. Both killed hundreds of thousands.

Homosexuality and the Problem of the Orthodox Episcopate

The scandal caused by the recent article of Metr Kallistos Ware on homosexuality has been well answered by a US convert in a typically Biblical way (1). Like the previous scandal on Metr Kalllistos’ views concerning the possible ordination of priestesses, it reveals the inherent Anglicanism of His Grace, which is why one of his Phanariot fellow-bishops calls him ‘o anglikanos’. This ingrained Anglicanism was already clearly visible in the very first edition of his book ‘The Orthodox Church’, which expressed the views of a young and idealistic Anglican scholastic looking in on the Church from the outside. Written for those outside the Church in an almost British public school civil service report style, the book was largely ignored by Orthodox on the inside.

It is doubtful if the ivory tower views expressed above really affect anyone in the Church outside the convert fringes and the academic ghetto. I do not think that any of my 600 parishioners have even heard of Metr Kallistos. Everything is simple for Orthodox who live outside the academic world, with its often refined and indeed rather effeminate ways: there is inside the Tradition and there is outside the Tradition. We are inside; what goes on outside is really not our concern. May God guide such people away from bookish secularism and flawed compromises towards the Church and Her inner and mystical understanding and age-old wisdom. This is sent down to the repentant by the Holy Spirit, is so lovingly cherished inside the monasteries and the parishes and is utterly different from mere academic understanding.

However, this issue does raise the problem of the Orthodox episcopate in the Western world and its frequent isolation from the parishes and the monasteries. This isolation, together with the frequent political captivity of the episcopate, are responsible for the lack of leadership it has often displayed over recent decades. True, a few Orthodox bishops come from widowed priests and even from priests whose wives have entered convents. However, the vast majority of bishops have always come and always will come from the monasteries. This is fine, providing that we understand that although bishops should be monks, only a few monks are suitable to become bishops.

The problem, especially in the Diaspora in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia, is that for decades most of the bishops have never been monks, but have simply been unmarried. This is not at all the same thing, for, inevitably, some of these bishops have been homosexuals and in some places and in some jurisdictions this, notoriously, has been and is the prevalent practice. I could draw up a list of several dozen such bishops, whom I have met over the last 45 years. The result has been that these bishops have in turn ordained homosexuals and some married clergy have endured persecution from their bishops and their ordinees, with their homosexual backbiting and narcissism. Thus, the episcopate of one group in North America used to be known as ‘a gay mafia’. And this is not just a problem among new calendarists and others on the liberal fringes. Notorious too are the episcopates of some uncanonical old calendarist groups.

Here we must be honest. If the episcopate has often been tainted, it is surely the fault of all of us. Monks, and therefore monasteries, and therefore bishops, do not grow on trees. They come from devout families and from parishes. The extraordinary decadence of Church life, especially over the last 100 years, is responsible for the weak episcopate. What we do not want is married bishops (the error of the schismatic renovationists in Soviet Russia), what we want is the restoration of monastic life, which is virtually non-existent in some Local Churches, resulting in all these scandals, which are, sadly, so well-known. What we need is genuine monastic bishops, continent heterosexuals, real men with vigour and energy, who are close to the parishes and our spades are spades language, who can understand ordinary Orthodox, without academic theorizing and head in the clouds language. However, the Church is not a welfare State where such bishops magically appear from above. They are created by us: we get the episcopate that we deserve.

Note 1:

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2018/06/kallistos-ware-comes-out-for-homosexual-marriage/

Metropolitan Kallistos and The Wheel Fr. Lawrence Farley Metropolitan Kallistos and The Wheel Fr. Lawrence Farley If a respected author writes for a publication whose known purpose is the promotion of a particular agenda, then by that very act he lends credence and credibility to that agenda.

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2018/06/met-kallistos-clearly-implies-that-the-church-should-bless-committed-same-sex-

https://orthodoxlife.org/contemporary-issues/kallistos-ware-homosexuality-humphrey/