Category Archives: Orthodox Life

Half a Century in the Orthodox Church in Western Europe (1)

Introduction: Nothing New Under the Sun

Apart from one year in Greece and several months in the Soviet Union, and then in Russia and the Ukraine, with brief visits to Orthodox in Moldova, Romania, Belarus, Czechia, Slovakia, Finland, Serbia and Bulgaria, I have spent 51 years as an Orthodox Christian in Western Europe, 41 of them as an Orthodox clergyman in Western Europe, in France, Portugal and England, but with liturgical celebrations in Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. My conclusions?

First of all, there is nothing new under the sun. This is because human nature does not change. Anyone who reads the Acts of the Apostles or the writings of the Church Fathers from the first centuries knows that all the difficulties and scandals of today have already occurred in the past. Of 80,000 Orthodox priests, I have perhaps met perhaps 1,000 and of the 1,000 Orthodox bishops, I have met about 100. I have never seen anything new compared to the past.

Seven Local Churches exist in the Western European Diaspora today: the Romanian, the Greek (Constantinople), the Russian (divided into three parts, one of which refuses to be in communion with another, so is in fact in schism, as well as the 100 new but independent parishes of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church), the Serbian, and then the three very small groups under the Churches of Antioch, Bulgaria and Georgia. Only the three first big Churches carry any weight in terms of the Diaspora Church as a whole.

The Three Big Churches in 1976

Fifty years ago, there were two Russian bishops in this country. As they were both Russian, they were, naturally, at daggers drawn and out of communion with one another. One was an anthroposophist (look it up), a great eccentric who believed in Atlantis. The other one was a notorious womaniser. A few English people were allowed to join the two Russian groups, usually provided that they learned some Russian. This was because both groups were rapidly dying out (1917, after which most of the still living but elderly Russians had come here, was nearly sixty years before 1976). Priests, very few of them lived outside London and they were also elderly, spent much of their time doing funerals.

Fifty years ago, the Patriarchate of Constantinople in this country was dominated by Greek Cypriots, whose lives were largely devoted to Hellenism. Most had arrived here between 1950 and 1974. A homosexual archbishop preferred to ordain his boyfriends and one of his vicar-bishops was a pedophile, who at that time got away with it. Of course, there was at least one bishop who was excellent and many very virtuous priests and pious people. However, the opening to non-Greeks was all but non-existent. From the archbishop down, English people were told to go away, at best being told to join the Church of England or else to learn Greek, ‘if you want to become a Greek’, at worst being told to ‘go away’ by one Cypriot priest, only in the most vulgar way possible in the English language.

Fifty years ago, the Romanian Church was more or less inexistent, as the whole country was controlled by the Romanian Secret Police.

The Three Big Churches in 2026

Today, the Russians remain in small groups here, small because they have all failed to pass on the Faith to locally-born children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on. No Russian group has learned how to cope with assimilation. Today, the larger (still small) group is 100% attached to the Russian Federation, politically and in all other ways, and is much compromised by scandals. The smaller group, dominated by American Trumpians, just encourages the crazies and so spawns old calendarists, just as the Russian Church inside Russia once spawned old ritualists, and is much compromised by appalling scandals. Another even smaller group just hangs on. All three groups are dying out – for all have survived largely because of immigration from Moldova. By far the saddest thing about the Russian Church is that it did not learn from history and so it has condemned itself to repeat the same mistakes as before the Revolution. Today, inside the ex-Soviet Union, the Russian Church strangely resembles the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church, with the same politicisation, the same militarisation, the same empty ritualism, the same inhuman rigidity, the same pharisaic and blind repetition that only they are ‘canonical’, the same blind obedience to the hierarchy and the State, regardless of Christ and His teaching.

Today, the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople in this country, although still dominated by Greek Cypriots whose lives are largely devoted to Hellenism, has a very dynamic archbishop, whose English is better than his Greek, and who is desperately trying to save his archdiocese from self-extinction despite his elderly flock. As he said to us a few months ago, he has one hundred priests who are so old that they are likely to die within the next five years and three candidates to replace them. For forty years the previous administration ignored all the warnings that this would happen. The saddest thing about the Greek Church is that they did not learn from the suicide of the Russian Church, so they are condemned to repeat the same suicide and also die out.

The Romanian Patriarchate is today by far the largest Church as a result of the immigration of four to five million Romanians and Moldovans here over the last 20 years. Overall, our two Autonomous Romanian Orthodox Metropolias in Western Europe have 10 bishops, 1,283 churches and 30 monasteries, which makes them by far the largest Local Church in Western Europe. We are about four times larger than the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople in Western Europe, five times larger than the Russian Church in Western Europe (most of which is composed of Romanian-speaking Moldovans) and incomparably larger than the tiny ROCOR and Antiochian dioceses, both with less than 100, mainly tiny (between 10 and 50 people), communities.

Conclusion: The Challenge for the Romanian Church

Between 1917 and 1962 by far the largest Diaspora Church in Western Europe, albeit divided into three warring groups, was the Russian Church. Between 1962 and 2007 by far the largest was the Patriarchate of Constantinople. But they both lost their dominating positions and indeed the respect of others, the Russians through their isolationist totalitarian politics, which excludes Non-Russians, and their lack of communion with others, the Greeks through their sheer racism. Today some 85% of Orthodox here are Romanian or Moldovan. Can the Romanians, now by far the biggest group, keep their position and the respect of others?

The Romanian Church has many devout clergy and people. It has the Carpathian spirit of solidarity. We are together in the Romanian Church, this is the People’s Church, with a sense of community, family and friendship. The Romanian language is a Latin language, written in the Latin alphabet. There is neither the politics, nor the military-style rigidity of the Russians, nor the racism of the Greeks. Moreover, and most importantly, the Romanian Church alone is in communion with everyone, in schism with no-one. However, the Romanian Church still faces two great challenges.

The first weakness of the Romanian Church, at least in Romania, is the temptation of money. Any Romanian layperson will tell you of a bad experience in Romania with a member of the clergy who demanded money from them. This is why some Romanians have become Protestants. I have not seen this temptation in the Romanian Diaspora, but we cannot be complacent. The second weakness of the Romanian Church is the potential lack of openness to others, in other words, the weakness of nationalism. To found a new Local Church in the Diaspora means to be open to others, to warring Greeks and Russians in particular, to be able to co-operate with others in a common language, accepting different languages, calendars and customs, and not imposing one’s own. Is this possible? Will it too fail to learn from history and repeat the errors of the Russians, repeated by the Greeks? We await the inevitable verdict of the history of the future.

 

 

The Fall of the West and the Path to Orthodoxy

For thirty long years, from 1992 to 2022, the ruling class of the Western Empire was able to act with impunity, it had a monopoly of power, for it lived in a multipolar world, without opposition. Those members of the ‘liberal’ Establishment could do whatever they wanted at that time and that is what they did: from asset-stripping the ‘Third World’, to buggering one another (having made that legal), to harvesting the organs of Kosovan Albanians, to pimping hungry and immoral Ukrainian girls (‘Russian brides’) (Epstein), or using them for surrogacy, and sodomising Ukrainian boys (a Prime Minister). After all, they believed in ‘liberalism’, meaning do whatever you want, rape and plunder others, both literally and metaphorically.

And inevitably, at the same time, as a result of its amoral liberal free for all, the all-powerful Western Establishment began to collapse. Having asset-stripped other countries under the name of ‘foreign investments’, they asset-stripped at home, under the name of ‘modernisation’ and ‘privatisation’. The collapse started with the revelations about Roman Catholic pedophilia, which soon led to the exposure of Anglicans and later spread to the American Synod, on the fringes of the Russian Church. Then, in general, to the political, royal, business and media elite. In other words, to all the parasites, as per Epstein. The barbarians were not at the gates, they were running the show, as they always had.

Their unipolar monopoly was destroyed by the rising again of Crucified Russia from 2000 on, once the Russian Church had begun canonising its New Martyrs and Confessors. That is why the Western elite hates Putin. He did not agree to the destruction of Russia through its disintegration and its asset-stripping and, moreover, he does not accept sexual perversions. The destruction of Russia was Hitler’s idea, repeated by Thatcher, with the genocide of Russians, sending the remaining forty million Russians to live beyond the Volga, thus sending back ‘the Asiastics’. This is why they invested in the anti-Russian Ukraine, whose ‘rare earths’ they want, and whose people would die for them ‘to the last Ukrainian.’

Amidst this moral chaos, there are those who search for some kind of morality and found, from the internet, the Orthodox Church. However, the vast majority of those do not want to come to Orthodoxy with an open heart, they are merely running away from the chaos of the West and its Baal worship: ‘Any port in a storm’ and to their imaginary ‘Warhammer’ Russia, for example. They are by mentality zealot Protestants who adopt an outward appearance of Orthodoxy, buying icons, incense and rosaries from online ‘souvenir shops’, growing long hair and beards, or in the few cases of women, putting on long skirts and wearing what look like tablecloths on their heads. Very few of them wish to become real Orthodox Christians.

Most of those who want the uniform, but not the battle, do not come to the canonical Orthodox Church, they go to fringe convert groups which promote extremist ideologies and persecute canonical Orthodox. There they find weird convert priests and bishops. These are often closet homosexuals and dislike families, women and children, not to mention the canons. That suits them and their phariseeism, which denies the Love and Truth of the Church. And that is good for us. We can continue our witness, uncontaminated by those who do not love us and the Church, but want to come to us only because they hate others. Such we do not need. We only accept the repentant into the Church. For nothing can be built on hatred.

 

 

Russian Orthodox Church Disunity

The Orthodox Church is the bimillennial Confederation of Local Christian Churches, each largely covering one nationality, one language, one culture and one territory, Russian, Romanian, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Arab, Albanian etc. Today there are sixteen Local Orthodox Churches in all and some have flocks in Western countries as a result of emigration, which has taken place either for economic or for political reasons. Over fifty years ago, in the 1970s in England, I was able to join the Orthodox Church through the émigré Russian Church, an emigration which had taken place after 1917 for political reasons.

Cut off from Russia and cut off from new emigres by Soviet atheism, the dying Church in the Russian emigration was really the only Local Orthodox Church which accepted or needed to accept Non-Russians. (Other Local Churches would generally not even accept those of another nationality. Since then, barriers to other nationalities have to some extent been broken, but that is another story). However, as a result of the political nature of its emigration, the émigré Russian Church was split into three warring parts, none of which was in communion. They were split by political beliefs, which is the only reason why Churches split.

The largest and most international émigré fraction was called the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), composed of anti-Communist emigres and centred in the USA. Then came a smaller part which we may call the Paris Emigration (PE), centred in France and composed of emigres who favoured a Western liberal political system for Russia. Finally, there came by far the smallest part, called the Moscow Patriarchate (MP), composed of emigres who, though members of the Church, out of patriotism turned a blind eye to Soviet atheism. What is the position now, 35 years after Soviet atheism?

The ideology of Soviet atheism was replaced by another ideology, Russian nationalism. Nevertheless, as a result of the fall of Soviet atheism, both ROCOR and PE came into communion with the MP and, briefly, with each other. This was based on sympathy for Russia, but not on full sympathy, as the Westernised descendants of both émigré groups today represent not Russian nationalism, but, respectively, US nationalism and Western liberalism. And for this ironic reason the very aggressive and ideological ROCOR group is no longer in communion with the PE. Thus, division continues, again because of politics.

Thus, even if ideologies have switched from what they were when the Soviet Union existed, they are still here. Having worked for fifty years to bring the three warring émigré groups together, the present lack of communion is tragic for me. Sadly, the younger generation of ROCOR is so Americanised, one might say, narcissistically and imperialistically Trumpian, that it does not accept any views other than its own. Such sectarian exclusivity betrays a vision of the Church which is opposed to the Church as Christian communion and sees it as an exclusive and intolerant sect which condemns and punishes all who disagree.

As regards the fall of the MP into nationalism, this was a logical development from the old Soviet nationalism of the period before the fall of the USSR, but in a new form. Soviet nationalism was paradoxical for Orthodox, as how could Christians be loyal to Soviet atheism? However, this Russian nationalism is also paradoxical. It makes of the Church an Army, a spirit of militarism, ritualism and clericalism, according to which everything is literally uniform, in which there is no place for personal spiritual inspiration and diversity. All isms quench the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth and Love, and nationalism is no different.

Thus, all three parts of the Russian Church illustrate divisiveness and exclusivity through the adoption of different political ideologies, tragically putting Caesar above Christ. Until all three parts of the Russian Church revert to full Orthodoxy, abandoning political or nationalist ideologies of any sort, there will be no general Orthodox unity. The sign of the reversion of the Russian Church to Orthodoxy will be in its recovery of Catholicity, that is, in its renewed and visible communion with the peoples of all other Local Churches. Once we see that, we shall see a renewed and valuable Russian contribution to Pan-Orthodox unity.

 

 

 

Keeping the Faith: Pastoral Considerations and Church Unity in the Diaspora

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!

Psalm 133, 1

Exactly 50 years ago I stood in the then newly-built Serbian church in Birmingham and listened to a sermon given by the late Fr Vladimir (later Bp Basil) Rodzianko. He spoke of the ‘sin of jurisdictions’ and looked forward idealistically to a time when there would no longer be any jurisdictions. I knew then that that was unrealistic. Indeed, 50 years have passed and there are now more ‘jurisdictions’ than ever. After over fifty years of life in the Orthodox Diaspora in Western Europe, divided into several separate Church jurisdictions, I have come to certain conclusions.

These conclusions were fed firstly by observing how the post-1917 Russian Diaspora died out in Western Europe (as a clergyman in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s I buried many of its last very elderly representatives, who had been adults before 1917). Then, secondly, I have seen how the 1950s Greek Cypriot Diaspora has also nearly completely died out in Britain. They both died out because they failed almost wholly to pass on the Faith to their locally born generations.

In 1973, I met the future Metr Kallistos (Ware), who tried and failed to unite local Russian, Greek and Serbian Orthodox into one shared church in Oxford. In 1980 I met the late Fr Alexander Schmemann, who invited me to become a priest in the USA. I politely refused his offer, as I felt my place was in Europe. I witnessed how in North America his attempt to found a new Local Church, called the OCA (the Orthodox Church in America), failed to unite Orthodox there – it unites only some 10-15% of Orthodox. Both were valiant attempts by sincere and often admirable people to do good, but both failed.

Others also tried to do something in this respect, like those who argued with each other, Fr (now St) Sophrony (Sakharov) and Metr Antony (Bloom), who tonsured me reader in 1981. The outstanding figure with Fr Sophrony was undoubtedly Fr Raphael (Noica), who gave me very good advice between 1975 and 1983. Another influence was Protopresbyter Alexei Kniazev, the rector of the St Sergius Institute of Orthodox Theology, where I studied.

However, the most outstanding figure I met was Archbishop Antony (Bartoshevich) of Geneva, who ordained me priest in 1991, after I had served for seven years as a deacon. He led the multinational Archdiocese of Western Europe, veering neither towards liberal modernism, nor to sectarian old calendarism. He was the successor of St John Maximovich as Archbishop of Western Europe. Clergy of seventeen different nationalities concelebrated at his funeral.

One of the problems with the experiments in Oxford and the USA was the lack of respect for the people in the parishes. Firstly, any Diaspora parish must use at least two languages, that of the main national group (or national groups, if there is more than one) and the local language. The latter is necessary for the children and grandchildren of immigrants in the Church, for the locally-born spouses of the inevitable mixed marriages, as well as for those received into the parish from local people who wish to join the Orthodox Church.

We do not wish the children of immigrants to lose the language of their parents, but they go to school in English, they think in English, they speak their parents’ language with an English accent. If they can understand the Church in English, then they will not reject the Church in the language of their parents. This is a psychological fact and, as any pastor will tell you, more than 50% of what we do is understanding our parishioners’ psychology.

Respect must also be shown for the calendars used by the parishioners, and for their cultures and customs. In order to do this, there may need to be at least two priests of different nationalities in each parish and choirs must be organised. We have seen too many cases of just the opposite, of disrespect and even mockery for different languages, calendars, cultures and customs. That is unacceptable because it is unChristian. Expressions of hatred for others are unChristian and eventually will lead to the downfall of parishes and even of whole dioceses. We are eyewitnesses of this. You cannot build a Church on negativity or hatred.

Here is a brief outline as to how we could perhaps proceed to keep locally-born generations inside the Church and also to help unite the Diaspora Church, which is divided administratively. The secret is in not being exclusive. Thus:

  1. No National Flags

A Church with flags is a Church which divides. Christ has no flag. Our only ‘flag’ is the Cross. Flags belong to the secular world, not to Christ. The absence of a flag, Russian, Greek, Romanian, Serbian or other, does not of course mean that it can be replaced by a local flag, by some sort of local nationalism, British, American, French or other. That is just as negative. If we want to have flags with their nationalism, let us keep them at home and not bring them to church.

  1. No Political Ideologies or ‘Isms’

Ideologies, or ‘isms’, are always divisive because they are narrow and sectarian. For instance, I have witnessed how the OCA tried to impose the new calendar on Slav origin parishes in the USA and condescendingly impose non-traditional, liberal and even modernist liturgical practices on them. This was very divisive and as a result many parishes left the OCA and many more did not want to join it. They felt they had been excluded.

On the other hand, I have also witnessed how certain clergy in one Russian emigration splinter tried to impose an extreme right-wing ideology, allied with old calendarism. They promoted themselves rather pharisaically as an exclusive ‘One True Church’, refusing concelebration and communion with the Local Churches, as ‘they are in error’ and ‘we do not like them’.

This sectarianism was very divisive and it only attracts converts from Catholicism and Protestantism with pathological problems, while turning away from the Church those with healthy psychologies. Such an aggressive splinter can never be part of a future Local Church and does not want to be. That is why we belong to the Romanian Orthodox Church, away from all extremes and schisms.

  1. No Money

What makes Orthodox of all nationalities reject their own Church more than anything else is the story that the clergy are only interested in money. Fixed tariffs for baptisms, weddings, funerals, memorials etc are fatal in this respect. The stories of laypeople about such matters, true or untrue, are legion. Either priests must have a secular profession and parishioners pay only for the often high costs of the church-building, or else an arrangement must be made with parishioners that they make known their salaries and they give a percentage of their salaries to the priest. In this way the priest’s salary will be the average of their salaries. For example, if there are 100 salaried parishioners, they could each give 1% of their salary to the priest. If there are 200 salaried parishioners, they could each give 0.5% of their salary to the priest etc.

The Church as a Family

Without national flags, political ideologies or money scandals, if we wish to keep everyone together inside the Church, then we must experience the Church as a warm and loving Family, to which all Orthodox can belong.

Orthodox who have been uprooted from their homelands, usually for economic or else, as in the Communist past, for ideological reasons, want to belong to something. Perfectly naturally, they have a problem of identity. ‘Who am I’?, they ask. However, those born locally, of such Russian, Greek, Romanian, Serbian or other immigrant parents, and who all speak the local language better than that of their parents, also want to belong to something, they also have a problem of identity. I tell all my people that, although we have a State passport with a flag on it, our spiritual passport has no flag, or political party, and under the Nationality section, it says: ‘Orthodox Christian’. This is our spiritual nationality and identity, we belong to the Orthodox Christian Family. Our unity is in our common Orthodox Christian Faith and Love.

 

The People’s Orthodoxy, Church Freedom and the End of the War

So-called ‘Western Civilisation’ is composed of a fatal mixture of Roman paganism and Germanic barbarism. Thus, Western Europe gradually renounced its heritage from the first millennium, real Christianity, and became subject to pagan and barbarian practices. That mixture began to claim supremacy over the rest of the world, now known as ‘Globalism’. To support this claim, the Western world used its form of Christianity to justify itself, and so justified the devil through its reductionist and secularist forms of ‘Christianity’, ‘the white god’.

This ‘Western Civilisation’ began to collapse after the fall of the Western European empires in the First and Second World Wars. These had in fact both begun as purely European Wars, which Western Europe had spread worldwide, but used the USA to rescue it from its two attempted suicides. As a result of their Wars, the European elites failed to keep their empires. Therefore, ever since the Second War they have used and manipulated the Western European-founded USA to maintain at least the remnants of their power and prestige.

No Western European empire was more manipulative than the most successful Western Empire, the British, which used the English language and culture to gaslight the USA. This is the meaning of NATO, whose purpose was, in the words of its first (British) Secretary General, ‘to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’. This was in the interests of the American people or in the interests of the peoples of Europe, but it was in the interests of the Euro-American elites, their high finance and military-industrial complex.

The reductionist and secularist forms of Christianity of the Western world differ from real Christianity, which is the Faith of the Orthodox Church. However, there are those ‘Orthodox representatives’ who also use our real Christianity to imitate that of the West, that is, the blend of pagan Roman paganism and Germanic barbarism. They suffer from a ‘Rome syndrome’, which is why such ‘representatives’ continually send their envoys to ingratiate themselves with the Pope of Rome. There is too much Rome and lust for riches and power.

Wherever there are Empires, real Orthodox Christianity has been abused. Most clearly this was the case with the First Rome in the West, but this has also been clear in the case of its imitators, in the Second Rome, Constantinople, and in the Third Rome, Moscow. Outside those two Imperial centres, Constantinople and Moscow, in the provinces, as in the fourteen other Local Orthodox Churches, we follow the People’s Orthodox Christian Faith, not a tightly-controlled, top-down, clericalist and ritualist, nationalised and centralised, State Religion.

Today, Greek leaders have dared to follow the oligarchic, Capitalist interests of the Americans and their vassals. On the other hand, Russian leaders have dared to continue with the Soviet-style, centralised interests of Russian nationalism. In both cases the interests are at root ideological, and tell those who are not of their nationality to ‘go away’, but other Local Churches welcome those who are told to go away. Chauvinism is not why the Lord granted any people the Orthodox Christian Faith. It was given to welcome people, not to dismiss them.

The following of Imperial, nationalist-political, ideological interests comes from a lack of repentance. And when there is no repentance, then enemies come. Thus, the Greeks had to fight the Persians, the Turks, the French, the British and the Americans. As for the Russians, they had to fight against attacks led by the Mongol-Tartars, the Poles, the Swedes, the French, the British, the Germans and today the Americans. As Russia is huge, each attack was combined, composed of several nationalities, as in the Ukraine, where they face the whole West.

Enemies are like the passions. They only attack us when there is no repentance, that is, no defence. This can be seen most clearly in that tragic situation today in the Ukraine. Both peoples are supposedly Orthodox Christian, but they are not, otherwise they would not be fighting. Every attack and every enemy is in fact a call to repentance. As long as there is no repentance, there can be no peace. This is why wars drag on, when they could end very quickly. Such is the case in the Ukraine, even now with a million killed and many more wounded.

The restoration of Orthodox Christianity throughout the Orthodox Church, and so outside Her in missionary work, will come only when Orthodox Christian leaders return to the People’s Orthodoxy and abandon Imperial, nationalist-political, interests. Those secular interests are wholly responsible for the present schism between Russians and Greeks. We confess the Faith, not some rigid, militaristic, and politically-inspired, centralised religion, designed to intimidate priests and imitate States. We refuse your Caesar and, instead, we follow our Christ.

 

 

From Feast to Feast: Nine Days in the Life of

Saturday 20 September

Today, the third Saturday of the month, we have our monthly English liturgy. As usual, the Liturgy is held in the little church and takes only one hour, ending at 10.20, though I do give a long instructional talk of 20 minutes afterwards. Then those who came, a mixture of English parishioners and Russian parishioners with their children – the parents want their children to understand the Liturgy – have tea together in the meeting room. We mix with those who attend the Saturday Russian School which takes place later in another room.

Sunday 21

I arrive at church, as usual, at about 7.15 am. Preparation and the Proskomidia take one and a half hours. We have many tens of thousands of names to commemorate, so we can only pray for all the names once a year. The second priest arrives at 7.30, but has to go to the hospital to give communion to a very sick elderly woman. He is back at 8.30. Then confessions begin at 8.45 with all three priests available and the two deacons helping. The Liturgy begins more or less on time at 9.20. After the Liturgy, I have a Russian memorial service, a Moldovan baptism, and then there are people to see individually. I get home at 3.30.

Monday 22

Today I am visiting Count and Countess Benckendorff at their rose-gardened thatched home in Suffolk. We have not seen one another for a good discussion for several months. First, we discuss what we need to do for next Sunday (see below). Countess Benckendorff will prepare some white roses (white because they are White Russians) for the graves, where the parish has erected new wooden crosses after nearly 100 years. Above all we speak of our favourite topic, the future of Russia and the Russian Church, against the background of the latest news from Russia.

Although both Benckendorffs were born, brought up and worked in the Soviet Union, they have worked through and understood the problems of the last century of Russian history. They are both appalled by the present civil war in the Ukraine and how the West has sponsored it against the interests of both peoples. But the peoples themselves are also responsible. We agree that all this horror is the result of the aftermath of both waves of Westernisation, the Marxist-Soviet one before the 1990s and, from the 1990s on, the Capitalist one of the oligarchs. Both were the result of the Western-organised regime change operation in 1917, known falsely as ‘The Russian Revolution’, that we should rather call ‘The Russian Degeneration’.

As regards the Military Operation in the east and south of the old Soviet Ukraine, it has always been clear to us from the outset that giant Russia would win militarily against small Ukraine, even with full NATO backing, rather as if in a conflict between Germany and Belgium, it would be clear that Germany would win, however much Belgium was backed by outside meddlers. However, from the outset it has equally always been clear that the Russian Church would lose. A Church, one third of whose members are Non-Russians, has lost one third of its members and been turned into an ever more centralised, clericalised and militarised ghetto, hostile to the people and to the spiritual. The violent and conscious rejection of Non-Russians and the Orthodox mission to Western Europe by the now nationalist Russian Church hierarchy for purely political reasons has been its huge loss.

Both the Count and Countess have a great fondness for their distant cousin, Count Paul Benckendorff, brother of Count Alexander, the last Imperial ambassador at the Court of St James (London). Count Paul was very close to the martyred Tsar, ready to die for him, and wrote the book ‘Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo.’ Their view is that in 1917 Russia committed suicide, betrayed by its corrupt aristocracy, the oligarchs of that age, and it still has not recovered from that suicide, even though we are now advancing on the road to recovery, especially compared to fifty years ago.

This can be seen very clearly in the Russian Church hierarchy, as it goes from one scandal to another, to the despairing patience of the faithful clergy and people, more and more of whom are boycotting it, as they have been let down. There is far to go to restore the original Russian Church, as it was before Peter I, the ensuing bureaucratisation and increased ritualisation. The problem is not that the State persecutes the Church or forces it into obedience, it is people inside the Church who think that the Church must imitate the State, just as in the Church of England.

Another thing we agree on is that the decadence in Russia in 1917 was shown by the fact that people no longer took communion, at best, only once a year, often indeed never after baptism. In effect, by 1917 Russia had fallen out of communion with Christ and into the ritualism of the pharisees who can express only hatred. Here is how the leaders of the once persecuted Church became persecutors.

Tuesday 23

Today I bless the home of an English Orthodox family in Bury St Edmunds. Afterwards N. comments that the alien British Establishment want us to rejoin the Globalist EU project (did we ever leave it?), continue the greedy Globalists’ war in the Ukraine in order to exploit all its natural resources, and increasingly control and censor us as they are authoritarians. N. adds that ‘the present Prime Minister claims that we have free speech and if anyone disagrees with him, they will be arrested’. I suggest that all may change, once the leaders of Germany, the UK and France fall, since they are all extremely unpopular, indeed are hated.

I listen to him with a smile, but change the subject to history and say how the problem of Western Europe is that it was conquered by barbarians like the Franks, Vikings and Normans.  As a result, the twentieth century was patterned by the descendants of these barbarians with their barbarian World Wars, fighting against neo-pagans – Communists and Nazis.

In the afternoon I collect the up-to-date statistics for our Church in Western Europe. Our two bishops in the British Isles and Ireland now have dioceses of 119 priests and 19 deacons in 95 parishes and 5 monasteries. We are part of the two Autonomous Metropolias of Western Europe, of Western and Southern Europe, and Central and Northen Europe. They include even our parishes and missions in Finland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland. We now have 10 bishops, 859 parish churches and 30 monasteries, with the number of churches increasing regularly.

We have come a long way from the days of liturgies in front rooms and sheds, with 10-20 huddlers in the catacomb churches of the 1970s. When there were more than 25 people present, they would say: ‘There were a lot of people at church today!’ However, these conditions still endure in the present Russian Church in the Diaspora, which still suffers so grievously from its past errors. Thus, the Russian Church in the Diaspora (ROCOR) may have up to 300 parishes altogether, but only about 50 of them have more than 100 parishioners for Sunday liturgies. Most have between 10 and 40 mainly converts. But we are now in the normal mainstream, in churches that have hundreds of parishioners present every Sunday.

Fr Ioan Nazarcu, our old friend, whom we have known for 15 years, and for some years now has been a priest, has just given the Economist magazine an interview. Although this Rothschild magazine is atheist in ideology, Fr Ioan, whose English is excellent, has been able to give them a first-rate interview.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/09/22/the-orthodox-church-is-thriving-in-britain-thanks-to-immigration

Wednesday 24

Today I have my day off and am at home, dealing with domestic matters and building work. 

Thursday 25

Today I bless a Ukrainian-Moldovan home in Basildon near east London. The parents are worried about transgender propaganda at school and are thinking of returning to Moldova to protect their children from it. I stop at church to get everything ready for the feast on Saturday. It takes me two hours. Then I bless the home of a Russian family in Colchester and stay for tea and conversation. They have just returned from Moscow, which is now very vibrant and generally more prosperous than Western cities, which have so many social problems and suffer from litter, graffiti and potholed roads and pavements.

Friday 26

Today I am seeing Moldovan and Romanian parishioners in Stowmarket in Suffolk and in Diss across the border in Norfolk. I will not make it to the canon this evening in Colchester, where 30-40 Romanian parishioners gather more or less every Friday evening or sometimes at midnight for a Liturgy. Fr Ioan will, as always, cope very well.

Saturday 27

Today is the Feast of the Exaltation for our Russian, Ukrainian and Moldovan parishioners. About 50 people are in church. Afterwards I baptise an adult Russian. 

Sunday 28

 I head to church at 6.45. After the Liturgy, we have the meeting of St Alban’s Circle, our youth group. About sixty people attend. The subject is the life of St John of Shanghai. Meanwhile, Fr Ioan is doing baptisms in the main church, while Fr Sergey has a memorial service in the little church. At 1.20, I leave for Claydon cemetery outside Ipswich and the graves of Countess and Count Benckendorff, wife and son of the last Imperial ambassador, Count Alexander. They are distant cousins of the present Benckendorffs. People place roses on the graves of Countess Sophia, Count Konstantine and his wife Maria Korchinska. I get home at 3.30

At home I have to start getting ready for my pilgrimage to Moldova and Romania from 6 to 17 October.

 

 

Questions and Answers July 2025

The True Faith. The state of the various Orthodox jurisdictions in England today and fifty years ago. The moment when the Russian Church turned its back on Europe. The Oxford and London Russian parishes fifty years ago. Tsar Nicholas in England. The coming end of the war in the Ukraine. The consequent fall of the European elite and of its ideology versus Orthodoxy.

Q: What for you is the True Faith?

A: In my late childhood and early teenage years, I came to three conclusions about what must be the True Faith:

Firstly, the True Faith must be about Christ, as only Christ is God and man, combining East and West, North and South. The True Faith must therefore represent the spiritual reality of Him and not State manipulations of Religion and the Bible, based on nationalism, racism, imperialism, colonialism and all cultures of apostasy, like the White Supremacy Western world.

Secondly, the True Faith must be historical and not some recent invention, neither of the nineteenth century, nor of the sixteenth century, nor even of the eleventh century, for it must go back a thousand years before, to the Scriptures, to the Word of God Himself.

Thirdly, the True Faith must be universal, as is Christ. In other words, the True Faith must be for all races who seek it, accessible to all, that is, to all who are repentant and so seek Christ, and so is not some esoteric or obscurantist religion for one nationality, or for the select few or elite.

Q: Why did you not become members of the Antiochian Diocese when you left ROCOR in 2021, unlike the three Western riters who were purged by ROCOR and went to Antioch?

A: The short answer is that none of us twelve clergy, or any of our thousands of people, had ever been Anglicans, let alone Anglican vicars. You have to understand the Antiochian Diocese exists in this country for them. We have all always been Orthodox and have never known any other religion, so something for ex-Anglicans, however worthy and sincere they may be, has no interest for us. It is irrelevant to us.

Also, Antioch is not European, as we are, and cannot members of one of the four Arab families who operate it. The Church of Antioch here is tiny, consisting perhaps of only a thousand people, mainly ex-Anglicans or ex-Protestants, especially rather puritanical conservative evangelicals. (This puritanism is rather ironic given the behaviour of the former Antiochian Archbishop in the USA and also drives away normal Orthodox, who, like Arab Orthodox, are not puritans).

Another problem of Antioch being so small is that it is desperate to recruit clergy and people, with one recent disaster when they accepted a reject from the mainstream Churches, based in his front room in Liverpool, and another disaster, some years ago, in Belfast. I believe in the latter case that vicar-priest ended up in prison for fraud. Other Non-ex-Anglican clergy under Antioch eventually transfer back to the Local Churches they come from. They cannot take the Anglican mentality, however hard they try to deny their origins.

The long answer is that our first act after we learned, directly, (it was actually boasted of by the culprit!) of the ROCOR schism in April 2021 was to warn the ROCOR Synod of what was going on. As soon as we realised that the whole Synod in New York had been perverted into the new ROCOR, not leaving a shred of tradition and the old ROCOR, and misinformed, our second act was to report to Moscow. When they replied that, although they perfectly understood the insanity of the situation, for purely political reasons they could not receive us, our third act was to join the Paris Archdiocese under Moscow. This had largely been cleansed of liberal French intellectuals and we have many friends and family there.

After Paris was told by Moscow, which could not make up its mind at first, that it would not be allowed to keep us, as the Moscow aim was not to expand Paris but to close it down, our fourth act was to look at our other options. Although three different jurisdictions wanted us, the obvious and only correct option, which we adopted very quickly, was to go with our old friends in the Church of Romania. (Romania had been the original choice of the Paris Jurisdiction when they had quit Constantinople there years before, but occult forces had rejected that choice and it had joined Moscow. So we made the choice for them). The Romanian Church had been suggesting to us for years in case ROCOR turned schismatic and it was supported by Moscow for purely political reasons, we could transfer to them.

So we joined the Romanian Church with the tacit blessing of Moscow, and any other refugees who want to leave the schismatic ROCOR for the Romanian Church have been invited to do so too. We have simply paved the way for the others, who will follow us. The strangest thing about this was that there appeared a lie on the internet that the Romanian Church had not received us! There were actually people who believed this, though not in Moscow. But the lie only discredited him who invented it and those who believed it. Today the culprit for the lie is isolated, shunned and shamed as a liar.

Q: So Moscow is abandoning ROCOR behind their backs? Why did you not opt for the Russian or Greek Churches?

A: As I said, Moscow was not allowed to receive us for political reasons, even though it knew that ROCOR was engaged in its insane schism. As Moscow was not politically free (a very serious fault), it had to go along with the ROCOR schism. This was a turning point and next year, in 2026, all will see the significance of this. Later, Moscow was punished for this lack of principle and has since had to tolerate the recent horrible Russophobic attacks on the Moscow Patriarchate by both ROCOR bishops in Germany.

This is what happens when you compromise yourself with the positions of enemies of Church teaching, even if only once. It is a downward spiral, as you have to accept everything else they do later on. Moscow already regrets it, indeed it is the great loser in all of this, but that was its choice. It was clearly told what was going on, but Metr Antony Sevryuk suicidally rejected the warning and told us to join the Romanian Church. Thus, the Russian Church turned its back on Europe – I don’t think that even now he realises the scale and significance of his error. In one act he had handed over Western Europe, including the local Russians, to Romanian Orthodox jurisdiction.

As a result, the Moscow Diocese in this country is now programmed to become a small embassy ghetto, a dependency, with just its church in London and the small church in Oxford surviving, exactly as it was fifty years ago, the rest has literally been left to die out. Since the British Establishment, like the other Establishments in Europe, has blacklisted Moscow, Moscow has no hope of expansion or incarnation into Western society. Therefore, Moscow is for the time being closed down in Western Europe. There is no future for the Russian Church here. It has had to close its window on Europe, given European political hostility to it, and is looking towards Asia and Africa. It will take a generation for Moscow to turn back to Europe, if ever it does. 2022 will go down in Western European Church history as the moment when the Russian Church lost it.

As for the Greek Archdiocese, it has recently been renewed, as it was dying out. It now has several younger bishops, including one excellent one (if only he could be the next Patriarch!), still has excellent infrastructure and several big parishes in London and some outstanding priests, but it has huge problems. It is profoundly ethnically and politically Greek, compromised by its CIA Patriarch, and, like Antioch and the Moscow Church here, most of its priests are elderly and dying out.

As Archbishop Nikitas told us recently, he has 100 elderly priests to replace in the next ten years and only 3 candidates. It is now not possible to get lots of poorly-educated young archimandrites from Greece, like they did in the 60s and 70s. That source has dried up. Moreover, only one church, the newly-frescoed Thyateira chapel, actually belongs to the Greek Archdiocese. The others are all privately owned by Greek and Cypriot businessmen and restauranteurs, who do as they want.

Q: What then is the future of ROCOR?

A: In rejecting the mission of the Diaspora Church to gather all Orthodox together through its schism and racism towards Greeks, Romanians, Moldovans and rooted English Orthodox in particular, it refused to concelebrate with the mainstream and cut itself off from communion. It has instead concentrated on attracting extremists, the naïve, the vulnerable and the pathologically ill. This is the path of the sect and the cult. And that is what it has become.

Q: Did you know Fr Mark Meyrick and Metr Kallistos Ware?

A: Of course. I first met the then Fr Kallistos in September 1974. He was an old-style, upper middle-class High Church Anglican, with an incisive public school-trained intellect. I loved his lectures and learned a lot from him. But above all, he was a very kind and sincere man. I remember him and pray for him with gratitude, although I was on a quite different wavelength from him.

I first met Fr Mark in July 1976. The problem with Fr Mark, who came from a long line of Anglican vicars, is that he had chosen to live among Anglicans, cut off from the Orthodox mainstream. As a result, he had a tiny community in a Norfolk village, isolated from Orthodoxy. He mainly seemed to be interested in converting young Anglican men and encouraging them to grow extremely long beards! As I had no interest in either Anglicanism or long beards, that was not for me.

Fr Mark (later Archimandrite David), transferred from ROCOR to Moscow, I think, in 1981. This was because of the attempted Americanisation and sectarian fanaticisation of ROCOR, which began at that time and which ended in 2021 with the triumph of American convert ROCOR in Europe and its abolition as part of the mainstream. It is now an American crazy convert colony and has no future. Crazy convert Orthodoxy does not export, as it is culturally alien to Europeans.

Q: Are Orthodox bishops worse today than fifty years ago?

A: Absolutely not. Fifty years ago, I knew three of them. One was a homosexual bureaucrat who ordained his boyfriends. One of those he ordained became an alcoholic, another gave up the priesthood within two weeks. A second bishop was a lady’s man who spent time with his main mistress in a cottage on the south coast, or so I was told. I knew her. A third was an anthroposophist. So we decided to return to Paris, to people who knew the Tradition. Today’s crop of homosexuals and sociopathic narcissists created by being spoiled as children are no better, but also no worse.

Q: What do you remember of the University of Oxford in the 1970s and the Russian chapel, then inside the house in Canterbury Road in Oxford?

A: In those days (and I am told that it has not changed very much since then), there were three ways of getting into the University of Oxford as an undergraduate. In order of importance, these were: aristocratic privilege, wealth, and academic achievement. I was therefore automatically and distinctly third class from the outset. The first two types were there to complete their Norman education, so they could enter the Norman (British) Establishment.

Moreover, those aristocratic or wealthy types who had nearly always attended public schools were shockingly, to me an innocent aged 18, often suffered from Norman homosexuality, like William Rufus. Oxford was riddled with it. Another reason to keep well away. In any case, I was not there to enter the Norman Establishment, though many who had not been to public schools allowed it to happen to them, as they were venal careerists. I was there for exactly the opposite reason, to understand how to de-Normanise. By Divine Providence I studied in the Alfredian College, by tradition (even if not in reality), the only pre-Norman College in Oxford. All was right.

I attended the Russian chapel in Canterbury Road in October 1972 and again in February 1973, when I was sixteen, just before the modernistic, octagonal chapel was built in the garden. The old chapel inside the House is now the library, based on Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, which I helped put in there. That old chapel was charming.

On the other hand, the rather effete University chapel later built in the garden of 1, Canterbury Road was definitely not for the ordinary people of Oxford. The Serbs, who were ordinary people, kept well away, as did most of the Greeks. The few by then elderly Russian academics who were still alive went when they could to one or other of the two Russian churches in London.

Apart from the majority of normal people who went there, there were also wealthy Anglo-Catholic homosexuals, or else those who mistakenly thought that Church Tradition means the same as right-wing political conservatism.

Q: What was the London Russian Church in Ennismore Gardens like at the time fifty years ago in the mid-seventies? And the ROCOR Church?

A: The London Patriarchal church had been taken over by upper middle-class people from wealthy west London, owners of Cotswold cottages, villas in Tuscany or on Greek islands. These were intellectuals, Liberal Democrats, BBC directors, well-to-do academics, lawyers, journalists etc, so rich that they had the leisure time to be enthralled by ‘spirituality’, Orthodox or Buddhist, as spiritual tourists. In 2006 they left en masse for Constantinople, as their hero, Metr Antony Bloom, had died. He was the reason for them joining, so once he had gone, in 2004, it was all over. Their cliquish snobbery continues. Only five years ago I overheard one of these now elderly people saying about a very pious and simple Romanian man, who dared (once) to frequent his clubby (rented) church: ‘I hope he does not come back, but at least he has a degree’. Is that Christianity?

Fifty years ago the Emperor’s Gate ROCOR Church had twice as many people as the Bloomite church, but it was an old people’s home. Apart from two or three Anglican homosexuals, the average age of the parishioners, who were very nice, must have been about 80. The writing was on the wall. It was an ethnic club that had no future, as they had failed to pass on the Faith to their descendants.

Q: Is there anywhere you would go on to a pilgrimage to the Royal Martyrs in England?

A: There are two places: Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Sandringham in Norfolk. Of the two I much prefer Sandringham, which is connected with the Tsar. He is still present there and he dreamed of becoming a Norfolk gentleman-farmer, if ever he had to leave Russia. Things will happen here.

For your interest, here is a full list of the five visits of the Tsar to England, with places and dates:

In 1873 the future Tsar first visited Queen Victoria as a five-year old child. He arrived on the Imperial Yacht at Woolwich on 16 June, stayed at Marlborough House on the Mall, visited Chiswick House on 28 June and on 28 July left for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, staying at Albert Cottage. On 8 August he went to Cowes Regatta, leaving England on 13 August, having spent nearly two months in England.

He visited London at the end of June 1893, having been met at Charing Cross Station, and staying at Marlborough House again. He went to Windsor on 1 July, visited Hurlingham on 4 July and Buckingham Palace on 5 July, attending the wedding of the future King George V on 6 July. He left the next day, having spent just over a week in England.

He arrived on 20 June 1894 to meet the future Tsarina. He arrived at Gravesend in Kent and travelled to Walton-on-Thames via Waterloo Station. He also visited Frogmore, Bagshot, Sandringham, Kings Lynn, London, Eton, Slough, Farnborough, Aldershot and Richmond-on-Thames. On 19 July he left for Portsmouth to cross to Osborne House and Albert Cottage, visiting Newport. He left on 23 July, after over a month in England.

1896 was his first visit as Tsar, with the Tsarina and the Grand Duchess Olga. They arrived at Leith on 22 September and went to Balmoral by train via Ballater. Here he visited Braemar Castle. He then travelled by train via Preston and Oxford, taking the Imperial Yacht at Portsmouth on 3 October.

On Monday 2 August 1909 the Tsar and his family visited Cowes on the Isle of Wight for the Regatta. He stayed at Osborne House, visiting Barton Manor and leaving on 5 August, having given £1,000 to be distributed among the island’s poor.

Q: When will the war in the Ukraine end?

A: This US proxy war against Russia (as Marco Rubio has openly described it) is a war of attrition. First, the Russians ground down first the first Ukrainian Army, then the second Ukrainian Army with old Soviet equipment from Eastern Europe, and now it is finishing off the third Ukrainian Army, with its NATO equipment. Wars of attrition, like the American Civil War and the First and Second World Wars, can go on for years, but they always end very suddenly, as the Second War ended suddenly in Berlin.

We are now reaching that point in the Ukraine, as the Americans are getting rid of their actor-puppet Zelensky. He has got too big for his boots and is too corrupt, resists the puppet-master and has refused peace, which is want Trump wants. The end will come suddenly and, I think, fairly soon. This is why Trump gave him (not Putin) 50 days so Zelensky could be finished off. Either he will get out on a CIA plane or else he will finish with a bullet in his head. When will Kiev collapse? The German-led, Pan-European invasion of the USSR in the Second World War lasted three years and eleven months. So maybe the end to this war will come within the same time span. At present it has lasted three years and five months.

The only danger is that NATO may invade Russia, as it has threatened, then that will be full war. That is possible, if the crazies in NATO have their way. If so, they will be crushed, as NATO has already been demilitarised by Russia. Russia has defeated all the Western Coalitions that invaded it, that of Napoleon, that in the Crimea, that of Hitler, and now this American-led NATO one.

Q: What will happen to Western Europe, once it has been defeated in the Ukraine?

A: The consequences of the defeat of the Western puppet government in Kiev, created and used as a proxy battering ram against Russia, and so the defeat of the whole of NATO, will be tremendous. The West will never get its money back. Worse still, it will never get its prestige back. The West has gone, replaced by the multipolar BRICS world. This will feed through and the old governing elites in Europe will have to be replaced.

This is because all empires decline in depravity and perversion (from Roman emperors to the debauched King Edward VII and now the Mossad-Epstein orgies) or buffoonery (the leaders of Western Europe and Kiev today, if they are not also pedophiles and cocaine addicts). Decadence comes at the end and with it a total lack of sense of reality, as buffoons live in virtual reality, fantasy, just as Hitler did at the end. We can see this clearly in the last 35 years of US leaders, from Clinton-Lewinsky to Obama, ending with the demented Biden and the world’s greatest narcissist, the result of a materially spoilt childhood, Trump.

Q: Do you think that Europe could return to Orthodoxy?

A: Europe, no, but a small portion of Europeans, yes. In the Romanian Church we are preparing for this literally, as you will see next year. We already have ten bishops in the twenty-one countries of Western Europe and a flock of nearly five million. One of those bishops is French, all speak at least one Western European language, if not two or three.

Moreover, our bishops also have a conscience of the importance of the veneration of the local saints of Western Europe. This is unique. I remember the fierce and insulting opposition of the ROCOR bishops to their veneration until 2017, when they finally realised that the tide was too strong for them to swim against any longer and then they stopped persecuting me on that score at least.

It is clear that we are moving towards a post-American Europe, the post-1945 part of the history of Western Europe is over. The American invasion and occupation will soon end. Its old puppet governments, in the UK, Germany, France and elsewhere, will fall. And Eurasia, Russian, India, China, India and Iran, north, south, east and west, the centres of the Heartland, are now co-operating in BRICS. Thus, the Western world, which was formed in the eleventh century has after a thousand years made itself spiritually irrelevant.

Q: Are the media censored in the UK?

A: Yes. The name of the official censor is Ofcom, but censorship relies above all on editorial control. Here news editors are appointed to carry out the censorship duties imposed by the State/Establishment and journalists who are completely mercenary, ‘presstitutes’ as they say. The BBC is a classic case of such censorship, of deliberate non-reporting, deliberate misreporting, and diversion (reporting irrelevant local stories of no interest instead of reporting the actual news).

 

 

 

 

The Latest ROCOR Scandal – This Time in Australia

https://news-pravda.com/world/2025/06/29/1477487.html

It is with great sadness that we have heard from multiple sources (a google search confirms all) of the latest Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) scandal, this time in Australia. There it has made all the main newspapers and media, though of course it will probably not make the largely ROCOR-run, anti-Greek, and heavily censored ‘orthochristian’ website.

Indeed, the Australian story has done nothing for the American Synod (ROCOR), which had already been publicly shamed in a court case for its blatant lies about Fr Alexander Belya and his Vicariate, as shown by the very expensive court case which it lost, and also for its blatant lies about the ‘Colchester Diocese’ in England. Here ROCOR lost half its Western European diocese through its anti-canonical, anti-Moscow schism, racist and sectarian persecution, slander and greed.

As a result, in all the nineteen churches combined of its so-called ‘Western European Diocese’, it is doubtful if on an average Sunday there are even 1,500 people inside them, many of which it does not even own. The ROCOR scandal in Geneva, with the vicious persecution and expulsion of the most faithful of the old ROCOR, all disciples of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, also remains unresolved. The Old Pre-Revolutionary Tradition ROCOR has been killed off by the New Convert ROCOR. St John of Shanghai has ben put on trial and suspended by the American Synod for a second time.

Now in Australia, after the sentencing of the ROCOR pedophile priest from Bombala, publicly known about for over seven years, though in the 1990s they had wanted to make him a bishop (!), another cleric, Fr Boris Ignatievsky, has made a shocking statement typical of ROCOR clericalism: ‘The sheep must not judge the shepherds’. Several of the Russian ‘gyprocker’ clergy in Australia, have already been responsible for scandals, including alcoholism, infidelity and wife-beating. Little wonder that our dear friend in Australia, a priest of integrity, Abbot Sergei Shatrov, left monasticism and the priesthood and became a taxi-driver. (Fr Michael Boyko, another Jordanville graduate, also left the priesthood and became a miner).

It all comes after the arrest and court case involving the notorious Fr Seraphim (Scuratov) in England back in the 1980s (the one whom they also wanted to make a bishop!), and the equally disgusting sexual scandals in the USA, in Boston, Blanco, Jordanville, Platina and Virginia. In the latter case a ROCOR monk left after being approached by a pervert-monk, went to his ROCOR bishop to talk of his trouble and then got touched up by the no less pervert-bishop, who claims to be ‘canonical’. (The monk threw off his monastic garb and walked away in disgust). Is all their monasticism composed of pedophiles? The half a dozen still active bishops of ROCOR (a generation ago, there were twenty – there are several who have ‘retired’ with disgust at the manner in which the new American Synod operates) do not know what to do.

The American ROCOR Archbishop for Australia, a former traditionalist Roman Catholic, rebaptised into ROCOR, is now spreading traditionalist Roman Catholic-style anti-birth control booklets, also to the scandal of the faithful. Russians have no truck with this. The pastoral crisis is in full swing here too. The ROCOR policy of sending out convert American bishops, who have no idea of the Russian Orthodox pastoral and cultural realities outside US convert ghettos, to the ROCOR colonies overseas, has been shown to be a catastrophic mistake.

Meanwhile, at their headquarters in Moscow, certain senior metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church (I know two of them, who informed me so) are thinking of replacing the ROCOR bishops with their own. They wanted ROCOR to be an embassy Church for them to improve their image abroad. In reality, ROCOR has made their image worse. Moscow is just waiting for the key old one to die, for he ‘zasidelsja’, has stayed on for too long. Most of the increasingly small numbers of ROCOR laypeople who are left would follow Moscow bishops. As for many former ROCOR clergy and faithful, they are now scattered as refugees from gross injustice, in the Patriarchates of Constantinople or Romania.

Moreover, both Patriarchates are keen to take even more of those fleeing the anti-canonical and schismatic actions of the rebaptising and anti-family ROCOR Synod. Therefore, they will take them all without letters of leave, which have no value or importance, as the new ROCOR is a schismatic group, which continues to persecute, in the harshest of ways, faithful clergy and people.

Scandals always accompany the decadence that comes before the end. It is just another nail in the coffin of the corpse of what was even twenty years ago a Russian Emigration Church with a largely respected and even glorious history. Sadly, a Persecuted Church has over the last generation become a Persecuting Church. All we can say to all is: Keep well away from ROCOR, approach it at your peril, for the old ROCOR is dead, killed by crazy converts, with their sexual and financial scandals.

To repeat the words of Fr Boris Ignatievsky: ‘Condemnation is a form of pride’. But the American Synod has been condemning the good and faithful for decades. Now it condemns the parents of outraged sons, who denounce pedophile clergy. Presumably then, in their view, pedophilia is a form of humility?

One commentator has asked: How did the Bombala pedophile get away with it for so long? All I know is that he had a terrible reputation when he was in Jerusalem in the 1980s. And all I can say is that either the bishops concerned are stupid, poor judges of character, or else, less charitably, they operate just like the Roman Catholics, as a gay mafia, protecting their own. One or the other. Sad, but true. The need for an Inter-Orthodox Council becomes ever more obvious to us, though apparently not to the majority of the bishops.

 

 

Convert or Converted? The Psychodrama of the Unconverted

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long, and is kind; love envies not; love vaunts not itself, is not puffed up.

1 Cor 13, 1-4

Religious psychosis, my ‘magical Orthodox thinking’, inspired by my obsession with listening to pseudo-elders on the internet, destroyed my life…I was living in fantasies that allowed me to escape reality and totally neglect my real responsibilities because I was setting myself an impossibly high standard of Christian probity and constantly failing.

Letter from a convert in the USA

Foreword

The worst case of a convert I have come across was in 1997, a young woman who had spent twelve years as a nun living in a cave in a Greek Old Calendarist sect in Greece and had come to realise that she had wasted her life. The only parallel I know of is that of that scandalous convent in the Urals led by the now fortunately defrocked Sergei Romanov, and which I visited in 2018. Time and again I return to the same conclusion: Keep to the mainstream, where there are families and children and flee from those who boast that they are not in communion with others. The Orthodox Church is the Catholic Church, that is the Church of Catholicity, of Conciliarity, and not of a lack of communion and so sectarianism, where there is no Church, only psychological manipulation.

Converts and Converted

The Apostles were all converts. How Christ gathered them together is recalled in the Gospels, for example the callings of Andrew and Peter the fishermen and Matthew the tax-collector. Then in the Acts of the Apostles we read about Saul the Persecutor who became Paul the Apostle on the Road to Damascus. However, we never think of the Apostles as ‘converts.’ Why? For the simple reason that they were converted and so their status as ‘converts’ ceased – they had become Orthodox Christians, like the rest of us. Although we were all once ‘converts’, even when we were children, we were then converted. For to remain a ‘convert’ means to remain in an infantile state. Those who think of themselves as converts need to grow up, to become adults and cease the things of children.

Pathology and the Convert

And now we come to the tragedy of ‘converts’ in contemporary Orthodox Christian life, and not only in the Diaspora, understanding that there is no theology here, only psychology, and often pathology, the manipulation of the vulnerable. For many of them do not want to know about the reality of Orthodox life and the services in Orthodox parishes and Orthodox families and how we live. Having listened to various fantasists and misguided idealists on the internet, often they straightaway want to become monks, which is impossible because to be a monk, obedience is essential. But Orthodoxy as monastic life is not accessible to them. For that would be to run before learning to walk. And that means falling. We have to start at the beginning, not to start at the end.

Pride at the Root

This is pride and it is pride that always goes before the fall. The problem with such converts is that they have entirely missed the point. They may join the Church, but this is not the same as ‘becoming Orthodox’, that is, being converted. To ‘become Orthodox’ does not mean keeping certain external monastic observances, such as growing long hair and (if a man) a long beard, (if a woman, wearing floor-length skirts and covering her hair with what looks like a table-cloth), dressing in black or talking with exotic words and incessantly and very boringly about the Typicon, ritual regulations, the canons, ‘the Fathers,’ or individual clerics. All this is irrelevant and ordinary Orthodox parishioners do not do such things, it is boring. Just look at them! Love is the sign of Orthodoxy.

Love at the Root

The essence of Orthodox Christianity is to acquire love for God, for others as for oneself. All external observances and long and boring issues about clerical personalities are irrelevant. Otherwise. it is all ‘sounding brass or a clanging cymbal’, because they have no love, as the Apostle Paul wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. And tragically there are ‘converts’ who even after fifty and sixty years have remained ‘converts.’ This is because they have no love, for love is the fruit of maturity, which is what they do not have, precisely because they have remained ‘converts’, infantiles, for they have never become Orthodox Christians. As Fr Seraphim (Rose) quoted an elderly Russian woman saying about a ’convert’ some fifty years ago: ‘He is certainly Orthodox, but is he a Christian?’

Afterword

Indeed, this disease of ‘convertitis’ has nothing to do with Christianity. It is always characterised by negativity, hypercriticism and interference in the lives of others. This dissatisfaction with others (real Orthodox are dissatisfied only with themselves and are generous and indulgent towards others) always results in the abandonment of Orthodoxy and schism, even if it takes them 50 or 60 years. There have been many contemporary examples, in the Old Calendarist schisms, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian (ROCOR). The convert disease of ‘illusionment’ always ends up in disillusionment, which, by definition, can only come from ‘illusionment’, which is called in Greek ‘plani’, in Russian ‘prelest’, in Romanian ‘inselare’, and in Latin ‘illusio’. Such a waste of life.

 

 

 

 

 

The One True Church and the Two False Churches: The Pastors Persecuted by the Politicians

Introduction

Even though they do not wish to join the Orthodox Church, let alone actually become Orthodox, certain Non-Orthodox admirers of Orthodoxy sometimes pronounce: ‘Yes, the Orthodox Church is the Church of the Holy Spirit’. They speak with naïvety and sentimentality, which is the result of their spiritual tourism. In reality, ‘The Orthodox Church is the Church of the War for the Holy Spirit, and it is a very bitter war. We Orthodox have two great enemies, those who prefer Mammon to the Holy Spirit and those who prefer Phariseeism to the Holy Spirit. Christ suffered from both and warned about both.  And both of them crucified and continue to crucify Christ and His Church.

The Church of the War for the Holy Spirit

The Head of the Orthodox Church is neither a Pope, nor a Patriarch, nor any other worldly leader, but the Risen Christ. The Church is His Body, irradiated and governed by the Holy Spirit, as the Church is the Bearer of the Holy Spirit. Our Church is not a dead body, a corpse, but it makes Saints, who are the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Any organisation that does not make Saints is not the Church, it is a mere human business, a sect or a corporation, not the Divino-human Church. For the Saints are the sign of the Holy Spirit. Where there are Saints, there is the Holy Spirit. Where there is the Holy Spirit, there are Saints. And where the Holy Spirit is not, there are no Saints.

The Church of Mammon

Ask any Orthodox from any Orthodox country why they rarely go to church and they will usually tell you that it is because of priests who demand money from them. For alongside the real Church there exists a parasitic organisation known as the ‘Church of Mammon’. This is full of those, mainly clerics, who carve out of the business careers for themselves and high salaries, exploiting the people, charging them money for all. Some are sexual perverts and the unprincipled, they swim with the tide, according to the wishes and whims of those who pay them. For them, the Head of the Church is not Christ, but States, and the Church is not governed by the Holy Spirit, but by Mammon.

The Church of the Pharisees

Ask any Orthodox from any Orthodox country why they rarely go to church and they will tell you that it is in part because of narrow-minded bigots and fanatics. For alongside the real Church there exists a second parasitic organisation known as the ‘Church of the Pharisees’. The Pharisees are clerics and laypeople who self-righteously proclaim that they are the heads of the Church, national leaders, and hypocritically devise all manner of human rules to oppress and condemn others and to cling on to power. They are deeply involved in State politics, nationalism and even militarisation. The word ‘schismatics’ for them denotes those who are of another nationality and do not worship their ethnarchs.

Conclusion

Who will win in this War for the Holy Spirit against both the Church of Mammon and the Church of the Pharisees? On the face of it, we know that these two powerful groups of enemies of the Church of the Holy Spirit work closely together. The businessmen and the pharisees love each other, as they have the same interests and so feed off one another. It would seem that it is two against one. However, paradoxically, their persecution of the Church makes us stronger. Their Persecuting Church never wins over our Persecuted Church, for we know that the last word in history belongs to Christ, Persecuted and Crucified, but also Risen from the dead. Not Death will vanquish, but Life.