Category Archives: Orthodox Life

Western Aggression + Russian Naivety = Ukrainian Tragedy + Millennial Transfiguration

Introduction: The End of an Old History

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 should have been a Godsend to the whole world. It should have led to the demilitarisation of the West since, with the fall of its Communist ideological rival, military aggression should have had no more meaning for the Western Capitalist world, if it ever had. Although, at the time, some spoke of ‘the peace dividend’, it became apparent that power had gone to the heads of the Western elite and they actually wanted to implement their ultimate fantasy. This consisted of totalitarian globalist control by the Western elite under the pretence of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ to the rest of the world through ‘humanitarian intervention’.

To do this, they would as usual use the organised violence of their ever more bankruptingly expensive military to impose it. They wanted ‘the end of history’ with ‘the global victory of the West’ and its messianic Zionism of ‘freedom and democracy’ (= slavery and tyranny), over all other and much older and far more sophisticated Civilisations. Already, even before the formal fall of the USSR in 1991, the Western elite had decided to invade the oil-rich and gas-rich Muslim world through Iraq. There followed decades of Western massacres of millions in various Muslim countries, which continue today, notably in the genocide in Gaza, with nearly 200,000 civilian dead so far.

Russian Naivety

Meanwhile, however, the pro-Western Russian government was dreaming about a common European home ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok’, made richer by demilitarisation. ‘We are Europeans’, claimed the now anti-Communist Russian governing elite. Even after 1999 the ultra-cautious and legalistic lawyer-leader of Russia, the pro-Russian President Putin, continued to want this common European home and even asked to join NATO. Indeed, for nearly three decades after 1991 Russian leaders continued to speak naively of ‘our Western partners’. With Communism removed, why was such idealistic friendship not possible?

However, naïve Russian leaders did not understand the true and envious nature of ambitious Western aggression. From 2008 on, after the West had aggressively declared that the Ukraine and Georgia would also have to join NATO, after already breaking all its promises to Russia not to expand to the whole of ex-Soviet Eastern Europe, Russia at last began to be alarmed. It had lost its post-1945 buffer zone set up to protect it from continual Western invasions. For the first time it resisted and defeated the aggression of the Western puppet government in nationalist Georgia. Relations between the West and Russia sharply deteriorated, requiring an utterly failed ‘reset’.

The situation came to a head in 2014 with the anti-democratic CIA regime-change coup on Russia’s doorstep, in Kiev. Manipulating Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, this Western-financed (it had cost ‘only’ $5 billion, as the US politician Nuland publicly boasted) coup was directed at destroying Russia. The aim was to start a proxy war and invade Russia from a highly militarised and NATO-ised Ukraine, then overthrow the Russian government, break this millennial country up, colonise it and seize its huge mineral wealth, thus surrounding China from the north. This was the dream of the Western elite, as openly expressed by the Pentagon’s think tank, the US Rand Corporation.

Such exploitation had already been tried in the 1990s, disastrous for the impoverished and humiliated Russian people, creating the corrupt class of Russian and Ukrainian (in fact, mainly Israeli) oligarchs. Thus, for eight long years between 2014 and 2022, the CIA-controlled Kiev regime and its US and British PR advisors and arms merchants massacred, persecuted and repressed the large Russian minority (about 40% of the population) in the east and south of the Ukraine, arming the Kiev regime to the teeth. During this time naïve Russia still constantly tried to create peace and negotiate, mainly through the Minsk Accords.

Naivety Rewarded by Western Aggression

In these ‘Accords’ the naïve Russian elite was systematically betrayed and deceived by the West, especially by the German and French leaders, behind whom stood Washington. Slowly, the extremely naïve Russian governing elite began to realise what had been obvious to others all along, that the US would not allow peace and that the Western European vassals were entirely in US pockets and no longer had any policy of their own. When at the end of 2021 it became obvious that the Kiev regime was about to invade and genocide Russian majority areas, in February 2022 a small Russian task force was forced to pre-empt Kiev and enter the east of the Ukraine, formerly Russia.

Numbering some 90,000, but facing the largest and perhaps best-trained, best-equipped and best-fortified army in Europe, that of the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime, this force had as its aim not to occupy, but to withdraw, having forced Kiev into realistic peace talks. However, again Russia was betrayed and lied to. In early April 2022 the US, through its UK subsidiary, forbade peace, even forcing Kiev to pass a law to forbid any negotiations with Moscow. In return, it promised to arm the Kiev regime with all the stocks of Western-held weapons, obsolete or not, it could give it, and to train its troops, if necessary, to ‘die to the last Ukrainian’, so killing as many Russians as possible and weakening Russia.

Thus, the Western elite forced Russia to make its small token operation into an operation against the whole of NATO. This meant the huge growth by voluntary conscription and reprofessionalisation and re-equipping of the Russian armed forces. It also meant the end of reliance on the typically post-Soviet private military Wagner mercenary company, run by the crooked Russian oligarch, Prigozhin, which was the equivalent of the US Blackwater. Much more than this, seeing Western hypocrisy, double standards and intense, Western media Russophobia with its Cancel Russia culture, the pro-Western Russian elite was shocked and even traumatised to its core.

At the height of the Nazis, no-one had ever thought of cancelling Goethe, Hegel, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Heine, Wagner or any other giants of German culture. Russia’s dreamed-of friends have turned into nightmarish enemies, who will not even speak to Russians any more. And the diplomat-free Western elite invented 20,000 illegal anti-Russian sanctions and, as true racists, called its patriotic President ‘Hitler’ (who was a Westerner as was his Fascism also Western) and its people ‘Asiatic barbarians’! Russia was forced to turn away from the hostile and uncivilised West to friendly and civilised China and India, becoming the champion of the anti-Western Global Majority.

From the Ukrainian Tragedy

Gradually, the pre-empting, token Russian Special Military Operation sent in to force negotiations on 24 February 2022, had to turn into another Operation, This had not just to liberate the eastern corner of the Ukraine, with its long-suffering Russian people, and demilitarise and denazify the rest of the Ukraine, but to demilitarise and denazify, that is, disarm and defeat, the whole of NATO. This defeat could well lead to its collapse and the eventual withdrawal of the bankrupt US from Western Europe. However, this in turn will mean the collapse of US world hegemony through the dedollarising, Russian-led BRICS Alliance, liberating Africa, Asia and Latin America from Western tyranny.

These will no longer fear a defeated West with its continual regime-changes of colour revolutions (currently involving Serbia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Armenia, Georgia, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru etc). Some Global Majority countries, especially in French colonial West Africa, have already seen the victory of Russian arms over the West in the Ukraine and liberated themselves in turn from French and US troops. In the end, BRICS may well take with it still relatively free European countries, like Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, perhaps the rest of the Central Europe and the Balkans, and perhaps ultimately Italy and others, thus in time collapsing the US Neo-Nazi EU puppet.

In the last few days, at least 12,000 fanatical Kiev regime troops and many NATO mercenaries, still believing in the recently invented myths of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, have been sent on a fool’s errand by the US/NATO, ostensibly in a terrorist operation which threatens the Kursk nuclear power station, in reality an operation which is guaranteed to fail so that Zelensky can be discredited and replaced. They have been sent as cannon fodder to die in a crazy and suicidal incursion across the Russian border to occupy 40 (not 1,000) square kilometres and a few villages in the south of the province of Kursk. Thus, the last of NATO arms sent in this US-promoted PR stunt to ‘invade Russia’ will be destroyed.

However, these last elite troops, the few trained left, supposed to defend the east of the Ukraine and Kiev itself, have been thrown away together with their German (and British) tanks fighting near Kursk again. All they have achieved is to occupy some fields, forests, hamlets and tiny villages in the vastness of Russia. Now they are running out of logistics, air cover, supplies, ammunition, fuel, food and water. Some 2,600 are already dead or wounded and over 300 of their NATO tanks and armoured cars destroyed. Many Ukrainian soldiers, trapped inside Russia, have surrendered. But Russian public opinion is outraged. ‘Go for Kiev’ is the message they are giving the once moderate Russian government.

To Millennial Transfiguration

Some have even suggested that the whole operation was a Russian trap, set to destroy this last gasp of the collapsing Kiev regime. Some compare the operation to the suicidal Nazi operation in the Ardennes, ‘the Battle of the Bulge’, in December 1944. This may be the end for those currently cowering in their bunker in Kiev. Russia never wanted any of this. But the treacherous trauma of Western aggression since 2014 in Kiev, which has led directly to today’s tragic bloodshed, has also made Russia into the linchpin of BRICS. Thus, it has allied itself with the Global Majority, that is, 90% of the world, the Non-Western world. The Orwellian-censored Western elite has been left sulking.

It has set about trying to assassinate any leader it can, apparently in Slovakia, Hungary, Iran and even regime-changing the USA itself, replacing the senile Biden in a palace coup with the unelected Harris, and trying to assassinate Trump. Its State propaganda mouthpieces call ‘war’ ‘peace’, ‘tyranny’ ‘freedom’, oligarchy’ ‘democracy’, and ‘lies’ ‘truth’. (Orwell was forty years too early, 1984 = 2024). Many have commented that this is a transformation which takes place only every 500 years. The period of exploitation and colonisation of the New Worlds, that is, everywhere outside Western Europe, between 1514 and 2014, from Latin America to Asia, from Africa to the Ukraine, is over.

It is the Ukraine that has been the bridge too far, the fat morsel which the greedy West has bitten off and choked on. However, in reality, this is a millennial transformation. For the West began its ascendancy in Rome when on 14 February 1014, the newly-installed Pope Benedict VIII crowned the centralising and imperialistic Holy Roman Emperor Henry in Rome. This was to the reading of the newly-formed dogma of Western ideology, expressed in the new Roman Catholic Creed, at variance with the age-old Creed of the Church. For Henry II had forced Pope Benedict VIII to include the word filioque in the Nicene Creed agreed on by the whole Church in the fourth century.

This is the proclamation that all authority and infallibility, the Spirit of God, proceeds uniquely from Western leaders, who are the replacements (‘vicars’) of God on earth. This is an ersatz humanist religion, replacing God by men, Faith by religion. Moreover, this authority and infallibility has been passed down to all Western leaders, whoever they may be, whether they have been Popes of Rome (up until the sixteenth century) and Western Kings (up until the revolutions of 1688 in England and 1789 in France), and then Western European Emperors (Napoleon), Presidents, Prime Ministers, Chancellors or, since 1917, US Presidents.

Conclusion: The Beginning of a New History

However, what will happen after the Russian Special Operation in the Ukraine is over? How will Russia, which has no intention of occupying the whole of this Communist construct of the Ukraine, win the peace there? Will there be a new Russia-friendly government in the New Ukraine (will it even be called that?), its capital still in Kiev, but perhaps shorn of between five and nine southern and western provinces, gone back to Russia, and of between three and five provinces in the far west, gone back to Poland, Romania and Hungary? And how will the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church cease after the fall of the now illegal, atheist Jewish dictatorship of Zelensky?

What will the new status of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church then be? Will the naïve Russian Church free itself of its corrupt or CIA bishops? Will the New Ukraine join BRICS, as part of the Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus? So many questions remain, for this conflict is only the beginning, not the end, of a new history. What is certain is that this new history will be led and created not by the West, but by the Global Majority, led by Russia and China. The US will be left isolated and the US-appointed EU Commissars, German and UK ministers will, with their Fascist ‘liberal’ globalist ideology, be as discredited as their Nazi grandfathers, and run away into US exile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 28th 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 33rd 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

 

 

What Does it Need to Found a Local Church in the Diaspora?

The Orthodox Diasporas in the Western world have so far given birth to only one new, albeit compromised, Local Church. This is the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), founded over 50 years ago. Much disputed by others, it has unfortunately been a failure – the vast majority of Orthodox who live in Northern America have not joined it and do not wish to. It has not united Orthodox. However, it must be said, it has been a bold failure and its failure is hardly a matter for rejoicing. It was bold because elsewhere founding a new Local Church has not even been tried. We should learn from the OCA’s strengths as well as from its weaknesses.

True, in England, there was in the 1970s an attempt not to build a multinational Local Church, but a multinational or, at that time, trinational, chapel. This was in Oxford and involved émigré Russian (and English) academics, Greeks and Serbs. It was never going to work. The Serbs never took part, apart from a certain rather effeminate bishop who was then ‘disappeared’. It was set up in a tiny, octagonal, Methodist-looking chapel, not at all traditional on the outside. Then the ‘Russians’ left it through ejection and miraculously managed to set up their own English-language chapel elsewhere.

It left Greeks and a tiny number of ex-Anglican, pseudo-Russian Bloomite elitists in their Methodist-looking chapel. Now that large numbers of new Romanian immigrants have set up their own church in Oxford, the whole experiment is best forgotten. The Oxford chapel represents not even 10% of local Orthodox, rather like the OCA representation in Northern America. Why these failures? It is always ideologies that destroy the unity required for a Local Church, because ideologies are always by definition exclusive.

For example, new calendarism (one of the great failings of the OCA) and old calendarism (one of the great failings of the new 2020s ROCOR sect) are ideological enemies, as are political and nationalist ideologies, like those of the Greek nationalist Second Rome and the Russian nationalist Third Rome. Neither of them ever learned from the failure of the First Rome with its equally nationalist ‘Roman Catholicism’ (a contradiction in terms). All of these isms operate against and are destructive of any multinational Church, for any Diaspora Church must by definition be multinational, not nationalist. Only the concept of a Second Jerusalem can be successful. This, for example, was where the Russian Church failed, and three times over. Thus:

In Russian émigré Paris, French liberal intellectualism, imported back from Saint Petersburg, did nothing for the Paris Russians and as a result their jurisdiction became very small because exclusive. But at least, small, they were not corrupted by money, like the other two.

In the émigré ‘Russian Orthodox’ Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the substitution of the subtle moderation of Russian émigré Orthodoxy for the very unsubtle extremism of US convert Orthodoxy. Well-financed Lutheran fanaticism was substituted for real Christianity. That is spiritual suicide, for no-one apart from crazy and uncharitable converts is interested.

The Moscow Patriarchate itself has been badly served both by Soviet nationalism and the corrupting riches of the post-Soviet episcopate together with their sexual perversions, as we can see at this very moment. But what has been rumoured for years in Moscow and elsewhere, is only the tip of the iceberg. The MP and ROCOR have to be cleansed. An antique-filled seaside cottage (cottage, not the antique-filled Victorian house, that is another story) on the south coast of England (in the nineteenth century gay Anglican bishops would also ‘resort’ to south-coast Brighton) is not the solution.

In England, we Orthodox will be neither pro-Soviet, nor pro-American, but faithful to local realities. You can only build a Local Church, if you want it and believe in it.

 

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.

 

Russian Nationalism Loses Control of the Russian Church

After the 1917 Revolution and the dissolution of the Russian Empire, the Russian Orthodox Church, formerly the Church of the Russian Empire, was forced to decentralise and give up various territories like eastern Poland and Finland, and the churches in them. Thus, the new country of Poland (and also Czechoslovakia) came to form its own independent (autocephalous) Local Orthodox Church. As for Russian Orthodox in Finland, like the emigres centred in Paris, and later Ukrainian emigres, they joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

However, the bulk of the Russian emigration, then in China (from here many later moved to Australia) as well as in Western Europe (from here many later rejoined others already in North America), became independent of Moscow. Eventually the descendants of this emigration became known as ROCOR or the New York Synod. Despite the fact that in 2006 several parishes in England and France had left the jurisdiction of Moscow itself to join Constantinople, in 2007 most of this New York Synod formally returned to Moscow, though a minority went to various old calendarist sects. In 2019 many of the descendants of the Paris emigres also rejoined Moscow, though a very large minority remained with Constantinople.

Despite reunification as recent as 2019, five years on, the 2024 situation mirrors the post-1917 chaos, when parts of the Russian Church refused to be subject to the politically-driven Russian Church administration.

Firstly, the Church in the Ukraine declared itself fully independent of Moscow. So much so that it set up nearly 100 parishes for its emigration in Western Europe, quite independently of Moscow. As for the Russian Orthodox Church in Latvia, it did much the same inside Latvia. In Moldova many parishes also left politically-coloured Moscow for the Romanian Church. Abroad many Moldovans went to Romanian churches, where they are not abused by Russian racism.

There is also dissidence in Lithuania and Estonia and even in Russia itself, where some Russian Orthodox also joined Constantinople. As regards the Russian Orthodox centred in Paris, now under Moscow, most there do not commemorate (or respect) their own Russian Orthodox Patriarch, whom they see as a politician, not as a churchman. More radically, the bulk of the old Russian emigration, now centred in New York and highly Americanised (they openly advise people to vote for Trump and support other post-Protestant phenomena), are also protesting. Some of its bishops openly called on the Russian Federation to withdraw its troops from the Ukraine!

Many suspect that several bishops and senior priests of this New York group has yet again been infiltrated, just as it was between the 60s and 80s, by the CIA. In any case its American or American-linked bishops parrot anti-Russian CIA propaganda, despite the fact that they call their fragment of the Church ‘Russian’! As a result, many Russian Orthodox patriots have been obliged to leave the New York Synod for other Local Churches, since the Moscow-centred Church, suicidally, refused to accept these patriots!

Thus, scandalous corruption in the New York Synod forced quite a number of patriotic Russian Orthodox in the USA, who also objected to the CIA hold over the group and yet were abandoned by politically-driven Moscow, to join the Church of Constantinople. In England, scandalous persecution from New York forced patriots in half the local diocese, abandoned by Moscow, to leave for the canonicity of the Romanian Church, thus skilfully avoiding politically-driven Constantinople. Here they continue to live exactly as before, as Russian Orthodox using the old calendar, but in exile as Russian Orthodox, as Moscow abandoned them. They are much supported by Moldovans, who are tired of being mistreated by Russians.

Ukrainians and Moldovans alike, tired of Russian racism, have been leaving, the Ukrainians setting up their own churches, the Moldovans, as we said, going to the Romanians. Making Non-Russian Orthodox feel like second-class citizens, usually deliberately, is suicidal for the Russian Church. The Russian Church is not only becoming a National Church, but rather a Nationalist Church. Suicidal politically-motivated and nationalistically-motivated actions by individuals in, or sent from, Moscow means that it has lost the loyalty of literally tens of millions of former Russian Orthodox.

At the present time, it is difficult to see how Moscow can ever get these tens of millions back. All this seems particularly strange when the Russian Church is supposed to be the Church of the multinational Russian Federation, part of the multipolar BRICS Alliance! And yet the Russian Church appears to be unipolar and uninational! Surely a Federation would be better represented by a multinational, and not nationalist, Church? Perhaps, once the conflict with the USA and its vassals in the Ukraine is over, the Russian Church, just like the Russian military with its four corrupt and now arrested generals, will also be cleansed of treacherous corruption, CIA bishops and all the rest?

 

 

What Will Happen to the Orthodox Church After the Fall of Washington?

The powers of this world have throughout history tried to abuse religious belief by making it into their own nationalist and ritualist institutions. This has been to camouflage and justify their nationalism, that is, their attachment to this world, their worldliness. Chinese, Indians, Jews, Greeks, Japanese, Copts, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs, Latins, Germans, Greeks, Spanish, Russians, French, British, Americans, they have all done it. These are just facts from Church history. How do Christians remain outside and resist an ideology which puts national and worldly issues above Christ, all for the sake of amassing more power and money? There are only two ways of resisting:

Either you are a Confessor, or else you are a Martyr. Thus, St Stephen the First Martyr was stoned to death by the Jews because he upset their nationalism. He was only following the prophets and St John the Baptist, who had told the nationalist King Herod the truth, and Christ Himself, Whom they crucified. Then came such Confessors as St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom. And in the twentieth-century there were the hundreds of thousands of Martyrs all over Eastern Europe, as well as Confessors like St Nectarios of Aegina, St Luke of the Crimea, St John of Shanghai or St Paisios the Athonite. There is nothing new under the sun. The saints are always the best witnesses.

In recent centuries the Church in the Middle East and the Balkans was oppressed by Ottomans, Poles and Austro-Hungarians. Meanwhile the Russian Church was oppressed by Westernising rulers, even more so after 1917. In the nineteenth century and even before, the main Patriarchate outside Russia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, was used as a plaything by the British and French ambassadors. The Western Powers also appointed German kinglets to rule the newly-liberated Balkan countries in their name.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has in the same way become the plaything of US ambassadors there. Meanwhile the Patriarchate of Moscow was being used as a plaything by the Soviet State. Neither the US State of the Soviet State was Christian. Both were, whatever the theory, in practice atheist. This situation has continued by centuries of inertia even after the end of the first so-called Cold War in 1991, but in ways even more terrible than before.

Thus, in Moscow, Stalinist centralisation has continued, repelling all Non-Russians from the Church, as Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova openly described in his recent letter to Patriarch Kyrill. For fifty years we too were treated as second-class citizens by the same Russian Church. None of this is because this mentality has been forced on the Church by the State, but because it has become a bad reflex inside the Church. It is nothing to do with the State. For example, a fragment of Moscow, the New York ROCOR has done this too, completely discrediting itself, mistreating Non-Russians. (As one of its bishops said to me recently, ROCOR is ‘a train wreck’).  The mentality to repel all, including many Russians, has been imposed internally. The only real slavery comes from ourselves, not from others.

We can see the same mentality also in the uncanonical, US-orchestrated actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and elsewhere since 2018. Sadly, Constantinople fell to Greek racist hatred and jealousy of Russians.  It could simply have refused to do any of its horrors. But the $25 million bribe was irresistible to the weak. Since then a second Cold War has begun, with US proxy forces trying to weaken and destroy Russia from the Ukraine. It means that the heavy burden of steering the ship of the Church has fallen to those less politicised, more free, to the now 14 other Local Churches. Their role has been dependent on the political freedom which they have.

Thus, under Communism in Eastern Europe and under the US control of the Greek Churches, the Serbian Church stood out as a beacon of relative freedom and theology. Today, in this respect the Albanian Church seems to have taken the lead as the voice of freedom, though the long-overdue visit of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America to the persecuted Ukrainian Church is also a miracle. The remaining 14 Local Churches are not all united because they do not enjoy the same measure of freedom. They are only relatively free compared to Constantinople and Moscow. For instance, the actions of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople have brought some of the other Local Churches into a state of internal schism.

Specifically, the Cypriot and Bulgarian Churches are now in a state of internal schism as a direct result of the US interference in Constantinople, both direct and indirect. Equally, the US-controlled Patriarchate of Alexandria and Moscow are in schism because of the latter’s interference in Africa. Other Local Churches, like the Romanian and the Georgian, which have a strong national identity, take an independent line, ignoring uncanonical Greek and uncanonical Russian alike. This is despite the attempts by the local US ambassadors, who behave like the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, to interfere in the choice of Patriarchs and policies. This independence is the only way to go. It is freedom.

However, our question is what will happen after the US stops interfering in internal Church affairs. It is our hope that, once political pressure eases, the Greek Churches in particular can take the lead and get out of political distortions and contortions, abandoning imperialist fantasies, recognising new autocephalies, notably that of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and its Diaspora. However, the Russian Church also has to give up its Soviet-style centralisation, which is its imperialist fantasy. It has to grant autocephaly to parts of the Church in now independent countries.

The shadow of the old Imperialism, Russian or Soviet, just like Greek and Latin imperialism, has cast a long shadow on Church life. Its time is up. For the Church does not consist of one Local Church ruling imperially over all the others, but of their entirety, their catholicity – all the Local Churches together. Once political meddling is over, all the Local Churches must hold a Council together. A free and canonically ordered Council, not the 2016 robber-Council farce in Crete. Then the very many long-outstanding issues between the Local Churches can at last be resolved. In freedom. May God’s Will be done!

 

 

A universal God has been declared! An examination for Orthodoxy

https://spzh.live/en/chelovek-i-cerkovy/80170-a-universal-god-has-been-declared-an-examination-for-orthodoxy

12 May 04:19

1473

A sermon on Anti-Pascha Sunday.

The time of trials is given to us to understand who we are. And not only we but also those who lead, guide and teach us how to live. This applies primarily to the Church because God will judge those on the outside (1 Corinthians 5:13).

As a priest I have experienced in my life the entire period of the recent history of the Church, starting from its revival in the territory of the former USSR and ending with what we have now. But now all Local Churches are undergoing examination, including those whom no upheavals have particularly touched until this time. The spirit of the new “wonderful” world, which is gradually beginning to enter its earthly possessions, offers each of them two options: to serve it or to be gradually destroyed.

The words of Christ that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” apply to the entire Church rather than its individual local branches. Where is the Church of St Genevieve, St Patrick of Armagh or St David of Menevia now?

Just a few decades ago, we had an unprecedented Orthodox boom. Huge editions of patristic books were published. And when the Internet entered society, hundreds of preachers began to teach people around the clock what an Orthodox Christian should be like. Teachers of faith of all kinds have been talking about Christ for almost forty years, but only a small part of them could show Him by their own example. After all, speaking and teaching about God is much easier than following Him.

Thus, we have built an Orthodoxy which externally looks fine but the strength of this structure can only be tested by an earthquake.

I remember a time when a hundred and fifty children could be baptised in a church per day. Where are these 30-40-year-old sons and daughters of God now? Are they living a spiritual life? Do they go to church or even know where it is?

The Lord has looked at us for decades and patiently awaited fruits. But now is the time for harvest. How many ascetics have grown in monasteries, righteous people in parish churches, and hierarchs in eparchial administrations during this time? I don’t know, only God knows.

Orthodox exams are taking place all over the world now. Each Local Orthodox Church is taking them. The best, privileged, one might say, position is held by those Orthodox who are openly hunted: those who are outlawed, persecuted in the media, lied against and slandered. Such a Church simply has no way out: nothing is left for it but to be crucified with Christ.

The worst position is occupied by those Local Churches that have turned from the brides of Christ into State concubines. Of course, they did not immediately decide on this adultery. It happened gradually, step by step. At first, it was necessary to make small concessions, and then to descend lower and lower.

All these processes vividly manifested themselves during the coronavirus period when, for the sake of fear, it was allowed to believe that physical death could settle in the Chalice, which is given to us as the source of eternal Life. Therefore, commune with disposable spoons, don’t trust God, trust the WHO. And do not let people go to services, close the churches for Easter and do not celebrate liturgies. And those who did not obey and did not want to violate their priestly oath received hefty fines.

All this was approved by the priesthood, which obediently adapted to the requirements of the state authority. The next step is to recognise the schismatics, then to start blessing non-traditional LGBT marriages, and so on.

There are also those who at the official level have rejected Christ and the Gospel, replacing them with national ideology and military-political doctrine. The clergy who disagree with this are banned or even imprisoned. But can all these bans be seriously considered canonically justified if they come from people who have become servants of Caesar instead of God, essentially betraying their soul to the devil?

And in recent times, among the faithful, a special type has appeared – “couch ascetics of piety”. They destroy all the “enemy filth” day and night with the machine-gun burst of their comments on the Internet. Their religion is anger. They do not understand that the only thing a person needs in this world is to learn to love the Lord and all people with all their soul.

All we need is to immerse our spirit in God and remain in Him forever. Neither in politics, nor in war, nor in Internet news, but in God. But only a few are capable of hearing this.

Judgment is approaching. Weeds have grown and multiplied all over the Earth. In the Church of Christ, there are more and more propagandists, political officers and simply opportunists. what do they direct the zeal of their flock? To hate sinners! That’s their main goal. The essence of their faith is war with global evil. But they do not see stubbornly that they are this very evil.

The Gospel calls us to be clothed in Christ, to become a renewed person. “No, this is not true,” teach modern preachers, you should kill other people “for the sake of Christ” – this is what we bless and inspire you to do. And yet the first Christians also lived in very difficult times. But for some reason, they did not care at all about the political situation of their empire; nor did they worry about either external or internal enemies.

They were worried only about one thing – whether their name was written in the Book of Life or not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Situation of the Orthodox Church in Britain in 2024

Introduction: The Apostasy of Non-Orthodoxy

In the last fifty years the situation of Protestantism and Catholicism in Britain has changed radically. That transformation can be summed up by one word – apostasy. In modern Britain once predominant Protestant sects, including religious organisations like the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Church of Wales, the Methodist Church etc are rapidly disappearing. The covid period, when clergy voluntarily closed their churches, all too often it would seem through cowardice, was a disaster. Many people who were closed out then have not returned. Statistically those Protestant groups are predicted to disappear by 2060. As they were founded at earliest in the sixteenth century, they will have lasted at most 500 years. Their members have simply lost their faith. Why go to church, when its leaders preach the same secularism as everyone else and are afraid of covid?

For the moment, discredited Protestantism survives almost only among Pentecostal African immigrants and in faddish happy-clappy groups. Elsewhere, it would seem that, as one commentator has put it, the Gospel has been replaced by ‘The Guardian’. In other words, faith has been swept away by the tidal wave of secularism and wokeism, imposed from the USA: anything goes. Little wonder that some people look to Islam, whose Muslims actually believe in something. Meanwhile, pedophile-undermined Catholicism, led by a politician Pope who scandalises many faithful Catholics, has since the modernism of the 1960s also been fast collapsing. In Britain Catholicism is now populated essentially by Poles, Portuguese, Filippinos, Hungarians etc. Given this apostasy, where could the few native people in Britain who still actually believe in Christ-God look to go to church?

Orthodox Christianity

There remains the option of the Orthodox Church, also composed essentially of immigrants, and some of whose bishops are just as politically-minded and so just as secular as Non-Orthodox leaders. Over the last two generations since I have been active in the Orthodox Church, the situation of Orthodox Christianity in Britain has been transformed. Once consisting of a small number of elderly, highly politicised and often aristocratic White Russians, based in London, a few very closed Serbs and other Slavs exiled here after 1945, and large numbers of modest Greek Cypriots, living in north and east London or running restaurants in seaside resorts, today’s situation is very different. As the older generations of Orthodox immigrants have simply died out, leaving little trace, new waves of immigration have followed.

Over the last fifty years the population of Orthodox in Britain has gradually tripled from 220,000 to 670,000, to one in a hundred, mainly because of twenty-first century immigration. However, in large parts of the country, there is still no choice as to which Orthodox church to attend, since Orthodox churches are still few and far between. But in larger cities, above all in London, there is a choice of churches. What is the difference between them? Of Orthodox groups we do not include here the quite small groups of Serbs, Bulgarians, Georgians and Ukrainians, as these groups are almost always closed, mononational, and generally do not welcome native people as members. However, this still leaves four groups, which native British people could attend. These are:

The Greeks

A generation ago this was by far the largest Orthodox group in Britain. It is composed in fact not of Greeks, but above all of Greek-Cypriots. The clergy of this group, including bishops, was once notorious for sending away any English enquirers, often quite rudely, and telling them to ‘join the Church of England’, in a curious mixture of racism and syncretism. Only in recent years, faced with the possibility of dying out, has it changed. Now under Greek-American control, it realises that in order to survive and keep its young people or to attract others, it must use English in its services and stop pretending to be just some form of Greek nationalist Protestantism. It has also for political reasons accepted small groups of Ukrainians, a few Russians and some English people and has a large multinational convent or monastery, with largely Romanian nuns. With an excellent infrastructure of church properties, wisely and very cheaply amassed in the 1950s and 1960s, and still for the moment with more priests than any other Orthodox group, it has great opportunities.

However, many feel that the opening to English has come much, much too late. This group has already been destroyed by its Greek nationalism and racist imperialism, which revolts most Orthodox. Also the last thirty years when it should have made the transition to English have been wasted. The result: the Protestant Church of England has dozens of Non-Greek-speaking, but ethnic Greek clergy! Unable to speak Greek, these descendants of immigrants left for well-paid jobs with free housing in the Protestant Church of England, using a language which they spoke and understood. As a result, most of the Greek clergy in the Greek Church are elderly and many of its parishes are clearly dying out. In many parishes the only children are Romanian, the old people are all Greek Cypriots, who after sixty years here often still speak poor English. Their assimilated descendants have long since left the Church. Why should they attend the foreign Church of their great-grandparents, whose main article of faith appears to be waving Greek and Cypriot flags? They have learned that Christ was not Greek; apparently, most have not.

The Romanians

This is by far the largest, most welcoming and most dynamic Orthodox group in Britain today, with over 450,000 Romanians and Romanian-speaking Moldovans, average age about 35, not including children. The vast majority have arrived here in the last twenty years. However, the Romanian Church, made up almost uniquely of these recent and modest immigrants has very poor infrastructure, with only 70 parishes, not much better than that of the relatively few canonical Russians. The result is that many Romanians frequent other Orthodox churches (there is nowhere else to go in the absence of their own church – although when a Romanian church does open, they leave the church they used to attend). There are also some very overworked priests, some doing a thousand baptisms a year, up to 20 at a time and hundreds of confessions per week. However, the help of the Romanian ambassador has recently enabled us to obtain a bishop for Romanian Orthodox in this country, who is to be appointed next month.

His Cathedral in Edmonton, North London, bought last December, will be ready later this year. There is great potential here, but only if the Romanian Church can avoid the errors of the Russians, all repeated by the Greeks. Avoiding this error means keeping the masses of young people in the Church, despite the fact that they will inevitably end up speaking better English than Romanian and be assimilated. The error of flag-waving Russian and Greek nationalism and politics must not develop into flag-waving Romanian nationalism and politics. That would be just as irrelevant to the assimilated descendants of Romanian and Moldovan immigrants, as Russian and Greek nationalism was to the assimilated descendants of Russian and Greek immigrants. Waving a foreign flag is of no interest to those who feel more British than Romanian, Greek or Russian and have little interest in the old country. Christ was not Greek, but he was not Russian or Romanian either.

The (Canonical) Russians

The Moscow Russians were once well-known among Anglicans for their famous émigré bishop and missionary, Antony Bloom. He knew how to talk to Anglicans, some indeed thought him rather Anglican, and certainly his presence developed into a controversial personality cult. Son of an atheist diplomat from the Tsar’s Russia and of the sister of the composer Scriabin, he was a very talented man, who created a small, multinational, though rather elitist, diocese. However, he died twenty years ago, in the past. Most Russians here never knew him. Under the present wave of Russian nationalism, the remains of his diocese are tending to resemble a national ghetto. The present Russian diocese appears to have rejected a lot of Ukrainians and treated Moldovans badly, exactly as it has done some English people. Today, this group exists only in the embassy area of west London and in a number of chapels outside London. Outside the capital most of its clergy, who knew Metropolitan Antony Bloom, are dying out. Despite recent bright prospects, today its future is in serious doubt. But perhaps changes in Moscow will soon be under way.

(There is also a former émigré group of Russians, known as ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia). This now numbers fewer than 1,000, perhaps only 500. Having rejected its traditional Russian roots, gone into schism in 2021 and as a result lost over half of its already small diocese, this tiny Trump-voting, US-based and US-cultured cult has tried to attract others. Having seen its original Russian émigré base die out or leave it for non-schismatic churches, they have attracted mainly right-wing, sectarian-minded English people, including Anglo-Catholics of an unusual orientation. Having seen its original Russian émigré base die out, it is trying to recruit Ukrainian refugees unsuccessfully, as they reject anything that is called Russian and psychologically normal Ukrainians do not wish to frequent a sect anyway. The schismatic ROCOR appears to have no future, since it has cut itself off from the Church).

The Antiochians

Critics call the Antiochians ‘Angliochians’, as they seem to be largely composed of ex-Anglicans. Probably with fewer than 2,000 laypeople, and many of these visiting Romanians with nowhere else to go, the mainly ex-Anglican clergy under the Patriarchate of Antioch (in fact of Damascus in Syria) are few, elderly and often do not know how to celebrate the services. Some of these appear to be more anti-Anglican rather than Orthodox.

However, in defence, we must say that, apart from a few recent converts who have pathological chips on their shoulders, members of this group are sincere, well-intentioned and have made great sacrifices to enter this Arab Patriarchate. The mere fact of their existence is a witness to their faith and zeal, despite the discouragement of Greeks and Russians alike. Hence those who declare that ‘Anti-och’ is for those who are ‘anti-Russian and anti-Greek’.

Conclusion: Disenfranchising the Franks

For the few remaining Christians in Britain, Orthodox Christianity probably represents a step that culturally goes too far, it is too radical. For Orthodox Christianity is the millennial opposite of Secularism, whose ancestor is Protestantism, whose ancestor is Catholicism. All are cut from the same secular block. Catholicism is secular because it wanted to control the world, making the Pope of Rome into a Super-King, an Emperor of the world, higher than all rulers. Protestantism was secular because it subjected itself to secular rulers and so to worldliness, for example, in England it was an invention of the rulers Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

For this reason, to join the Orthodox Church is an act that disenfranchises, that is, ‘defranks’ the Norman-imposed Frankish Establishment, depriving them of their freedom, privileges and self-appointed right to tyrannise the people. Only if you have understood this and wish to reject this inherent secularism, would you wish to belong to the Orthodox Church. It is the only logical solution, if you want something that is not inherently and institutionally compromised by Secularism. If you have not understood this, you will remain somewhere inbetween, in what is now the no-man’s land, outside Orthodoxy Christianity. However, surely a no-man’s land is not the best place to be at a time when the fiercest spiritual warfare is raging from the trenches in the anti-Christian modern world all around us?

 

 

 

The People’s Church: 2008-2024

Foreword: Our Faith

I was born in Colchester in Eastern England. We Eastern English are renowned for our independence, straightforwardness, reliability and pragmatism. We are also bluff and good-natured, but are suspicious of newcomers and always test them to see what they are made of. That is why we are often underestimated. However, we can also be lyrical and poetic beneath our great skies, among our woods and fields, and on our coasts. We have no ideology – for the Gospels are not an ideology, but life itself – and we live by the motto: ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil’. This truth-telling can be seen in the victory of our great national hero, champion and patron saint, our martyred last King, St Edmund of East Anglia (+ 869). He told the heathen the truth, even though they did not like it. He was not afraid. We do the same.

Our love of the truth is why we always resisted the secularism of the recent past. This consisted of the liberal, modernist and syncretist ideology of indifference, that there is no truth, that all faiths are the same. This relativisation was a purely political manipulation of globalists, a pan-heresy, as St Justin described it, as it maintained that truth and lies, light and darkness, are equal. This was obviously untrue and was promoted only by those whose souls had been bought and paid for by the secularist politics of this world. Equally, however, we resist the post-modernist extreme, the nonsense that only one tiny sect possesses the truth and that all others are ‘satanic’. This very primitive and narrow ideology is clearly the fruit of sad and broken individuals with psychological, not to say, pathological problems of pride and broken childhoods. In history it belongs to the heresy known as Donatism.

Thus, truth-telling makes us unpopular and controversial among the elites of all persuasions. This is because the one thing they hate is the truth, for the truth undermines their grasp on power and riches. That is why they hated Christ. That is why we have one great strength: we know that the Truth always wins, however long it takes. With Christ it took three days. Because we are sinners, it takes us much longer, but our victory through Christ, Who is ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’, is still inevitable. This is our Faith.

The Beginnings

In 2008 I stood in the largest church in my native town, the future City of Colchester, and looked towards our second church, a small chapel. Both were empty, but they both now belonged to us, after eleven years of prayerful patience. Our monocled master had given his blessing for us to buy the property, but he told me I was mad. The main church, at 6,500 square feet, was ‘too big’ (much bigger than his own, which was a problem for him) and he gave us not a penny of help or any support. We just heard disheartening criticisms which came from his personal despair.

But I had a vision and said that with God’s help we shall fill this church and then need a bigger one. People mocked, especially him. But after 16 years, we have got to that point. Looking back, I can see three periods: The first period, one of foundation, went from our first service in December 2008 up to 2016. The first liturgy then was attended by only 35 people, however the number of those attending gradually increased to about 120 regular parishioners, becoming more multinational. We were becoming the local church.

Our second period, one of consolidation, went from 2015 to 2020. In that time, we doubled in size to about 250 regular parishioners and set up new parishes in Norwich and just outside Cambridge for those who were coming to us from such great distances. The third period, of protection, began in 2020 with covid, when the wolf attempted to close us for the first time. We never closed. This period, which is one of protecting the flock from the jealous wolves, even though they may mask themselves as shepherds, is far from over. Like the much-persecuted St John (+ 1966) before us, we shall always protect our flock from the wolves.

An Elitist Sect or the People’s Faith

Then we heard the young and inexperienced neophyte without seminary training, publicly in church declaring to us who were of many nationalities that the Greek Patriarch Bartholomew was ‘satanic’ and that he ‘disliked Romanians and only half-liked Moldovans’. Now we do not agree with several personal opinions and actions of Patriarch Bartholomew (like a lot of his bishops, priests and people, including the monks of Mt Athos, who are very good people who our dear friends and completely agree with us on these subjects), but we would never, never call him ‘satanic’. He may have an all too human weakness for money, like many bishops in another Local Church and we can name quite a few of them, including the one who called him ‘satanic’. The pot calling the kettle black. There are a dozen or so Greek parishes in London, all attended by 200-300 every Sunday of the year. We respect them. As for the single small church of that young convert, people flee its ‘police-state’, sectarian and schismatic nature. We know many of the refugees who have at last seen through it, as they now come to us.

His words were incredible. We were all horrified. A stunned silence fell on us as we heard his awful views. As for the racism of this Non-European newcomer, a new ‘Orthobro’, but not an Orthodox and certainly not a Christian, not just towards the many pious Greeks, who carry out dozens of baptisms and chrismations of Non-Greeks in this country every few months, but also towards the mass of very pious and honourable Romanians and Moldovans, as well as to English people who practised the Orthodox Faith before he was even born, we were absolutely appalled. And this alien individual was supported by his colleagues in distant America, where they do not understand Europe and despise us. It was clear that the young and very aggressive ideological son of NATO, who, like the rest of the American elite, claimed to be exceptional and able to impose its imperialism on us, had rejected all possibilities of helping to build the Local Church.

Helping to build a Local Church has always been the aim of our lives, as we are neither psychopathic ideologues, nor narrow racists, but shepherds, and so we welcome all the sheep without political or racial distinction to our church, as Christ commanded us to do. (Have you not read the last words of St Matthew’s Gospel? We do not send people away because they are not rich enough or are not effete enough). On the other hand, he had chosen the path of isolationism and sectarianism, cutting himself off from communion with all, even from his own Russian Church, and punishing all who disagreed with him. This was his practice of what he considered to be ‘punishing’ or, with the typically American Protestant mentality, ‘sanctioning’ us, so revealing his Lutheran/Calvinist witch-hunting mentality.  His actions said: ‘You dare disagree with me? Then I hate you and I will punish you’.

Our Struggle for Truth

In reality, he punished himself through his uncanonical and schismatic actions and destroyed his own already tiny diocese, the only remaining meaning of whose existence since 2007 had precisely been to contribute towards building Local Churches – our own aim. His act was an act of suicide. Since we left him, we have doubled our income and are now intending to buy a house for a third priest and pay him a salary. We have a candidate. At that time, we faced the choice of belonging to a weirdy-beardy sect of converts, or of belonging to a mass faith, to an elitist sectarian religious ghetto, which had usurped and replaced its legitimate head and forged his signature, or to the faith of the people. Filled with narcissism, and so jealousy, and so hatred, after forging its own head’s signature, sidelining him and creating its own Metropolitan, the group expelled all the senior clergy who know the Tradition and replaced them with itself and others who also have no heart and only an extremist ideology.

This was clearly not the way forward. They had committed spiritual and so moral suicide (loss of faith always ends in suicide) and destroyed their once immense potential. They had created an irrelevant and narrow sect, a fake Church, in full view of the broad and deep Orthodox world, to the wonder of men and angels alike. We faced the refusal, for purely political and suicidal reasons, of the canonical but once again captive (only the captors have changed from Soviet atheists to centralising State nationalists) Russian Orthodox Church (the ‘Sourozh Diocese’) to receive us on 10 May 2021. Next we faced the brute political force used to make the Western European Archdiocese of the Russian Church, where we had sought refuge from persecution, abandon us, and so abandon the cause of a Local Orthodox Church of Western Europe in the Russian Church, in February 2022. Where would we go after fifty years?

As so often in history before, those who should not have been distracted by politics, did just that and so forgot about the salvation of souls. Thus, in the history of the wealthy Capital of Saint Petersburg, spiritual leadership went from the mighty bishops of this world to a widow turned tramp, St Ksenia, and to a provincial pastor, despised by his jealous bishops and hated by the aristocrats who wanted to kill him, St John of Kronstadt. Following the political captivity and so marginalisation of the now isolated two main Local Churches, who would take over the spiritual leadership of the Orthodox peoples? We would go to the centre where are the other fourteen Local Churches, to the astounding churchmen in the singing mountains of Carpatho-Russia and on the sunshone banks of the Jordan, of martyred Damascus and martyred Bachneny, of Tirana and Tbilisi, of Iasi and Warsaw, of Brno and Belgrade, of Budapest and Rila, of Kiev and Limassol, of Athos and Jerusalem. We would go to the living fountains of piety where God directed us to go.

Our Romanian Orthodox Church Home

The negotiations that took place on the very next day, 16 February 2022, with our friend Metropolitan Joseph, whom we had known for nearly 25 years, took four hours. All our churches and all our clergy (except for one new convert reader who naively fell to the sect) and literally 99% of our people transferred to the Romanian Orthodox Church, keeping everything as it was before. All this took place just eight days before the latest phase of the US proxy war against the Ukraine and Russia was triggered on 24 February 2022.

This passage to the Romanian Orthodox Church was entirely providential, as in this way we could remain outside politics, remaining multinational, keeping Moldovans, Romanians, Russians, Ukrainians and everyone else together, remaining on the old calendar, but also free to do services on the new calendar for all who wished. And what will happen if the British Establishment bans the Russian Church completely? The equally Russophobic Establishment in Latvia has already done that and it may happen in Estonia. It could happen here. Perhaps all will join the Romanian Church? Providentially we will still be here for all the Russians who are really Orthodox, who are not flag-waving nationalists or centralising ideologues. Others may not be allowed to remain here to care for them pastorally. We shall still be here.

On Palm Sunday 2024 we once more saw that our church building is too small. Nearly 100 people were standing outside, as the church can only take 500 people. Some 150 of these people were children. As for our overflow parish in Little Abington outside Cambridge, it was packed with 100 people, including more refugees from the schismatic Russians in Chiswick. Here then we face a new dilemma. With several seminary-trained laymen and excellent singers in the parish, we have to look seriously at setting up more new churches. After Norwich and Cambridge, we are now looking at Harlow and Southend. And then we still have to buy permanent premises for our growing Felixstowe Orthodox community. And permanent premises for the communities in Coventry, Wisbech and York? We have seminary-trained candidates for the priesthood. They can be ordained. After all we are the People’s Church.

The People’s Church: The Church They Tried to Close, Announced is Closed, and Which ‘is Now Empty and Where No-one Goes’!

In retrospect, we can cope with so many people because we had slowly been moving towards this point for years, ever since the repose of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor to St John, who had established a multinational Archdiocese. However, after him, they dismantled this. I can remember exactly twenty years ago how we were told the following by those who left us in 2021:

‘We do not like other Orthodox because they have divorces, which we don’t have’. (My answer: Of course you don’t have divorces, because you have not had a single wedding for 25 years, because you are all so old, let alone have baptisms). ‘We do not like other Orthodox, they do different services in the same church at the same time. In one corner of the church one priest is doing a baptism, in another corner a second priest is doing a memorial service’. (My answer: What ignorance! This is perfectly normal. A church that is not doing this is dying out, it is underused).

‘We don’t like their church. It’s too noisy because there are too many children there’. (My answer: Yes, it can be noisy in church because there are lots of children. Children are life. It’s not like your church, where everyone is aged over 65. As a result of your dislike of children, your church is dying out’). And they even continued, quite shockingly: ‘Our church is like a glass of clean water; theirs is a glass of dirty water’. (My answer: Why are so many of your clergy being defrocked for moral reasons then? Remember your ‘Very Reverend’ Archimandrite Antony Grabbe, the protected son, who stole six million dollars and debauched nuns? Your view is in any case phariseeism). Obviously, we would never belong to this alien American sect of newcomers, when they ordered its formation and final fall in 2021.

Our Easter Message

How do we cope with so many people? For years I have been going to Kiev and bringing back what we need and reserves in heavy suitcases. We use bigger chalices (we have five of them), we have four stands for confession, use bigger and more utensils. We have the blessing from our Metropolitan for our deacons to give communion in order to cut down on the time taken by 200-400 communions. We are ready. Later this year we will have our own bishop in his new Cathedral in North London. For many years my niece used to work at St Paul’s Cathedral. I used to say that one day we would need that church, built according to the legend there where the Apostle of the Gentiles preached all those years ago, as we will be able to fill it. They laughed at me then, but that day is coming.

As for two calendars, we cope with them quite simply because we are pastors, not insecure, sectarian ‘onetruechurch’ ideologues, who tell lies about others. We do exactly like the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of the old Russian Church did, for he was the successor of St John of Western Europe. He too was obliged to leave Kiev. He had many old calendar Russian parishes, but his biggest parish in France was the Romanian new calendar parish. (Just like the Moscow Patriarchate which has new calendar parishes in Austria and Bulgaria, for example). Our Metropolitan Joseph has the same attitude, because he too is a pastor, not an ideologist, and so accepts both calendars for the fixed feasts and concelebrates with all. We clergy all agree to look after our people. People follow the example set by the clergy and accept each other and different customs.

There are people who keep the fast as strictly as possible (they examine the ingredients of all the food they buy as closely as possible), but they hate their neighbour as much as possible. Such people are not ours. Our Easter Message is quite simple. At the Last Judgement we shall be judged only on whether we showed love for others or hatred for others through the actions of our hearts. Our friend the Romanian priest who did 800 confessions in one week, staying at church from 7 am to 7 pm every day and who washed the feet of twelve parishioners on Holy Thursday, shows the way. Christ, the Son of God become man, the only Knower of hearts, showed the greatest love of all, allowing himself to be crucified out of love, so that He could offer all victory over death and the Resurrection of salvation. We follow Him and always will do. The wolves of this world have lost. Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion. Together with the thousand voices of Easter Night again we say: Christ is Risen!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

City of Colchester, England,

Eastertide 2024

 

 

Nine Canons For Modern Times

In the last times the followers of Antichrist will go to church, get baptised and preach the Gospel commandments. But do not believe those who have no good deeds. You can only know a real Christian by his works. True faith is in the heart, and not in the reason. He who has faith in his reason will follow Antichrist and he who has faith in his heart will perceive who he is.

St Gabriel (Urgebadze)

Canon I

Any bishop has the right to impose a schism with another canonical Orthodox Church or any Diocese of it, forbidding his clergy to concelebrate with it and excommunicating all their clergy and people, even though his own clergy and people have close relatives or lifelong friends in that Church or Diocese. This schism may be imposed for ideological or for racial reasons and this is quite acceptable. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon II

Any bishop has the right to depose clergy who refuse to hand over to him large amounts of money or property, so that he can live a luxurious lifestyle. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon III

Any bishop has the right to abduct his head bishop, whether Patriarch, Metropolitan or Archbishop, in order to ensure that he can then do whatever he wants. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking

Canon IV (The Geneva Canon)

Any bishop has the right to depose another bishop whom he dislikes in order to ensure that he can then do whatever he or his protege want in the place of the deposed bishop. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon V

Any bishop has the right to depose any clergyman who disagrees with his personal political opinions, in order to ensure that he can preach whatever he wants without opposition. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon VI

Any bishop has the right to depose any clergyman who reports to his fellow-bishops that the bishop in question is homosexual. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon VII

Any bishop has the right to be jealous of any clergyman who is more successful than him in attracting people to the church. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon VIII

Any bishop has the right to forge the signature of his head bishop, whether Patriarch, Metropolitan or Archbishop, electronically, in order to ensure that he can do whatever he wants. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon IX

Always remember the main principle: Hate your neighbour as much as you hate yourself.