Category Archives: Orthodox Life

The World and the Church after 2022

Introduction: After the Military Campaign

The date of 24 February 2022 has already gone down in world history. We come to the end of a vital crossroads year and a revolution that happens only once every 500 years. With the end of Western Conquistador Civilisation, we try to peer over the horizon into 2023 and beyond. What will come after the Ukrainian war is over? Some who follow Western reporting of that conflict may be surprised by this statement. However, that reporting has been a strange mixture of delusional fantasies/wishful thinking and straightforward propaganda organised by the secret services, omitting truth, logic and reality. Journalists have been ordered to report such nonsense from on high (otherwise, they would have lost their careers and their income). Such reporting has essentially been destined to try and keep Western peoples under control in the hardships they are facing as a result of the suicidal decisions of their pro-US political elites. The US elite is making use of the meagre resources of its NATO vassals (so-called ‘allies’), using as its battlefield the Ukraine and as its cannon fodder Ukrainians and mercenaries. But Russian victory is inevitable, even if delayed because the US wants to make the Ukraine into its Second Vietnam.

The Western elite wants to fight ‘to the last Ukrainian’. (“We don’t care how many Ukrainians will die. How many women, children, civilians and military. We don’t care. Ukraine cannot take the peace decision. The peace decision can only be taken in Washington. But for now we want to continue this war, we will fight to the last Ukrainian.” Former US Senator Richard Blake). Therefore it is supplying all sorts of lethal arms for hundreds of thousands more of them to die and be wounded. Even if some in NATO dare to send more tens of thousands of their ‘willing’ to the slaughter in the Ukraine directly, and not in Ukrainian uniform, as with the tens of thousands of mainly Polish mercenaries at present, many of them already dead, that victory is still inevitable. Russia has been preparing for a full-scale Continental war ever since 2014. Even if next year the 200,000 strong Polish Army and reservists attack, armed to the teeth by the USA, Russia is ready. Although the prophecies of the saints and elders indicate May 2024 as the end of this ten-year long war (the US elite started it through their Ukrainian puppets in 2014), prophecies are always conditional on repentance and we should not try to determine exact details from them. Whatever happens, the next few years are going to see revolutionary transformations worldwide as a result of this war.

The New World Order

The most dramatic event after its defeat in the Ukraine will surely be the retreat of the USA, as it is expelled from Eurasia, a process which began in Vietnam and then continued in Iraq and Afghanistan. The nationalist Trump wanted to withdraw voluntarily, but he was not allowed to, therefore the humiliating US withdrawal will happen by force, as it did in Kabul. ‘Yanks, go home’, chants the whole world, including many in Western Europe, tired of US tyranny. In Eurasia the US now occupies only a few islands (Taiwan, Japan, Singapore), the tips of two peninsulas (Korea and Western Europe) and the seaboard edge Israel. It will have to leave all of these, except for the Non-Palestinian parts of Israel. Taiwan will naturally return to China, Japan will have to find its own way, reconciling itself to a reunited Korea and submitting itself to China economically. For Western Europe, see below.

Once home, the USA will have to lick its wounds and be deoligarchised by popular revolt. The dedollarisation of the world economy is already under way, with very serious consequences for the deindustrialised US economy. The American Empire will undergo deimperialisation, like the European Empires after 1945, and, if at all possible, have to find some sort of unity, identity and sovereignty in its highly polarised, highly indebted and highly fragilised situation. Outside the US, the world chants ‘Yanks, go home’, but inside the US, ordinary Americans chant: ‘Feds, go home’. It is the same thing. The swamp must be drained. The departure of the USA from Western Europe after its eighty-year long occupation will mean the end of the already much disarmed and futile NATO. The suicidal bankruptcy of the European countries will also lead to the end of NATO’s political and economic arm, the EU.

This will mean the reconfiguration of the tip of the European peninsula and its resovereignisation, a process which has already begun in Hungary. In the Western Balkans, Camp Bondsteel, the second largest US base in the world, will be abandoned, and Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Bosnia will rearrange themselves in the post-American world, the world of long-awaited justice. The future of Europe is not thousands of miles across the Atlantic, but eastwards, next door, in its natural sources of energy, food, fertiliser and manufactures. Europe as a separate Continent is after all a pure fiction, an artificial construct which was created from and cut off from the Eurasian landmass for purely political reasons. Europe is about to learn this, as it returns to its roots, which Russia alone has kept. A Russian-led Europe provides the prospect of a unity of sovereign but confederal Northern Eurasia ‘from sea to shining sea’, in fact, from Reykjavik to Tokyo. It is the future, in which the USA is utterly irrelevant. Its ‘lies-based order’ of genocidal chaos is over.

Inside Russia itself the transformation has already begun, with treacherous members of the ‘creative class’ gone to their spiritual home in Israel, with Pugachova and Zelensky, as well as across the borders to Georgia and Finland. This cleansing process and the ensuing Re-Russification of Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus will go far. After the deviations of 200 years of Imperial Russia – and there were very serious deviations then – otherwise Tsar Nicholas II would not have wanted to return to pre-Imperial Russia, to ‘Rus’ and there would never have been 1917 – 75 years of Marxist Sovietisation and 30 corrupt years of the Americanisation and so oligarchisation, the transformation has far to go. There will be a great and radical refreshing and cleansing of national identity after this unheard-of period of decadence and corruption, which ultimately stretches back over 300 years. All Russian institutions, including the still Sovietised Church, together with its small branches founded by post-1917 emigres, will be transformed. The uncompromised Russian Church, freed from the moneychangers, will arise from the embarrassing ruins of the past. The past is over. The arrival of the future in 2022 has made it all so irrelevant.

The New Christian Order

As regards the current versions of Western Christianity, Protestantism (1517-2017) is largely a spent force within the Western world, its 500-year best before date is up. Just as it was launched by printing technology, it has been ended by internet technology. Puritanism preached ‘Hate the sin and especially hate the sinner’, now its just as aggressive descendant, Wokeism, preaches, ‘Love the sinner and especially love the sin’. In other words, all is permitted. The once full churches of Protestantism close down in their hundreds every year in the Western world. It was what it was, a moralising and White Supremacist blip in history, both for good, as in keeping promises, honesty, integrity and moral uprightness, and for bad, as in the ruthless and unsustainable exploitation of human and natural resources, including slavery, the obsession with money and saving money, as well as boring and iconoclastic philistinism caused by narrow-minded bigotry, and the tragic, rigid, literalist, moralising, unnatural and pharisaical repression of human nature, causing crass hypocrisy and misogyny, to the point of the slaughter of women as ‘witches’.

As for Roman Catholicism, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it was taken over by the CIA in the early sixties to be used as a political battering ram against the USSR. And it too is also largely a spent force (1054-2054?) in the Western world. Covered-up pedophilia and the misogyny of compulsorily unmarried and frustrated clerics, some of them perverts, now exposed, are killing it off. Little wonder that some say that the present Pope is the last one. However, if Catholicism can be freed of American and European political stooges and cleansed of its inherent millennial secularism, it at least can return to roots (Protestantism as a schismatic, splintering protest opinion movement has in itself no roots to return to). Liberated from Rome, the people now called ‘Catholics’ can reflourish in new forms, especially in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, providing that Catholicism goes native, yet remains traditional, and the Global South’s clergy’s almost universal, but hypocritically concealed marriages can be recognised officially. This will mean Catholicism divesting itself of the secularist and corrupt Western Middle Ages and returning to the spirit of the pre-Roman Catholic Faith of first millennium Western Europe.

As regards the Non-Western, Orthodox Church, the 200 million in the at present fifteen local branches of the Orthodox Church, the Dewesternisation revolution will be just as radical. At present there is the 7%, the 14 million of the Greek Churches of Constantinople, Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria and Jerusalem. Once the US Establishment, which stands behind them all and meddles intensively in their affairs, has retreated, freedom will come to them at last. As for the Russian Church, the 70% or 140 million, just as for the 23% or 46 million of the other Non-Greek Churches, in Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, Macedonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Albania, the revolution will also necessarily be radical. They are all going to have to be freed from the Western disease of worldliness:

‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all those who sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said to them: It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves’.

The Future of the Russian Church outside the Western World

The whole Russian political campaign over the last twenty-two years to move towards a multipolar/polycentric world is now coming to fruition. The Big Four, Russian, China, India and Iran, are being joined by many countries from all Continents in the Global South in huge and powerful Non-Western organisations like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), the SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Organisation) and the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union), to form a new G20 to replace the failed American vassal one. Now this multipolar/polycentric world, inherently anti-centralist, will be reflected in Church life. The old and failed centralisation of Constantinople and Moscow especially, which has always brought corruption in its wake, will eventually disappear in the global internet age of transparency and diversity, where people are seen for what they are. This is a warning to all tyrants and bullies. Your secrets are being found out. Your time is up.

Russian nationalists and old-fashioned centralisers believe that once Russia has taken over the Ukraine, the Church in the Ukraine will return to being part of the Russian Church. This is absurd. The Russian campaign has made most real Ukrainians into disaffected enemies of everything Russian. A military and political victory is only military and political. In the New Ukraine (or whatever it will be called), with a majority Orthodox population of between 10 and 20 million, inhabited by real Ukrainians, the people will simply refuse to attend Russian churches. There are already over thirty independent Ukrainian parishes under Metr Onufry in the Diaspora. The insistence on Soviet-style centralism that has caused the appalling mess in the Russian Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, as also in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and in the Western world, will have to be remedied. Just as new Autocephalous Churches were eventually founded (as late as the 1950 and 1970s) in Poland, Czechoslovakia and ‘America’ (as well as Autonomous Churches for the very small flocks in Japan and China), Autocephalous Churches will inevitably be founded as a result of the break-up of the Soviet Union. Thirty years have passed. It is high time.

The many dioceses of the Russian Church outside the Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus have lost their multinationalism. That has finally been destroyed in the last ten months in the Ukraine. Exarchates like that already in Belarus will not be enough elsewhere, though no doubt new Exarchates will be founded in countries like Kazakhstan. The Church in Moldova, already 20% under the Romanian Patriarchate, may perhaps not even become an Exarchate, but rather an autonomous part of the Romanian Orthodox Church, using the old calendar and with its own customs, just as our own Moldovan/Russian/ Romanian group of parishes in England already does.

The Russian Church is set to become a Family of Autocephalous Churches, perhaps relatively close to the Mother-Church, like the Church of Poland, the Church of the Czechs and Slovaks and the OCA in America, but still fully independent of it. This is the best left-behind Moscow can hope for now. The process has already long been under way. Moscow will just have to recognise reality as a fait accompli. Reality will dawn. The grassroots have voted. You cannot force people to belong to an alien Church. Thus, there will be formed a new ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’, not just of the Russian, Polish and Czechoslovak Churches, but, we think, perhaps with as many as eight more new Local Churches. This could bring the total number of Local Churches, recognised by all, from fifteen to twenty-three. We suggest that new Autocephalous, not Autonomous, Churches, because the numbers are too great for that, will be founded in the Non-Western world in:

The Ukraine. Nobody knows what will become of the former 25 provinces of the typically Soviet-centralised, because wholly Communist-invented, Ukraine. It seems likely that between 7 and 12 of them will return to Russia, as 5 already have by large democratic majorities, 3 may return to Poland, 1 to Romania and 1 to Hungary. (The latter could in turn become the foundation for a future Hungarian Orthodox Church). But whatever the New Ukraine will look like, it will have its own, Ukrainian-speaking, Autocephalous Church.
The Baltics. Finland (that is, all the Orthodox in Finland who want to live on the Orthodox Paschalia, which is a definition of canonical Orthodoxy), Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania together have a large enough Orthodox population and enough bishops to form their own Autocephalous Church. A Church for these Four Nations will put paid to any petty, provincial nationalism.
South-East Asia. The present Exarchate of South-East Asia will in time become at least one Autocephalous Church, though its territory may be defined differently from now.
Africa. Whatever may be thought of the recent Russian initiative there, it is now too late for the Russian Church to give up its Exarchate of some 200 parishes and clergy in Africa – even if it wanted too. The colonial Greek Church of Alexandria has had little future for a long time. It had many missionary chances and dismissed most of them over the centuries. A nominal flock of perhaps one million out of a population of one billion Africans is not convincing as a missionary effort. The at present Russian Exarchate in Africa will relatively soon have native African bishops – candidates are already studying in Russia – and it will in time become an Autocephalous, and genuine, African Orthodox Church, albeit 1,700 years late.

The Future of the Russian Church inside the Western World

At present the CIA and its daughter-agencies manipulate much of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Western world, just as it does the Patriarchate of Constantinople. It interferes in Orthodoxy, just as it does in Catholicism, there using the Papacy as its stooge, here bishops. Divide and rule is the slogan and it has successfully done that, polarising into liberal Greeks and conservative Russians. Both groups are manipulated and infiltrated by exactly the same secularism, according to their inherent political weaknesses. It is time to solve the Diaspora problem at last. 100 years late. We suggest that new Autocephalous Churches will be founded in the Western world in:

Northern America. Unlike the term ‘North America’, this geographical term means the USA and Canada, together with some northern islands like Bermuda. Here missionaries can build on the OCA, renaming it the NAOC (North American Orthodox Church). The OCA was vital and brave, yet flawed, because of the Cold War and because it despised parts of the Tradition. If co-operation between Greeks, Russians, Arabs, Serbs, Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians and others can be achieved without imperialist condescension and political and nationalist meddling from Greeks and Russians in particular, there is real hope that a new Local Church can be founded.
Latin America. Stretching over a vast territory from Argentina to Mexico and including the Caribbean, here there is a great need for a new Local Church, though much input must come from the Arab Orthodox world.
Oceania. Centred in Australia, here there is a great need for a new Local Church, though much input must come from the Greek Orthodox world.
Western Europe. This has far more Orthodox than any other part of the Western world. Now 80% are Romanians/Moldovans (a quarter of Romania, over 4,000,000 Orthodox, and a third of Moldova, 1,400,000 Orthodox, live in Western Europe, especially in Spain, Italy, Germany and England. There are also over 1,000,000 Greeks, Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Arabs, Ukrainians and others. It is really scandalous that there is not already a Local Church – the WEOC. First Greeks and then Russians have lacked the courage and will to follow the canons. The hopes we once had in them have been dashed by their nationalist politics. The great responsibility for the future now appears to lie in the hands of by far the largest and by far the most recent immigrant group, the Romanians and Moldovans.

Conclusion: Build Up the Church of God or Die in Irrelevance

New Local Churches are going to appear outside the Western world. This, outside the Western world, may be a fairly straightforward matter for the Russian Church. Inside the Western world, it is a far more complex matter because of the present multi-jurisdictional situation. It does not depend on Russians. They lost their chance. The solution will demand diplomatic talent and co-operation, between Romanian, Greek, Russian, Arab, Serbian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Georgian Orthodox. All of them have diasporas. National dioceses and deaneries can be set up within a multinational structure not dominated by any one nationality, as to a large extent Northern America lived under the future St Tikhon of Moscow some 120 years ago. So much time has been wasted through political meddling and nationalist despotism and it is still being wasted now. Russians refused to learn from the mistakes of Greeks and Greeks refused to learn from the mistakes of Russians.

Any extremists who do not want to co-operate because they are flag-waving nationalists (that is, secularists) will be left to one side. Any ecumenist modernists who do not even want to celebrate Easter on the Orthodox calendar will also be left to one side. The same goes for right-wing sectarian groups like the new ROCOR (the old ROCOR was sadly killed off in infamy by love of the dollar and greed for power) and other old calendarist groups who do not want to belong to the Church of 200 million, but only to tiny exclusivist ghettos. They too will be left to one side. The exclusivists who refuse to co-operate with other Local Churches, in the pharisees’ imagination of their proud hearts thinking themselves superior to them, have lost their purpose, their raison d’etre. As sectarians, they have made themselves irrelevant, discrediting themselves with cultish and hypocritical practices and attempts at intimidation, threats and guru-style mind control. As for us, we simply ignore them and continue to build!

December 2018-December 2022: On Becoming a Local Church

After the Liturgy for the Feast of the Entrance into the Temple of the Mother of God on Sunday 4^th December, Fr Andrew was interviewed informally about the present situation of the Orthodox Church. Below is the slightly edited interview.

Q: What would you say about the events in the Orthodox Churches over the last four years?

A: The present very tragic situation of the Local Orthodox Churches is such that I almost feel nostalgic for the first third of my Orthodox life, before 1989, during the Cold War. In those days there were two groups of Local Churches: those in front of the Berlin Wall and those behind the Berlin Wall. All was clear. You knew exactly why some spoke in one way (because they had a Communist gun in their backs) and why others spoke in another way (because they had an anti-Communist gun in their backs). The first were involuntary hostages, the second were voluntary hostages.

I did not think I would live to see the present chaos, which has accumulated as a result of the errors over the last thirty-three years. First of all, precisely in December 2018, exactly four years ago, the Church of Constantinople, backed by the USA, for purely political and financial reasons started a major schism with the Russian Church in the Ukraine (it had already started a minor one in Estonia, back, I think, in 1994). This 2018 event was the foundation of the OCU, or ‘Poroshenko’s Orthodox Church’ (PCU), as it is called in Ukrainian. Result? The Russian Church refused to concelebrate or have anything to do with the Church of Constantinople and all those who supported it, for example, the Church of Alexandria. In so doing, however, it locked itself into isolation.

Then, in 2019, the small New-York-based Diaspora part of the Russian Church began taking numerous clergy and churches from Constantinople. This caused even more division and controversy. Then, exactly two years ago, in December 2020, the same fraction started a schism with the other Diaspora part of the same Russian Church, which is based in Paris. So there developed a still unresolved schism inside the Russian Church itself! A Church in schism with itself. What have we come to? Then, a year later, in December 2021, the Russian Church formed a schism in Africa, taking nearly 200 clergy and parishes from the Patriarchate of Alexandria, nearly half of its total number of missions there.

As if that was not enough, on 24 February 2022 the Russian Federation invaded the Ukraine and most of the hierarchy of the Russian Church backed the action. From this highly divisive moment on, the once multinational Russian Church started splitting into different Churches, the Russian, the Ukrainian, the Latvian, and perhaps tomorrow the Estonian, the Moldovan and the Lithuanian (where the situation is already dire after the uncanonical defrockings of clergy for merely expressing a different political viewpoint from the Russian Patriarch).

As a result, the Russian Orthodox parishes in Western Europe are cruelly affected, for a majority of their clergy and people are not Russians from Russia, but Baltic Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans etc. So people have left those parishes, many of which are now undermined. Therefore new parishes of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (not the tiny and uncanonical OCU) have been opened for the (so far) four million Ukrainian refugees in Western Europe. The situation is catastrophically divisive.

Oh, for the good old days of the Cold War! It was all so simple then.

The whole situation is in an out of control spiral. Where will it end? What has happened over the last four years – most of the events taking place every December – is that the century-old uncanonical chaos of the Diaspora, with its multiple jurisdictions, has been spread to Estonia, the Ukraine and Africa and may very well spread elsewhere. For example, it now looks as though Cyprus is going to be affected in the same way, with two jurisdictions developing there too.

This is all due to a problem of lack of authority in the Church, caused by those who are more interested in politics than in Christ. And here authority is very different from bullying authoritarianism. Authority comes from the Holy Spirit, whereas authoritarianism comes from a perverted human spirit.

Little wonder that the Vatican is looking on and saying: ‘What do you expect, look at the chaos of the Orthodox Churches, always at each others’ throats, because they do not have the Pope in control and guaranteeing unity’. Of course, that is nonsense. Anyone who knows anything about the schismatic situations within the Roman Catholic Church knows it to be nonsense. Nevertheless, there is a problem and that problem can only be solved by the highest organ of authority in the Church, a real Orthodox Council, free of politics. Sadly, at the present time the chances of that are probably as small as they were fifty years ago. We have not moved forwards at all. However, miracles do happen.

Q: What do you think will happen in the Ukraine?

A: The arms and army of Russia will win against the very weak and now even weaker NATO in the very risky war that the US began there in 2014. For there has never been a war between Russia and the Ukraine. The latter is just a location for the NATO battles. The war has always been purely between Russia and NATO. The Ukrainians and the huge number of mainly Polish mercenaries there have only been pawns and cannon fodder for the USA, just like the now increasingly arm-less NATO. The new cemetery for them in Poland has 1,200 dead so far.

However, the coming Russian victory in the face of the lack of real support for Kiev on the part of the now bankrupt West, does not solve the pastoral problem. You can conquer a country, but you cannot force its people to attend your churches. There will have to be an Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, without mention of a Russian Patriarch. The only very unlikely chance of unity would be if there were to be a Ukrainian Patriarch of the whole Russian Church and the ‘Moscow’ title was dropped from it altogether. Then the once multinational Russian Church might be restored.

Q: But surely this is just another Cold War situation, with the Church divided as before into two, East and West?

A: Not at all. It is far more complex than that. There are now three groups of Local Orthodox Churches. There is the Russian Church all by itself in the first ‘group’ and the US-backed Constantinople/Alexandrian Churches in the second group. Those two groups are at daggers drawn. Then, there is the third group, the thirteen other Local Churches. The thirteen others are the only ones that are in communion with everyone, Greek and Russian alike, but still independent of both of them.

True, the Cypriot and Greek Churches may well be forced by political pressure from the local US ambassadors to join the Constantinople/Alexandria group. This would leave only eleven in the third group, independent of both Russian and American politics. However, it seems as if more new Local Churches will also be founded and increase the number of those eleven. Certainly, Autocephalous Ukrainian and Latvian Churches would join that group and any others that might come into existence, for example, perhaps in Moldova. Quite simply, nobody wants to be too close to the Russian or Constantinople Churches at the present time, but all want to remain distant from them and any schismatic actions.

Q: So there is great disunity in the Church?

A: Tragically, yes. For instance, if I think about the Russian-French parish where I used to serve in Meudon, a suburb of Paris, I can clearly see this disunity. In Meudon there used to be only one church, the one where I served. It united everyone locally. Now there are three small parishes in the same small suburb and none of them is in communion with each other! There is the one where I served, which sadly has become very closed, almost club-like and very much Russian only, excluding Non-Russians and even Russians who do not have a certain spirit. Secondly, there is a very modernist Greek parish, which mainly uses French, and finally there is an old calendarist Greek parish, which also mainly uses French. It is so sad to see this quite unnecessary disunity. This is not a local church, but three anti-local churches.

Q: How do you see your own situation in Colchester?

A: In Colchester we defended the church against the evil one. Let me explain.

I remember in 1976 the Belarussian priest in Cambridge, a dear friend, Fr John Piekarsky (Eternal Memory to him), telling us how in the late 60s all the people in his home village in Belarus near Dokshitsy, gathered together and stood around their village church which the atheists, instructed by the crazy Ukrainian Khrushchov, wanted to destroy. An armed militia faced them. The people made it clear that the soldiers would have to gun everyone of them down in order to close their church. The militia backed off and the church was saved.

We also have a Ukrainian parishioner, whose grandmother, Galina, also in the 60s, just lay down in front of the bulldozer which the atheists were going to use to destroy the village church. She made it clear they would have to murder her, the most respected person in the village, to close the church. The atheists backed off and the church still stands today.

Well, we did the same, using English Trust law as our defence. We too had to defend our church from those who wanted to take it away from us, demanded the keys (which we refused to hand over), persecuted and slandered us (only the weak in faith believed such nonsense), and then wanted to close it, just as the atheist nationalists of the OCU do in the Ukraine. We won with the support of many.

Now is the time to confess the faith, there is no need for martyrdom, that is not yet required. But we have to confess the faith against aggressive bullies, those with hatred and not love in their souls, whether Communist or Capitalist. They will have to kill us to steal our churches. We made that clear to them despite, and because of, their aggressiveness and they backed down and lost everything. That was visible to all.

Q: What sort of churches do you have in your group, which since last February has been inside the Romanian Church?

A: I suppose we are rather like Moldovan churches, not just in the sense that we all have Moldovans, but in the sense that we are Russian and Romanian. However, we are also more than that in Colchester, as we have 25 nationalities and our other churches, in Coventry, Little Abington just outside Cambridge, Wisbech, Bradford and Felixstowe, are all still multinational.

Q: Do you have any Greeks among your parishioners?

A: We have very few Greeks, only four in fact, for the simple reason that there are hardly any practising Greeks in any of those places.

Q: How would you characterise the Colchester parish?

A: As you know, our patron saint is in effect a Ukrainian from Poltava who lived all over the world and was multinational in his outlook, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. He also accepted the Western rite, which at that time, over sixty years ago, was still a reality.

Now, all my life I have worked and prayed that we might be able to build a Local Church. Be careful what you pray for, because you might get it! Well, towards the end of my life, we have managed to avoid all ghettos, both ethnic and ideological, and have been given what we prayed for, a local church.

In the home countries of Orthodoxy, inevitably churches will be mononational. That is normal. In capital cities like London, Paris and Berlin, centres of immigration, you will also have embassy churches, that is, mononational churches. That is not the case here outside London. Here we have to go with the flow, to go with the majority. God sends you a flock of all nationalities, who knock at your door. You behave as the Good Samaritan, not like the priest who walked by on the other side. You have to accept them all, with all their diversity, but it is logical to be with the majority, providing that their hierarchy behaves canonically, and not schismatically.

Q: Isn’t it difficult to have different nationalities together?

A: It can be, but it does not need to be. Nationalists and racists do not come to us (but nationalists and racists tend not to be Christians and, if nominally Orthodox, do not set foot in church anyway), but those with a little tolerance do come. And they learn to accept each other, with the result that you end up with mixed marriages, mixed in the positive sense of inter-Orthodox. For instance, our second priest who is Romanian is married to a Latvian and that is only the tip of the iceberg. We have couples who are Scottish-Cypriot (yes, he did get married in his kilt), Estonian-Nigerian, Moldovan-Guinea-Bissau (that must be unique!), Romanian-Slovak, Ukrainian-South-African, Lithuanian-Serbian, as well as the really rather ordinary English-Russian.

Sad to say, I have seen very many Orthodox parishes all over Europe closing in my lifetime. Why? Because their flocks died out. The original immigrant-parents, the first generation, died and as their children were assimilated and gave up attending a church which to them was foreign, the parishes died out. We must not do the same here. We have hordes of children at our church, between 50 and 100 at every liturgy. I am told that this is more children than in any other church in this country. They are our future. We must not lose them to narrow, bigoted, right-wing ideologies, relating to the past or to the present, or lose them to attempts by exclusivists to grab our properties, as they are the properties which belong to all the local Orthodox of all nationalities, or to some ethnic narrowness, which refuses to preach Christ in the local language.

In the last three months we have chrismated two English people (former Protestants) and baptised another one (who had not previously been baptised) into the Church. May this continue. So, despite the great changes and the chaos caused by politics over the last four years, we continue. We continue despite them all and despite their opposition.

In Memoriam: Daria Dugina

The news of the recent terrorist murder of Alexander Dugin’s daughter, Daria, has shocked us all. Of course, in one sense it is no different from all the other brutal murders of countless human-beings under puppet regimes from the Philippines to Vietnam, from Italy to Latin America, from Greece to Africa, and in many other countries over the last three generations. Nevertheless, it concerns me more personally, as I know her father.

I first met the Russian Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin in London in March 2005. He and I were two of the four speakers at an International Conference on the European Tradition. My approach was spiritual and so politically neutral, his approach was that of a right-wing academic. But regardless of that, we were heading in the same direction and, all the more as I was the only Orthodox priest present, we sympathised. I was able to speak to him between talks and we had a photograph taken together.

Alexander went on to become quite well-known on the academic and political philosophy circuits internationally. His influence on President Putin has been much exaggerated by the Western media which has decided (or rather been ordered) to cast him as ‘Putin’s adviser’, but that is another story. In fact, Alexander was a theoretician. However, as such his books, articles and talks were always stimulating and thought-provoking and will continue to be so.

It is my hope and prayer that the sacrifice of his daughter, Daria, which leaves him heart-broken, as it would any father, will not make him bitter. Rather it will inspire him to purify and refine his thought further, so that his influence through her will be ever greater. Below I attach the talk I gave that day, seventeen eventful years ago. I dedicate it to Daria.

Holy Europe and Anti-Europe

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten

Psalm 136, 6

Foreword

Last November I was invited to come and speak to you about Europe. My viewpoint is perhaps an original one for most of you, since it has an Orthodox Christian perspective. In the Orthodox Church we have a very different understanding of the Trinitarian God, and therefore of life, from that found in the Catholic/Protestant religion. I hope that this will become apparent to you in the course of this talk.

I have lived all over Europe and have travelled in many other parts of Europe and worked with dozens of European nationalities. I have been deeply drawn to many places in Europe, some well-known, others very obscure. I have very good friends in many European countries. So I have learned to have compassion for others, and try and look at the world from different standpoints. The following is a viewpoint which expresses the underlying unity of Europe, but which is also respectful of the diversity of the national traditions of European peoples. I hope that it will be of interest to you.

Introduction: Cynicism and Belief

Great nations are born in real belief and enthusiasm. They die in unbelief and cynicism.

Alfred Noyes, 1937

So wrote the English Catholic poet Alfred Noyes nearly seventy years ago. Perhaps we may also say, paraphrasing his words: ‘Great civilizations are born in real belief and enthusiasm. They die in unbelief and cynicism’. These words, sadly, may seem strangely apt in relation to modern Europe, which does appear to be drowning in unbelief and cynicism.

In today’s decadent European context it may therefore seem peculiar to use the words ‘Holy’ and ‘Europe’ together. However, if we can speak of ‘Political Europe’, ‘Economic Europe’ or ‘Social Europe’, then we should also be able to speak of ‘Holy Europe’. Moreover, it is our duty to speak of this, for it is the belief of the Church that if the European house does not first have a holy foundation, if it is built not on rock, but on sand, then it will possess no lasting moral or cultural values, it will be flooded and blown away, and great will be the fall of it.

It is our belief that the cause of moral and cultural decadence is always in spiritual decadence. It is our belief that a humanity deprived of spiritual values is a humanity doomed to falter and fail in a cultural and moral quagmire. Not believing in God, we no longer believe in ourselves. The result is the purposeless but uniform futility that we see around us in today’s throwaway culture, with its throwaway remarks, disposable goods, junk food, junk music, junk TV, junk culture, junk existence. This is the situation today, not so much of Europe, but of Anti-Europe. How has this Anti-Europe come into being and how can we return to a Europe of spiritual culture and moral dignity, a Europe of nobility and indeed holiness?

Europe and Jerusalem

We have forgotten Jerusalem and the land where He was born

Christmas 1912, J.E. Flecker

In any consideration of Europe and the Christian understanding of the word holiness, we must first point out that Christianity came down from heaven and became incarnate not in Europe, but in Asia. In the fourth century this was the whole sense of planting the capital of the Roman Christian Empire on the Bosphorus. At the gates of Europe and Asia, New Rome, or Constantinople as it came to be called, looked to unite both East and West, as symbolized by the emblem of the double-headed eagle.

Although Christians in Asia, including in the Middle East, were eventually to become a minority in a sea of Islam, the source of what some might call ‘the European Faith’ is not in Europe, but in Asia, or more precisely in Jerusalem. It does not matter whether it was the Russian Patriarch, Nikon (1605-1681), who in the seventeenth century built to the south of Moscow, a complex of buildings imitating the sacred geography of Jerusalem, which he called ‘New Jerusalem’. It does not matter whether it was the English visionary, William Blake (1757-1827), who wrote that he would not cease from mental fight, till we had ‘built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’. It has always been to Jerusalem that Europeans, East and West, have looked for inspiration as the source of holiness. And every step that Europe has taken away from its roots in Jerusalem has always been a step away from Christ. Jerusalem is at the roots of Europe’s Faith and Europe’s Holiness.

Indeed, when the region around Jerusalem where Christ lived was given the name ‘the Holy Land’, Europeans imitated it. Thus, like the Holy Land, the largest country in Europe, Russia, was also given the title ‘Holy’ and called Holy Russia. Elsewhere there is the Holy Mountain (Mt Athos), and in England, Scotland and Wales there are Holy Islands. As for Ireland, it was once known as ‘The Island of the Saints’. And all European countries, from Armenia to Iceland, Lapland to Portugal via Liechtenstein and all points inbetween, have adopted Patron Saints, be it St Gregory or St Columba, St Tryphon or St George and St Theodul, St Andrew or St Patrick, St Modest or St Olaf, St Denis or St Sava, St James or St David.

Furthermore, two European countries and thousands upon thousands of settlements in Europe, have taken their names from those who have won holiness and so become local Patrons. There are Georgia and San Marino, named after St George and St Marinus, and then countless cities, towns, villages, islands, mountains and lakes. To name but a few: St Petersburg in Russia and the same dedication of St Peter Port in Guernsey, St Andrew’s in Scotland and the same dedication of Szentendre in Hungary, the island of São Miguel in the Azores and the same dedications of Archangelsk in the far north of Russia, Monte San Angelo in Italy and Mont St Michel in Normandy, Santiago de Compostela (St James) in Galicia and San Sebastián (St Sebastian) in the Basque Country, Sankt Gallen in Switzerland and Sankt Johann in Austria, Saint Nazaire in France and the island of Aghia Marina in the Dodecanese, Sviatogorsk in the Ukraine and St Alban’s in England, St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly and Santa Cruz, the Holy Cross, in the Canaries.

Another tiny European country, Monaco, is named after the monks who once dwelt there, and there are hundreds of towns named after the same monks and nuns who sought and brought holiness, from München, Mönchengladbach and Münster in Germany, to Monastir in Macedonia. There are countless French towns including the word Moutiers and some thirty-two English minster-towns from Axminster to Westminster. As regards the word ‘church’ and all its equivalents, we could start with Christchurch in the south of England, go to innumerable Llan names in Wales, to Kirkwall in the Orkneys, from there to Dunkirk, the church on the dunes, in northern France, pass on to Belaya Tserkov to the south of Kiev and then back to Trinité sur Mer in Brittany, to cite just a few examples.

Other sites and towns are famous simply as holy places, be it Rome, Echmiadzin in Armenia, Trondheim in Norway, Tinos in Greece, Iasi in Romania, Roskilde in Denmark, Czestochowa in Poland, St Paul’s Bay in Malta, Zhirovitsy in Belarus, Braga in Portugal, Mtskheta in Georgia, Echternach in Luxembourg, Diveyevo in Russia, Montserrat in Catalonia, Rila in Bulgaria, Skellig Michael in Ireland, Pochaiev in the Ukraine, Iona in Scotland, Piukhtitsa in Estonia, Utrecht in Holland, Ochrid in Macedonia, the shrine of the Virgin of Meritxell in Andorra, Pec in Serbia, Birka in Sweden, Marianka in Slovakia, Valaamo in Finland, Fulda in Germany, Velehrad in Moravia, Einsiedeln in Switzerland, or Canterbury in England.

Despite these historic facts, there are those who, to the amazement of men and angels alike, would deny the Christian basis of Europe. Indeed they have just drawn up a Constitution for the atheist Europe of their dreams, and our nightmares. Such people would cut Europe off from its spiritual roots, they would confirm the Anti-Europe.

Europe and Anti-Europe

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

Lord Grey, 3 August 1914

In speaking of an Anti-European spirit we may first think of the insular nationalism of the Irish and the Icelanders, of the Maltese and the Corsicans, of the Cypriots and the Sicilians, of the Sardinians and the English, of the Faeroese and the Shetlanders. Their insularity comes from living on islands. However, continental Europeans can also be insular. Those who live in the mountains have also fought their tribal battles, whether in the Swiss valleys, the mountains of Armenia and Georgia, the Carpathians of Slovakia, the glens of the Scottish clans or in the Balkans, from Bosnia to Croatia, Albania to Macedonia, Serbia to Montenegro, Romania to Bulgaria.

However, it is not only island and mountain peoples who can be insular and nationalistic. The French, for instance, have fought wars to preserve the geometric integrity of ‘L’Hexagone’, ensuring ‘insular’ borders, the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine, the Vosges, the Ardennes. Where there was no natural border, nations constructed the buffer-state of Belgium between France and emerging Germany. Other European countries have been constantly overrun, because they had no natural borders, through lack of insularity, as one might say. The flat plains of Hungary, the Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, provide no protection.

In the modern context, we can also see the same insularity, the same nationalist reluctance to accept others. Western European politicians are prone to say the word ‘Europe’, and in fact mean their own country. ‘La France forte dans une Europe forte’, ‘A strong France in a strong Europe’, was the war cry of French President Jacques Chirac only a few years ago. Many another European politician has made it clear down the years that when they spoke of Europe, in fact they often meant their own selfish interests. Another example: wherever you travel in the European Union, you will see signs with the yellow ring of EU stars, in the centre of which you will find a GB or D or I or SU, or whatever it may be. This is not a European identity, this is a national identity under siege.

Thus, although nationalist insularity can embody the spirit of Anti-Europe, there is also another sort of Anti-European insularity. In order to exercise close control and create the illusion of a centrally united Europe, many politicians speak of ‘Europe’, when in fact they mean the European Union. In fact, this so-called ‘Union’ is not Europe, but merely an insular Europe. It is merely the Western corner of Europe, with some significant gaps – Norway and Switzerland, for example, which, for many, are the most European countries of all. And in this so-called European Union there are the gaps of the two largest countries in Europe: Russia and the Ukraine, and some fifteen other countries and peoples.

There is nothing new in this, for such a European Union was attempted even towards the end of the First Millennium. As the great French medieval historian, Jacques Le Goff, has written of the first attempted European Union, that of the Carolingian Empire: ‘Of all previous attempts to unite Europe, this was the first example of a perverted Europe…it was the first failure of all the attempts to build a Europe dominated by one people or one empire. The Europe of Charles V, that of Napoleon and that of Hitler, were in fact anti-Europes’. (In ‘Was Europe born in the Middle Ages’, p.47 in the French edition of the collection ‘Faire l’Europe’, Seuil, 2003). It is our belief that the present version of the European Union is just such another Anti-Europe. The very word ‘Union’ symbolises this fact, for any centrally-imposed Union, not freely-chosen, inevitably crushes the diversity of its peoples.

True, strides have recently been made to incorporate several ‘missing’ parts of Europe into the European Union. Here I am thinking of the addition of ten more countries to the EU on 1 May 2004. However, these new members have not yet been absorbed into the Brussels machine and perhaps, thank God, never will be. The accession of these ten new members has revealed an obscure but highly symbolic problem; it has proved impossible to find a single person out of 450 million who can interpret or translate from Finnish to Maltese and vice versa. Other permutations, such as Slovak to Danish, Estonian to Greek, Lithuanian to Hungarian, Dutch to Latvian, Slovene to Spanish and vice versa, have also proved very problematic. This problem symbolises the diversity within even the present European Union and the impossibility of actually imposing the Brussels centralist nightmare on such a diverse and obstinately real Europe.

Thus, in our context, when we speak of Anti-Europe, we mean both the nationalist refusal to accept the underlying unity of Europe, and also the internationalist refusal to accept its diversity. By Anti-Europe we mean that spirit which cuts Europeans off from the only thing that Europe really has in common, Jerusalem, Europe’s Christian roots, Europe’s Holiness, and that also cuts Europeans off from other Europeans. For in cutting themselves off from God, Europeans cut themselves off from their neighbours and so become tribal:

In failing to love God, Europe fails to observe the first commandment of the Gospel.

In failing to love its neighbour as itself, Europe fails to observe the second commandment of the Gospel. And he who fails to love his neighbour as himself, automatically begins to hate himself.

And so Europe takes the path of suicide. Hatred of God leads to hatred of man; hatred of man leads to hatred of self.

This is the path that Anti-Europe has taken again and again, from the Deicidal Crusades and Inquisitions of the Middle Ages, to the Fratricidal ‘Wars of Religion’ of the Reformation, to the Suicidal Wars of 1914 and 1939.

After committing tribal genocide against its own European peoples in the first half of the twentieth century, Anti-Europe came directly to its post-1945 reaction. This was the temptation of centralising, creating the cosmopolitan uniformity of the European Union. As a result, since 1945 a cultural suicide has been taking place in Europe. Mafia-like Eurocrats, encouraged by the United States, have tried to impose uniformity on all, crushing European national identities by imposing secularism. This is not the underlying unity of Europe’s roots in Jerusalem, but a false unity, the pseudo-unity of secular Brussels, of Anti-Europe. From the Christian standpoint, such ‘unity’, top-down centralisation, is no more a solution to Europe’s problems than the warring nationalisms which marred so much of Europe’s history in the Second Millennium.

In contrast, the original Christian model of international relations has never been aggressively nationalistic. Neither has it ever been soullessly cosmopolitan and internationalistic. The original Christian model has always been that of Trinitarian unity in diversity, Community, Commonwealth, Confederation. What hope is there for the victory of such a model today?

Europe and Interpatriotism

You are seeking and you shall find,
Not in the way you hope, not in the way foreseen.

A King’s Daughter, John Masefield

It is the recent accession of ten new members to the EU, with very diverse, but very European, histories, cultures and languages, which gives us hope. Their EU membership, together with the future potential membership of other European countries, may at last begin to break down the secular Anti-Europe. New members could destroy Anti-Europe’s ignorant and bigoted cosmopolitanism and its anti-religious ‘political correctness’, imported from post-Christian Puritan America, by creating a new awareness of real European identity. Their membership may at last put paid to the absurd ‘one size fits all’ standardisation and soul-destroying egalitarianism of the present European Union.

Above all, their membership could lead to a new awareness of the underlying stratum of what all European countries really have in common: Europe’s roots in the Faith from Jerusalem. It is those roots which reveal to us neither belligerent nationalism, nor soulless internationalism or Americanisation and Zionisation, which is now camouflaged under the name of ‘Globalisation’. Those roots reveal to the ignorant and bigoted a balance between the national and the international, a replacement for both nationalism and globalisation. I would call this replacement – Interpatriotism; the love not only of one’s own homeland, patriotism, but the love of the homelands of others too.

Bez Boga, ne do poroga. The Russian proverb can be translated freely as ‘No God, no entry’. It neatly illustrates opposition to the present-day EU among all who belong to the European Spiritual Tradition. It neatly illustrates what all European Christians have in common, in spite of and because of, their diversity. There are certain orthodox principles on which all who belong to the European Spiritual Tradition can agree. This is in our opposition to Godless secularism, the spirit of ‘this world’, to which we say ‘No entry’.

We saw this in October 2004 with the affair of Rocco Buttiglione, who was not allowed to express Christian sense, the sort of common sense that fifty years ago every five-year-old European child could express. At the end of 2004, personalities as diverse as Pope John Paul II and Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens, were at one in declaring that Buttiglione had been persecuted for his Faith, the once common Faith of Europe. On 19 November 2004 Cardinal Josef Ratzinger spoke of how the forces of secularism in Europe, the so-called ‘liberal consensus’, have now become aggressive persecutors of European Christendom. Like many others, we had been saying it for years before him.

There are such turning-points in European history, moments of truth, when questions of principle arise. Then we have to say where we stand, in black and white. And the united spiritual forces of Europe, united as they were for most of the First Millennium, the living Faith of Europe, can bring strength. Here I would like to give a few examples from that Europe of the First Millennium, a Europe united in diversity, before the Apostasy, betrayals and tragedies, before the Deicide, Fratricide and Suicide, which rapidly took form in the Second Millennium. For most of the First Millennium, called by many ‘The Age of Faith’, although divided and diverse, there was also unity, a spiritual unity which gave Europe the strength to absorb and baptize barbarian hordes and produce a new Europe. Here are a few names from that epoch, who illustrate true internationalism, or as I have called it – Interpatriotism:

St Irenaeus of Lyon was a Greek from Asia Minor. He was a disciple of St Polycarp, who had been a disciple of St John the Evangelist, ‘the disciple whom Christ loved’. A Church Father, he was Bishop of Lyon in Gaul, where he was martyred for the Faith at the beginning of the third century.

St Chrysolius was an Armenian who lived in the fourth century. Under persecution from the Persians, he left his homeland, went to what is now Belgium, and evangelised the area. He was martyred in Flanders and is still venerated in Bruges.

St Martin of Tours was born in the fourth century in what is now Szombathely in Hungary. He was educated in Pavia in Italy and enrolled in the Imperial cavalry. Posted to Gaul, he left the army after the famous incident in Amiens. He was to become the Bishop of Tours and one of the greatest saints of Christendom, a patron of the Loire Valley, of hundreds of French villages and towns and his name became one of the most common French, and indeed European, Christian names and surnames.

St John Cassian was born in the Dobrudja in what is now Romania. He became a monk in Egypt and in the fifth century established a monastery near Marseille in the south of France, becoming one of the great monastic Fathers of Christendom.

St Martin of Braga lived in the sixth century. Born in what is now Hungary, he became a monk in Palestine, then went to Galicia, in what is now Portugal. He is one of the greatest figures of the Iberian Peninsula and played an important role in converting pagans, like his namesake in Gaul. He made his see of Braga into the first spiritual centre for all north-west Iberia. Indeed, in Portuguese, Braga, ‘the Rome of Portugal’, has become proverbial: ‘tao velho como o sede de Braga’, ‘as old as the see of Braga’, means in English, ‘as old as the hills’.

St Theodore of Tarsus lived in the seventh century in Asia Minor, a hundred miles from the coast of Cyprus. In middle age he left for Rome and there played an important role in uniting East and West at a time of controversy. Then he was appointed the first Greek Archbishop of Canterbury. Here he played a fundamental part in uniting the strands of Irish and Roman Christianity in England, approving both as complementary to one another.

St Boniface was born in Devon in the south-west of England. In the eighth century he went to the German Lands and became a great missionary Archbishop, reforming much of the Christianity of north-western Europe. Supported by three Popes, including the Greek Pope St Zacharias, this Englishman, known as the Apostle of Germany, was martyred in Frisia in Holland in 754.

St George of Córdoba was born in Bethlehem in the ninth century and became a monk at St Sabbas Monastery outside Jerusalem. Fluent in Greek, Arabic and Latin, he then travelled via North Africa to Córdoba in Spain where he preached the Faith, finally being martyred with Spanish brothers and sisters by the Muslims.

St Wenceslas, or Václav, was Duke of the Czech Lands in the tenth century. He was martyred there in intrigues and is venerated in St Vitus Cathedral in Prague to this day, as the Patron-Saint of the Czech Lands.

St Olav was King of Sweden in the mid-tenth century. He and his family were baptized by the English missionary St Sigfrid. His daughter married into the Russian royal house, lived mainly in Novgorod, had twelve children, one of whom is venerated as a saint. In her widowhood, she became a nun, taking the name Anna and is herself honoured as a saint.

St Gregory of Burtscheid was a Greek monk from Calabria who, fleeing from the Muslims, met Emperor Otto III in Rome. At the latter’s invitation, Gregory went north and founded a monastery just outside Aachen where he was a holy Abbot, reposing in 996.

St Simeon of Padolirone was an Armenian pilgrim. Having visited Jerusalem, then Rome, Compostela in Spain and Tours in France, he settled at a monastery outside Padua in Italy, where he was renowned as a wonder-worker, reposing in 1016.

St Simeon of Trier was a Greek, born in Syracuse, educated in Constantinople, and who then lived as a hermit by the River Jordan, in Bethlehem and on Mt Sinai. Sent by his Abbot to Normandy to collect alms, he eventually settled in Trier in Germany and lived there as a much-venerated hermit. He was canonised seven years after his repose, which came in 1035.

Another Anna of the eleventh century, this time of Kiev, married Henri I of France. She played a vital role in spreading Christian values, like many other women of the First Millennium before her. As examples, there are St Clotilde in Gaul, the Greek Theodosia and also Ingonde in Spain, the Bavarian Theodelinda in Lombardy, the French Bertha in England, the English St Bathilde in France, the Czechs, St Ludmila in Czechia and Dubrava in Poland, the Swedish St Helga, or Olga, in Kiev, the Greek Empress Theophano in Germany. In Anna’s eleventh century Kiev, they were to welcome Christians such as Thorwald of Iceland and Gytha of Winchester. Both Kiev and Winchester were famed for their standards of civilization, running water, drains, pavements, education.

Here are but a few examples of the concourse or coming together, of Interpatriotic Europe in the First Millennium, before the advent of both warring nationalism and soulless internationalism in the Second Millennium. In the First Millennium, we find the roots of Europe, we find Holy Europe.

Conclusion: Roots and Routes

Die Weltgechichte is das Weltgericht
The history of the world is the judgement of the world

Friedrich von Schiller

Europe – you forgot holiness, and so you began a hundred wars of crusade and conquest over a thousand years.

Europe – you silenced your conscience, and so you invented the machine-gun and saturation bombing.

Europe – you stifled the voice of God, and so you invented the concentration camp and the Atom Bomb.

Europe – you forsook your roots in Jerusalem, and so you invented Anti-Europe.

I would paraphrase the most terrible, above-quoted words of Friedrich von Schiller, as he spoke in Jena in 1789: Die Europageschichte ist das Europagericht: The history of Europe is the judgement of Europe. The blood-soaked deeds of Anti-Europe are Europe’s judgement, but they are only part of Europe’s judgement. There is another Europe too. As I said at the beginning of this talk, the conjunction of the words ‘Holy’ and ‘Europe’ may seem strange, as though words from two different planets had collided, but I tell you, and have been telling you all this afternoon, that it was not always so. A voice from the past should be jarring on the memory of today’s Anti-Europe.

It is my belief that in seeking common European roots, or origins, we shall find routes, or paths, out of the present European crisis towards what I have called an ‘Interpatriotic Europe’, summed up so harmoniously in the French phrase ‘l’Europe des Patries’. It is in our common spiritual origins that we shall find our common spiritual opportunities. It is in our common spiritual identity that we shall find our common spiritual freedom. But if Europe denies her common roots, her common spiritual origins in Jerusalem, then, as even the warlike Churchill said of earlier twentieth-century Europe: ‘…the whole world…will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science’.

In recent years, I have heard certain naive people declaring that ‘the barbarians are at the gates’. They are not at the gates and have not been for a very long time. The barbarians entered long ago and began their long task of expelling Wisdom from the City. Ever since the barbarians have been parading in the City, destroying the walls and opening the gates wide, whenever new forms of barbarianism appeared. Nevertheless, I would end this talk with words of optimism, inherent to all Christians, who know that the last words in history will be Christ’s. As the Emperor Julian the Apostate is reputed to have said on his death-bed, some sixteen hundred years ago: Thou hast conquered, O Galilean…

Reflections on the Pastoral Crisis: Seven Days and One Thousand Miles in the Life of a Diaspora Priest

Introduction

Last week was particularly busy. Why? Because we are so desperately short of churches and priests in England. The situation in London is one of pastoral abandonment for many. There is now no Russian bishop in the Patriarchal Church. One of the rumours has it that the Russian bishop cannot return from Moscow because of threats to his life in the present Russophobic UK. Is that true? There are other rumours which say quite the opposite. Now there are threats to send any Russian priests who do not have British nationality back to Russia. Who will listen to confessions in Russian? Already the Russian Patriarchal Church has more or less done like the Greek Church, which does no confessions at all because of the shortage of priests (or worse because of an anti-Orthodox ideology), whereas the Russian Patriarchal Church uses the (uncanonical) ‘general confession’. In any case both generally refuse to listen to confessions.

All I know is that in 1985 some had to agree to become freemasons before they could be ordained to the priesthood. (I was one of them and refused, so remained a deacon for seven years). Now in 2022, it seems that you have to agree to do even worse and compromise yourself with the powers that be.

Monday: 100 miles

I travel locally to see several parishioners.

The main topic is the new Ukrainians. Thirty years ago there were 50 million Ukrainians in the Ukraine. Today there are 30 million. Who wants to have and bring up children in a wretchedly poor country without a future? I have been to the Ukraine many times and noticed the absence of children – one-child families are very common. On top of the low birth-rate and the high death-rate (high because who wants to live in a wretchedly poor country without a future?), there are the refugees.

According to UN statistics 10,000,000 Ukrainians fled the Ukraine between February and July 2022, but 4,000,000 returned, making 6,000,000 refugees. 2,000,000 have taken refuge from Ukrainian bombardments in Russia since the war began in 2014. That still leaves 4,000,000, who are now in EU Europe and the UK, half of them in Poland. Quite a few appear to be from the far west of the Ukraine (where, ironically there is no war), so they are Catholics, that is, Uniats, or belong to one of the other schismatic nationalist groups, which worship not God, but the Ukraine. Nobody knows what proportion are canonical Orthodox and what proportion of those are churchgoers, but it must be at least 1% of 4,000,000, or 40,000. Thus, of the 104,000 new Ukrainians in the UK, there may be over 1,000 who are churchgoing, canonical Orthodox.

If these refugees are concentrated in a particular city, for example, in London, they will inevitably set up their own church, as has already been done in Brussels and elsewhere, under Metr Onufry. The Russian Church will not help them, but we in the Romanian Church can help, as we are politically neutral, outside both Russian and Greek political scandals. (This includes the latest scandal in the Russian Church, the highly divisive meeting between the Pope and Patriarch Kyrill, planned to take place in Kazakhstan next month during what is an existential war). Just in our part of the Romanian Church, we have four Russian-speaking priests. (Russian is the main language of the Ukraine. Just as Welsh is the second language of Wales, Ukrainian is the second language in the Ukraine).

From Amsterdam I hear of the pastoral disaster there. The clergy and many laypeople of the large Russian church, which I know very well, has joined the Greek Church, thus splitting the people into two groups Those who did not want to change now celebrate with their (Belarussian) priest in the Armenian church building. I feel sorry for the traitors and narcissists, victims and perpetrators alike. (Yes, even most victims have their responsibility, as it is often cowardice that brought them there, not truth). However, to be overwhelmed by sadness or disgust is not an option for an Orthodox Christian. Some there are already regretting the move, in view of the scandal in the Greek Orthodox Church in North America. Our own Greek parishioners in Colchester know all about this: we live in the internet age, you cannot hide.

Next I receive a phone call from York. I have been going there for years. The community needs its own church. And for that we need money. One couple I knew well actually returned to the Crimea in despair at the situation. I will have to return to York soon to continue missionary work there.

Tuesday: 150 miles

Today is a prison day. I have been a prison chaplain for 10 years now in four different prisons. I do not really have time to do it, but there is nobody to replace me. Of Orthodox prisoners a majority are Romanian. This is normal, given that some two-thirds of the 670,000 Orthodox in the UK are Romanian. Indeed, our Autonomous Romanian Metropolia in Western Europe has six bishops and nearly 700 parishes, which makes it bigger than some Local Churches.

Perhaps all Orthodox in Western Europe should be under the Romanian Church, as it is by far the biggest? It is in fact multinational and allows both calendars. Many of our clergy speak Russian and there are many Russian and Romanian-speaking Moldovans here (20% of churches in Moldova itself are under the Patriarchate of Romania). Sadly, most Moldovans in England and France have been forced to leave the Patriarchate of Moscow, for complex and very dark reasons internal to that Patriarchate.

If there were one united, multinational, bicalendar Western European Orthodox Church, there would be a flock of perhaps 5,000,000, at least 2,000 parishes, many monasteries and over 25 bishops. This is bigger than any of the Four Ancient Patriarchates or the Georgian Church. We should have had such a Local Church years ago. Instead, we get political and divisive ideologies from Russians and Greeks, sometimes even sectarian and schismatic tendencies, which split the Orthodox presence and destroy all hope of a Local Church. This is abnormal. I want my children and grandchildren to be part of a Local Church.

In reality, of course, by far the largest jurisdiction of Orthodox is that of Orthodox who do not go to church anywhere. And in part this is because they have been so disgusted by Orthodox bishops and priests who want only money or power that they do not go to church. As one taxi-driver parishioner from Colchester said to me last year in all too fluent English: ‘In my country the priests are all (expletive deleted) thieves’. Why indeed should people go to church in those conditions?

At the end of the day, I have a house blessing for a Ukrainian parishioner. Although she has been here for 15 years, now all her family are refugees in London.

Next, I receive news from the Western Rite parish. Here too is another pastoral catastrophe: they are being abolished. I know little about the ‘Western rite’. I have only ever been Orthodox, I know only one rite, the Orthodox Christian rite, which for me is universal, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern. But the situation shows there is still a real pastoral need for an all-English parish in London. We have been waiting for one for 50 years. Much has been prevented by the vanity of individual bishops. It is the big fish in the little pond syndrome. Vanity, already pernicious, develops into egomania and narcissism when it is given power, hence the big fish, so all except cowards and yes-men inevitably leave, hence the little pond.

A married man has problems developing into a narcissist, just as a monastic bishop. Both are restrained. However, a non-monastic bishop has no restraints. And then the usual disasters follow. I have seen it all so often before. There is indeed nothing new under the sun.

Wednesday: 150 miles

Today is a day of house blessings and visits up the east coast to Lowestoft. Although we have our parish we set up in Norwich, Norfolk needs parishes elsewhere. Our community in Yarmouth is very small, but we do have others in west Norfolk, where people feel abandoned. The obvious place to set up a church there is Kings Lynn, where I have been twice recently. Here I feel really concerned. If I had the money, I would definitely start something here. We should dedicate a new parish to the Tsar-Martyr, as he visited the town in summer 1894. This would bring in Orthodox from south Lincolnshire. Could the Romanian priest in Boston help us?

One of our parishioners phones to tell me about how in Belarus, where her very ill grandmother lives, it costs 100 euros to get a priest to cross the road (the church is opposite the grandmother’s flat) and give her communion. That is a week’s salary in Belarus! If it were 100 euros here, it would be scandalous, but there, it is ten times more scandalous. Sadly, it is similar in some parts of the Russian Church, where some bishops demand money and threaten their faithful clergy if they do not get it. St John gave his shoes away to the barefoot, others buy themselves £400 shoes….what a difference….

Thursday: 150 miles

Today I go to south Essex for the funeral of a baby. It is very sad. The local priest told the mother that God had taken the life of her baby as a punishment for her not being married. It is hard to believe that someone as heartless as that could be ordained. I would like to know the name of the bishop who ordained him.

There follows the wake and the blessings of two houses. Here too, in this large city, we have parishioners and we have long needed to set up a church. I know where we can get a priest, but how can we buy a building?

Later I return to Colchester to tidy the church for the Liturgy on Saturday. In the early evening I meet one of our Ukrainian parishioners who has brought us a large parcel with icons and rosaries we ordered last January. This has been brought by courier from the Ukraine (he travels by van every week and he often brings us things we have ordered).

The main very large icon is wonderful. We ordered it in January and would have had it months ago but for the war. The iconographer, who lives in a house outside Kiev which is used by our church, fled when she saw a missile flying overhead last March. We had hoped to receive this icon of the 1962 prophecy of St John of Shanghai for our patronal feast on 2 July. Then he entrusted our Church to St Alban. The icon illustrates this. It has come now, by Divine Providence. This is our parish icon of St John and St Alban.

Friday: 120 miles

Today is another prison day, though I am giving communion in an old people’s home first. Here there lives an elderly woman who remembers Fr Ambrose Pogodin from the old Emperor’s Gate church in London. Fr Ambrose, a real scholar who knew the Latin Fathers, was of the old generation of ROCOR. Archbishop Seraphim of Brussels reminded me a lot of him. Both were completely unmercenary, lived in poverty, and dressed and celebrated in whatever they had. No bling for them. They were the real thing.

Saturday: 170 miles

Fr Ioan serves the Liturgy in Colchester. But this morning I have a child baptism in the hospital in Cambridge. Our priest in our new Moldovan parish there speaks only Romanian and Russian. Here we need English. Though the boy is a Russian Muslim, he speaks very little Russian. We need bilingual clergy who speak a language like Romanian, Greek or Russian, but also English. This need has been urgent for 50 years. English is essential to communicate with the children. They were born in England and speak English far better than their parents’ native language. They go to English schools.

It is always a shock to me that I have hardly ever seen children in Greek churches, except for Romanian children. It is much the same story in Russian churches here (though not in Russia). This was how the old pre-Revolutionary Russians died out. I can remember how in the 1970s Russian churches typically did 12 funerals a month and 1 baptism every two years. Now we do 12 baptisms a month and one funeral every two years.

In the afternoon I have three Russian baptisms. They have no church where they live, so they have come here. In the evening I have a memorial, the Vigil service and confessions.

Sunday: 60 miles

Confessions. Liturgy.

Conclusion

In the last 30 months I have covered 70,000 miles in my car doing pastoral work.

I feel as though I am the only Russian-speaking Orthodox missionary in the country, or at least in the Eastern quarter of the country. In the last year, apart from Essex and Suffolk which effectively form our parish, I have been to see Russian and English-speaking Orthodox in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, Kent and Sussex, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire, over twelve counties – exactly one quarter of the country.

I have spent nearly fifty years, thirty-eight of them as a clergyman, working towards the creation of a Local Church both here and in Western Europe. Neither the Greek and Russian Churches seems to be serious about setting up a Local Church here. Despite their mountains of fine words over the decades, there are no actions, promises are broken and indeed there is only negativity towards others and narrow ideologies. Can the Romanian Church help? Someone has to lead the way, to be a pioneer, especially if others are only interested in futile politics, divisions, arguments and intrigues. A Local Western European Orthodox Church remains our long-needed ideal.

This Sunday evening I had just written these words, almost in despair at the pastoral crisis, when within five minutes, I have received messages from two Ukrainian priests who wish to come here. Since we are in the Romanian Church, they are particularly interested. Godsends, literally. Tomorrow I start the search for paperwork.

7 August 2022

A Parable

There was once a priest who was visited by satan. Satan promised the priest fame and glory, great riches and power. The only thing was that in return satan wanted the priest’s eyesight, so that the priest would then be blind. Nevertheless, the priest was tempted, thinking of all that fame, all the awards he would get, those riches and that power.

As he was not sure what to do, he decided to go to his bishop and ask him what to do. Arriving at his bishop’s residence, which he noticed was in a very rich place, he was met by a servant of the bishop. When the priest told the servant that he wanted to see the bishop, the servant answered him: ‘You can talk to the bishop, but he can’t see you, he is blind’.

The Parish Problem

Christianity has always been spread by monastics and monasteries. This is universal. In normal conditions, what happens is that after their mission has been completed, monastics (some of whom are bishops – real bishops are always monastics) delegate the everyday running of churches to married clergy. These either run the local parishes founded from monasteries or else, in the absence of any support from monasteries or bishops, found parishes themselves.

For centuries and centuries this is how it worked, whether with St Nina in Georgia, St Martin of Tours in Gaul, St Patrick in Ireland, St Augustine in England, St Boniface in the German Lands, St Cyril and Methodius in Moravia, St Stefan of Perm, St Job of Pochaev in what is now the western Ukraine, St Cosmas of Aitolia in Greece or St Herman and St Innocent in Alaska. Today, this age-old system is in crisis everywhere, perhaps especially in the Russian Orthodox Church.

There are not only the massive dysfunctions of episcopal, monastic and parish life, mainly caused by 75 years of vicious Soviet persecution inside the ex-Soviet Union. Outside the ex-Soviet Union the situation is not much better in many places. The decadence in parts of the Russian Church before the Revolution, the chaos of emigration, the scattering of the flock, and the catastrophic lack of finance and infrastructure, have caused enormous problems. Thus, I can remember over 40 years ago the then rector of the Rue Daru Cathedral in Paris, where thousands would gather at Easter, telling me that they had only 25 registered parishioners. The number of people who took communion on Easter Night was similar – 25.

Many, though not all, Russian churches inside Russia and in capital cities outside Russia resemble little more than railway stations. Orthodox Russians call the passers-by who you may never see again ‘prokhozhane’ (as opposed to ‘prikhozhane’, the word for parishioners). Then there are the people who call in from time to time – ‘zakhozhane’. These people you may see only half a dozen times a year. An example: as a parish we have some 4,000 people who are attached to us, but our list of parishioners is just under than 600 and that includes children. And yet all 4,000 would claim to be parishioners!

Another problem, worse in some countries than others, but still common in Russia and the Ukraine, despite recent welcome changes, is the massive imbalance in age and gender. For every 100 women standing in church, there may only be 15 men (at most) and two children. I can remember at the old ROCOR Cathedral in London 40 years ago, there would perhaps be 400 people (average age 75) at the Sunday Liturgy, out of whom three-quarters were elderly women and the only children our own. Where are the men? Where are the young people? Why have the grandparents not passed on the Faith to their children and grandchildren? The situation of the Greek Church in this country today is very similar and very critical. Expect many of their churches to close over the next 20 years.

In the old ROCOR of the time, I can remember one elderly and prominent woman parishioner boasting that the children in their church never made a noise. I politely pointed out that there were no children in her church (and also no baptisms). She then boasted that they never had any divorces in her church. Again I politely pointed out there were no weddings either (the last had been thirty years ago) and that the average age of the parishioners was about 75. She then boasted that they had never had any problem with their clergy. Once more I politely pointed out that that must be because they had no clergy….The last one had died a decade or so before.

As one relatively young archbishop said to me in the 1980s: the fewer parishes we have, the better it is, because the fewer the parishes, the fewer the problems. He died soon afterwards.

Why is it that there are still many churches (especially in Russia and Eastern Europe) which it is impossible to enter with a pram or a pushchair (let alone a wheelchair)? Is it because children (and young people in general) are not welcome and not wanted? (As also in so many churches outside Russia?).

Why are there no contemporary toilets (for children) and no changing facilities, attached to the majority of churches?

Why are there so few meeting places for parishioners to get to know each other and support each other, where children can play together and make friends, and where young people can meet (and perhaps marry)? Or do you want to die out?

Children are our future. That statement is neither new nor original, but blatantly obvious, and yet many people still do not understand it.

A parish is not a cow to be milked for money. A parish is a local community to which people have a sense of belonging, to which they want to belong, so important for a flock which is scattered.

A parish is a community (not a racist ghetto, as in the old emigration), where all are welcome and a community which will stand up to the frequent injustices, persecution, meddling and bullying from outside, and support its clergy both morally and financially. Where does that exist?

Until we have many more parishes, we will not make progress.

Together in Life, Together in Heaven: Ten Questions and Answers on Martyrdom of the Russian Imperial Family

Who ordered the murder of the Russian Imperial Family in 1918?

The seven members of the Imperial Family and their four faithful servants were shot and bayoneted to death in the very early morning, probably just before 1 a.m., of 17 July 1918. This took place in the requisitioned house of a military engineer called Nikolai N. Ipatiev in the city of Ekaterinburg in the Urals on the very limits of Europe and Asia. This house had been built on the site of the Church of the Ascension, which had stood there in the eighteenth century.

From studies in post-Soviet Russia, for example those by the senior official investigator, V. N. Soloviov, it seems that the murder of the Imperial Family was carried out only on the initiative of the local Urals Regional Soviet. The Bolsheviks in the industrial city of ‘Red Ekaterinburg’ were particularly militant, hateful and also powerful, showing great independence from Moscow. In any case, no proof has been found of co-ordination between the local Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg and Lenin in Moscow or anyone else.

However, it is clear that Lenin would have had the Imperial Family murdered in any case and with the backing of his financial and political sponsors abroad, for example in New York. However, Lenin had wanted some sort of show trial first. It is also clear that the Soviet leaders and ordinary Bolsheviks who did not actually order the murder were not upset when it did occur. Thus, although they did not order it, they were quite capable of doing so and would have done it anyway in time. Probably they even felt relief that others had done the dirty work for them so soon.

Were their murderers Jews?

Although the top Bolshevik elite in 1917 was 90% Jewish by race (but militant atheists by religion and mocking their ancestral religion and mercilessly slaughtering Non-Bolshevik Jews), ordinary Bolsheviks were overwhelmingly Russian. As the Old Bolsheviks, largely Jewish, died (Lenin was only a quarter Jewish) or were murdered (like Trotsky), they were replaced by Russians or those of other nationalities, like the Georgians Stalin and Beria, or later the Ukrainian Khushchov. Of the ten murderers (not ‘executioners’, as the secular West calls them) of the Imperial Family, eight were Russian, one was, probably, Latvian and only one was Jewish, although he was in charge of the other killers. However, this latter, Yankel Yurovsky, was a Jew who had long before been baptised a Protestant and had nothing to do with his Jewish family or religion. Therefore, he was Jewish only by race.

Indeed, several foreign soldiers, perhaps Latvians or Austro-Hungarians, had categorically refused to pull the trigger and murder the Family, especially the children. The fact – however terrible – is that the ten murderers were all baptised Christians, eight of them Russians. Their names were: Yurovsky, Kabanov, M. Medvedev, P. Medvedev, Netrebin, Nikulin, Strekotin, Tselms (probably, and probably Latvian), Vaganov and Yermakov. This fact that they were all officially Christians should be reflected on.

This is also why the Church Outside Russia canonised the Imperial Family and their servants as martyrs, whereas in 2000 the Church inside Russia canonised only the Family as Passion-Bearers. The difference here is only that the term ‘Passion-Bearer’ is used only when the murderers are nominal Christians and not pagans. However, in reality the terms are largely interchangeable.

Was their murder a ritual murder?

There is no such thing as a ’ritual murder’. This whole Non-Orthodox myth was invented in the Roman Catholic Middle Ages. It began in Norman England, with the notorious case of the murder of ‘William of Norwich’ in 1144, the first such case. The myth, based largely on jealousy of the wealth of certain elite-connected Jews, finally spread from Catholic Poland into the western Ukraine only in the late nineteenth century. Anyone who reads about the chaos of the murders at the Ipatiev House, carried out by militant atheists and Non-Jews, can see that there was no system (rituals are by definition always systematic) and had no connection with any religion whatsoever. The myth of ‘ritual murders’ is pure anti-Semitism, as is the myth of ‘kabbalistic’ signs on an inside wall of the Ipatiev House. They were simple scribbles.

Why did many not believe that the remains of the nine victims, found in 1979, and those of the two victims, Alexei and Maria, found in 2007, were those of the Imperial Family and their servants?

The second early investigator of the murder, N. A. Sokolov, (well before him the first investigator, I. A. Sergiev, had done nearly all the work) was appointed by the White Army in 1919. He could not find the remains of the Imperial Family and therefore concluded that the victims’ bodies had been consumed by fire, petroleum and sulphuric acid. In reality, only the martyrs’ clothing and shoes had been burned on bonfires. His ‘conclusion’ – although in fairness it was only a preliminary conclusion because he had not had time to finish his investigation – came about simply because he could not find the remains, even though he had passed by their site. Many, if not all, at the time and for long afterwards, believed in his conclusions/suppositions for lack of any other information, and a few still do believe in him today.

Sokolov was not a chemist or a forensic scientist, just a legal man – and also a convinced anti-Semite – and did not realise that you need very high temperatures – about 1,000 C – and huge amounts of sulphuric acid in order to destroy eleven human bodies. These had not been available. Others blindly repeated his suppositions, even adding the speculation that the bodies had been burned to cinders and their heads had been sent to Moscow. This latter wild and proofless speculation was made only because the investigators had found no teeth – by far the most difficult part of a human body to destroy. In reality, there were no teeth, simply because the bodies with their heads and therefore teeth had not been found. However, there are still a few who believe these suppositions, even today, though probably for ideological (anti-Semitic) reasons or out of personal vanity and wish for publicity.

How can we be sure that ‘the Ekaterinburg Remains’ are indeed the relics of the Imperial Family?

We are 99.999999% sure of this just from the two sets of extremely thorough genetic studies on the unique remains, conducted internationally. If you add to this the locations and the number of bodies (eleven), the post-Revolutionary period when they were killed, their ages, the way they were killed, the type of bullets and other fragments found with them, as well as the dental records showing very clearly that the victims’ teeth had been treated by world-class dentists, I can see no rational way in which there can be any doubt about their identity.

In that case, why have the Church authorities been so slow in recognising the remains as the Imperial Family’s relics?

The first genetic tests were carried out in the 1990s under the Yeltsin government, which of course no-one trusted, as it was notorious for its lies, just as all the Communist governments before it had been notorious for their lies. After all, Yeltsin himself had ordered the destruction of the Ipatiev House less than twenty years earlier, in September 1977, for the sixtieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Since the remains could eventually be venerated as holy relics, the Church authorities, also distrusting Yeltsin, had to be absolutely certain of their identity. You cannot make a mistake if you are going to present remains as relics. This is why a second batch of genetic tests were made on the basis of even more advanced DNA science, their results being released on the centenary of the martyrdom in 2018. The findings coincided with the first ones.

Secondly, perhaps more importantly still, the Church authorities have had to face the opposition of sectarian elements inside Russia, who are largely anti-Semitic. Only now are the Church authorities dealing with them. The bishops have always feared a schism, however small, on the subject of the identification of the remains.

Thirdly, the Church authorities know that in post-Soviet Russia there are those of the other extreme, opposed to the far right anti-Semites. These are the liberal and atheist elements opposed to the enshrinement of the relics, just as they were – and are – opposed to the very canonisation of the Imperial Martyrs. Indeed, inside Russia itself, the Church authorities have still not canonised three of the four servants of the Seven Imperial Martyrs (see below).

Outside Russia we should not be surprised at this or, even worse, feel smug. Even the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), supposedly free, only made up its mind about canonising the Imperial Martyrs and four of their servants in 1981, 63 years late! This is scandalous. And even here there were some members of the Church Outside Russia who opposed the canonisation, as I well remember. Anyone who remembers the very hostile reactions to the 1981 canonisation outside ROCOR, on the part of the liberal Paris Russian Jurisdiction (founded by the very Saint Petersburg aristocrats who had overthrown the Tsar) and the Parisian-influenced OCA, let alone the mocking reactions of the secular media, will recall just how virulent the opposition to the canonisation was.

Why are there no miracles from the relics, which do not give out myrrh or perfume?

I think there are many miracles from them. The fall of the Soviet Union was only the first one.

As regards the actual relics, not all relics give off fragrance or myrrh. In any case, relics need faith to work miracles. This we can see time and again from Christ’s words in the Gospels – ‘according to your faith be it unto you’ (Matt. 9, 29). Christ Himself could not work miracles in Nazareth, where he had spent most of his life, precisely because of the faithlessness of the inhabitants (Matt 13, 58 and Mark 6, 5-6). In the Gospels Christ says time and again: ‘Thy faith has healed thee’. In other words, there is no healing without faith. At this moment, nine sets of relics, which lie in the St Catherine’s chapel in the Church of St Peter and Paul in its Fortress in Saint Petersburg, are closed off and cannot be venerated by the faithful. Disgracefully, the relics of St Alexei and St Maria are not even enshrined in the church. We cannot even venerate these relics physically.

In Moscow the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate has not canonised three of the servants of the Family, though it did recently canonise one of them, Dr Eugene Botkin. Many say that it cannot canonise all of them in any case, since one was a Roman Catholic and another was a Protestant.

These four servants were all canonised by the Church Outside Russia in 1981 together with the Imperial Family. I questioned the very conservative Archbishop Antony of Los Angeles about this matter, when I accompanied him to visit Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich in Paris in autumn 1991. He explained to me that this issue had been discussed by the ROCOR Synod in New York well before the 1981 canonisation. The Synod had accepted the age-old practice of the Church that anyone who was martyred for the Faith, even though unbaptised, was considered to have been baptised in their blood.

There are many such examples of baptism in blood in Church history. The fact that of two Orthodox martyrs, one was a Roman Catholic and another was a Protestant, should surely be considered as Providential: this is a call to the Non-Orthodox world to follow in the footsteps of the Imperial servants, as indeed is the canonisation of the converted Tsarina Alexandra herself, though she had been chrismated into the Orthodox Faith before her wedding in 1894. We are all called to be Imperial servants, servants of the Christian Empire, the Empire of Christ.

If the remains are eventually accepted by the whole Church as holy relics, should the relics be enshrined at Porosionkov Log, where they were found?

The area a few miles to the north of Ekaterinburg where the relics were found in 1979 and, 67 metres away, in 2007, was renamed Porosionkov Log (‘Piglet’s Ravine’) only in the nineteenth century, as a result of the amount of mud there which attracted pigs. Originally there had been a large lake here, but when the railway was built across this area, the land around the large pond became very boggy with no drainage. It would not be possible to build a large stone church here, but only a small wooden church on piles. This is the case four and a half miles away at Ganina Yama (‘Gabriel’s Pit’), where the murderers burned the victims’ clothes and belongings and first and unsuccessfully tried to dispose of the relics in the early morning of 17 July 1918. Here there now stand wooden churches dedicated to each of the Imperial Martyrs.

In your view what should happen to the relics now?

Tsar Nicholas II repeatedly said that he wanted to be buried in Saint Petersburg. He spent most of his life as Tsar at Tsarskoe Selo (‘The Tsar’s Village’), just outside Saint Petersburg. Here the whole family was happy, rather than among the mean-minded gossip, criminal slander and treasonous intrigues of jealous aristocrats in Saint Petersburg. Surely, it is here in the spacious grounds of Tsarskoe Selo, where the Family spent so many happy times together, that a huge Cathedral dedicated to the Imperial Martyrs could be raised up, with the relics of all of them at last reunited and enshrined inside. This would become a pilgrimage centre for Orthodox the world over. The Imperial Family: Together in life, together in heaven. From here tiny splinters of relics could be sent out all over the world, so that their veneration could be confirmed as worldwide, as indeed it already is, and for the repentance of all. Then clearly visible miracles would begin, including the transfiguration of Post-Soviet Russia into Orthodox Russia and the beginning of the realisation in Western countries that they cannot continue as they are now, in their state of apostasy from Christ.

Holy Imperial Martyrs, Pray to God for us!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

St John of Shanghai Church, Colchester, England

Blessed Xenia of Saint Petersburg

24 January/6 February 2021

A Life in the Day of an Orthodox Priest

7.10 am. Leave for the church in Essex where at 8.00 I have to meet an engineer about a fault in the sound system in the church. I get there early and he too. We shall need one new microphone and two extra speakers.

8.30 am. I have time to tidy the church and then see a Bulgarian woman who has problems with her son who is studying medicine.

10.00 In September a drunken man crashed into the perimeter wall of the church at 3.20 in the morning. He managed to get out of his car unharmed though the car was a write-off. Having found out the car registration from the police, now I have an appointment with a builder who is to give a quote to our insurance company to repair the wall. It will cost them several thousand pounds. For some reason he wants to see me and not the caretaker. He turns out to be an Irishman who wants to talk to a priest.

10.25 Get the church caretaker to be present for the fitting of a new smart meter for the electricity in the church.

10.40 I call on two parishioners in Colchester, originally from Saint Petersburg, a mother and daughter. The mother, born during the German siege in the War, has dementia.

11.30 Visit a parishioner in Colchester whose husband is Turkish and hesitating about being baptised. We already have three Turkish parishioners and I want him and his wife to come tomorrow where I will be baptising another Turkish man. Once he has accepted baptism, I will be able to marry him and his civil wife.

12.15 Visit the graves of my parents and my brother fifteen minutes away. Tidy them

12.40 Phone call from a parishioner in Thetford in Norfolk whose friend’s mother has just died. I will serve a panikhida tomorrow, St Dimitri’s Saturday. O Lord, give rest to Thy servant Larisa who has fallen asleep.

2.00 pm. Despite the covid lockdown, I have to go to one of the prisons in west Suffolk, about an hour away, where I am the Orthodox chaplain for an emergency, to see a Russian man on suicide watch. He is clearly suffering from severe depression. I manage to listen to his first ever confession and give him communion. He says he feels better.

4.00 Call in on a parishioner about forty minutes from the prison. She obtained British nationality two years ago, but her foreign-born daughter still does not have it. She is panicking and tells me that her daughter may be deported. I reassured her and telephoned an advice centre, who inform me that there is no hurry and that the daughter will obtain a British passport within six months, after payment of just over £1,000. The problem is only financial, not worse. We read the akathist to St Nicholas together in her icon-corner.

6.00 Get home which is thirty minutes away. Answer two letters and pick up messages from parishioners left on the landline.

7.30 E-mail the lists of parishioners with a circular about arrangements for confession and communion during the forthcoming new closure of churches. A rush of phone calls on my mobile starts.

8.00 Tell the cleaner that she need not come in next week because of covid-19.

8.05 Phone the second and third priests about the new arrangements.

8.15 Phone-call with the future deacon about service-books.

8.20 Phone call from a couple whose marriage at crisis point.

8.40 Order a mantle for the Bishop from the Ukraine.

9.00 Phone call from a Moldovan woman in East London: Please pray for my uncle and aunt, Sergei and Elena. They were climbing in the Himalayas when they fell into a crevasse on a glacier. Their bodies cannot be retrieved for burial, at least not for some centuries. She is in tears.

9.10 Answer e-mails, including an e-mail from a family who have had to move to a place on the other side of the country where there is no church. I tell them that if they can find other Orthodox there and premises, we can ask the Bishop about the possibility of starting a mission. But we are so short of priests; we need at least three more just in our area.

How Will the Church in the Diaspora Survive Covid?

Introduction: The Orthodox Diaspora

Although the Orthodox Diaspora in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia has existed for well over a century, it represented little more than embassy churches until 1917. Then, after the overthrow of the Russian Empire by Westernised aristocratic atheists and then Westernised middle-class atheists, it grew enormously. Without the Russian Empire to protect them, there followed the political and economic collapse of Greece, Cyprus, Orthodox communities under the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem and more immigration, especially after 1945.

More recently the Diaspora greatly expanded after the fall of the post-1945 Stalinist Empire all over Eastern Europe and, in 1991, the Soviet Union. This collapse has especially affected now EU countries, with Orthodox populations, like Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltics. But what spiritual, and therefore real, identity and significance does the Diaspora have? Does it have any long-term future or will it inevitably disappear into the Western atheist melting-pot of assimilation? What identity can the Orthodox Diaspora have in a spiritually alien and hostile environment?

Two Negative Identities

On the one hand, some look on the Diaspora as merely nationalistic entities. They see it as a mere conduit for cultural nostalgia for a distant and long-abandoned ‘old country’, for flag-waving. But those who hold processions headed by flags, and not by the Cross, are doomed to die out. It comes as no surprise that, generally, the more nationalistic the community, the more its churches closed during covid. After all, one can wave flags at home; why take risks by going to church? Only those who live by faith do not fear death and take communion. The rest, who live by nationalism, disappeared ‘for fear of the Jews’. Moreover, many of them may never return.

On the other hand, some look on the Diaspora as a set of groups which will be assimilated – inevitably. Diaspora-born children and succeeding generations lose their parents’ language and culture; what possible interest can they have in the cultures of countries which they do not know and whose languages they can barely speak? Either the children and grandchildren have adopted another language and another flag, or else they are indifferent to any language except the one they use at school and to all flags. Covid will hardly bring them back to church. If they have been given no spiritual identity, they assimilate.

Conclusion: A Positive Identity

The Church in the Diaspora can only survive, especially after covid, if it is a Local Church. This means a Church which brings together all the Orthodox of whatever nationality and language in the local area and gives them the Orthodox Christian spiritual and therefore cultural – not nationalistic – identity. Moreover, such ‘local’ Orthodox can only be brought together on the basis of real Faith, on the basis of uncompromised Orthodoxy, and not on the basis of the lowest common denominators of a hotchpotch of folklore. That only produces the escapism of fakery, the irrelevant fairy-tale pretence of being something you are not.

If any jurisdiction is to survive in the post-covid Diaspora (and many are already dying out or have died out), it will be the one which by origin is multinational and also uses the local language – though not exclusively. Such a jurisdiction will give a spiritual identity to its people as the exclusive bearers of local and universal real Christianity, not of folklore or a foreign language – though many may speak one – but of the unique Christian Civilisation, of the unique Christian values which only Orthodox who go to Church hold and live by. Our Orthodox Christianity is a way of life, not an exotic hobby.

From Recent Correspondence (September 2020)

Q: Very recently you returned to Mt Athos for the first time in many years. What changes have you noticed since you last went?

A: I went to Athos twice in 1979 and spent time there. Now again I have been there. There have been enormous changes.

I think it was better before because it was poor then and there were virtually no roads, no vehicles, no electricity, no telephones and of course no internet. Today there is all this. There are roads everywhere, new road-building is very noisy and disturbs both the holy silence and unspoilt nature, and there must be hundreds of vehicles on the mountain now. All of this has been done with EU money. Each monastery, much refurnished and repainted, now has a shop and, ominously, a museum (always a sign of the end, because it shows that it is dead, not living). It is clear that the Greek government, whose flag flies everywhere on the mountain, even on monasteries (you will not find a single Russian flag at St Panteleimon’s) is preparing to open the mountain up to mass tourism some time in the future. Greek nationalism and money are killing the mountain. Instead of being a multinational Orthodox centre, it is slowly becoming a department of the atheistic Greek State.

Q: Is it likely that one day there will be new monasteries on Mt Athos for, say, English, French, German, Italian etc monks?

A: As long as Greek nationalism rules on Mt Athos, that is unthinkable. Out of some 2,000 monks today, 1800 are Greek. It is forbidden by the nationalists to have more than 20 monasteries, which is why the Romanians, say, only have a skete, though with more monks than a couple of the smaller Greek monasteries, why the Georgians lost Iviron to the Greeks and the Russians lost the huge so-called sketes of the Prophet Elijah and St Andrew to the Greeks. Then, there is also the fact that anyone who becomes a monk on Mt Athos must become a Greek citizen! For the moment Mt Athos is a fragment, albeit with some holy people, of the Second Rome, it still has to enter post-1453 reality.

Although I have met, seen or heard of two English monks, two French monks, two Finnish monks and two black African monks on Mt Athos, two is hardly enough to open a monastery. In any case, what we first need to do is to have authentic monasteries in Western countries, using the native language. So far this exists only in France and the USA. The number of vocations is tiny at present.

Q: Should people not leave the Patriarchate of Constantinople because their Patriarch acts heretically?

A: I think it is far more likely that the very elderly Patriarch Bartholomew will die. So he will be leaving, not his three million-strong flock.

Q: Recently the Greek Archbishop of America, Elpidiforos, stated to Roman Catholics that the unity of Orthodox and Roman Catholics is not a question of if, but when. What do you answer?

A: He was talking only about himself.

Q: Is the Russian Church the centre of the Orthodox world?

A: Like it or not, Russia is the centre of Orthodox Civilisation, even secular historians like Toynbee and Huntington recognised it. How blindly nationalistic do you have to be not to see this? On the other hand, the Russian Church must behave responsibly. It has often failed to do, treating Non-Russians as second-class citizens. Leadership simply because you are nearly ten times bigger than any other Local Church is not automatic, you have to earn leadership and deserve it. As I said – like it or not. The Russian Church still has to overcome suicidal Soviet tendencies and become the Third Rome again. The dead hand of the Soviet Union with its bureaucracy and centralisation is still too close. Christ is the only centre of the Orthodox world.

Q: Is it true that the Russian Orthodox Church is heretical because it blesses icons and even crosses with holy water?

A: This is an old chestnut that comes up every decade, usually written by a literalist convert or a polemical Greek, together with the accusation that the Russian Church is heretical because we bless icons and crosses!

Of course, it is not heretical. But of course it is not strictly necessary to bless icons and crosses, we do it out of piety. We do all sorts of things that are not strictly necessary – for example drinking a little wine after communion in the Russian Church, blessing kolyva at memorials, especially in the Greek Church, and kneeling on Sundays, especially in the Romanian Church. Such an accusation of heresy because of piety is all on the same level as the ‘no kneeling on Sundays’ convert pride syndrome. We are not supposed to do it, but we do it for piety’s sake. Let the semi-intellectuals, aggressive fault-finders and proud self-justifiers fall silent, also for piety’s sake!

Q: What is needed for unity in the Diaspora?

A: Trust in one bishop by members of every jurisdiction. At present the bishops of most jurisdictions are not even trusted by their own members, let alone by members of other jurisdictions. Trust will bring the leadership and authority essential for unity. A bishop who is subject to some nationalistic group, financial interest or political party earns no trust. Ultimately trust means holiness.

Q: What are the origins of the Greek priest’s chimney pot hat, the Greek monk’s headware and the Russian skufia?

A: The Balkan chimney pot hat for priests is simply the old Turkish top hat but black, the low cylindrical hat worn by Balkan monks is simply the Turkish fez but black, and the Russian skoufia is simply to keep you warm in the Russian winter.

Q: Where does the Roman Catholic anti-woman spirit come from?

A: It comes right from the beginning, in the second half of the 11^th century, when the German Popes forbade married priests. Married men are not anti-woman; bachelors often are. This same innovation introduced institutional clericalism and also, incidentally, led to the disappearance of monks who were not priests and also of deacons; everyone had to be a priest – ‘a mini-pope’.

Orthodox England

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