Category Archives: Orthodox Restoration

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars

‘Serve Russia just as you served me…Faithful service to your homeland is more precious in the days of its fall than in the days of its greatness’.

The last words of the Holy Martyr Nicholas II to Colonel Kushelyov, 31 July 1917

‘The night will come soon, dark and long’.

St Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, Prophecy of the Twentieth Century, 25 March 1925

In a remote provincial cemetery in Paraguay where the clocks go slow, beneath the brilliant sun and the torrential rain, lie the grave and mortal remains of Evgeny Ivanovich Smirnov, a White Russian Officer from Kursk and hero of the war against Bolivia (1932-35). He died there exactly fifty years ago, in 1967, across the ocean, so very, very far from his forebears’ homes. There were many such who, like him, did not live to see the light in their homeland and so return there. They are scattered in faraway cemeteries under wooden and stone crosses all over God’s earth, from Manchuria to New South Wales, from Saskatchewan to Seine et Marne, from Patagonia to Vermont, from Tunis to Cape Town, from Belgrade to Dublin, from great European cities to outback shacks, from parched deserts to snowy wastes, their hearts broken by enforced exile from their homes and their kin. Why?

Because in 1918 the peoples of the Russian Empire actively or passively, consciously or unconsciously, consented to the murder of the last Christian Emperor and his family and beautiful children at the hands of a clique of foreign maniacs and ever since they have had to pay in blood for their crime, either of treason, or of cowardice, or else of deceit. The ruling elites of foreign powers did not only stand by, but actively financed and encouraged the sadistic murderers. The jealous elites of Great Britain and France had already beheaded their own Christian kings in bloody, secularist revolutions and could not understand why others would not do the same. The greedy elite of Germany had always wanted to destroy the Slavs, militarily, from Charlemagne to Hitler, and, economically, to Merkel. As for the crazed elite of the United States, it wanted, as it still wants, to head a Zionist-inspired World Dictatorship.

In that way, repeating their lie that, ‘you cannot turn the clocks back’, they ensured that there would be no return to the peace of the pre-1914 world, but war without end, with only pauses on the way to their suicide. Having rejected a thousand years of the revelations of the Holy Spirit, in the nineteenth century the Western elite proclaimed the death of God and in the first half of the twentieth century it proclaimed their new gods of Communism and Fascism. But when these failed hopelessly in unspeakable barbarism and downfall came, they proclaimed the golden calf of Consumerism, bread and circuses, which in despair the people turned to, living without an ideal. Us who did not follow the consumerists call ‘losers’. For us there is more important than the stripes in toothpaste. For us ‘losers’, our ideal is still Christ and His heavenly kingdom, which we wish to bring down to earth.

To the ‘winners’, we say let the dead bury the dead, for we know that the last words on earth belong to Christ. Their illusion that they are winners will only lead them to bitter disillusionment. As long as we remain faithful to Christ, we have no cause to fear. In the meantime, we shall continue to fight for Christ’s Truth, delaying the coming of the Antichrist until more can find salvation. This means bringing down Christ’s Kingdom on earth, incarnating the truths of the Orthodox Christian Faith. Perhaps we are mystics, but we are pragmatic mystics, bending the State to all the implications of the Church of God. ‘May thy will be done on earth, as in heaven’. One day, perhaps sooner than many expect, the bourgeois Consumerist nightmare will inevitably end, and then the Western and Westernized world will be faced with spiritual reality: that which Evgeny Smirnov suffered for in his exile in faraway Paraguay.

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars.

Those Who Lapse and Those Who Last: The End of ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’ and the Beginning of Orthodoxy in Europe

For some 40 years between the 1960s and the end of the twentieth century, some two thousand Anglicans joined certain parishes of the Orthodox Churches in England – mainly those under the then Parisian ‘Sourozh Diocese’. Together with a small number of ordinary (Non-Anglican) English people, they joined the Church for many reasons. Some of us, perhaps especially the Non-Anglicans, joined because we were sincerely seeking, not being influenced by any personality, but called by Christ to help rebuild His Church in the Western desert. For us, the Orthodox Church was and is the only Church, our spiritual home, to which we had come after realizing that this is God’s Will for us and our souls will die without spiritual food, that is, outside the Church. We have lasted and not lapsed because for us, belonging to the Church has always been a matter of spiritual survival, although and because we have been voices crying in the anti-Orthodox and so secularist wilderness.

However, some did not last but lapsed, for it seems that they were not attached to the Orthodox Church and Faith. Dissatisfied with the ever-changing and ever-new fads of Anglicanism, they attached themselves only to some personality or intellectual philosophy, and not to the Church Herself. Some were perhaps received by marginal figures who, without support from Churched Orthodox, needed to build personality cults for themselves among the naïve, ill-prepared, uninstructed or deluded. In other words, attraction operated for negative reasons, by being against something else, and some never accepted the Church as She is. Deluded by anti-Incarnational fantasies, sometimes of Hindu or Buddhist origin, Russian fakirs and charlatans and secondary and superficial attractions, some remained ‘converts’, not actually becoming Orthodox because of their baggage. They joined the Church, but did not become and live as Orthodox Christians.

The fundamental error of such ‘converts’, as they often liked to call themselves, consisted in not first separating themselves from the 900 + years of the anti-Orthodox and therefore also anti-English, Norman-founded British Establishment. This included its Anglican extension under the syphilitic Tudor tyrant Henry VIII and his followers, not least his murderous ‘theologian’ daughter Elizabeth, the genocidal Cromwell and then various other mercantile Dutch, German and ‘British’ Protestant Imperialists with their ‘Rule Britannia’ jingoism that invaded and enslaved the world. In no way therefore were they able to adopt the Orthodox Faith, for they had not first cleansed their minds and souls from the Anti-Orthodoxy, which they had been conditioned and deluded into thinking of as ‘Western Christianity’. Not having first made room in their minds and souls for the Orthodox Church, the only authentic Western or any other Christianity, they could not last and so lapsed.

Unwilling and so unable to live according to the Orthodox way of life and the Orthodox view of the world and so to think naturally in an Orthodox way, many lapsed completely, some returned to Anglicanism, and others lapsed into a fringe ‘Anglican Orthodoxy’. This inability and unwillingness to integrate meant that these latter tended to form exclusive cliques and convert clubs, which made their church into a ‘Halfodox’ hobby, Anglicanism with icons. Thus, some allowed the baggage which they had brought with them into the Church to define their lives and block possible spiritual growth and understanding. This was because their Western-founded Norman Establishment has always called us, the people, ‘Anglo-Saxons’ or ‘plebs’, although we have always called ourselves simply ‘English’. Their alien Norman Establishment has always patronisingly despised us natives and all who ‘go native’, that is, all who are Orthodox Christians in mind and heart, who are foreign to them.

With this mentality of Establishment condescension and pride towards us English, they also rejected the Orthodox people, with our unintellectual and unphilosophical simplicity and uncomplicated and unmoralizing piety. Thus, some refused in their imagined racial ‘superiority’ and intellectual theorizing to ‘go native’. Between about 2000 and 2010, with Anglicanism altogether disappearing into the New Age blur, few Anglicans asked to be received into the Church, while the by then ageing converts from the last century began to isolate themselves and die out. In recent years, however, a new period has begun. Some ordinary (Non-Anglican) English people from the vast majority have begun to join the Orthodox Church. Like the few Non-Anglicans among those who had preceded them, they have had little difficulty in renouncing the Norman-founded British Establishment and its corrupted culture, because they have in any case never even belonged to it.

Thus, unlike some who had preceded them, they have never been tempted to put British Establishment culture above Christ, so betraying Christ, His Church and also His Orthodox England. For this reason they can begin to develop a real English Orthodox culture. Far more importantly, what has happened in England is only an example of the wider situation all over Western Europe. The betrayal of Western Europe by its Christophobic elite, making it into a wayward, schismatic and isolated province through heresy in 1054 and then apostasy, the betrayal of the real England, Orthodox England, finally destroyed in 1066, the repeated Western betrayals of the Christian Emperors and invasions of the multinational Christian Empire between 1204 and 1917, these are what real Orthodox in Europe reject. What we accept is the end of the old compromised ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’ of the philosophers and the beginning of the real Orthodoxy of the saints of Europe, the Restoration of Europe.

The choice for Christophobic and so Russophobic Europe today is fast becoming Apocalypse or Repentance. Europe, on its suicidal death-bed, caught between self-invented Secularism and self-imposed Islamism, has a last chance. If the peoples of Europe can yet throw off the degeneration of their millennial brainwashing, they can still learn that the truth will set them free from stepping lemming-like off the precipice into the abyss. If they can accept that their elites have deluded them into thinking that they are ‘free’, by being enslaved to the elites’ millennial secularist ideology, regardless of whether it is called Roman Catholic, Scholastic, Protestant, Anglican, Conservative, Socialist, Communist, Democratic, Liberal, Agnostic, Atheist, Post-Modernist, then suicide can be averted. If they can accept that their roots are only in the Tradition, Orthodox Christianity, the Church of God, and not in any latecomer manmade religion, then Repentance even at this late hour is still possible.

Fake News and Fake History, Frangistan and Freedom

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Fake News and Fake History

We are told that in 2017 43% of British people still trust the UK media to tell the truth, down from 50% in 2016 (1). Why is the figure still so amazingly high? After all, by the end of the old Soviet Union, the figure for trust in the Soviet media must have been 0%. And the fake news issued by all the Western Establishment media, from the BBC to the New York Times, from Le Monde to German Television, is no more truthful than the propaganda lies issued by the three generations of the Soviet Establishment. The reason for this high figure can only be because many Western people have been so deeply brainwashed by Establishment lies, not over three generations, but over a millennium, forty generations. In other words, what lies behind fake news is fake history.

This fake history actually began over a millennium ago, with the Frankish ‘Charlemagne’ (real name: Karl the Tall) in the First Reich centred in Aachen. He began the first post-Truth society with the news that he had the right to massacre any non-Frankish peoples (Saxons, Slavs or anyone else) who resisted him. This was because he had the self-created divine right to bring ‘barbarians’ to his ‘truth’ and if they refused to accept his truth, then they could be murdered en masse, which he did. As the ‘Father of Europe’ (2), the truth of the Holy Spirit flowed from him as vicar of God on earth – a conscious part of his filioque ideology. Fortunately, his propaganda myth was rejected in and immediately after his time, because Orthodox Christianity was still then strong enough, even in his Western tip of Eurasia, for it to be rejected.

Unfortunately, this spiritual strength did not last and by the mid-eleventh century his propaganda to mask plunder, that the task of Frankish ‘Europe’ was to spread ‘civilization’ among ‘primitive peoples’, had been revived under the popes. As a result, in 1066 the papally-sponsored, feudal Normans invaded, occupied and massacred their way through England (3) and then all Britain. A generation later Frankish Europe began the ‘crusades’, invading, occupying and massacring their way to the Holy Land. In 1204 their greed led them to plunder the Christian Capital of ‘Byzantium’ (real name: New Rome). Their cousins then attempted to plunder Russia under the name of the ‘Teutonic Knights’. In and after 1492 their ‘Frankish’ (4) Spanish and Portuguese spiritual cousins took part in the rape of South and Central America, as well as Mexico.

Later, other spiritual descendants of the Franks got rich quick by plundering Roman Catholicism, under the pretext of ‘The Reformation’. In England, the Tudor ‘reformers’ proved to be ruthless Machiavellians and their descendants massacred all who resisted them in civil wars in England and then in genocide in Ireland. In 1689 they usurped power from the legitimate Stuart Kings and invited Dutch and then German puppet monarchs to permit their merchant class to build an Empire based on slavery. They sang ‘Britons never, never, never will be slaves’, but did not add that everyone else would precisely be slaves, including their own voteless labouring masses. In the 19th century the elite of Western Europe plundered Asia and Africa, as described by the Polish novelist Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novel ‘The Heart of Darkness’.

Nineteenth-century ‘Frankish’ hypocrisy, wiping out the ‘Red Indians’, the Tasmanians, slaughtering spear-armed Africans with Maxim guns (5) and anyone else who stood in their way, led directly to two ‘World Wars’ (real name: inter-tribal European Wars), which Western Europe spread worldwide, not least through the descendants of European colonists in North America. The Western European ideologies of Capitalism, Communism and Fascism did untold damage, creating and using weapons of mass destruction, which killed tens of millions and can destroy the whole planet many times over. In the 21st century the continued neo-colonial attempts to impose Western values on the Middle East, notably on Iraq, called a ‘crusade’ by the Italian leader Berlusconi, in a bid to plunder and control, are still generating massive genocide.

Frangistan and Freedom

The above, presented by fake history as the ‘generous’ civilizing influence of the West among the Rest, ‘the barbarians’, is in fact the unjustifiable justification for the plunder and control of the Non-Western world by the Western world. Because of its origins in Continental Western Europe under the Frank Charlemagne, this Western world became known as ‘Frangistan’ in traditional Persian. However, long before, the Norman invasions of Scotland and Ireland in the 12th century were called ‘the coming of the Franks’, Arabs called Westerners ‘Faranga’ and when the Portuguese and Spaniards arrived off the coasts of China in the 16th century, locals called them ‘Fo-lang-ki’ – Franks. And in modern Hindi all Europeans in general are still referred to as ‘Firang’ (4). In other words, ‘Frangistan’ is the Western world.

With its modern acronyms of USA, EU, NATO and G7, Frangistan, represents much less than one seventh of the world, much less because many ordinary ‘Franks’ can themselves see through the fake history spun by the Frankish elite. In the real world, where live the other six and a half billion of the world’s population, this Western world seems to be isolated. Originally meaning only the Western tip of Northern Eurasia, the name Frangistan comes, as we have said, from the one Germanic tribe, the Franks. Ironically, this meant ‘the free’, but it has come to define the world’s greatest enslavers – whether literally, as before in the Americas and Africa, or else economically, as today. The endlessly greedy and aggressive ‘Franks’ not only destroyed the Christian Civilization of New Rome, but all other civilizations, whoseever assets could be stripped.

Thus, they destroyed the great civilization along the Amazon, reducing the cities by the banks of that river to jungle, they destroyed the other civilizations of South America, among them the Inca, those of Central America, among them the Aztec and the sophisticated Maya, and despised and laid waste to all others in North America, India, China, Japan and the rest of Asia, as well as in Africa. Only when the ‘free’ ‘Franks’, or at least the 43% of them who apparently still believe in the fake history told them, have delivered themselves from their self-justifying fake history, that they are ‘civilized’, demonizing the Non-Frankish peoples with their often far more advanced and humble civilizations, as ‘half-devil, half-child’ (Kipling), ‘wild animals’, ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’ and wishing them dead, will they really be free.

The self-justifying foundation of the ‘civilizing’ propaganda for plunder, ‘the white man’s burden’, is that the Franks persuaded themselves that they alone are ‘Christians’, that ‘God speaks only to them’ (George Bush (6)). But their god is not the Risen Christ, the Living God, Who is ‘an all-consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12, 29), but the sentimental, weak as water, bleeding Western man ‘Jesus’. Thus, there is nothing new in fake news. Western history is a thousand years of fake news. The news is: ‘We are bringing you ‘Christian’ civilization (meaning our plunder of your civilization), and if you reject it, ‘as true Christians’ we will be so kind as to bomb you back into the Stone Age’. Gun and Bible. Freedom will come for the ‘Franks’ only when they give up their thousand years of fake news and retrieve real Western history in the saints of the pre-Frankish past.

The word ‘Europe’ is said to mean ‘the West’ and the word ‘Asia’ ‘the East’. Hence ‘Eurasia’, where all civilization began, means ‘West-east’. By far the greatest part of ‘West-East’ Eurasia is united in the Eurasian Russian Federation. This developed and expanded by assimilation, not by massacre, quite rapidly from Muscovy to the Arctic north, then to the east, gradually heroically overcoming immense Tartar/Muslim opposition, as far as the shores of the Pacific and even across it, then to the south (although ‘Frangistan’ has challenged that expansion by aggressive wars and imposing German puppet kings in the Balkans, especially to the south-west, invading the Crimea twice in a century. With illegal sanctions it is still challenging today the overwhelming democratic will of Crimeans to return to and belong to the Federation (7)).

Indeed, even apart from the Crimea in the south-west, the Christian Federation of Russia (unlike the atheist USSR) has never been able to expand to the west, with Western Europe powers repeatedly invading Federation territory, four times between 1812 and 1941 alone. This tragedy has meant the self-isolation of Western Europe, cut off from Christian Northern Eurasia. Today’s great hope among many in the Federation is that it will at long last be able to establish a Metropolia in Western Europe, thus bringing the extreme Western territory at least into Church order out of its chaos. This will represent a spiritual victory, the victory over 1,000 years of fake news, the millennial fake history of ‘Frangistan’, delivering it and bringing it to rediscover the real Europe, the Free Christian Europe of the Saints of the first millennium, of the Church of God.

Notes:

1. uk.businessinsider.com/fake-news-drives-down-programmatic-budgets-2017-6

2. The monstrous Karl, founder of the First Reich in 800, the mass murderer and forerunner of Bismarck of the Second Reich and of Hitler of the Third Reich, is still quite seriously honoured as ‘The Father of Europe’, notably by the Fourth Reich EU elite.

3. The Norman occupiers wrote their own propaganda history, proclaiming that there had been no English kings or people before them, merely ‘primitive’ and ‘decadent’ ‘Anglo-Saxons’. To this day kings of England are numbered from the foreign kings from 1066 on; not one of them has been English.

4. For a full survey of the word ‘Frank’ to mean a Western European see ‘The Making of Europe’ (950-1350), by Robert Bartlett, 1993, especially pages 101-105.

5. See Hilaire Belloc, in the words of the figure “Blood” in his poem “The Modern Traveller”:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.

6. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa

7. The bilionaire leader of the genocidal, US-installed Kiev puppet junta, Poroshenko (real name: Waltzman) has only this week stated that all Ukrainians who do not accept his tyranny should go and live in Siberia. With these words he has repeated the ‘Drang nach Osten’, ‘Lebesnraum’ policy of Hitler, to exile all East Slavs to the east of the Urals in order to make room for ‘European’ expansion and exploitation in the east.

Globalism versus Spiritual Unity

Why do they so hate Russia, the Orthodox Faith and the Church now? Because they know that Russia will stand up to Antichrist….Antichrist will even fear the Russian Tsar. Russia will be reborn only with Orthodoxy and under the protection of the Russian Tsar. There will be elders pleasing to God, just as there were before, until the end of the world. Such is the prophecy of St Laurence of Chernigov.

Igumen Kheruvim Degtariov

The clash between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism was a clash of ideologies, which, despite all the differences, still had the same external aims: freedom, equality and prosperity. But traditional Russia, with its authority and nationhood, will strive for completely different aims.

Professor Samuel Huntingdon

A Western democrat can very easily have an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. But this would be unthinkable with a traditional Russian. If Russians stop being Marxists, but do not accept liberal democracy and begin to behave like Russians and not Westerners, relations between Russia and the West will once again become estranged and hostile….

The West will never tolerate the rebirth of Holy Rus. It will always try to annihilate us, foisting on us as heroes its one-time agents of influence (to a greater or lesser extent): Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin. It will always strive by any means available to blacken and slander our Orthodox Civilization and our holy Tsar, in order through them to besmirch and compromise our Orthodox Church and our present State, blowing them apart from inside. Unfortunately, many in the State and also in the Church still do not understand the direct connection between these phenomena. Our victory can only be achieved when we all go into battle, not for Stalin and Lenin, nor for liberalism and democracy, nor for oil and gas, but for Holy Rus, for our friends, as our ancestors did before us…

It was precisely Moscow that received the great and responsible mission to be the Third Rome, restraining the world from falling into the abyss of evil. This is not some invention or boast. Moscow was in no way better than Kiev or Vladimir when it became the centre of the Russian Lands. The great mission was given to us, not by the rebellious will of man, but by the will of God. Our mission has nothing to do with….so-called ‘Russian nationalism’. Our mission is the rebirth of Russian Civilization, in which all nationalities who so desire unite for life in God and with God, in the world of Goodness and Justice, in which we can stand up to the atheistic and anti-human Western ‘New Order’, whose aim is to annihilate man as God’s creation.

Petr Multatuli, Contemporary Russian Historian

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

Petition from the Great Litany

Hearing the above petition, I was recently asked if therefore the Orthodox Church was in favour of globalism, the Oneworld movement towards global unity. This was preached one hundred years ago by the mass murderers Lenin and Trotsky, by the syncretist hippy John Lennon in his song ‘Imagine’ nearly fifty years ago and by the Trotskyite neocons with their nightmarish ‘New World Order’ today. This ‘Order’ is the ideology of the global elite of bankers, industrialists, politicians and hired journalist-trolls. I answered as follows.

There is a great difference between globalism and the spiritual unity of the Church. Indeed, it can be said that there are two sorts of unity. Globalism means outward unity with the inward sameness (‘equality’ or homogeneity), created by the lowest common denominator, that is, by the unity of bread and circuses of the mob. On the other hand, spiritual unity means inward unity with the outward diversity created by the highest common denominator, that is, by spiritual maximalism. Thus, the two sorts of unity are exact opposites.

Globalism is the elitist project of neocons, which in reality began as far back as 1916 through the scheming of transnational bankers, including the Warburgs, the Rothschilds and Schiff, and Anglosphere politicians, including Lord Milner and Lloyd George. Seeing the collapse of old national empires as a result of the suicidal Great European War, they decided to seize power for themselves. They made sure that the new world would be directed by the new aristocracy of oligarchs (some of them actual aristocrats), in other words, by themselves.

After setting up in 1916, their first great project was implemented one hundred years ago in 1917. This was their project of implementing ‘regime-change’ in Russia, a coup d’etat in the vital Eurasian Heartland of the geopoliticians, through their agent Buchanan, the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg. This meant replacing the Christian Empire and the Emperor, who was holding back Antichrist, with a secularist elite on the same wavelength as themselves. So they were responsible for the bloody Bolshevik holocaust.

But they failed in their aims. Their incompetent fifth column of the Russian secularist elite was either killed or else forced to flee into exile by the satanic Bolsheviks. The global elite had managed to create an enemy for themselves in the Bolshevik USSR. So from Wall Street and London they then financed Hitler to destroy it. So they were responsible for the bloody Nazi holocaust. Again they failed, and Berlin was liberated by the Red Army. They had to wait another fifty years to seize the power in Russia that they had so craved.

Their success with the USSR came through the corrupt oligarch nomenklatura (‘some are more equal than others’) traitors Gorbachov and Yeltsin. The latter handed over the rotten and collapsing Communist system to neocon globalists from the USA. But even here their success was short-lived. After the ruination of US-directed privatization banditry (‘shock therapy’), in the Year 2000 the Russian Federation, the battered but main remnant of the Christian Empire, began to rise again from the Marxist ruins by canonizing the New Martyrs.

This is a miracle, which we had long dreamed of. Today, there is hope, but no guarantee, that the Russian Federation will drag up the rest of the former Empire from the ruins of the Western liberal oligarchs. Meanwhile, today, after 50 years since the early 1960s repression of normality, the for too long silent majority of the Western world is striking back against the elitist project. Now the Western world is divided between the neocon globalists and patriots, the latter supported by the Christian values of the returning Russian Empire.

The neocons preach social injustice (camouflaged by PR operatives under the name of ‘the free market’) combined with ‘anything goes anywhere’, satanic immorality a la Clinton, who considers that abortion is ‘kindness to children’. However, the patriots preach social justice and what the globalists call ‘social conservatism’ (= normal values). In this way, patriots of left and right, the ordinary people, are united against the utterly rotten, cosmopolitan elitist centre of the transnational Establishment and its amoral media hirelings.

We are also affected by this on the Church level. As one man, later to become a bishop (now defrocked) of the Constantinople Establishment or Phanar, said to me over 40 years ago: ‘There is no such thing as ordinary people’. At that point I realized that the elite was trying to take over even the Church of God through the soft, new calendarist underbelly of the Paris School world. But the attempt by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to foist on the Orthodox Church the ‘liberal’ (=Fascist) agenda of the elite utterly failed in Crete in 2016.

There the threats by the US-installed Patriarch, a personal friend of Biden and Obama, who have so much blood on their hands throughout the Middle East and the Ukraine, were rejected. The whole project looked like the last gasp attempt of an ageing elite to corrupt the Church before they die. After 100 years, the attempt to impose the project of the mammonist millionaires on the Church has failed. With God’s help, in 2017 we ordinary people will move forward in the restoration of spiritual unity and the destruction of globalism.

Some Constructive Suggestions Towards Overcoming the Chronic Pastoral Crisis in Both Dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church in the British Isles and Ireland

Introduction: The Russian Orthodox Presence in the British Isles and Ireland

There has been a Russian Orthodox presence in England for 300 years. And yet, incredibly, both dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church in our countries (that of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and that of the Church based inside Russia (the Diocese of Sourozh)) have faced battles to get even the name of their diocese right! Although it is thirty years since the late Fr Mark (Meyrick) of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) painted his Icon of All the Saints Who Have Shone Forth in the British Isles and Ireland with the correct title, we recently had a battle at the Theological Commission of the Inter-Orthodox Committee of Bishops even to establish this title, since most of the foreign bishops had no concept that there was a difference between Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the British Isles and whether any of these names included Ireland!

The Present Crisis

Both Russian Orthodox dioceses here have been in crisis in recent decades, facing three problems.

The first problem faced by the small Diocese of Sourozh, directly under Moscow, has been a mixture of modernism, liturgical renovationism and a personality cult characteristic of small organizations, all problems inherited from the Paris School of modernist Orthodoxy. This battle for the integrity of the Faith against what was in reality Protestantization resulted in the 2006 Sourozh schism, when the Diocese lost over half its mainly convert clergy and 300 people, also mainly converts. Though this is all in the past, there is still a hangover from that period. The second problem faced by that Diocese is its chronic lack of properties because of its defective ecclesiology in the past. This entailed dependence on Church of England for borrowing properties and so a lack of independence and freedom to preach the Gospel in the Orthodox way. All that the Diocese possesses is a smallish Cathedral in west London and tiny chapels in Oxford, Manchester and Nottingham. The third problem is its chronic lack of (overworked) clergy, whose average age is about 65 and few of whom speak the language of the masses of the Russian-speaking people, whose average age is about 35 (excluding children)!

The first problem faced by the even smaller ROCOR Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland, has been a narrow nationalism mixed on the fringes with old-fashioned Anglo-Catholicism, which in the past created a dead end of insularity. This battle for the integrity of the Faith against such Sectarianism, mixed with personality conflicts characteristic of small organizations, resulted in the 2007 ROCOR schism, when the Diocese lost its only monastery and convent. Though this is all exactly ten years in the past, there is still a hangover from that period. The second problem faced by the Diocese is its chronic lack of properties because of its over-strict narrowness and rejection of any form of mission (there was even a missionary tax!) in the past. This entailed total exhaustion and demoralization of the clergy and so a lack of any encouragement to preach the Gospel in the Orthodox way. With one exception, the Diocese largely only exists in London (and missions dependent on London) and in East Anglia. All that the Diocese possesses is a very small Cathedral in a sidestreet in west London, the largest Russian Orthodox church in the British Isles and Ireland in Colchester (not London) and tiny chapels in a house in Essex, in a private garden in a Suffolk village, in Norwich in Norfolk and near a village in central Ireland, far from where Orthodox live. The third problem is its chronic lack of overworked clergy, whose average age is about 65 and few of whom speak the language of the masses of the Russian-speaking people, whose average age is about 35 (excluding children)!

A Future Solution?

As can be seen, the common crisis is today purely pastoral in nature. Given that two of the three problems of both dioceses, lack of church buildings and lack of clergy, who are elderly, overworked and exhausted, are identical, there should be some common solution. One shrewd commentator has said that the Diocese that will dominate will be the one that sets up proper, large churches in London to provide proper pastoral care for the tens of thousands of faithful there. Notably, churches are required in the south of London, around, Croydon, in the east, around Stratford and in the north, around St Albans. The scandal is that there is only one permanent Russian-speaking priest to cover the country to the east and south of London – one third of the whole country!

However, we should also take into account the wider Russian Orthodox world in continental Western Europe and beyond. The Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) dominates the Russian Orthodox presence in the English-speaking world, in North America and Australasia. However, the Russian Orthodox Church based inside Russia, dominates elsewhere, notably in South America and above all in Western Europe. Here, where 25 years ago ROCOR was dominant and representatives of the Church inside Russia hardly existed, today ROCOR hardly exists. Just the Diocese of the Church inside Russia in Italy is larger than all of ROCOR in Western Europe. This has only eight parishes outside its parishes in western Germany and the few in Switzerland. Surely it is the Russian Orthodox presence in continental Western Europe will one day come under representatives of the Church inside Russia, with its new Cathedral and seminary in Paris and active young bishops, large flocks and newly-built churches in Rome, Madrid and many other places?

On the other hand, perhaps at this point we should consider what can be called ‘the Brexit Factor’. With the United Kingdom, at least, leaving the European Union, it is inevitably returning to closer relations with the rest of the English-speaking world, former colonies, especially in North America and Australasia. Surely, ecclesiastically, this means the Russian Orthodox presence in the British Isles and Ireland one day coming under ROCOR? Rather than the canonically absurd arrangement of two dioceses of the same Local Church on the same territory, there should surely be some rearrangement, at least in the British Isles and Ireland. It may seem premature to talk of this to some, but, after all, the two parts of the Russian Church have been united for ten years now, since 2007. The only delay on such matters can be because of pastoral considerations, in the interests of economy, that the people may not be upset.

Conclusion: Divine not Human

Of course, none of this can take place without the right leader, that is, without the right bishop, one acceptable to both sides, and this must be a bishop who speaks English and understands English people. A pastor. It is no wish of ours to hurt anyone’s feelings with the above considerations. The above is all written in the spirit of throwing a stone into a pond and seeing what ripples there may be. In other words, surely it is time at least to begin discussing such possibilities as we have outlined above in the spirit of pastoral love and unity. Let us remember: All crises are man-made and all solutions are God-made. Let us all strive to discern and do God’s Will.

Akathist to the Holy Martyr Gregory the New

Treason in High Places: On the Hundredth Anniversary of 30 December 1916

Quench not the spirit. Despise not prophesyings. But test all things, hold fast to that which is good.

1 Thess. 5, 19-21

Russia will not perish…it was and will be glorified; the tears of those who suffer, whoever they are, are higher than all idle talk.

Gregory Rasputin-Novy, 16 November 1916

Poor Russia bears a penance…It is our duty to cleanse the memory of the Elder from slander…This is vital for the spiritual life of the whole Russian Church…As Divine Truth begins to be revealed, everything will change in Russia.

Elder Nikolay (Guryanov) (1909-2002)

Petr Multatuli, Contemporary Russian Historian

Exactly 100 years ago, on 30 December 1916 (new style), the peasant elder Gregory Efimovich Rasputin-Novy was brutally and ritually murdered. Responsible were British spies and treasonous and parasitic Russian aristocrats, one of them an Oxford graduate, transvestite and occultist. Gregory, a ‘good, simple and religious man’, in the words of the Tsar, had been outrageously slandered by all the enemies of Christ and His Holy Church. These included ignorant, xenophobic nationalists, oligarchic February revolutionaries (and their ‘liberal’ Western and Westernized supporters to this day), as well as Bolshevik October revolutionaries with their German ideology and German/US finance and orders.

In the words of one of the assassins, Purishkevich, Gregory’s murder was ‘the first shot’ in the largely British-orchestrated February Revolution against the Christian Tsar. It anticipated by over two months the bloody torrent of the many millions of cruel deaths to come. His scapegoating, which had been going on for years before his death, which he had accurately prophesied, was only the self-justification of guilt-ridden murderers. Attitudes towards him have become a litmus test which shows the depth of repentance and mystical understanding necessary if the worldwide apostasy that began with the removal of the Tsar, who had held back Antichrist, is to be stemmed. Only then can the long-awaited restoration of our beloved Christian Emperor and Empire take place.

Below we present for the first time an English adaptation of the best-known of the three akathists to him, the one written by Nikolay Kozlov, all of which we have carefully read and compared. It is not an exact translation because the original, like the author’s full service to the New Martyr Gregory, at various points contains ambiguities in theological and other domains which could be misinterpreted by those of ill will. Although we give full credit to the author, this first ever version in a Western language is a long-considered adaptation, even original in parts, as much as a translation, with, for example, the words ‘Tsar’ generally translated as ‘Emperor’ and ‘Orthodox’ as ‘Christian’, as well as other changes.

May this be an English wreath laid on the gravesite of the still officially uncanonized but much venerated elder, healer, prophet and protomartyr of the Russian Revolution. This was ordered by anti-Christian sponsors and implemented by apostates, blinded by rationalism, from the anti-Christian globalist forces of evil. In their apostasy, folly and treachery these forces brought a curse of 100 years to the whole planet, not just an extended First World War and then Satanism in Russia, but a Second World War with its holocaust of 30 million Slav victims and a Cold War which endures to this day. It is from this that we may only now in 2016 be recovering, as the threat of a Third World War miraculously seems to be receding for now.

May the curse that has beset the whole world for 100 years at last be lifted!

Kontakion I

Called from the furthest bounds of East and West by the Most Holy Mother of God through her Image of Kazan to become a faithful servant of the Double-Headed Eagle, thou didst journey as a pilgrim to the holy places of the vast Orthodox Lands, even to the earthly Jerusalem, fearing God, honouring the Tsar and having compassion on the people. When the Spirit came down on thee, thou didst not forsake thy calling even unto death, acquiring boldness before the Lord and praying for those who sing to thee: Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Ikos I

Coming forth from the village of the Intercession of the Mother of God, thy destiny was revealed to be as an intercessor for the Imperial Family, O martyr Gregory, by thy prayers opposing the efforts of the dragon to overthrow the Christian Emperor and bestow his Empire on the beast from the bottomless pit. In wonder at thy service and protection beneath the veil of the Mother of God, we sing to thee thus:

Rejoice, thou who didst heal the heir to the throne after earthly doctors had laboured in vain.
Rejoice, thou who didst heal the future hope of the Christian Empire through thy prayers.
Rejoice, thou who didst turn the sorrow of the Empress into joy by the Holy Spirit.
Rejoice, thou who didst not seek any earthly reward for thy labours.
Rejoice, thou who didst imitate the mystical feat of the great martyr George.
Rejoice, thou who didst bear thy name as an evil for the sake of the Lord’s Anointed.
Rejoice, thou who didst obtain from thy Lord a new name that shines like a star in the heavens.
Rejoice, thou who didst speak words of the Lord like as a prophet of the New Israel.
Rejoice, thou who made the slanders and blasphemies of the enemies of Christ into salvation.
Rejoice, O spiritual warrior and companion in the battle for Sovereignty.
Rejoice, O invisible companion of the Emperor’s prayer.
Rejoice, O good and faithful servant even unto death.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 2

Seeing the Christian Empire troubled and shaken by the enemies of Christ, thou, O martyr Gregory, wast revealed after the repose of the Righteous John of Kronstadt as a new prophet to denounce the spiritual impurity of the Emperor’s foes and confirm the good estate of his faithful subjects, singing to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 2

Having the mind of the saints of old, whom thou didst love, and concealing God’s gifts from the world behind the foolishness of the Cross, thou wast beloved by the Emperor and Empress. Slandered by the spite of apostates and the jealousy of traitors, thou, O blessed one, wast no friend to the dark forces that hated Christ. Teach us also by the knowledge that God inspired in thee to withstand temptations, the enemies of Christ and the devil, singing to thee thus:

Rejoice, O man of God, honoured by Imperial friendship.
Rejoice, O messenger of the will of God, revealed to the Emperor.
Rejoice, O treasury of the Wisdom of God, hidden from the world.
Rejoice, O servant of Christ, whose nobility was far greater than that of princes.
Rejoice, O bee made wise by God, who gathered mystical nectar from the Emperor’s flowers.
Rejoice, O sweetness feeding the lovers of honey with holy honeycombs.
Rejoice, O faithful keeper of the Sovereign Empire against the servants of Antichrist.
Rejoice, O untiring guardian and zealot of ancient piety against the demons.
Rejoice, O converser with the Imperial Family.
Rejoice, thou who didst suffer for the good order of the Empire.
Rejoice, O meadow of virtue cultivated from generation unto generation.
Rejoice, O fool for Christ blessed by God amid the intrigues of Babylon.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 3

Raised up from a distant province for thine Imperial destiny by the Divine Love of Providence, thou, O blessed Gregory, admiring the Redeemer, didst witness to Him. In thy vigilance, as prophesied by the Righteous John according to thy name, thou didst sacrifice thy soul for thy Imperial Friends, prophesying and calling out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 3

In thee the Sovereign Family found a new intercessor, a new prophet and a new martyr, for thou, O faithful Gregory, wast revealed to be a forerunner of the Imperial Martyrs, like them slain in the darkness of the night by the base in a basement. As the offering of thy soul for the Emperor was accepted, now pray for those who call out to thee in this wise:

Rejoice, O trusted intercessor for the Imperial City come from a lowly village.
Rejoice, O protection against those who plotted to slay the Emperor.
Rejoice, thou who gavest thy life for the Tsar as a protomartyr.
Rejoice, thou who didst suffer at the hands of those who then martyred the Imperial Family.
Rejoice, thou who didst repeat the famed patriotic feats of old.
Rejoice, thou who didst mystically sacrifice thy soul for the Emperor.
Rejoice, thou who didst accept royal hallowing from God.
Rejoice, thou who wast revered by thine Emperor and Empress as a man of God.
Rejoice, thou who wast crowned on earth with a crown of thorns.
Rejoice, thou who wast crowned in heaven with a royal crown.
Rejoice, O friend of the ancient and sacred union of Emperor and people against apostates and traitors.
Rejoice, O spiritual offshoot of the Imperial Family.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 4

Rightfully spurning the wisdom of the world as vainglorious and impure and preferring the foolishness of the Cross, thou, O blessed one, didst denounce the lies and delusions, intrigues and evil schemings of those who had rejected Christ and didst pray with the greatest simplicity for those who sing to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 4

Hurling slanders and blasphemies at the Emperor who had been crowned by God, in their folly the traitors forced the Anointed of the Lord from his ancestral throne and led him like a lamb from his Gethsemane to his slaughter. Seeing the depth of thy love for the Emperor, who looks down on us now, we sing to thee, O Gregory, thus:

Rejoice, thou who in thy life with the Imperial Family wast falsely accused of every sin and vice.
Rejoice, O ever-watchful guardian of the Ruling Family who suffered for the sins of Russia.
Rejoice, thou who art not parted in death from their heavenly glory.
Rejoice, O gatekeeper in the heavenly mansions, guiding those who are called to speak of the Imperial mystery.
Rejoice, thou who denouncest unfaithful ministers before the Imperial Family.
Rejoice, O stumbling block for those gone astray from Christ, who even now scorn the Emperor’s glory.
Rejoice, thou who didst abide night and day in prayer for the Christian Ruler.
Rejoice, O never-slumbering eyes of the Tsar, delaying the appearance of Antichrist.
Rejoce, O holy standard of all the faithful servants of the Emperor.
Rejoice, O denouncer of treason, cowardice and deceit.
Rejoice, O humble ploughman who didst put thy hand to the plough of the Empire.
Rejoice, O mystical shield and protection of the Christian Emperor.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 5

Like a star shining forth from the Russian Lands in the distant east and moving on its God-given course to Christ, thy soul, O martyr Gregory, burned like a bright flame amid the delusions of the spiritual night in the west, going before the Emperor who cried out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 5

Seeing thee going before the Emperor as a prophet and fool for Christ, and witnessing to the grace of God resting on His Anointed, in their folly the traitors turned on thee like wolves in order to part thee from the Emperor. Wondering at the many miraculous acts of Divine Providence which guide the Christian Empire, we sing to thee thus:

Rejoice, O pilgrim who during many years prayed at the holy places.
Rejoice, O sower of the noble seeds of beauty, goodness and truth among the Orthodox people.
Rejoice, thou who didst mystically see the Imperial destiny of Holy Rus.
Rejoice, O fisherman, who gavest wise counsel to those caught in thy spiritual nets.
Rejoice, thou who didst come like a prophet unto thine own and wast not known by them.
Rejoice, O pearl of great price who was cast before swine.
Rejoice, thou who didst love God, Tsar and Empire.
Rejoice, O citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem.
Rejoice, thou who didst worship in the Holy Land and the earthly Jerusalem.
Rejoice, O pilgrim to Patmos, where John the Theologian saw the vision of the last times.
Rejoice, thou who didst eclipse the dark star of the enemies of the Tsar with the Sun of Righteousness.
Rejoice, thou who gavest sight to those made spiritually blind by the world.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 6

False brethren, weak in faith and cold of heart, did not wish to honour the see of Tobolsk, but thou, O wondrous Gregory, zealous for the greater glory of the Empire, didst intercede before the Tsar for the glorification of the holy hierarch John Maximovich, who is wonderful among the saints, calling out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 6

By thy prayers and intercessions before the Emperor, the light of Christ shone forth from the shrine of the holy relics of the sainted John of Tobolsk, for thou, O martyr Gregory, didst diligently labour to keep thy land faithful to the Tsar; through thy intercessions forsake not us who call out to thee such things as these:

Rejoice, O fulfilment of the mystical prophecies of Holy Rus for all the peoples of the world before the end.
Rejoice, thou who didst proclaim the city of Tobolsk to be Christ’s.
Rejoice, O hope of the land that suffered the blood of idolatry in former times.
Rejoice, O intercessor for the Empire made white by the red blood of the first martyred Tsar.
Rejoice, O spiritual guardian of the prison, which received the Imperial Captives.
Rejoice, O native of the land where mystically met the earthly and heavenly paths of Emperor and prophet.
Rejoice, thou who didst bear chains on thy body like a hidden schema.
Rejoice, thou who tookest the sanctuary of Tobolsk from its enemies with the sword of the Spirit.
Rejoice, thou who didst work many wonders and healings in thy lifetime.
Rejoice, thou who gavest repentance to the hierarch Germogen, appearing to him after death.
Rejoice, thou who didst mystically accompany the Tsar through the land of Tobolsk.
Rejoice, thou who lookest down on us from Heaven together with the Imperial Family.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 7

Desiring that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, thou, O blessed one, didst guide both the good and the bad through life’s sorrows, giving spiritual treasures to the faithful, who call out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 7

Christ showed thee to be a new passion-bearer, for thou didst not render any of thy persecutors evil for evil, praying for them and making ready for the Day of Judgement. Help us to escape the horrors of Gehenna that await Satan and his henchmen, as we call out to thee thus:

Rejoice, O generous almsgiver who didst love the poor.
Rejoice, thou who didst bar the gates of hell for the faithful.
Rejoice, thou who didst help the poor and naked.
Rejoice, thou who gavest every good gift for Christ and the Tsar.
Rejoice, thou who hast the exceeding great power to console in sorrow.
Rejoice, thou who didst call the rich and powerful to repentance from their spiritual impurity.
Rejoice, thou who dost ever sorrow for all who were guilty before the Tsar and sinful before God.
Rejoice, for none who came to thee with faith departed sorrowing and unconsoled.
Rejoice, thou who in wisdom didst conceal thy deeds from traitors with the foolishness of the Cross.
Rejoice, thou blessed by God who wast wiser than the enemies of Christ, the world and the devil.
Rejoice, thou who didst appear deaf and mute before those who insulted thee.
Rejoice, thou who didst pray for the enemies of God before the Day of Wrath.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 8

Seeing thy life of struggles and labours in the world through the eyes of spiritual impurity, O holy Gregory, some fell into temptation, for they heeded the words of the enemies of Christ, whose slanders against thee described their own vices, raising up a persecution against thee and thy spiritual children, who call out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 8

Thou didst endure all the filth and torment of the enemies of Christ with valour, O martyr Gregory. Struck by cutting words and piercing slanders sharper than swords and spears, thou didst accept bodily wounds, foreknowing thy violent death at the hands of enemies of Christ and traitors. As thou didst smite the old dragon, who rose up against the Christian Emperor with the Cross of the Lord, pray for us who call out to thee thus:

Rejoice, O protomartyr, against whom the demons inspired slander in every enemy of Christ.
Rejoice, thou whose life God had already preserved from death.
Rejoice, thou who didst bear the feat of martyrdom by the power of Christ.
Rejoice, thou who wast pierced in the side like the Saviour, with the cross in thy hands.
Rejoice, thou who wast thrown down beside a dead dog according to the evil custom of the enemies of Christ.
Rejoice, thou who wast cast into a freezing watery grave.
Rejoice, thou whose body was buried by the Imperial Family in a place of honour.
Rejoice, thou whose body was taken up and burned by the enemies of Christ, so having suffered both ice and fire.
Rejoice, for the enemies of Christ slew thee in a basement at night like the Imperial Martyrs.
Rejoice, for apostates and traitors of the Imperial line were guilty of thy peasant blood.
Rejoice, thou who wast raised up from afar for an Imperial destiny.
Rejoice, thou who didst beforehand show the Emperor a martyr’s end.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 9

Having shared and passed through every temptation of thine Imperial Friends by the grace of God, thou didst confess the Imperial mystery of the Incarnation, O blessed Gregory, which none knows, save the pious Orthodox who truly confess Christ and so are faithful to the Tsar, singing to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 9

All the long words of orators and all the airy works of philosophers are unable to express the depth of the spiritual impurity of those in seats of authority, who had lost the Orthodox Faith and so fell into envy, spite, slander and treason against the Emperor, the Empress and thee; but as for us, we see and honour only the glory of thy cross and call out to thee thus:

Rejoice, thou who didst share the Imperial burden before their Golgotha.
Rejoice, thou who didst eat at the Emperor’s table.
Rejoice, thou who didst choose the path of loyalty to the Emperor, refusing the pieces of silver of the traitors.
Rejoice, thou chosen out of distant Siberia who becamest one of the Ruler’s own.
Rejoice, thou who didst look on the Emperor and Empress as a faithful son.
Rejoice, O holy new prophet blessed by God to protect Sovereign Rus.
Rejoice, for thou didst shame those who shamed Holy Rus in the sight of the whole world.
Rejoice, thou who wast rewarded by the Empress.
Rejoice, thou who voluntarily tookest on thyself the sorrows of the Emperor.
Rejoice, thou who didst gain the envy and spite of the enemies of Christ.
Rejoice, thou who wast the Emperor’s faithful servant.
Rejoice, for thou wast one of those of whom the world is not worthy.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 10

God entrusted thee with the protection of the Christian Emperor, the faithful Empress and their godly children, O prophet and wonderworker Gregory. Thou didst stop the issue of blood of the heir, shedding thine own blood instead, that with the piety and holiness of the Orthodox spirit thou couldst feed the souls of thine Imperial Friends, who call out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 10

In their cunning and jealousy the enemies of Christ, greedy for power, tried to build a dividing wall of slander and lies between the Emperor and the people, that they might slay first him and then them, but thou, O wise one, pulled down that dividing wall, interceding for the people before the Emperor and showing the people to him, thus interceding for us too, who call out to thee such things as these:

Rejoice, for the Imperial Family were among thy spiritual children.
Rejoice, for in thy person they mystically adopted the Russian people.
Rejoice, O wise and patient mentor of thine Imperial disciples.
Rejoice, thou who didst savour their souls with the salt of Divine grace.
Rejoice, thou who didst teach the Imperial Family prophecy and holiness.
Rejoice, thou didst bless them with the simplicity of wisdom.
Rejoice, O offshoot of the Church sacredly grafted onto the Imperial vine.
Rejoice, thou who by thy grafting dost break off the withered branches of the Church.
Rejoice, thou who gavest a good answer for thy sacred pledge.
Rejoice, for thou makest us too, who honour thee, the Emperor’s friends.
Rejoice, thou who mystically askest for the Tsar’s forgiveness for those who betrayed him.
Rejoice, for in thee we await the restoration of the nobility of old.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 11

Loving the Church and partaking of the Holy Mysteries more eagerly than of all the treasures of the world, thou, O Gregory, tookest up thy cross of serving the Emperor in accordance with thy destiny appointed by Divine Providence, calling out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 11

The hierarchy was divided; brave and humble-minded missionaries, serving the Tsar and the people in east and west, blessed thee with warm hearts; proud and self-admiring functionaries, serving themselves and the worldly in ease and wealth, despised thee with cold hearts. Praying for the enlightenment of scribes and pharisees, we honour thy memory and that of all those faithful to the Imperial Family, singing praise to thee in this wise:

Rejoice, thou who wast mystically raised up from among the people by the Emperor.
Rejoice, thou who wast blessed by many faithful hierarchs such as Aleksiy, Makariy, Pitirim, Barnabas, Isidore and Melchizedek.
Rejoice, O pleaser of God, who didst honour Christ our God in every place of His dominion.
Rejoice, thou who hadst spiritual power, shaming the powerless wisdom of this world.
Rejoice, O unmercenary builder of the church in thy home village.
Rejoice, thou who didst love the Mother of God and wast zealous for piety.
Rejoice, O resolver of disputes, not with the booklore of scribes and pharisees, but with simplicity of heart.
Rejoice, O peacemaker sent by God among the disorder of men.
Rejoice, thou who didst fulfil the prophecies of the holy wonderworker Seraphim.
Rejoice, O lover of the Scriptures through the Spirit, who gavest the name of God all glory and honour.
Rejoice, thou who didst receive from Christ the gift of discernment.
Rejoice, thou who didst fight the serried ranks of heretics.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 12

By thy prayers increase the grace of intercession of Christian Emperors for the whole world, O martyr Gregory, for the prayer of the righteous avails much. After God had raised thee up from among the people to shame the apostasy and so lack of love of the rich and powerful, the treason of princes, the cowardice of generals and the deceit of the fleshly-minded ushered in an age of bitter persecution, but of sweet glory for the faithful, who called out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 12

Singing of the wonders worked in thy life by the grace of God, the healing of infirmities, the casting out of evil spirits, the granting of victory in battle, the foretelling of things to come, the consoling of the sorrowing with a single word and wise counselling for all life’s needs and cares, we call on thee, O wondrous Gregory, cease not to pray for us who are scattered across the face of the earth, awaiting the coming restoration of the Christian Empire and the new Tsar, who will sweep away the unworthy and the unfaithful, and calling out to thee such things as these:

Rejoice, O wise husbandman of the Imperial garden.
Rejoice, O fence against the thorns of the rich and powerful.
Rejoice, for no man has ever been slandered in his life like unto thee.
Rejoice, for even after thy martyrdom those who honoured thee were slandered.
Rejoice, O spiritual cloth with which every tear is wiped from every eye.
Rejoice, that evil words against thee may be forgiven.
Rejoice, O mystery of peasant nobility, tilling the earth of the soul.
Rejoice, O faithful servant of the holy ones of God.
Rejoice, for by thy martyrdom the dragon was run through.
Rejoice, O bright star of Siberia and martyr for Holy Rus.
Rejoice, for the Imperial Family loved thee.
Rejoice, O fair flower from the Imperial meadow.
Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 13

O glorious new martyr and wonderworker Gregory, by the cross of foolishness for Christ’s sake and voluntary suffering thou didst defeat the dragon, like the martyrs George, Theodore and Mercurius of old, and as the friend who fought for the Emperor of the Russian Lands thou dwellest with the holy ones in eternity, pray for the servants of Christ that by thine intercessions we unworthy sinners may also be accounted among the number of the friends of the Emperor, singing to Almighty God: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

The above kontakion is read three times, then the first ikos, followed by the first kontakion.

Prayer

O holy new martyr and wonderworker Gregory, the Emperor’s friend who fought against the traitors who took Holy Rus to the depths, show the foes of the Orthodox Lands on the left side and on the right side the might of the double-edged sword of Divine justice. May they not destroy the holy seed of Sovereignty, may the Christian Empire and Emperor be restored for all before the end, still mightier than before, according to the prophecy, through thine intercessions and the prayers of the Imperial Martyrs, that all who love the Name of God in Orthodox wise all over the world may make glad forever. Amen.

Troparion, Tone IV

O friend of the Emperor, who fought for Christian Rule, / thou didst appear as a fool for Christ to the world, / which did not know thee and evilly slandered thee. / O holy passion-bearer and martyr Gregory, / as thou didst offer thyself up as a sacrifice to Christ for the Emperor, / so pray for us that we too may be delivered from the injustices of enemies, / becoming the friends of the Sovereign Emperor // and seeing the Resurrection of Holy Rus.

What Will Replace the EU?

When Guy Verhofstadt, a former Prime Minister of Belgium who now heads the alliance of ‘Liberals and Democrats for Europe’ in the EU Parliament, described British political figures leaving the EU ‘as rats leaving a sinking ship’, he revealed what he really thought. Like other EU bureaucrats, he knows that time is up, that the EU is indeed a sinking ship. Its disappearance into the dustbin of history is not a question of if, but only of when. The post-War invention of the EU (though not at that time under that name) was clearly only a temporary accommodation provoked by the USA. It is amazing that it has gone on for so long, especially after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and then of the Soviet Union exactly 25 years ago, the existence of which, like that of NATO, was the EU’s only raison d’etre.

The deception perpetrated on the British people in 1972 by the then Prime Minister Edward Heath (then awarded a £40,000 yacht for his treason and now being investigated for pedophilia) in submitting the United Kingdom to the alien authority of the Treaty of Rome could not stand. Let us remind ourselves that it was another Belgian politician, Paul Henri Spaak, who had been entrusted with drawing up proposals for a European Common Market. Spaak was a revolutionary who had held talks with Trotsky. His right-hand man in the project was one Baron Robert Rothschild (not to be confused with the New York banker of the same name). In 1954 Rothschild had been appointed Spaak’s chef de cabinet at the Belgian foreign ministry and for two years worked with Spaak on the Treaty of Rome.

Not only did Spaak and Rothschild draft the Treaty, they also had the opportunity of deciding where it would be signed. They chose the main first-floor room of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the southern peak of the Capitoline Hill in Rome as their venue. They knew that the Palazzo had been built in the Middle Ages right on top of the Temple of Jupiter. The site had immense pagan, spiritual and political significance. Every year, the pagan Roman Senate used to hold their first meeting in the Temple. Jupiter was the protector, the ‘Conservator’ of Rome. Not only that, he was the Roman successor to the head of the Greek pantheon, Zeus, and if the altar to Zeus in Pergamos was said in the New Testament (Revelation 2, 13) to be ‘Satan’s Seat,’ this was Rome’s satanic equivalent.

However, although the teeming millions of Europeans (condemned by the judases as ‘populists’) will rejoice when the hated tyranny of the EU finally does disappear, this does not answer the question as to what will replace it. However, before such a question can be answered, another question must first be answered: What will replace the Soviet Union? After all, the EU only ever came into existence as a US-designed, anti-Soviet and anti-Russian bloc. Clearly, the present hotchpotch of unviable countries that replaced the Soviet Union is not going to last. They too, like the temporary Soviet Union, are only temporary. In order to find positive answers to both these questions, it seems to us that we must search in history before the First World War which ruined the Paris-Berlin-Saint Petersburg axis of unity.

It is clear that the countries included before 1917 within the Russian Empire form a territory that needs some sort of loose confederal unity and economic co-operation. Clearly, this does not mean the sort of centralized, tyrannical ideological unity of the Soviet Union, nor does it mean recreating the Russian Empire as such. There are already the beginnings of such a loose unity and such voluntary co-operation in the countries that form the Eurasian Economic Union. However, in 1914 in the western tip of the Eurasian Continent there were then empires and countries of Europe that were never part of the Russian Empire and have now mostly been absorbed into the failed European Union. Strangled by the political and monetary ideology of the EU, the peoples of these countries now look to freedom.

Surely they need look no further than the selfsame Eurasian Economic Union. Western Europe has in its pride and arrogance for a thousand years lived in self-chosen isolation from the wider Eurasian Continent. As it now faces collapse beneath the weight of its own spiritual and ideological bankruptcy, known as Secularism, and the self-inflicted invasion of Islamism, which will never recognize Christian values, it is now time for it to reintegrate the Eurasian Continent. This, vitally, contains the roots of its Christian Faith and thus its spiritual and so cultural identity. However, even more than this, Eurasia also contains its political and economic salvation. Eurasia, stretching to the Pacific, contains the mineral and energy resources which alone can save it from its dependency on the unstable and ever-warring Middle East.

The dream of many a European politician, not least of Charles de Gaulle, was a Eurasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok. This is now becoming possible. In the East, the bankrupt ideology of the German Jew Marx was abandoned 25 years ago. It is now for the West, the remaining countries of the EU, to give up its bankrupt ideology of Secularism. The time for isolation is over. It is now time to return to roots. The dream of a Eurasian Confederation of Free and Sovereign Nations, voluntarily working together, is possible. The alternative is what the EU has created in the Ukraine: a land of inherent corruption, inflation and self-inflicted civil war. The only question is whether the EU leaders will have the courage to repent before their folly reduces their countries also to the state of the Ukraine, creating a Europe-wide Ukraine.

Christ or Antichrist: There is No Room for Half-Christ

At the present time the politically-minded representatives of a minority of fewer than 20% of members of the Orthodox Church oppose the representatives of the majority of over 80%. This was clearly seen at the 2016 Inter-Orthodox forum in Crete, boycotted by representatives of over 80% of Orthodox and whose pre-written, ‘Halfodox’ documents respected Orthodox bishops refused to sign. The representatives of nearly 20% are from the Greek and EU parts of the Church that are US/Western run and influenced; the representatives of the 80% are the politically free, who are able to keep to the Christian Tradition, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and who believe in the Incarnation of the Church in the Christian Empire.

The 20% who in fact, consciously or unconsciously, betray the Church are composed of two groups.
The first group is formed of petty nationalists, who fall into idolatry by putting their national flag above the multi-national Church. The result of such nationalism is that those outside their nationalism are swiftly assimilated into surrounding groups. For example in the Diaspora, the descendants of such nationalists, speaking above all the local language and assimilating the local culture, are soon absorbed into the Non-Orthodox majority. Thus the churches of such nominal, nationalistic Orthodox rapidly die out, as the foreign nationalism of nationalist forebears has no relevance to descendants born in the Diaspora and they quit the Church.

The second group is formed of modernists, who have no deep love of the Church, no spiritual life or values, and tell you that it is irrelevant whether you belong to the Church or not – as ‘it is, after all, just another culture’. They are therefore inferiority-complex relativists and so ecumenists. Such people used to baptise their children (if they baptised them at all) into what they perceived to be the majority religion of the country where they lived. In other words, such modernists are relativists because they are conformists, who swim with the tide of the Establishment where they live, whatever it may be. Their Diaspora descendants also have little time for the Church and are quickly assimilated into the atheist masses.

As a result of the defection of one emigre group of such modernists, already dissident before the Revolution, which indeed they brought about, to the US-run, largely nationalist and modernist Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church has had to build a new Cathedral in Paris. This is a Cathedral for those Orthodox who are faithful to the integral Christian Tradition, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and who believe in the Incarnation of Christ and so of the Church in the Christian Empire. Only here, for example, is the Orthodox calendar adhered to, only here is the tradition of confession before communion adhered to, only here do women keep to the Christian Tradition of modest dress. In other words, only here are spiritual ties to the integrity of the Church kept.

After consecrating both the Russian Orthodox Cathedrals in London and Paris in the last two months, it is clear that the Russian Orthodox Patriarch is intent on witnessing to the integral Orthodox Christian Tradition before the Western world. This is a clear rejection of the watered down, modernist, relativist and ecumenist Cretan or Westernized version of Orthodoxy, created by the neocon sponsors of Greek Orthodoxy in Washington. This anti-dogmatic Halfodoxy is unable to witness anything to anyone except its inferiority as a merely exotic version of Western secularism.

Today, 100 years after the blood-soaked Revolution, the Church is returning to witness to the spiritually damaged Western world that the Western-developed, globalist atheism that persecuted it for three generations in the Soviet Union, in the greatest persecution seen in history but which is virtually ignored in the guilty West, is dead. Moreover, this clearly implies that if the Western world continues its adoption of that globalist atheism, then it too is dead. As in 2016 Western people after Western people re-assert their national identities, to the fury of their power-grasping, US/EU political and media establishments, the message of uncompromised Orthodox Christianity is at least being heeded.

On the Meaning of Destiny and the Future of Russia and the West

Introduction: Destiny

The word ‘destiny’ is vague because it has different meanings according to the three parallel universes which exist. The first-created universe is Heaven and here the word ‘destiny’ means God’s Will. The second universe is Earth, now fallen, aptly called in Old English ‘Middle-earth’ (a term more recently popularized by a former Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon, J.R.R. Tolkien). Here the word ‘destiny’ can have the pagan connotations of ‘the fates’, indicating fatalism and the buffetting of forces apparently beyond human control, called by the Ancient Greeks ‘the gods’, but by Christians ‘the demons’, but it can also have positive connotations, for on Middle-earth, people can also be inspired to do God’s Will, though this is not always understood. Finally, there is the third universe, which we call Hell, that provides a hellish destiny, what the demons want for us.

The Parallel Universes

Those who listen out for and do God’s will have a heavenly destiny or calling. They follow their heavenly roots of the past and the future. Awaiting Divine inspiration, they can have a prophetic gift and become God’s seers, visionaries. They foresee a hellish destiny for mankind if there is no repentance and a heavenly destiny if there is. (Demons can only foresee the hellish destiny because they have renounced their freewill to do good. This is why demonic prophecies are very often wrong in their dire and depressing prophecies, as they are unable to see the possibility of good. And this is why secular media often depressingly imitate those hellish forecasts). Prophets have their eyes fixed on the future and are not too bothered by the details of the present, which can tie down to the quagmire of this world, and which scandalize the narrow-minded who cannot see long-term.

Christian Destiny

Those who listen to their Divine calling and so have a Christian Destiny, do not live according to the destiny of the Middle-earth, still less to hellish destiny, but according to heavenly destiny. Their prophecies lead heavenwards. Their destiny is, according to the logic of this world, seems strange, irrational, ironic, mysterious. In reality, none of this is true, for it is the logic of this world that is composed of fallen human rationalism and therefore is strange and ironic. God’s logic, heavenly destiny, is quite different, it leads heavenwards.

Men and Women

The general heavenly destiny of men is self-sacrifice, meaning tenderness. That of women is natural beauty, meaning beauty of soul. The general hellish destiny of men is egoism, meaning brutality. The general hellish destiny of women is artificial beauty, meaning vanity. Modern Western society has largely chosen a hellish destiny, so becoming a society of egoism and vanity, that is, the selfie society, a society of narcissism, the self-important, I-society of look-at-me Facebook and MySpace, of i-phone and i-pad, of I love me.

Russia

As regards the destiny of Russia, we can say the following:

The first shot of the so-called Russian Revolution, as stated by one of the assassins, Purishkevich, was fired on 30 December 1916. The countries of the former Russian Empire then went through three 25-year generations of horror, obscenity and hysteria, of turning their backs on their roots. After the bloodshed following 1916, came 1941 and yet another Western invasion, which was a call to repentance, then the abortion holocaust of the 1960s with the whole Soviet ABCD (alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce), the result of 50 years of rejection of pre-Revolutionary values and the demotivation, especially of men, who no longer had any role to fill, as the State had total control, and finally the horrors of perestroika after 1991, in which millions died premature deaths, especially through vodka and suicide, as people were unable to face the banditry of so-called ‘privatization’ and ‘the bright future’, promised for the huge sacrifices made for the Soviet Union, turned into a nightmare. The heaven on earth promised by the Communist ideologues had become hell on earth.

Today, the hangover and vestiges of the hellish destiny of the Soviet past are still alive, but the younger generations are now aware of their Christian roots, of their forgotten and rejected heavenly destiny. Hell stopped in 1991 and a great many stepped back from the brink. Hope sprang. A generation on, there is still uncertainty, but as time passes more and more Russians have not only stepped back from the brink, but are fleeing it as fast as possible.

The West

The same pattern of generational change, every 25 years, has gone on in the West. In 1914 the Western elite rejected Christ and slaughtered and maimed its youth in indescribable conditions. In 1939 it rejected the possibility of repentance and deepened its abysmal tragedy. In the 1960s it rejected inherent Christian cultural values. In 1989 it began to spread its evil to Eastern Europe and worldwide under the slogan of a ‘New World Order’ and the word ‘globalism’. Western Europe, since 1917 under US domination, now became nothing more than a laughable US vassal.

However, in 2016, with the events of Brexit, the election of a Non-establishment politician in the USA and the rejection by Italy of Brussels bureaucrats, there is hope that the Western world is also stepping back from the brink. Having peered over the precipice and seen hell, some at least are coming to their senses. What will 2017 bring? Of course, it may be that the events of 1916 are mere pauses before, lemming-like, the West continues its suicide, but it may be these events mark a sea-change. The West stands on the edge of the cliff, hesitantly. Political elites and their hireling-journalists, who obey hellish voices and destinies, are alarmed: they could lose their well-paid jobs Could the people be reclaiming their freedom despite their alleged manipulation into zombies by the Western media?

Conclusion

In Paris this weekend, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, Patriarch Kyrill consecrated the symbol of Holy Rus in the Western world, a new Christian Cathedral and spiritual centre. Jerusalem has come to Babylon. Will this help the Western world to come back to its senses and roots? By the grace of God, may it be so.

The Paris School and the Future

The phrase ‘Paris School’ (of Russian religious philosophy) is a vague phrase because many of its representatives ended up not living in Paris or even France and because it was such a very varied phenomenon. Thus, it included intellectuals mainly of Russian origin (but not all of them), who ended up living as far apart as the USA, England, Finland, Bulgaria (the anti-monarchist plotter, Fr George Shavelsky) and Constantinople (the philosopher Metr John Zisioulas). Some of these were close to Orthodoxy, others were in open heretical revolt against the Church and constructed anti-Church ideologies, others were simply harmless eccentrics who lived in the clouds.

A representative close to the Tradition, for example, was the academic theologian (and not philosopher!) Fr George Florovsky, who was ousted from St Vladimir’s Seminary by another much more Protestant-minded thinker of a Paris-born generation, Fr Alexander Schmemann. However, there were others like the notorious Fr Sergey Bulgakov, who founded a new heresy under the influence of the alcoholic Catholic occultist Vladimir Soloviov. The latter was the real founder of the School, who infected it with all its basic currents of Gnosticism, Origenism, liberalism and ecumenism and had a great influence on the enormous intellect of the polymath, Fr Paul Florensky.

Then in Paris there was also the esoteric philosopher Berdyayev, who was imbued with semi-Catholic mysticism and like Bulgakov never quite shook off his Marxism, but there was also the more Orthodox Fr Basil Zenkovsky who wrote a magisterial ‘History of Russian Philosophy’. Then there were Vladimir Lossky, trained in Scholasticism, but whose views were very close to the Tradition in many respects, but on the other hand, the fantasist Bishop John Kovalevsky or the recently deceased French ecumenists, the ex-pastor Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and Olivier Clement. Their views were respectively as close to Protestantism and Catholicism as is possible without lapsing.

In England there were other representatives of the Paris School. These included the late Metr Antony (Bloom), whose curious, personal views combined a theoretical conservatism with an extraordinary liberalism and influenced several convert followers, like the Jewish Fr Sergei Hackel. Then there was the late ex-Uniat Fr Lev Gillet, who appears to have died either as a Quaker or else a Buddhist (no-one is quite sure), or the Parisian artist and intellectual the late Fr Sophrony Sakharov, whose whole esoteric philosophy of Orthodoxy came to be shaped by the peasant St Silvanus whom he had met on the Holy Mountain, where he had been a librarian.

With such a variety of individuals, some much closer to Orthodox Tradition than others, some more renovationist than others, some more fantasist than others, what do they all have in common? Negatively speaking, it is how far most of them seemed to have stood from the saints of the Church in the emigration like St John of Shanghai (also who also lived for many years in Paris and often came to London) or St Seraphim of Sofia, or from the genuine Orthodox philosopher of the emigration Ivan Ilyin. These followed the wholeness of the ascetic Tradition of the Church, and not selected fragments of it, which is why the Paris School was opposed to authentic monasticism.

However, this was not the essence of the Paris School. Its essence was its intellectual pretentiousness, which contains the pride which is at the heart of all deviations from the Church, without exception. Not understanding that enlightenment comes from the grace of God that alone cleanses the repentant heart, they all mistakenly believed that enlightenment comes from the purification of the intellect and the imagination. This tragic mis-take meant that their views were intellectual, philosophical, more or less renovationist, more or less fantasist, disincarnate from reality and from ordinary Orthodox and Orthodoxy, and so ultimately they became sectarian and cultish.

The proof of this thesis is in the fact that when the time came for the gradual liberation of the Russian Church inside Russia from Sergianism and Renovationism after 1991, they refused to re-enter Her fold and glorify the New Martyrs and Confessors together with Her. They had not been longing to return all along, as had the faithful, but had instead been cultivating their own intellectualist philosophies outside the Orthodox Tradition. Thus, cultivating private, personality-driven sidelines, they failed to see the mainstream of Church catholicity and ended up isolating themselves in the worst sort of isolation – isolation from the real saints, the New Martyrs and Confessors.

This meant that they allied themselves only with the vestigial renovationist and sectarian elements on the fringes of the Russian Church inside Russia. It also meant that they sullied themselves with politics (under the pretence of being apolitical!, which is always political). Thus, they allied themselves with Russophobic elements in the Western world, for example, with the self-justifying neocon hawks and past-worshipping warmongers of NATO, who never wanted the Cold War to end and in their ethnocentricity arrogantly never understand that the vibrant values of Orthodox Christian Civilization are quite different from their dying anti-Christian Western culture.

This is why, when at the end of 2016 the time of generational change had come for renewal in Russia and then, inspired by the Russian example, for the first glimmers of freedom and the hope of repentance in the West, the Paris School and its values stuck to the dead past. These last representatives were now aged, vestigial relics, whose rebellious and often absurd ideologies had been half-baked in the spiritual desert of the 1960s, which had been passed on to a few convert intellectuals in Russia who still had not caught up with the real world. As for the Church, we look as ever towards prophetic holiness and the dynamic restoration of the Tradition in the Holy Spirit that is happening now.