Category Archives: Orthodox Restoration

On the Spiritual Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

Introduction

The living beliefs of St John of Shanghai swim against the tide of the world and are remarkable examples to all of us for the three following reasons. First of all, although he lived outside Russia he expressed faithfulness to Holy Rus, which for him, as shown in his sermon on the 950th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus, is a living reality, not a dream or myth, as it is for unbelieving modernists a la Schmemann. This faithfulness to Holy Rus, even though it was enslaved beneath the Soviet atheist yoke, entailed his constant prayers for the Patriarch of the Russian Church (shown by his words to the then Fr Vladimir Rodzianko) despite the Patriarch’s political enslavement and so separation from free Russians. It also entailed St John’s opposition to those who fought against Russia, under the tragic and misguided illusion that that they were fighting against the Soviet Union.

Secondly, St John was faithful to the Tsar, already in the 1930s enjoining his canonization against those of both left and right who opposed it. Thirdly, he believed in the Russian Church not as a national ghetto, but as an organism with the worldwide calling to convert to Orthodoxy, as he clearly expressed at the Second All-Diaspora Council in 1938. These three virtues, faithfulness to Holy Rus, faithfulness to the Orthodox Monarchy and faithfulness to the Russian Church’s calling to preach to the heterodox and unbaptized world, are matched by three opposing temptations. These can be found among the still unChurched (and this includes clergy and laity), among those on the fringes of the Church and those outside the Church. These three temptations of spiritual impurity are liberalism instead of faithfulness, conservatism instead of faithfulness and heterodoxy instead of faithfulness.

Liberalism instead of Faithfulness to Holy Rus

This is the temptation from the left, with its renovationism, modernism, new calendarism, liberalism, ecumenism and freemasonry. We have met its spirit in ‘Orthodox’ freemasons in Paris, in cultish, Hindu-style gurus with a name-worship mantra or psychic hypnosis and even occultism, inspired by Blavatsky and Steiner, in those who cannot stop speaking of ‘hypostasis’ and ‘theosis’, rather than living the commandments of the Gospel, in ‘cowboy’ copies of liberal Protestantism and liberal Catholicism camouflaged by long Greek ‘theological’ words, in the elderly or now dead renovationism of the old KGB-selected Moscow Patriarchal representatives from before the fall of atheism, in well-read converts who reject new immigrants from Eastern Europe because they are not liberal intellectuals like themselves, and in ideologies driven by personalities, not by spiritual realities.

Conservatism instead of Faithfulness to the Orthodox Monarchy

This is the temptation from the right, with its phyletism, nationalism, naïve idealization, old calendarism, right-wing emigres and converts who support and accept money from the CIA or MI5, the cultivation of the museum ethos. We have met its spirit in Greeks who tell Non-Greeks to go away, in those who ban the use of languages other than their own, in nationalist Ukrainians who have nothing to do with the Church because they are driven by politics, not by Christ, in those who fall into schism on account of minor errors rather than the general correctness in the Church, in those who schismatically divide the Church, falling into the temptation of the Church’s enemies who want to divide and so rule Her, in converts from conservative heterodox who bring prejudices into the Church, in those who self-justifyingly confuse psychology with theology, serving self and not the general good of the Church.

Heterodoxy instead of Faithfulness to Missionary Work

Authentic missionary work is about conforming the world to the Church, and not as some compromised people have suggested, supporting the errors of those outside the Church through their own syncretism (‘all religions are the same’), founded on indifference. Also, if heterodox are prematurely received into the Church, they may bring spiritual impurities, either in the form of agendas for ‘reform’ or else of reactions to their heterodox past. Thus, there may be ex-Anglicans still with their Protestant mentality who want a ‘refomed’ Orthodoxy in their own image, since they, received prematurely and not yet ready for the Orthodox Church, are unable to cast off their own personal, cultural and spiritual prejudices. Either such will mature, or else they will lapse. Unable to cast off their Establishment class views, whether of left or right, they will never become Orthodox, however well-read.

Conclusion

The title of this essay is formed by the words of the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus (+ 2008), said to me in May 2006, on the need to conserve the integrity of the Holy Orthodox Faith. However, his words were in the same line as those of three generations of Russian bishops of the Diaspora before him, of Archbishop Antony of Geneva (+ 1994), of St John of Shanghai (+ 1966) and of Metropolitan Antony of Kiev (+ 1936), the first First Hierarch of the Church Outside Russia. They all agree, in words as in deeds, that any immixture of spiritual impurity in the Faith is a dead end precisely because it is unspiritual and what is unspiritual by definition brings death. It is for us to follow with care their words, deeds and lives, so that we do nor err from the Tradition of the Church through impure influences from outside Her. And this we can do through faithfulness.

Answers to Questions from Letters

Below are some answers to questions in recent correspondence.

Q: In your recent article ‘Truth and Mercy’, were you expressing prophecy or just wishful thinking?

A: As usual, I wanted to make people think outside the restrictive box that the secular media offer and also to comfort the weaker from the despair that is offered by those media. In both these respects from feedback it is clear that the article was successful. That article describes a possible and spiritual outcome of present world events.

Obviously, I am not a prophet, but it is clear that what is being played out in the world today, in Gaza, with massacres by US-armed Zionists, in Iraq and Syria, with massacres of Christians by Qatari-financed terrorists, and in the Ukraine, with massacres of Ukrainians by CIA-organized terrorists and mercenaries (all these events are very closely interconnected) is of vital importance. This year we are reaching another huge turning point in history, as great as that of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

However, there is a prophetic element. That article, ‘Truth and Mercy’, was based on prophecies of several holy people, of St John of Shanghai, Schemamonk Aristocleus, Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan, Fr Paisios the Athonite, Elder Jonah of Odessa and others. However, we must remember that all prophecies, theirs too, are conditional on repentance – and repentance is not certain. What I am saying is that if we do not go in the direction of ‘Truth and Mercy’, then we will go in the direction of the end of the world. There is no middle way, no compromise, as people of fantastical Anglican culture always imagine that there is. Today, we are going either towards repentance, or else, to Sodom and Gomorrah and unspeakable catastrophes before Antichrist. I want to give people hope. Catastrophe is not inevitable.

Those who think with worldly criteria do not understand that article, they find it fantasy. This is because they think in secularist, political terms only, which by definition exclude Providence, the Divine and the miraculous, from their thought processes. This is because their thought processes are not Orthodox, not Christian, they are deceived, for processes in the real world are not directed by secular forces. In reality, human affairs are directed by spiritual forces, either Divine or else, as we can see around us and throughout the history of the last 100 years, Satanic. The Divine is possible, but the Satanic, what in the Old Testament is called ‘the wrath of God’, is also possible. It is our choice. Such is human freewill.

Q: You mentioned St John of Shanghai. Why does he stand out as THE saint of the emigration?

A: Firstly, because he was a saint. That in itself is exceptional, especially with all the pseudo-saints and pseudo-elders of the Russian emigration, with false claims and personality cults, developed by themselves and then, much worse, by their disciples after their deaths. Secondly, because he was universal. He affected all Continents and spoke to all nationalities, Eastern (Chinese, Japanese and Filippino) and Western (European and American). And thirdly, because he was a monarchist, a ‘Tsarist’ to the core.

Q: Why is that significant?

A: Because that is the litmus test for the understanding of Orthodoxy today. The restoration of the monarchy in Russia for the benefit of the whole Orthodox world and indeed for the benefit of the whole world is the only direction in which we can go. Those who have not understood this have not really become Orthodox. They are disincarnate, semi-Protestant, they do not understand that Orthodoxy is the religion of the Incarnation, of the last two fingers when we make the sign of the cross. They think that Orthodoxy, and religion in general, is just a private matter, a personal theory, without any practical and public ramifications. That is a heresy. I wonder if they know how to make the sign of the cross properly. They may be full of doctorates, but I am sure they do not hold the last two fingers, representing the Divine and human natures of Christ, together. They would do well to learn from the last illiterate village greybeard in Moldova, or for that matter in Galilee.

St John is the guide to this as he possessed the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. So many converts treat Orthodoxy as ‘comfort Orthodoxy’, a kind of part-time hobby or ego-trip. Christ, that is, Orthodoxy, is not that. A hobby or ego-trip is starters, comfort eating; what we have to do is to get to the main course, the meat dish, which is in the arena. Only when we have been in the arena with the wild beasts that attack us, as they do because they are our main course – can we get to the sweet, dessert, which is paradise. As they say, you cannot get to paradise in a Rolls-Royce.

Q: What is the situation among new Orthodox (those who have been baptized in the last 20 years or so) in the Church inside Russia? Have they come to what you have called ‘the arena’, ‘the main course’?

A: That is an interesting question and the answer varies. I can remember how in the 1990s, many newly-baptized in Russia (and they numbered tens of millions) read books by Metr Anthony of Sourozh and other Russian purely intellectual and theoretical writers who wrote for Non-Orthodox in the West. In other words, they read what was appropriate for outsiders and beginners, introductions. Fortunately, a great many in Russia now, especially because of the influence of authentic monasticism (that is so sorely and disastrously lacking in the West) have got past that stage. They are no longer outsiders, converts, but insiders, Orthodox. Now they read the lives of the saints and of elders like Fr Paisios, Fr John Krestiankin and Fr Nikolai Guryanov. In other words, they have indeed got to the main course. This is encouraging.

Q: A historical question regarding the Tsarism of St John: Why did the White Counter-movement fail after the Revolution?

A: It failed precisely because it was not White. It had no single and unitive leader (that could only have been a Romanov) and it was not even firmly monarchist behind Tsar Nicholas. Even individual Whites like Wrangel and Kolchak were compromised by people around them, who were not white. Few had a pure motivation and so the White movement failed. Archbishop Averky writes very clearly about this, as several other Church writers too.

Q: Some say that St John would have been against the Church inside Russia. What would you reply?

A: The Slavonic service book that I have always used is that published under Metr Anastasy, the second First Hierarch of ROCOR. According to it, in the great litany we pray for ‘all the Orthodox Patriarchs’ before we pray for our own ROCOR bishops. This was the real Church’s position before sectarianism started creeping in through US old calendarism in the 1960s (I strongly suspect that that old calendarism was financed by the CIA), which tried to surround, abduct and divert spiritually the noble and venerable Metr Philaret, before being partly rejected by Metr Vitaly (who was then surrounded, abducted and diverted literally by it), and then rejected completely by Metr Laurus.

This traditional ecclesiological position was also the position of St John. One whom I knew, Fr Vladimir Rodzianko (later Bishop Basil), recorded St John’s words: ‘Every day I pray for Patriarch Alexis at the proskomidia. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer is still the same. By force of circumstance we have been cut off from one another, but we are still one liturgically. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we are with Her and in Her. Administratively, for the sake of our flock and well-known principles, we have to take the way that we have taken, but this in no way breaks the sacramental unity of the whole Church’.

You see pre-2007 ROCOR had two parts – the main patriotic part (those who loved Russia because she is called to be Orthodox and to save the world) and a smaller, but powerful political/ideological part (nationalists who always put their personal advantage and interests, financial or political) above the Church. Remember how it was that political wing that actually put St John of Shanghai on trial in San Francisco in the early 60s.

As a result of the actions of this political, ideological wing, many left ROCOR in England, for example, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The sectarians tried to take over in London and elsewhere. We lost at least four priests at that time as a result of them – and that was just in one small diocese. The older generation were squeezed out; the situation by the mid-1980s was dire.

Q: Were you affected by that situation in England personally?

A: Very much so. We emigrated as a result of it. I came to ROCOR not through the situation in England, but through Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who had nothing to do with the old calendarist nonsense that had come over from America. He had remained faithful to the Tradition, to the ecclesiology of St John, who had preceded him in Western Europe. Like St John, he received by chrismation. Vladyka Anthony said that we must belong to a ROCOR that did not concelebrate with Moscow, but only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. But he and his clergy concelebrated with everyone else, with all other Local Churches. Before he died 20 years ago, I know that one priest from inside Russia had already concelebrated with him, while remaining in the Patriarchate. Vladyka Antony, like St John, was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev, whom both had known in Belgrade. They are my spiritual lineage, my spiritual ancestry, that of Universal, and not sectarian, Orthodoxy. Metr Laurus belonged to the same spiritual family.

Such were the views too of hierarchs like Bp Alexander (Mileant) and Bishop Mitrofan (Znosko-Borovsky) of the generation before, whom I met. They were ardent patriots, not of Russia, but of Orthodox Russia. And that was the reason why we could not be under what was then called the Moscow Patriarchate, which outside Russia was dominated by individuals who displayed Soviet patriotism, which came from fear, and so was alien to us. All of us thought like Dostoyevsky – that a Russian who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. So there was no indiscriminate nationalism for us.

Q: What happened to the political wing?

A: It left the Church over a period of 20 years, from 1986 on, mainly leaving for various sects, including various old calendarist sects. I would remind all that both St John and Archbishop Antony had parishes under them on the new calendar (for the fixed feasts). In St John’s case, they were Western rite parishes.

Q: What about St John and the Western rite? Surely his support of Western rite means that we too should support Western rite today?

A: People who say such things have completely forgotten the historical context. St John’s Western rite worked with former Catholics (not with Anglicans and other Protestants) and he did this before the revolution of the Second Vatican Council, before, in other words, before the Protestantization or rather Americanization of Catholicism. At that time, in the 1950s, there still was a Western rite. That is the fundamental difference between then and now. St John was striying to save those who were at the end of a culture and bring them to Orthodoxy. Today that culture is all but dead – it only exists among a few upper class people or the very elderly and dying. There is no future to it, which is why the Western rite is also elderly and dying, where it is not actually dead.

For fifty years there has not been a living Western rite and you cannot renew and then modify a rite that is no more. This is why all Western rite experiments, though motivated by pastoral concerns, the best of intentions, have ended in failure. There is only one living rite today and that is the Orthodox rite. I know. I have seen the Western rite failure in France.

Q: How and why does the Russian Orthodox view of Catholics and Protestants inside Russia differ from that in the Church Outside Russia?

A: There is not a great deal of difference, but there is a difference. I would say that the view inside Russia is more pro-Catholic, but more anti-Protestant (indeed Protestants there are called ‘sectarians’). The reasons for this are as follows.

The Russian (not Ukrainian) experience of Catholicism is that of a pre-Vatican II, Eastern European confession which has a hierarchy, monastic life and sacraments, clergy who dress as clergy, believes in the Mother of God and the saints and even venerates icons. It therefore sees in Catholicism an admittedly provincialized and primitivized but still potentially Orthodox Church. It has no experience of the reality of the protestantized and infantilized Catholicism of the post-Vatican II world, as it is in Western Europe. When it discovers that, it is in a state of culture shock.

On the other hand, the Russian experience of Protestantism is that of sects which are rabidly anti-Orthodox and can hardly be recognized as Christian at all. This experience was much reinforced by aggressive American evangelical preachers who came to Russia in the 1990s and tried to bribe Orthodox into joining them. Clearly, the experience was entirely negative and hence in Russia Protestants are called sectarians.

Q: So who is right?

A: The Church inside Russia is right in Eastern Europe. The Church Outside Russia is right in its domain, in Western countries, among Western people. Catholicism and Protestantism are so variable, they are not monolithic; we have to look at the local realities of both before we decide on our attitude and the use of economy or akrivia.

Q: In various Local Churches you can find heterodox customs. How can we tolerate them?

A: We can tolerate them because we are not sectarian, but tolerant! However, that does not mean that we observe such provincial customs ourselves. We do not cultivate the fringes, but the broad mainstream of the Church. For example, I remember an ex-Anglican Antiochian priest (in England they are all ex-Anglicans, virtually without training), wanting to introduce little girls to serve in the altar because he had seen a bishop in Syria doing this! I told him that just because others had adopted Uniat customs out of pan-Arab nationalism, that did not mean that we have to. The same goes for so many customs, from certain Carpatho-Russian chants preserved in their emigration in the US and which are pure old-fashioned Catholic chants (which the Catholics have now lost), or Bulgarian icons, which are not iconography, but folk art, or beardless Ukrainian clergy as in the OCA (another Uniat hangover) etc. In other words, we do not prolong decadence, but let it die out by itself.

The lack of discrimination is typically Anglican. It is the inability to distinguish between the essential Tradition and eccentric local customs which may have nothing at all to do with Orthodoxy. Thus, in one community of the Rue Daru group in England an ex-Charismatic, ex-Anglican priest, also untrained, has his converts calling out names for commemoration during the service! It would be better if he joined the Pentecostals, especially since he maintains that he is better off without a bishop (who is in distant Paris), so that ‘I can do whatever I want’.

In general, Rue Daru claims to be of the ‘Russian Tradition’, but that was thrown out of the window there 26 years ago in 1988. If you are of the Russian Tradition, then you must be part of the Russian Church, observe the Orthodox calendar, have confession before communion, wear Russian vestments, have women wear headscarves, keep the canons and traditions of the Russian Church. As one correspondent in France wrote to me, the Russian Tradition never stayed a single night in the vast majority of the tiny convert Rue Daru communities, which Russians simply boycott because there is no Orthodox Tradition there. Once you have seen and above all experienced the real thing, you know what is false as soon as you see it.

The Mystery of Archbishop Averky

The future Archbishop Averky (Taushev) was born in 1906 in Kazan. Due to the nature of his father’s work, in his youth he travelled all over Russia and grew to love its monasteries, reading deeply. In 1920 the Taushev family fled Russia for the Bulgarian city of Varna. Here, while still at high school, the young man met the exiled Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, who further inspired his love of monastic life. After leaving school the future Archbishop enrolled at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Sofia.

On graduating he accepted a position as assistant secretary in the Carpatho-Russian Diocese in what was then Czechoslovakia. There, in 1931, he was tonsured monk with the name Averky, ordained deacon and in 1932 ordained priest, serving in local parishes. After carrying out various tasks for the diocese, in 1940 Fr Averky was forced to leave Carpatho-Russia. He moved to Belgrade where he taught Pastoral Theology and Homiletics, but in 1945, moving out in front of the advancing Red Army, he arrived in Munich together with the Synod of Bishops of the Church Outside Russia. Here he continued teaching.

In 1951 Fr. Averky was assigned to teaching at Holy Trinity Seminary at Jordanville in New York State. Fr Averky was soon consecrated bishop and in 1960 he was chosen by the monastery to be their Abbot. As Abbot, Archbishop Averky, as he had become, led the curriculum, teaching New Testament and Homilectics, writing and preaching. He also actively participated in publishing the Russian periodical ‘Orthodox Rus’. He reposed in 1976, known for his Orthodox writings and sermons calling to repentance, his saintly life, adherence to the Tradition against ecumenism and extremism, and his conviction that the end of the world was rapidly approaching amid contemporary apostasy.

The mystery that concerns us is why the Archbishop was so convinced that the end was near. After all, forty years on, we are still here. The answer, however, is not complex. Already, over 1950 years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote similarly of the end of the world. Is it possible then that saints can be wrong? In reality, the saints are not wrong. The end of the world has been near on several occasions. Saints and the saintly have intuitions of this and this is precisely why they are sent by God to warn us and to call to repentance. This is what the Apostle Paul did and it is also what Archbishop Averky did. And people did listen to him and others.

In 1981, five years after Archbishop Averky’s repose, the Synod of Bishops canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Thanks to their prayers, persecution ceased in the Russian Lands and there began the process of the Rebaptism of Rus. With this act of repentance for the overthrow of Old Russia and its Orthodox foundations three generations before in 1917, the world changed. God gave an extension to the world and the end that had indeed been near in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the holy Archbishop had said, drew back.

Today, with the world situation on a knife edge, with the Western world gripped by the Satanic urge for global military and economic control and seeking to destroy the last vestiges of spiritual life everywhere, with many Orthodox countries like Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria compromised by Western propaganda, with many of the last strongholds of Orthodox piety, including Serbia, Georgia, Moldova and now the Ukraine, under threat, and with Russia only half-way to repentance, it is clear that the end is approaching once more. Now only the Mother of God can extend history and grant us another period for repentance. Now we should turn again to the prophecies and warnings of Archbishop Averky.

The West is Alienated from Christ and Therefore Intolerant

Many people worldwide have been amazed at the Western indifference and even hostility to the plight of massacred and fleeing Christians in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and now in the Ukraine. There, 55,000 refugees have fled to Russia in the last 24 hours from the devilish massacres by foreign mercenaries of the Christian people of the Ukraine. The neo-Nazi junta in Kiev, under strict Western control, sends in tanks, murders and maims Christians, refusing to talk to its own people.

Where do this intolerance and hatred for Christianity come from? Surely the West supports Christianity? It used to. And why does President Obama meddle in the UK’s possible decision to leave the atheist EU and Scotland’s possible decision to leave the atheist UK? Why does he threaten and intimidate even Western peoples? Where does this bullying arrogance come from? These riddles have today been answered by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov.

As reported by the Interfax Religion agency and the sedmitza.ru website, the Russian Orthodox Foreign Minister considers that the West has become antagonistic to Russia because of its return to the Church of Christ. He noted the Russian amazement that the West still equates the Russian Federation with the atheist Soviet Union, whereas ‘the new Russia is returning to traditional spiritual values, rooted in Orthodoxy’.

At the same time, he noted that the ever clearer contradiction ‘between the multipolarity of the world which can be objectively affirmed, and the desire of the USA and the historic West to hang on to their habitual positions of domination, the ever clearer contradiction between the cultural and civilizational diversity of the contemporary world and attempts to foist Western values on everyone’. He added that the West ‘is increasingly breaking away from its own Christian roots and is less and less receptive to the religious feelings of people of other confessions’.

From Recent Correspondence: May 2014

Q: How do you understand the current civil war in the Ukraine?

A: Whenever the Orthodox world is on the brink of victory, the West intervenes and undermines it, carrying out its genocide. So it was in the mid-eleventh century, a brilliant time of military victory and spiritual prosperity for New Rome and the whole Christian Empire. So it was in Kiev in the twelfth century, when the West tried to undermine its brilliant Orthodox civilization, so it was in Russia when the barbarian hordes from the West invaded in 1612 and in 1812, then again in 1854 in the Crimea, yet again in 1917 when Russia was on the verge of victory, and so today in the Ukraine, where we are witnessing yet another Western invasion and occupation of Kiev. The Western elite cares nothing for the Ukrainian people or history; the Ukraine is just a tool to gain more power, destroying all opposition to its domination by bread and circuses. Thus, its new President-elect is only a puppet – the real governor of the Ukraine, the next state of the USA, is the US ambassador in Kiev.

Q: This is not the version of the Western media.

A: The propaganda being pumped out day and night by the BBC, for example, is quite astounding. They have quite lost their conscience and all integrity. People are turning more and more to alternatives, especially the Internet, which is not censored – not yet anyway. It is worse than in the days of the Cold War; then you knew that the Soviet Union was atheist and persecuted the Church. Now the Russian Federation is becoming Christian and it is the West that is atheist and persecuting the Church and indeed any spiritual or traditional values at all.

Q: Who do you think was originally responsible for the problem in the Ukraine?

A: Stalin and his borders were responsible. Can you imagine a country made up of eastern Poland and western Russia? It was never going to work. It is as though you made one country out of France and Germany. It is not possible. Now a civil war is going on in the Ukraine, with Ukrainian killing Ukrainian. Little wonder that most of the Ukrainian Army refuses to take part or has surrendered to the free Ukrainians in the east; the junta in Kiev has had to bring in foreign mercenaries in the east, the same as those that brought it to power by violence last February. The civil war in the Ukraine will be interminable – until the country falls apart into its natural and quite different parts.

Q: Has the West won anything by meddling in the Ukraine?

A: No – just as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only has it lost a lot of money, which has been poured into the corrupt black hole of Kiev, but also the events in the Ukraine have affirmed post-Communist Russian identity. Before there were many in Russia who wavered in loyalty and were pro-Western. Now 82% support President Putin. I can think of one Church figure, who not so long ago was an ecumenist and papophile, but who is now appealing for faithfulness to the Tradition – like everyone else has always done! Such is repentance for the errors of youth.

President Putin has adopted the Church and its values as his emblem. This is not the Church being taken over by the State, as in the West – it is the Church influencing the State. President Putin has realized that there is nothing else. The US has made a colossal mistake by meddling in the Ukraine. It has lost all support in Russia and also now lost China, so isolating itself even further. Moreover, the US has little support in many parts of the EU itself, even in Germany. It looks as though the West has been following instructions on how to make enemies; at least that is the effect of Western imperialist meddling over the last 25 years. The West has lost international respect.

Q: Are there any other repercussions?

A: Yes, a huge one. The aggressively expansionist West has brought Russia to create the Eurasian Economic Union, with the very wealthy Kazakhstan and Belarus. Now Kyrgyzstan and Armenia want to join the EEU as soon as possible. Armenia is all the more interested since its neighbour and enemy, Azerbaijan, has become a US colony through its Turkish proxy. Other countries have expressed great interest, notably Vietnam and above all China. Generally, the stupidity of the West has thrust Russia into the arms of China. Russia is already one of the largest Christian countries in the world, but China within a generation is due to become the largest Christian country in the world.

Q: But Christian in the sense of Protestant or Roman Catholic, and not Orthodox.

A: Yes, but the spiritually sensitive there will migrate to Orthodoxy, having seen though the Western myths of Protestantism and its parent Catholicism, just as has happened in the West itself. For the moment the Chinese are not spiritually ready, but this will come and they will move to Orthodoxy and to the Russian Church, to whose canonical territory China belongs. I think the same may happen in North Korea (not in South Korea which, like Japan, has since 1945 been a US colony). In addition, once Communist ideology has collapsed in despotic North Korea, as it inevitably will do, as it already has done in China, there will be a need for another ideology and a religious one – certainly not the Western one which is atheist.

Q: Why are both Greek new calendarists and Greek old calendarists at one in condemning the Russian Church and generally being Russophobic?

A: There are five reasons for this. The first is Greek nationalism – both new calendarism and old calendarism are a purely Greek problem. The second is jealousy. For instance they accuse the Russian Church of ‘imperialism’ (!), when they really mean Greek imperialism. The third is extremism – they do not like moderation because they represent two extremes, two isms. The fourth is self-justification; if Russia is ‘imperialistic’, then that would mean that they are not. The fifth is the CIA, which finances both groups to varying degrees. Indeed, one old calendarist bishop in America actually wrote to me a few years ago vigorously defending the CIA and openly told me that many of his parishioners worked for it.

Q: But there is such a thing as Russian nationalism, isn’t there?

A: Of course, there is. We have suffered from it over the last 40 years. There are unChurched Russians who have no understanding of the word ‘Rus’. They confound culture and language with the Faith. As I said at the San Francisco Council in 2006, Rus is the Orthodox reply to globalism. Rus means Orthodox multinationality. Whether among the 100 or so peoples of the Russian Federation, or in Russian canonical territory in Japan and China, or in Alaska (at least among the natives, not among the Anglos), in North Korea, Thailand and Laos, or in the 50 or so countries of the Western world and beyond, which are covered by the Church Outside Russia, you can find Russian Orthodox. Russian Orthodoxy is a world, not a single nationality.

Q: That sounds a bit Roman Catholic.

A: The concept of Rus is not one of papist centralized unity, it is Trinitarian, unity in diversity. As one Russian philosopher put it: ‘The choice is between the Holy Trinity and hell’. We choose the Holy Trinity, not Western (= pagan Roman) centralization.

Q: Doesn’t the support recently shown by the Russian government for anti-EU movements mean that it is allying itself with right-wing movements?

A: Not at all. Both the European left and the European right, all those with actual political beliefs and principles, are alike opposed to the EU, which, as they realize, is only a US colonial project, using Germany as its executive pawn. Those who oppose the neocon EU also want social justice. This is why, in the UK for example, UKIP is not only anti-Brussels but also anti-Washington. Most Russians today bitterly regret the ‘privatizations’ inside Russia in the 1990s, carried out by Harvard–trained or at least Western-style necons. Such asset theft created the oligarchs, who now mainly live in London and Tel-Aviv. The Russian Federation has not forgotten social justice and so also supports the left-wing anti-EU movements throughout the south of Europe.

Q: But surely that is left-wingery and is just nostalgic support for the old Soviet Union?

A: Not at all. If you believe that, you have swallowed one of the main myths of Soviet/Western anti-Russian propaganda. This is that the pre-1917 government did not believe in social justice, that it was against the people. The pre-1917 government was committed to social justice, the literacy rate was nearing 90% and huge strides had been made not only in education, but also in medicine and improving working conditions. Most, if not all, of what was good in the Soviet Union had been inherited from the Tsar’s Russia. By 1917 Russia had already overtaken the West in several areas. The Tsar’s rule was a popular monarchy. Do not forget that it was brought down by the aristocrats, who were losing money and land to the people, just as today the anti-Putinists in Russia are also pro-Western oligarchs (modern aristocrats) who are frightened that they will lose their ill-gotten gains back to the people through populist government.

Q: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the West?

A: I would say ‘cautiously pessimistic’, even though the rate of spiritual decline in the West has accelerated tremendously over the last 25, and even the last 10, years. The West has for a thousand years been held in a cycle of atheist logic. It is captive to it. Everything that we in the Church do is only a delaying action, something that puts off its atheist Babylon. But even delaying it is still a miracle.

Q: What will happen in the West in the end?

A: Today political correctness is already talking of making circumcision illegal. Soon it will be the same with baptism, especially baptism by immersion. We shall be forced to flee to Russia to get baptized, just as St Seraphim of Vyritsa prophesied in the dark days of persecution in Russia.

Q: Do you have any thoughts seven years on from the great events in Moscow on Ascension Day 2007, when the two parts of the Russian Church were administratively reunited after an interval of nearly 90 years, when before there unity had only been spiritual?

A: Our ROCOR Metr Hilarion was brought up in a Diaspora parish of the Church inside Russia. Our ROCOR Archbishop Mark wanted to study in the Church inside Russia. I would not compare myself to them, but I had the same ambition in 1976. However, it was all impossible. The Diaspora parishes of the Church inside Russia were simply not free. I realized this in 1976 in Russia, when I saw the authentic Church and could compare it with non-ROCOR parishes outside Russia and saw scandals in them. One of our ROCOR bishops told me that if he had been treated by representatives of the Church inside Russia as I was treated, he would have left the Church altogether. Today those who caused all the problems are all dead; they have become history in the bad sense, just bad memories. But such was the decadence of that period because of the lack of freedom. A Church cannot live without spiritual freedom.

Fortunately, there was the Church Outside Russia which had kept and cherished that freedom. And today both parts of the Church have spiritual freedom. And that is due to two great hierarchs: Patriarch Alexis II and Metropolitan Laurus. I firmly believe that one day there will be a feast in the Church calendar in honour of Sts Alexis and Laurus, Restorers of Unity. That was, is, and will be a spiritual ascension for us all.

Ascension Day 2014

The Last Bastion of Orthodoxy

But that which ye have already hold fast till I come.

Rev. 2, 25

Introduction

For 100 years, ever since 1914, the world has constantly been at war. This is because, before the final and inevitable triumph of Christ, a One World Government must come to power in Jerusalem. Hence the recent preparatory visit there of Pope Francis, accompanied by an imam, a rabbi and a Greek Patriarch. The assaults on all the Orthodox Churches are to be seen in the light of this preparation. However, the main obstacle to the enthronement of that government, and it will be an enthronement, is the resurgent Russian Orthodox Church. This is why the multinational chorus of the Western media, orchestrated and fed as one by the powers that be, so violently expresses its hostility to this last bastion of the Church of God on earth, so proving its importance.

The Seven Ancient Churches

The first phase of the assault, launched as long ago as 1909, was on the Seven ancient Churches. First to be tempted was the tiny and impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, weakened by flattering its Greek nationalism or phyletist Hellenism. The assault was then spread to the three other tiny and impoverished but also ancient Patriarchates in the Middle East and the rest of the Greek-speaking world in Greece, Cyprus and Albania. Today, as the Patriarchate of Constantinople is tempted by Uniatism, the faithful in its jurisdiction, led by the monks of Mt Athos, resist and look to freed Russia for deliverance from the chains of modernism, ecumenism and even apostasy, provoking the question: Will these Churches survive until 2054?

The Seven New Churches

The second phase of the assault was on the Seven youngest Churches. It came first in the Balkans, by bombing and dividing Serbia, bribing Romania, Bulgaria, as also the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, into the EU and attempting to undermine Georgia. Then came the attack on the Seventh Church, the Russian. First, they tried to attack her through Syria and the Middle East, but this failed. As President Assad said this week: ‘Russia has saved Syria and the whole Middle East’. So the assault entered a second phase, through the Ukraine, where schism, a civil war and genocide have been instigated, just as they were in Serbia. The aim is to destroy the unity of the Russian Church so that the Russian State, now reviving under the Church’s influence, can also be destroyed.

Conclusion

Thus, the powerbrokers of this world have attempted to destroy the whole Orthodox Church, subordinating it to this world. In the first fifty years of the third millennium they wish to make all fall away from Orthodoxy, just as they made all fall away from Orthodoxy in the Western fifth of the Church in the first fifty years of the second millennium. So they turned to the Russian Orthodox world, undermining its vulnerable, protestantized outer fringes with renovationism. Now they are turning to the marches of the Russian Orthodox world in the western Ukraine, where they continue the genocide of Orthodox under a puppet President who made his oligarch’s fortune not from chocolate, as his PR advisors claim, but from arms-dealing and even worse. Now all is at stake.

Eurosodom or Euro-Vision?

The news reached me in the USA on Sunday. The Eurovision Song Contest, usually inane but relatively innocent, had been won by a bearded transvestite who could not even sing. There was a clear political conspiracy of systematic jeering of the innocent Russian song. This was sheer provocation. The accelerating repaganization of Europe is now headlong, as it hurtles towards its suicide. What was unthinkable only ten years ago is now a reality. Satanism is here and we can smell his sulphur.

Those who applauded this transvestite declaration of ‘peace and freedom’ and thought that it was a declaration of human rights and democracy could not have been more wrong. As one whom I know who has never liked President Putin told me: ‘I will now vote for him’. The message has indeed struck home in the troubled and divided Ukraine: As President Putin told the Ukrainians: ‘Is this what you wanted: Eurosdom? Then you can have it, but we will remain Christians’. As Europe sinks ever deeper into the pagan degeneracy of Ancient Greece and Rome, the fate of Pompeii threatens it.

Russia is today offering all Western peoples, inside and outside Europe a vision, the true Euro-Vision: a Eurosodom or the vision of a Europe of Tradition. This Song Contest has crystallized the polarization of the Western world. For months now conservative Republicans – paleocons, not the opposite neocons – in the USA have been praising President Putin and ironically and amazingly condemning their own country as ‘the evil empire’. The once implacable enemies of the Soviet Union are becoming the implacable friends of Russia. The same has been happening in Europe. There is developing here a broad coalition of Western citizens, let alone Ukrainian citizens, who now look to Russia for salvation and rescue from Eurosodom.

The clear and deliberate provocation of Eurovision has backfired. It has created support for true peace and freedom, not the ‘peace and freedom’ of Antichrist, but those of Christ, which ‘pass all understanding’ of the new pagans. The Western world thought to make the Ukraine into the battleground between Christ and Satan; in reality it has made itself into that battleground. As never before in the whole of history, Western people who are still spiritually alive, who still have a conscience – and not just the Orthodox among them – are looking to Russia for leadership and support.

Exactly 200 years ago Russian troops liberated Paris from the tyranny of the atheist Napoleon after he had tried to enslave Russia with a multinational European army, 90% of whom died in the attempt. Today, Orthodox Russia is being called on to liberate ‘Paris’ – that is, the whole Western world that is enslaved by its apostasy – once more. In 1814 Paris rang to the cries of Christ is Risen; in 2014 these are once more the only words that can change the Western world. Protestantism is all but dead; Catholicism, its former Pope rejected, has utterly discredited itself despite its recent public relations campaign; there remains only the Church of God, without which there is indeed no Christianity, and Russia is at the heart of the Church, as it has not been since 1917.

‘Orthodoxy Main Impediment to Western Apostasy’

For us Western Orthodox who have not lapsed into a masonic, Western-manipulated Euro-Orthodoxy/Halfodoxy (masonic because its Western-appointed Patriarchs are all freemasons or do what the freemasons tell them to do), the below marks a very sad day in Western history. It is a historic definition of the new post-Christian Western ‘Civilisation’, which in the first millennium was Orthodox, as the religion of Antichrist. Thus, it marks the day of the final apostasy of the Western world after a thousand years of degeneration.

Coming from Sweden, a country notorious in post-Schism times for its Crusades against Russian Orthodoxy, this report, if it is true, is perhaps no surprise. With the new Western anti-Christian Crusade currently being operated in the Ukraine, Carl Bildt, an ideological disciple of the notorious Christ-hater, Russophobe and geopolitician Zbigniew Brzezinski, has in fact told the truth that we have always known: post-Orthodox Western ‘Civilisation’, in fact Western Anti-Civilisation, is leading to Antichrist and the Apocalypse. See:

http://agora-dialogue.com/rex-carl-bildt-thinks-eastern-orthodoxy-is-main-threat-to-western-civilisation/

If Carl Bildt actually said this, he is correct: the main threat to Antichrist is indeed Christ.

With the current suggestion, under pressure from the part-Jewish John Kerry, that the Israeli State hand over Mt Zion to the Vatican and international control so that the new World Religion can be further prepared, we move a step closer to the preparation of the throne of Antichrist. We also note that in a few days time Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew will be meeting in Jerusalem, thus furthering this World Religion.

However, we should not despair. In Syria the city of Homs has at last been delivered from Western-backed Muslim terrorists. In Germany ARD television has now proved that those killed in Kiev in February were all victims of the terrorists, not of the legitimate government, as we knew all along. In Russia President Putin has just signed a new law, forbidding the use of foul language in all media (the opposite of what has happened in recent years in the West). And in the Ukraine Orthodox forces are every day stregthening against the Uniat terrorists and the Judas Philaret of Kiev. If we pray to him who defeated the Scandinavian apostates in the past, St Alexander Nevsky, and to the great Swedish saint, St Anne of Novgorod, we shall be victorious again.

Holy Rus Lives and Calls: Now is the Hour

On 29 May 2014 the Eurasian Economic Union will be formed by the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and Belarus, with Armenia and many another country waiting in the wings. The implementation of this new Union has been greatly hastened by the tragic events in the Ukraine. The divide and rule instability provoked by the USA, helped by the EU, in the Middle East and Northern Africa over the last few years has now spread there too. Standing on the threshold of global events against the background of the separatist junta in Kiev which is still slaughtering its own people, it is clear that the importance of this new Union is now no longer only economic. It is being dwarfed by its political importance as a centre of security, independence and freedom from potential global dictatorship.

Naturally, this Union is opposed by the fifth column of the Western media, which is still strong in post-Soviet Russia, as above all outside Russia. However, such media do not represent the Russian Orthodox ethos which lies behind this Eurasian Union; they represent only their sponsors. They are angry and fearful, for this new alliance opposes US plans for global hegemony, which is why they censor and block the free Russian media. And that fifth column, liberals, ecumenists and modernists, is looking increasingly old-fashioned. Resurgent Russia, built on Christian civilizational principles and values, is now competing with the atheist West and the decadence it has tried to sow in once Orthodox lands, gathering together different lands of the world beneath the protecting veil of Holy Rus and its consistent belief-system and world view.

The US administration spent a lot of money ($5 billion) and 23 long years to try and split the Ukraine from the Eurasian civilizational world of Holy Rus. Instead, Russia is gathering it together and integrating it, starting with the Crimea. Little wonder that seeing the US losing the Ukraine altogether, two days ago John Kerry agreed with the Establishment-maligned British politician, Nigel Farage, and condemned the EU for creating the chaos in the Ukraine (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIvoq2oZZuU). What he did not mention, of course, was that it was the US that put the EU up to that chaos-creation, which it had itself financed and orchestrated, choosing even the leaders of the junta that seized power from democracy.

Details have their importance, but salvation is now in being together. Sticks can be broken one by one quite easily, but a bundle of sticks cannot. Post-Soviet Russia is turning into resurgent Orthodox Russia and so has begun fulfilling its historic and messianic role, which we have waited so long to see. It is showing an imperial understanding of the global situation – in the best sense of the word ‘imperial’; now the future has hope. We look forward to the moment when Russian leaders, who conquered atheism, address once cultured, educated and intelligent Western peoples, over the heads of their political and media elites who so despise them and feed them bread and circuses. Then they will denounce the lies of those elites about Russia and denounce also the elite’s own misdeeds, calling the Western peoples back to their spiritual roots and holiness. Holy Rus lives and calls. Now is the hour.

On the Failure of Anglican Converts to Produce an Orthodox Culture

Introduction

It is now fifty years since Anglicans began to convert to the Orthodox Church in this country. In that time most have failed to incarnate themselves into Orthodox culture and then transmit that culture to succeeding generations, children and grandchildren, instead forming only small, short-term, ex-Anglican ghettos. Now hybrid Anglican Orthodoxy is dying out and disappearing. What went wrong? We believe that we can see four reasons for this failure, two of which are sociological, two of which are theological. What are they?

a) Sociological Reasons

1. Numbers

First of all, it must be said that only a relatively small number of Anglicans have entered the Orthodox Church in the last fifty years. I remember that at the Effingham Conference in 1975 I was told by one in authority at Ennismore Gardens (the jurisdiction of the late Metr Antony Bloom, who formed a self-justifying ‘mini-diocese’ out of ex-Anglicans) that 1,000 English people had been received by that date, the vast majority from an educated Anglican background. Since then, in the 1980s, a number of Anglicans were received by a dissident archbishop into the local diocese of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and, in the 1990s, some 300 were received into the Western European diocese of the Patriarchate of Antioch. But even so, it is unlikely that numbers of converts ever reached even 3,000, probably fewer at any one time. And this figure does not take into account numbers lapsing through being received prematurely, back into Anglicanism, into nothing, or else into Greek sects, or else dying of old age.

There have been several reasons for these small numbers. First, there has been the problem of language – most Orthodox use their native languages (i.e. not English) in Church services. This tends to create immigrant ghettos and does not reach down into English society, attracting only the well-educated and well-travelled. For example, some Greek parish priests, and in fairness representatives of all jurisdictions have done this, have shown hostility and sometimes downright rudeness to English people interested in the Orthodox Faith. Unedifying anecdotes abound. There is also the fact that after over some 900 years of being cast out of this country, the Orthodox Church has had to start here again from scratch as a poor immigrant Church, without funding, without church buildings, without infrastructure. This lack of infrastructure has discouraged many Anglicans because of the mentality described below

2. The Establishment Mentality

Anglicans generally suffer from an Establishment mentality. As an inherent and wealthy part of the Establishment, they usually expect everything to be done for them by their State authorities. As a State Church, they often suffer from the syndrome that expects everything to be provided. The problem of Anglican and Anglo-Catholic clericalism (‘the clergy will do it’) only makes the problem worse. This is utterly different from the Orthodox Church, where the impoverished faithful (priests and laity) have to do everything for themselves and can expect no financial or practical support from their impoverished bishops. This Anglican Establishment mentality, often public school and very patronising to ‘poor Eastern European peasants’, also leads to a class-based exclusiveness. This is basically racist and hypocritically but deliberately snubs those who do not belong to it, not only Non-English people, but also English people but who are not of Anglican and Establishment background.

b) Theological Reasons

1. A Weak Dogmatic Consciousness

One of the main characteristics of Protestantism (and clearly this includes Anglicanism despite its outward pretence of catholicity, as invented in the 19th century) is its weak dogmatic consciousness – in other words, its lack of faith and so lack of spiritual depth. Thus, it has a concept of God, but only the dimmest concept of the Holy Trinity and is not even aware that it confesses the papal filioque (as well as the papal calendar). Thus, it has a concept of ‘Jesus’ (the human nature of Christ), but not of the Son of God, not of the God-man, and therefore not of the Incarnation. In addition it utterly confuses the Holy Spirit with psychic self-exaltation (a confusion that underpins the ‘charismatic’ movement). Indeed, it is difficult to know if modern Protestantism, dependent on Western States and secular cultures, without the dogmas contained in the sign of the cross, believes in anything.

Thus, it is said that 40% of Anglican clergy do not believe in God, let alone in the Holy Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, the Holy Spirit, Providence, the Resurrection, the Ever-Virgin Mother of God, the Saints, the Sacraments and prayer-deepening fasting. Certainly, especially at Easter time, we are accustomed to State-appointed Anglican bishops, let alone the laity, regularly saying that they do not believe in the Resurrection. Thus, for many Anglicans and sadly, ex-Anglicans, the Orthodox Faith appears only to be an intellectual hobby, a piece of snobbish exotica for outward mimicking and ritualism, an upper middle-class debating issue, at best a personal and private theory, at worst pure fantasy. And this problem of a lack of commitment has only been reinforced by another difficulty.

2. Personality Cults

Sadly, the Orthodox Diaspora has been dominated and divided by a series of mainly Russian personality cults. Alpha egos, all claiming some unique revelation or access to Divinity, shrouded in absurd foreign jargon, have split relatively small groups of immigrants and even smaller groups of converts. Each personality, preaching some pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-mystical and pseudo-esoteric cult and claiming holiness, has attracted the inexperienced and, frankly, the ignorant. With most of the real Orthodox world inaccessible because of Communist persecution and most of the Church paralysed because of Communist captivity, and so no checks and balances, such personalities were able to dominate small groups of naïve and inexperienced converts and even hoodwink them, almost hypnotically. This was especially the case in insular Britain, geographically cut off from a sense of catholicity, the wider Orthodox Church world and an overview of the civilizational and cultural reality of the Orthosphere.

Conclusion

Although the above description of the past is pessimistic, we are optimistic about the future. In recent decades atheist regimes collapsed and Churches were freed from their feudal shackles; the old personality cultists with their absurd claims are dead and their books gather dust; masses of immigrants from Orthodox Europe have renewed Church life and the Faith; finally, today’s converts are coming from the vast mass of English people who are not Anglican. They have no cultural prejudices, no baggage, and are therefore receptive to and can commit to genuine Orthodox culture, without simply mimicking it, just as Anglo-Catholics have always mimicked Catholicism. Today, with the services translated and more churches, the Orthodox Church can reach further into English society, far beyond the spiritually superficial and elitist Anglican Establishment, than ever before. In this way, and in this way alone, can an authentic local Orthodox culture be produced in this country, by becoming incarnate in the roots of the land. Reality is taking over from fantasy.