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Category Archives: Orthodox Restoration
The Polish Orthodox Church Officially Returns to the Orthodox Calendar
Meeting on 18 March in Warsaw under the wise leadership of Metropolitan Sava, the Bishops’ Council of the Polish Orthodox Church decided to return to the Orthodox calendar. In this way the Bishops’ Council has overturned the lamentable decision made ninety years ago on 12 April 1924, under pressure from the notorious freemason and modernist, the Anglican-installed Patriarch Meliton of Constantinople, to introduce the secular, Roman Catholic calendar for the fixed feasts. It was that controversial and later deposed Patriarch who also did so much to divide the Russian Church by encroaching on its territorial integrity, especially in Poland, Finland and the Diaspora. This victory for Orthodoxy will come into force in Poland on All Saints’ Sunday, 15 June 2014.
The Polish Orthodox Church thus shows its solidarity with the vast majority of Orthodox, especially other Slav Orthodox in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus and Serbia, but also with the Churches of Georgia, Jerusalem and of course Mt Athos. It is to be hoped that the last remaining new-style Slav Churches of Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia will follow suit. May this move be an inspiration to those who fell into the calendar decadence of the past. For only when the Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian Churches have returned to the Orthodox calendar will their disastrous, sectarian calendar schisms be overcome. It is to be hoped that at the 2016 Inter-Orthodox Council the 80% of the Orthodox Church that remained faithful to the Orthodox calendar can persuade the erring minority to return to the fullness of Orthodox practice. Then the Church bells will ring for joy all around the Orthodox world.
Euroatlantic Aggression Against the Unity of Holy Rus
To speak of a new Cold War between the Western secularist world and the Russian Christian world is absurd; the Western aggression of the Cold War never finishes and has been going on for centuries, at least since the age of Daniel of Galicia (1205–1255) and St Alexander of the Neva (1221-1263). True, sometimes that Cold War heats up, as in the thirteenth century, as in 1612, 1812, 1854, 1914 and 1941. Or, as in recent years, with the attempted US-funded and EU-backed Georgian invasion of Russia in 2008 and now the US-funded and EU-backed seizure of power by mainly Catholic Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine in 2014.
The roots of this aggression, ‘the ‘Cold War’, were sown over a thousand years ago, when what had been the western part of the Church assumed the ideology of papism. This ideology, known as the filioque and stating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Pope of Rome, meant that what had been the western part of the Church became a papocaesarist State, its self-proclaimed task to conquer the whole world. This globalist imperialism was in the sixteenth century inherited by a new vital force in the West, Protestantism, which asserted that all male believers are popes, not just one, so ‘democratising’ the filioque.
Today and since its long-awaited appearance in the 1960s, there is the new vital force of atheist secularism, which asserts that all, believers or not, are popes, so further democratising the filioque and making faith completely irrelevant, for the Holy Spirit proceeds from all human nature, not just from white males, but also from atheists, pagans, homosexuals, transgenders etc. So the process of apostasy that started in Rome long ago spread outside it. Rome was only the carrier of the virus that will lead to final apostasy and the end of the world.
In today’s Ukraine we see how all these forces, Catholicism (in its Uniat form), Protestantism (in the new self-appointed President), secularist atheism (in the ideology that rules all these puppets), and also schismatic and apostatic ‘Orthodoxy’ under the married ‘monk’ Denisenko who concelebrates with Catholics) the apostate front is complete. All the filioquists are together, all united, all ready to accept the rule of Antichrist, as long as the West rewards them with their toy of Ukrainian nationalism.
Yesterday in Brussels President Obama, himself the apparently lapsed Muslim leader of the collected atheist and agnostic heads of Western European states, made a clear statement of naked aggressive intent against the Christian world. He called for the stationing of more NATO troops throughout Eastern Europe, asserted that Might is Right and that a big bullying power (the USA) has the right to take over a small, bankrupt country (the Ukraine), using the puppet junta that it has put into power there. Thus, in a speech full of historical lies, the US President denied freedom and democracy, the right to self-determination, of tens of millions of Little Russians and Carpatho-Russians, now under the yoke of the Euroterrorist junta in Kiev.
To sow discord between Orthodox Christians using nationalism as the sword with which to rule and divide has always been the Western technique. Thus, in the Balkans, almost a century ago, it began to divide off the small and weak, if ancient, Greek Orthodox world from the rest of the Orthodox world, experiencing success in Anglican-subsidised Constantinople and British-controlled Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria and Antioch. Then under the masonic Patriarch Myron, it tried to pluck Latin Romania from the Orthodox Christian orbit. Today it works ardently in the same direction in EU Bulgaria, in bombed, much divided and bribed Serbia and at this very moment in puppet-regime Ukraine.
Thus using the weakness of nationalism to divide the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Orthodox world (for which nationalism the West then reproaches it!), the West hopes to disrupt the Inter-Orthodox Council which may take place as early as 2016. Now is the time of testing. If semi-modernist, Western-financed representatives of Local Churches at that Council do not return to the fullness of the Orthodox Christian Tradition, regarding for example ecumenism, the liturgical calendar and other practices, it will turn out not to have been a Council at all, merely a failed Conference. It will then be for the Russian Church to organise a real Council, attended by all the bishops of all the free Local Orthodox Churches.
Euroatlantic aggression against the unity of Holy Rus means a clear choice between Western Secularism and Orthodox Christianity. Whose side are you on?
On the Workings of Providence
The February rejoicing of the minority junta, now in power in Kiev but thanks only to US and EU backing and drawn from non-denazified Galicia in the far west of the Ukraine, is turning into March lamentation. Having overthrown a democratic government (corrupt, but no more corrupt than those now in power and those before it) through violence and intimidation, it has been deserted by the Ukrainian Army, Navy and Air Force. The majority of the inhabitants of the Ukraine, 83% of whom are Russian-speaking according to last November’s Gallup poll, has no confidence in the junta and no loyalty to it. So they are abandoning it.
The Crimea left the Ukraine on the day of its great contemporary saint, St Luke the Bishop-Surgeon. As one resident there wrote to me yesterday, ‘Here every day is now a holiday’. In the south- west, Transcarpathia is pleading in a petition with President Putin to free it from the tyranny of the Kiev junta. The north and the south and the east want freedom, refusing to recognise the US-funded Neo-Nazis from the far west. Those who mocked in triumphalism three weeks ago did not foresee the workings of Providence. As a result of their blindness:
President Putin’s popularity has now soared to 76% according to the latest opinion poll. China and the other Non-Western countries have taken Russia’s side, accusing the meddling West of hypocrisy, especially in bomb-ravaged Iraq (1,000 dead last month alone) and Afghanistan. The Kiev junta has received no money from the bankrupt EU. There has been no NATO invasion, as their fantasists had told them. And the US is too poor to pay out the billion dollars that the junta needs every three weeks just to survive.
The bullying rhetoric of the West, with its ironic support for the artificial Stalinist and Khruschovian borders of the Soviet Ukraine, has remained just that, words without concrete actions. Sanctions have backfired and now the French government is supine after Russian threats to cancel its orders at the Saint Nazaire shipyards and the US administration is trembling, as Russia also threatens to cancel its orders for a fleet of Boeings from Seattle. As for Germany, half of its gas comes from Russia.
The main thing is that the Orthosphere is at last reviving. Orthodox Unity and Restoration are on the cards. The New World Order – the Western building of the new Tower of Babylon – has, for the moment, been put on hold. The world breathes again.
Reconstruction Begins (1914-2014)
1914 – 1939 – 1964 – 1989 – 2014. The hundred-year nightmare of four generations of decivilisation is coming to an end. The generational change is becoming apparent and the cycle of historical injustices is being broken. True, we are now witnessing only the first timid signs of this transformation, but there is the promise of much more to come. After the recent expression of the free choice of the people of the Crimea, we are now witnesses to a historic moment throughout the Russian Federation and indeed throughout the Eurasian Union. The attempt to westernise, that is, to secularise, Christian Russia by violence, that which began 100 years ago in 1914 by dragging the then Russian Empire into the contagion of a decivilising Western imperialistic war, has failed.
The attempt to destroy the millennial underlying belief system which held together the East Slav and other peoples of the Russian Empire had begun with the influx of Western materialism among the upper classes long before 1914. What was new in 1914 was the spread of Western materialist ideology in a most extreme form. First, from 1914 a foreign invasion (as in 1812 and 1854) led to weakness. However, this time the weakness became so great that in 1917, just as the Russian Empire was on the brink of victory, it led to the overthrow of the legitimate government by upper-class traitors, orchestrated from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg (just as the recent overthrow of the legitimate government in the Ukraine has been orchestrated from the US Embassy in Kiev). lmmediately, after a good many deaths, this ‘bloodless’ revolution took the legitimate ruler captive and pressure was put on the Church to compromise and accept the coup d’etat.
This first coup d’etat was followed some six months later by the seizure of power from these upper-class incompetents and traitors. This second coup d’etat was operated by a group of extreme and violent materialists, the brainwashed heirs of Voltaire, Darwin and Nietzsche, imported into Russia through and by Germany in a train (not sealed, as the myth would have it). lmmediately, the Church, which had always supplied the belief-system of the Russian Lands, came under bloody and unheard of persecution and the former ruler and his family were slaughtered. The materialists abolished the Russian Empire and founded the Soviet Union. There followed a generation of the most violent persecution, sweeping away millions of innocent lives, including 600 bishops, nearly 200,000 priests, monks and nuns and millions of faithful Christians. Mass shootings, artificial famine in Russia and the Ukraine to enforce collectivisation (on the model of the ‘Enclosures’ in England and the ‘Clearances’ in Scotland), torture chambers and concentration camps were the rule of the day. The Western world, birthplace of the ideology behind this holocaust, was mainly silent and eagerly traded with the new country.
This generation of violence ended in 1941, when the contagion that had yet again started in Western Europe, this time in 1939, also spread to the Soviet Union with yet another invasion, the fourth bout of anti-Russian Western imperialism in the five generations since 1812. On the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands, expansionist Nazi Germany invaded the former Russian Empire, causing 27 million mainly civilian victims, the greatest holocaust and genocide known to the history of humanity. However, it was also this holocaust that began to bring the new rulers of the Soviet Union to their senses. lt was a very slow and extremely painful process that lasted two generations and although direct persecution of the Church more or less ceased, indirect persecution continued most viciously. However, during that period, most stopped believing in atheism – when they had believed in it at all – and even their atheist rulers began to realise that their ideology was bankrupt.
It was in 1989, exactly two generations after the Second European War of 1939, that the signs of imminent collapse became obvious. This culminated in 1991, exactly two generations after the most recent Western invasion of the Soviet Union, that the atheist regime collapsed and the country fell apart. The West was triumphant and now, having divided, it tried to rule through its present ideology. So there began that disastrous period when Western materialism, now in its liberal consumerist form of individualist egoism, spread anarchically into the newly divided countries of the old Soviet Union. The spiritual and so moral decivilisation of the West took over. There was a decade of shame, when capitalist oligarchs (the old nomenklatura, the new aristocracy) stole the public assets and the poor were created. ABCDE – alcoholism, abortion, corruption, drugs and emigration – prevailed. Many of the best left, many of the worst seized assets and power. Only in recent years have we begun to see light, culminating now in the freedom and return home of the Crimea.
Four generations, one hundred years, since the attempt to destroy the Russian Orthodox world began in 1914, its geographical reunion has started. Christianity, in its original form and not in the apostate and compromised forms of the second millennium, is rising up against the whole tide of atheist secularism that seized power in Saint Petersburg in 1917 and in Kiev in 2014. lf those who are apostates and those who are compromised do not wish to join this movement, they are free not to do so. Thus, if the Roman Catholics of former Poland, now the far west of the Ukraine, wish to leave the Ukraine for the Poland of the secularist and bankrupt EU, let them do so, taking their Galicia with them. But let them leave the rest of the Ukraine, the other 80%, alone. As regards the rest of the smaller and weaker Orthodox Christian world in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it can now look to the Russian Orthodox Church to lead it away from the mess of pottage of the European Union and the USA, back to Orthodox Christian roots and the free and uncompromised calendar and practices of the Orthodox Tradition in the coming Inter-Orthodox Council. The Restoration, Reconstitution and Reconstruction of the world that was lost in 1914 are in the air. Our vision is clear.
The Victory of Martyrdom and the Victory of Confessordom
In the 20th century the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia won a great victory against Western materialism in its Communist form, a victory won mainly through martyrdom. With 600 martyred bishops, 200,000 martyred priests, monks and nuns and millions of martyred laypeople, its sacrifices were an immense example to the whole world, as long as that world wished to see it and not be blinded by its cultural prejudices causing it to hate the Church of God.
At the same time, living in outward freedom, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia won a great victory against Western materialism in its secularist form, a victory won mainly through confessordom. With figures like Metropolitans Antony, Anastasy, Philaret and Laurus, Archbishops Averky, Antony of Geneva, Tikhon, John and Antony of San Francisco, and a host of faithful priests, monks, nuns and laypeople, it resisted the ways of the Western secularist world, remaining faithful to the best of the Tsar’s Russia.
At one point, during the decadence of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the Church Outside Russia was indeed virtually alone in speaking on behalf of authentic Orthodoxy and combatting the modernist and ecumenist compromises of new calendarism, while the Church inside Russia was paralysed, a hostage of the Soviet atheist regime. The Church Outside Russia opposed Frankish-style ‘Orthodox’ ‘theology’, which fills the brain with mere academic theories, but does nothing to nourish the heart, and the attempts to create a Western Establishment Halfodoxy, in fact an anti-Orthodoxy, instead of real Orthodoxy.
The victory of the Church Outside Russia is apparent in that the now free Church inside Russia is speaking with the same voice and spirit as the Church Outside Russia. Ecumenists, immoral bishops, personality cultists, syncretists who wish to merge Hinduism with Orthodoxy in ashrams, are all of the past. Today the old decadent modernism and ecumenism, so prevalent in the Patriarchate of Constantinople for example only a few years ago, is dying out, its remaining representatives mostly in their 80s.
This double victory of both parts of the Russian Orthodox Church is apparent in the forthcoming Inter-Orthodox Council to be held perhaps in 2016. (The 2015 date prematurely announced was always unrealistic, given the amount of work there is to do in preparation). This Council was unthinkable, as St Justin of Chelije pointed out in the 1970s, as long as Eastern Europe suffered under Communist persecution and the Greek Churches were chattels of the CIA. If the Patriarchate of Constantinople can be persuaded to accept the autocephaly of the Churches of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and of America, and if the Patriarchate of Jerusalem can renounce its imperialist ambitions in Qatar, then a Council as early as 2016 is still possible.
With the Patriarchate of Constantinople now having accepted the Orthodox principle of consensus, as against the papist system of majority voting, the Local Orthodox Churches together will have to prepare an agenda, as the old one was long ago hopelessly discredited. It is true that because this Council is to be held in Constantinople, where resources are very limited, only about a third of the 800 or so Orthodox bishops will be able to meet. However, it may be that after this initial Council there will come another and more significant Council, which could be held for example in Russia, where there is the infrastructure to hold a Council of 800 and more bishops.
However, it is good that this Council is to be held. The heterodox world will learn something. It will help to put an end to the decadent drift in the smaller and spiritually weaker new calendar Local Churches and could also end US and EU meddling in Orthodox Church life. This could also put an end to the cultural isolationism and nationalism of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the other new calendar Local Churches. It was, after all, the cultural isolationism of Western Europe that brought it into the Great Schism in the 11th century, when it replaced God by Western man with its filioque heresy.
Then the Western world cut itself off from the Church of Christ and the Holy Spirit and propelled itself forward into fallen humanisation. It entered the ever deepening and tragic ideology of its filioquist civilisation and its ensuing inevitable secularism and atheism. If the new calendar Churches can be brought back to the Orthodox calendar and its ascetic and liturgical ethos, this will be a mighty example for the heterodox world. Perhaps the Council, gathered together in unity, could even speak prophetic words to the contemporary world, like St John the Baptist before the First Coming – repent for your sins before the Second Coming.
The Triumph of Orthodoxy
Today, on this the Sunday of Orthodoxy 2014, we pray to the saint of Little Russia who conquered the world, St John of Shanghai, Western Europe and San Francisco, for the Triumph of Orthodoxy.
The Meeting
The meeting of many, but not all, leaders of the Local Orthodox Churches in Istanbul, so inconveniently-timed in the first week of the Great Fast, has ended. The absence of all Orthodox leaders, notably of the Patriarch of Antioch and Metropolitan Rostislav of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, is much to be regretted. If the meeting heeds the words of the Russian Church, it will hopefully lead to a radical revision of the proposed, secularist agenda, which sounds like a provincial version of the now much discredited, fifty-year old Second Vatican Council.
As Patriarch Kyrill underlined, old-fashioned ecumenism is at an end – except perhaps in US-funded Constantinople, whose representatives are referred to as ‘our transatlantic colleagues’ by Russians, who see it as an American colony. The intervention of Patriarch Kyrill and others also explained to Constantinople that no decision can be rammed through by a small group of foreign-funded modernists; all decisions must be agreed on by consensus, by all bishops of every Local Church, and not just by a few of some Local Churches, if those decisions are to be ‘received’ by the Orthodox faithful.
Nationalism
Archbishop Chrysostom II of Cyprus, one of the smallest Orthodox Churches, rightly mentioned the problem of nationalism as the major problem of mononational Local Churches. For example, we only have to think of Mt Athos and the recent ‘shock’ meeting of a racist (‘phyletist’) Greek minister with a Chinese Orthodox monk on Athos, which led to the proposal by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to limit the number of Non-Greek monks there to 10%!
Another example of this is the Greek nationalist philosophy of Metr John Zizioulas, which was largely shaped by the disincarnate and intellectualist ideology of semi-Orthodox Paris Russian thinkers. Other examples are the ownership of the Russian church in Budapest, disputed by Constantinople despite Hungarian law, or the situation of the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, whose canonically-elected leader is not recognised by Constantinople.
The Ukraine
The meeting in Istanbul came against the background of the recent Western-financed and orchestrated overthrow of the democratically-elected government in Kiev. This was supported by an estimated 3,000 to 5,500 Western mercenaries, mainly flown in and armed from the USA. The non-representative junta, come to power in an Orthodox country through violence and intimidation, has a President who is a Baptist pastor, a Prime Minister who is a scientologist and a homosexual Minister of Internal Affairs! The spontaneous reaction and decision by most of the inhabitants of the Ukraine, 83% of whom are Russian-speaking, to attach themselves to Russia, bringing about the possible break-up of the Ukraine in its present and temporary form, was inevitable.
The present anti-democratic Western aggression, led by President Obama and his ill-informed ideologue-advisors, is backfiring. Brought about by a deeply spiritually deficient West, the birthplace of the two most genocidal and atheist ideologies in history, Communism and Nazism, it is bringing Russian liberals, previously pro-Western, to revise their erroneous views and is encouraging oligarchs to return to Russia, repatriating their assets. They ask themselves: Whose side are we on? On the side of the bankrupt Galician junta and their regional language, representing scarcely 15% of the Ukraine, or of the real Little Russia and sorely persecuted Carpatho-Russia, whose leader has just been sentenced by the Neo-Nazis in Kiev to three years in prison against European law? In other words, on the side of the atheist West or the Christian East?
Today Orthodox Rus prays to the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas for the Triumph of Orthodoxy, both in Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia, as well as in Istanbul and in the rest of the weaker Orthodox world.
The Ukraine: Freedom from NATO tanks and the EU?
The hoodlums who have illegitimately seized power in Kiev now realize that they are bankrupt. They want money. Russia is playing a waiting game to see if they are competent enough to sort things out and can survive till May, that is, till democratic elections which will replace them can happen. Timoshenko, who is on the Interpol wanted list for corruption (she was even worse than Yanukovich) has fled to Germany. So no-one is in control. The Crimeans have taken control of themselves and pushed out the Fascists appointed by the gangsters who have seized power in Kiev. More worryingly, Poland, a NATO country, has sent its tanks to the Ukrainian border. They will not pass.
Two US warships have been off Sochi for the last month, but one got grounded on a sandbank. That is why Russia has sent a warship to Cuba in reply, to show that they cannot be pushed around. There is discontent among the mob in Kiev because the US government, having achieved its aim, wants to stop paying them (apparently $20 million a week over the last three months). The US problem is that it thinks that it can take over a country by appointing a small pro-American dictatorial clique in the capital, as it did in countless Latin American countries and then Afghanistan, Iraq and Georgia (only for a few months in the latter case). But when you try and take over a country, you have to get all the people, not just 15% of them in Eastern Poland, on your side.
Surely the days of the NATO-backed, Fascist junta that has seized power in Kiev are numbered. Bankruptcy stares them in the face. As the people of Kharkov spontaneously tear down the oppressive EU flag and replace it with the Russian flag, as the people of Crimea rise up and take control of their own land and installations, as the people of the Donbass simply ignore instructions from the Neo-Nazis in Kiev, as the people of Transcarpathia search for autonomy from seventy-years of oppression from Kiev, as the people of Pochaev and Kiev protect their monasteries from beardless Catholic aggressors, the Galician Eurocriminals tremble. It has been said that at Easter President Putin will ride into Kiev on a white horse to be greeted as a liberator by the oppressed people. With 68% of Russians supporting him in opinion polls, he has nothing to fear.
The only question is if the disaster that the EU has prepared for itself in the Ukraine will not be repeated elsewhere in Europe. At the European elections in May the UK and France may well reject all pro-EU parties. Similar hostility to EU oppression can be seen in virtually every other country whose corrupt and bribed elites have bound them to the EU Fourth Reich. In London the German Fuehrerin may lecture zombified and spineless, public schoolboy, pro-Munich British Establishment politicians about what they can and cannot do, but she has forgotten the people. We are still free and we can do what we want.
Outposts of the Empire: A Brief Catechism of the Christian Resistance Movement
1. Question: It is said by the atheist globalists and secularist indifferentists that there is only One God. How do Orthodox Christians respond to this statement?
1. Answer: There is indeed only One God. And as a result of this fact all members of the Church of God, all Orthodox Christians, are different from others.
2. Question: How are we Christians different from Buddhists?
2. Answer: We are different from Buddhists, for they do not believe in any god, they worship a dead Indian prince, the Buddha.
3. Question: How are we Christians different from Hindus?
3. Answer: We are different from Hindus, for they worship thousands of mythical gods or demons, for they do not know the One God.
4. Question: How are we Christians different from Jews and Muslims?
4. Answer: We are different from Jews and Muslims for they only have their own partial understanding of the Old Testament – an anthropomorphic Old Testament god, the god of vengeance and hatred – not the real Old Testament God, who is made completely known in the New Testament. Rejecting the Revelation of the New Testament, they do not know that God is Love and Forgiveness, as expressed in the unique revelation of the Holy Trinity, Which is the Revelation that God is Love.
5. Question: How are we Christians different from Roman Catholics?
5. Answer: We are different from Roman Catholics, for they secularised the Holy Trinity, blasphemously replacing God with a mere man, an earthly substitute and replacement, a ‘Vicar of God’, who could, for instance, issue infallible decrees to massacre, for Roman Catholicism asserts that the Holy Spirit proceeds from him.
6. Question: How are we Christians different from Protestants?
6. Answer: We are different from Protestants for they replaced the Holy Trinity with themselves, rejecting man made in the image of God and instead making God in the image of each man, each making their own manmade ‘church’ according to their own imagination, this creating today’s secularist culture of egoism, the ‘iChurch’.
7. Question: How are we Christians different from Western secularists?
7. Answer: We are different from Western secularists, for they have replaced God with Gold, Materialism and the worship of the Holy Dollar. This is idolatry.
8. Question: So Who is the One God?
8. Answer: There is indeed only one God and He is the God of the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Christianity.
9. Question: What today is the main enemy of the Church of God, Orthodox Christianity?
9. Answer: Today, and for a thousand years already, the main enemy of the Church, of the Orthosphere, of the Eurasian Christian Empire, is Western secularism. Firstly calling itself Roman Catholicism, its ‘crusaders’ filled Jerusalem with blood, sacked the Eurasian Christian Capital of New Rome and then sank their greedy claws into Russia through more ‘crusading’ knights. Secondly, in part receiving the name of Protestantism, it set about secularising and nationalising the Churches of Christ through political meddling, finally bringing about the Western materialist Revolution of 1917. Thirdly, in its ultimate secularist form of modern Western atheism bent on world hegemony, it is set on destroying the final centre of resistance to its worldwide evil and the reign of Antichrist it wishes to establish by annihilating the reviving force of the Orthosphere, centred in what for the moment is called the Russian Federation.
10. Question: What specific forms of attack on the Church does Western secularism take?
10. Answer: Its attack takes a two-pronged form, the ancient pagan Roman prongs of divide and rule.
11. Question: How does attack by ‘Divide’ work?
11. Answer: Secularism’s first form of attack – ‘Divide’ – works through those who have a conservative, but not Traditional, mentality. ‘Divide’ takes two different approaches. This can take the form of nationalism and nationalistic division. The nationalist attack conditions its victims to believe that the most important thing in Church life is not Christ and so Unity, but their nation, in other words, that being Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serb etc, is the most important thing of all. But the nation is an attachment to the world, a form of worldliness, and to put any nation above the Church is idolatry. This attack can also take the form of ghettoisation, conditioning its believers to divide themselves from others, for some obscure reason, whether of language (converts), calendar (new calendarism or old calendarism), or dogmatisation of personal opinions regarding, for example, the toll houses or the interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Whether nationalists or ghettoists, the victims of ‘Divide’ are all people who cannot see the wood for the trees and divide themselves from the rest of the Church, this weakening her collective witness and also making their tiny sects and subgroups irrelevant.
12. Question: How does attack by ‘Rule’ work?
12. Answer: Secularism’s second form of attack – ‘Rule’ – works through those who have a liberal, but not Traditional, mentality. It involves substituting ‘Halfodoxy’ for Orthodoxy, using liberalism, modernism, renovationism and ecumenism to secularise Orthodoxy. Halfodoxy is used by the American or Western Empire, centred in the USA but with a very powerful tentacle in its puppet EU, to attack continually the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Orthodox world through the temptation of money. This means bribing those areas of the Orthosphere that are on the fringes of Eurasia Christendom, always its weakest and poorest parts, whether in Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, the Middle East, the Western Diaspora, Romania, Bulgaria, or more recently in Serbia, Georgia, Syria and the Ukraine. By creating Halfodoxy, the only form of the Church beloved of, not feared by but courted by and also mocked by, secularists, secularism can rule. This is because Halfodoxy is spiritually neutered and castrated, a balkanised toy, a petty nationalistic and provincial ethnic plaything of secularism, with no more spiritual force than pathetic Uniatism, the tiniest and most mocked provincial branch of secularist Roman Catholicism.
13. Question: How does Orthodoxy fight back against Secularism and its ‘Divide and Rule’, its dividing into sectarian conservative ghettos and ruling over liberal ‘Halfodoxy’?
13. Answer: We fight back with the fullness of the Tradition, with Patristic Orthodoxy, Spiritual and Incarnational Sovereignty and Orthodox International Identity. We fight back by striving to restore our Orthodox Empire, avoiding nationalistic or ghettoistic dividing and ruling by the secularists through Halfodoxy.
14. Question: Who is the Head of the Orthodox Empire?
14. Answer: Christ.
15. Question: Why do we at present have no earthly head of the Orthodox Empire?
15. Answer: Because Orthodox in Russia fell to the apostasy of Western secularism and murdered the last earthly head of the Orthosphere. Until we have all repented for this, we will be unworthy to have a new earthly head, unworthy of the Final Restoration.
16. Question: What is the role in this process of Final Restoration of our monasteries and parishes in the Diaspora?
16. Answer: We in the Diaspora are outposts of the Eurasian Christian Empire, oases, islands and missions of the Orthosphere, embassies of spiritual resistance to Antichrist, spokespeople for our Christian civilisational values against atheist Western secularism. Our role is to gather together all the spiritually vital forces in these last times, to save and convert whatever we can for Christ and His Holy Orthodox Church from the tide of atheist Western secularism.
Notes on the Restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church
Introduction
At this present time of Church restoration, our Russian Orthodox consciousness and ambitions are clear – our aim is not the restoration of the Church to what it was in 1917. That is not good enough, or else there will be another Revolution. Our aim is more than historical restoration, it is also to make better. What specifically do we need to see?
1. A Patriarchate
Already in 1905 the future Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II proposed the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate after a sorrowful 200 year interval. Sadly, those who had grown used to the old uncanonical system refused his offer – they were not yet ready for restoration and preferred the bittersweet captivity of the Protestant system of Oberprocurators and Synodal government. Nevertheless, in 1918 the pro-Patriarchate forces, long led by Metropolitan Antony of Kiev, were triumphant. However, this restoration was reversed by Soviet atheism and even after its second restoration during the Second World War, it made little difference, as the militantly atheist Soviet religious affairs bureaucrats dealt with the Church in even worse ways than the worst masonic oberprocurators of the eighteenth century. After the tragic Soviet period, today it is clear that the restoration of the Patriarchate is permanent.
2. Freedom
The freedom and independence of the contemporary Patriarchate from the Russian Federation State, subject to the whims and fashions of democracy and party politics, and from other successor States, must continue as it is in today’s post-Soviet times. None must fear any State interference. This principle is all the more important inasmuch as the Patriarchate is by nature and title multinational, representing not merely the Russian Federation, but the whole of Rus and its canonical territories, covering most of the former Russian Empire, as well as Japan and China, as well as shared territories of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia – altogether 62 different nationalities. The Divino-human Church must everywhere resist subjection to the whims of westernising or other States and plainly show her freedom to preach the Gospel of Christ and not to become some mere State institution for moralism.
3. Financial Independence
Next comes the thorny question of Church finance. Before the Revolution clergy often lived in poverty and the Church was often subjected to the whims of wealthy merchants, the equivalent of modern businessmen and ‘sponsors’. Here contemporary States have a role to play. Churches have to be rebuilt by the successor States to the Soviet State which destroyed them. Successors to those responsible for destruction have moral obligations and here there is a long way to go even to return to pre-Revolutionary numbers of Church buildings. Once this task has been carried out, there are questions concerning clergy and choir finance. It is not good enough to allow clergy to live in poverty and force them to work in secular jobs and to rely on choir directors who are never free during the week, meaning that all weekday services have to be sung by priests. There must be financial security.
4. Education
The question of clergy education is connected with the previous problem, as we saw both before the Revolution and with certain erroneous ordinations of the post-Soviet 1990s. If the Church cannot pay her clergy a living wage, it will find talent going elsewhere. Thus, many study theology, but do not make use of their knowledge as clergy, for they can find better pay and much better conditions elsewhere. Some may be shocked at this, but it is only realistic; inasmuch as parish clergy are married and have children, you cannot torment them even more by depriving their wives and children of sustenance. As regards the nature of clergy education, it must be of due and moral level. Otherwise Church life may be reduced to ritualism. To reduce the Church to external ritualism may be an easy way out, but it is an error and even a heresy, which turns away the faithful who look for inner content.
5. Church Culture: Music, Iconography, Furnishings, Art and Architecture
For two centuries before the Revolution Church music was dominated either by Italianate concert-type professional singing, inaccessible to the faithful, or else by solo singing for lack of choirs. At the same time iconography was also dominated by Roman Catholic imagery of a realistic and humanistic style which expressed nothing of Orthodox iconography. The quality of vestments, at times over-ornate and excessively heavy, and Church furnishings also suffered. On the other hand, just before the Revolution there was a revival of traditional art and architecture. It is to be hoped that traditional forms will continue to revive and that the bad taste of certain ‘sponsors’, in love with gold, can be overcome, in such a way that available funds can be used not to build a few over-elaborate or luxurious churches, but many more functional churches, albeit simpler and more modest in form.
Conclusion
Restoration does not mean the blind repetition of mistakes. Authentic restoration means a return to the best models of the past. The restoration of the free, independent, educated, worldwide Patriarchate of Rus, multinational and multilingual, the protector of the other Local Churches, and a model of Church culture and practices, is our aim.