Category Archives: Orthodox Restoration

On the Importance of Sobriety (2)

Edited E-mail Correspondence Following the Questions and Answers of 17 September

Q: In your answers in the correspondence in ‘On the Importance of Sobriety’ (17 September) you seemed to be defending ROCOR as a Church of moderation, which is why the extreme Greek and convert old calendarists left it between 1986 and 2007. But surely there were extremists among the Russians in ROCOR, for example, people who actually seriously believed that there was no grace in the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church? And they did not leave in 1986.

A: On the ROCOR side I knew of only two Russians (admittedly very senior figures) who asserted that the Patriarchal part of the Russian Orthodox Church had no grace. But I met hundreds, if not thousands, of ordinary ROCOR clergy and laity who believed otherwise, freely gave the sacraments to anyone from Russia and indeed were scandalised by such an absurd thought of gracelessness. So let us look at all this in proportion. You will always find a few extremists in any group of human-beings, but that does not mean that the vast majority are extremists. By definition they are not.

However, it is also true that a few members of ROCOR at that time (I am speaking about the Cold War period before 1991) appeared to be more interested in anti-Communism than in Christianity. However, the members of that generation have either died out or else have left ROCOR since 1991. The problem for them after the fall of Communism was that they no longer had any motivation to be active in Church life. You cannot be anti-Communist when Communism is no more. They had lost their raison d’etre, and so they gradually disappeared from Church life. This was most regrettable for them, but on a human level it was a great relief to us because they had put us ordinary ROCOR laity and clergy under pressure, trying to politicise the Church, which we resisted.

And I would like to add to all this very important qualification. Those few who previously claimed that there was no grace in the Patriarchate after 1991 received several clergy from it without ordaining them, let alone baptising them! And they gave the sacraments to Patriarchal laypeople without dreaming of baptising them. So it had all been empty words, rhetoric, political propaganda and not actions. In reality, they full well knew that the Patriarchate preserved apostolic succession. They rejected their own absurdity, which had only ever been a purely political ploy. I seriously think that the ludicrous concept of a graceless Church inside Russia may even have been invented by the CIA. It is simply not theological, but purely secular.

Q: You have said before and also in ‘On the Importance of Sobriety’ that all Russian Orthodox parishes outside Russia will eventually come under ROCOR administration. But why should not all, including ROCOR ones, come under the administration of the Church inside Russia instead?

A: There are three reasons why not. First of all, the agreement of 2007 was crystal clear: all parishes outside Russia will come under ROCOR, all parishes inside Russia will come under the Church inside Russia. Secondly, there is the name, ROCOR. It is only logical: only ROCOR is the Church Outside Russia, it is absurd to have parishes outside Russia that belong to the Church inside Russia. It is literally inside out or, if you prefer, outside in.

However, there is a third and moral reason. During the Cold War period (I mean, after 1945 and until well after 1991) the Church inside Russia was under KGB administration and there appeared outside Russia very many unworthy representatives of the Patriarchal Church, at best Soviet bureaucrats, at worst liars and renovationists, politically or morally compromised or just plain corrupt. (The notable exception was Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussels). And I am afraid that the Church inside Russia lost all the trust of the world outside Russia at that time. In a word, it shot itself in the foot and ever since it has had to pay the price for the distrust that it created.

As a result, even today, I cannot think of a single person in ROCOR who would go under the Patriarchal administration outside Russia. Even today, virtually the only people under the Patriarchate outside Russia are those who have come out of the former Soviet Union over the last 20 years

I mentioned Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussels as an exception, but it must also be said that his integrity was wasted, as that of other sincere people. He had the nominal title of Archbishop, but his diocese consisted of little more than two priests, two deacons and about a dozen laypeople. And in general, until 1991, the Patriarchate only had tiny churches outside Russia. Russian Orthodox outside Russia would have nothing to do with a KGB-sponsored organisation. That is not a secret and not a theory. It is simply a fact of history.

An example of such corruption is the case of the late Archbp George (Wagner), who was a victim of it. A priest of the Patriarchate in 1950s Berlin, he was asked by it to become a Soviet spy. To his credit he refused and left for the Paris Jurisdiction. He was just one in a very long series of sincere people who left the Patriarchate because of its corruption. Another even more striking example is the present Metr Hilarion of ROCOR, who was brought up in the Patriarchate in Canada and left it when he realised that it was not free.

And that was all a great loss of talent for the Patriarchate. But it was their own fault; they did it to themselves. In general, the Patriarchate, whether in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London or New York, lost many people, the best friends of Orthodox Russia in the West, because of its unworthy representatives, with their political and moral compromises and corrupt personality cults. It lost the best friends of Orthodox Russia precisely because its representatives were not the best friends of Orthodox Russia. This is why ROCOR is an autonomous part of the Russian Church. If ever, things go badly in Russia again – as they could, the situation is still relatively fragile – ROCOR will retain its independence. That is very important.

Fortunately, virtually all such unworthy representatives had died out before the reconciliation of 2007, sometimes well before. Now we are waiting for a new generation. The Patriarchate outside Russia has been expanding with the new emigration. We believe that the majority of the new representatives are and will be more worthy, will at least be up to the standard of ROCOR and so prepare the Patriarchal churches outside Russia for their transfer to ROCOR.

Q: Do you feel bitter about this waste during the Cold War due to the captivity of the Patriarchate at that time?

A: Of course not! A Christian cannot feel bitter because he believes in Divine Providence, the ever-present, intervening love of God. This makes all mistakes into opportunities, all negatives into positives.

Q: What is your view of the murder of Fr Pavel Adelheim in Pskov last August

A: On average one priest a year is murdered in Russia and every murder is a tragedy and a crime, including that of Fr Pavel. I saw a Russian programme about the murder. His matushka appeared and spoke of the tragedy with great dignity.

However, Fr Pavel Adelheim himself was a well-known dissident and controversialist, a marginal figure and in that sense a bit like the late Fr Alexander Men, who is believed by many to have been a Catholic. The latter is a hero to all those who are anti-Orthodox, especially since he asserted that ‘it is better to be a Hare Krishna than to be like Fr Seraphim Rose’. (By the way, under the old regime the London Patriarchal Cathedral on Ennismore Gardens refused to sell his books, just as they refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs; that has changed now). Murder is a tragedy, but it is does not absolve anti-Church views. I am not saying that Fr Pavel was like Fr Alexander Men, he was not pro-Catholic, but nevertheless he was very much a fringe personality. It is very interesting that although deaths like that of the late Orthodox priest Fr Daniel Sisoev are hardly mentioned in the West, Fr Pavel’s was widely reported and by two groups.

The first group was the freemasons of the Russophobic Rue Daru with their Western supporters and the second was the equally Russophobic old calendarists. It is disgraceful that such anti-Russian-Church groups opportunistically and self-justifyingly try and make capital of a tragic murder, which was carried out by a satanist. You cannot justify schism. What such sectarian groups as Rue Daru and old calendarists, two sides of the same coin, do not understand is that the Church is not an exclusive club for those with eccentric views, but it is for all who believe in Christ. The fact that Fr Pavel had peculiar views and was then tragically murdered does not for one moment mean that those views are justified.

Q: Russophobia has been in the international spotlight recently. What would you say about the civil war in Syria and President Putin’s recent intervention that averted US missile attacks?

A: First of all, this is not a civil war. The original legitimate protests against the dictatorial Syrian government were hijacked by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey (all Israeli-backed). 1200 murderers, rapists and bandits were released from Saudi prisons, armed and trained by Western Special Services in camps in the Jordan and Turkey and paid over $1000 dollars a month to murder, maim and cannibalise innocent Syrians. Together with them there are tens of thousands of fanatical foreign mercenaries, Chechens, Tunisians, Libyans and many Muslims from Western countries like Britain, France, Belgium and Germany. (These terrorists, who use chemical weapons in Syria, are the same people who prepare chemical weapons in Somalia). The war in Syria is a war between Syrian patriots on the one hand and foreign-financed traitors and foreign mercenaries on the other hand.

As regards the intervention of President Putin, the man who is so hated by Rue Daru and the old calendarists, what is remarkable is that for the first time, someone has stood up to resist the New World Order, that will lead to the enthronement of Antichrist in the rebuilt Temple on Zion. (Speaking of Russia, called the ‘Heartland’ in geopolitical science, Zbigniew Brzezinski said that the ‘New World Order’ would be built on its ruins). President Putin may even have averted a Third World War and certainly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, unlike President Obama who should be stripped of his.

It was not a billion-peopled China or India or Africa, representing half the population of the planet between them, but Russia that stood up to the New World Order. President Putin has played the role of the Orthodox Tsar, of ‘him who restrains’ (2 Thessalonians 2, 6). This is remarkable on the part of a mere politician. Moreover on 19 September the President went on in his Valdai Speech to explain that the role of Russia is in Orthodoxy and that this is her Christian civilisational role against the secularist and suicidal West which has opted for Sodom.

The West has two great enemies in Russia today. The first is President Putin, the second is Patriarch Kyrill. It will do its utmost to bring them both down, as it has already done.

Q: Why?

A: Because the secularist West knows that if either of them is successful or both of them are successful, they will with time be replaced by even more powerful Orthodox figures in Russia. They will not only resist the New World Order even more successfully, but will actually reverse it, restoring the Russian Orthodox Empire in Eurasia and worldwide Orthodox unity. That will be the end of the Antichristic, unipolar global project, of Orthodox countries eternally indebted and enslaved to the European Union, the end of absurd new calendarism and masonic puppet Orthodox bishops, the beginning of freedom for Orthodoxy in China, financial support for the Orthodox missions in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the building of tens of thousands of churches there and, if God wills and the world lasts long enough, the foundation of new autocephalous Churches. In a word, this will be the great gathering of all Orthodox Christianity before the end.

Q: It is 20 years since the attempted coup of October 1993 in Moscow, with the bombardment of the White House and the Yeltsin era. What are your thoughts?

A: The 1990s were a disgraceful period, when Russia went from Communism to Consumerism, from lies to theft. Russian public assets were stolen by those whom we now call oligarchs through so-called ‘privatisation’. These oligarchs, international criminals, now live in asylum under British government protection in London and elsewhere in the Western world that so adored their stolen billions that so impoverished Russia. This was massive, State-sponsored theft. In the 1990s the West tried to dismember and destroy the Russian Lands, just as it had tried to do under the seven months of the Provisional Government of 1917. It is said that these new Kerenskys, Harvard-educated privatisers, the cowboys of the ‘Wild East’, actually rigged the election of 1996 so that the drunkard Yeltsin could win. It is possible. The CIA has plenty of experience in rigging elections all round the world. In 1917 the decadence lasted seven months; in the 1990s it lasted seven years until the Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the canonisation of the New Martyrs in Moscow.

Q: Some conservative convert Orthodox, especially under the Patriarchate of Antioch in the USA, would perhaps be shocked by your words. They think that privatisation is good. What would you say to them?

A: Conservatism is not the same as the Tradition. To use American vocabulary, neoconservatives or ‘neocons’ (unprincipled Money Tories or economic liberals in Britishspeak) worship God and Mammon against the Gospel. Indeed, monetarism is just another word for Mammon. And even the so-called Paleoconservatives (High Tories, UKIP, noblesse oblige, the Patriarchal) are not the same as Orthodox. Firstly, paleoconservatives have a tendency to racism. Secondly, unlike Orthodox, they have little sense of social justice. (If socialism exists, there are reasons). And thirdly, the paleoconservatives tend to attract a lunatic fringe, people who are obsessed with conspiracy theories, hate the Jews, admire Hitler and other such nonsense

Q: What are your hopes and fears for the revival of the Russian Church in Russia today?

A: We must understand that the revival of the last 25 years, although spectacular, has only just begun. As Patriarch Kyrill said last week, at the present rate it will take 100 years just to build enough churches to catch up with the number of churches that existed in the Russian Empire before the Revolution. Instead of building 1,000 churches a year, over the next ten years 14,000 churches need to be built every year. That is what would be happening if Russia were not nominally Orthodox, but actually Orthodox. Another example: at the Synod in Moscow on 5 October seven new bishops were nominated. That is very good and it should bring the total to more or less 300 bishops. But if Russia and the Church’s canonical territories were actually and not nominally Orthodox, there would be 200 times more bishosp being nominated – 1,400 new bishops. Then any future Inter-Orthodox Conference (falsely called a Pan-Orthodox Council by the Phanariots) would be Orthodox

Q: One last question. Earlier you mentioned Fr Seraphim (Rose). Do you think he will one day be canonised?

A: God makes saints, not men. It may be that one day God will reveal Fr Seraphim to have been a saint. It is quite possible, judging from his life. But, before this, the monastery at Platina will first have to return to ROCOR. That is what Fr Seraphim would have wanted. That would be justice correcting the historic injustice of Platina leaving ROCOR, something carried out after Fr Seraphim’s repose. I would even say that the main impediment to Fr Seraphim’s canonisation is precisely the fact that Platina has not yet returned to ROCOR. Then everything will fall into place.

Q: Would Fr Seraphim have agreed with the reconciliation between ROCOR and the Church inside Russia?

A: Of course, he would. He was a deeply anti-sectarian person, as you can see by the way in which the proud ‘super-correct’ persecuted him in the 1970s. He was a genuine monk who had no pathological complexes, like many of the super-correct converts at that time. He suffered greatly from them, especially when they insisted on being photographed with him – photographs that they now display in their self-justification! ‘Look at me, I’m standing next to Fr Seraphim, I’m a saint’. That is what they proclaim and yet in his lifetime they were his worst enemies. It was the same with St John of Shanghai. Some of his worst persecutors during his lifetime, those who put him on trial, proclaimed after his canonisation how much they had supported him!

Q: When you see what is being introduced in the Western world, what has been called ‘Eurosodom’, are you pessimistic or optimistic about the future

A: It is a strange fact that all empires end in sodomy because they lose faith, they no longer have any self-belief and so they commit suicide. It happened in Ancient Greece and Rome. And today we are seeing not the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but the decline and fall of the Western Empire. It is a tragedy. And it is the duty of Orthodox to try and save the best of Western culture before it disappears altogether under the tidal wave of atheism.

Am I pessimistic or optimistic? True, it is quite possible that only very little of my above hopes for the future restoration of Orthodox Russia will be realised. I have no illusions. But even so, even despite all this, I remain optimistic because, although man proposes, God disposes, and God has already won, ‘trampling down death by death’. The worst that can happen is that we die. And if, I repeat if, we die repentant, and I underline repentant, we will go to Paradise! Who can be a pessimist? Fear not, little flock!

Neo-Hesychasm and the Struggle for Authentic Orthodoxy

Already before the First World War, British Establishment freemasonry in Cyprus, then 65 years ago, in 1948, the US State Department in Constantinople, and then 32 years ago, in 1981, the EEC (now called the EU) in Greece, have all taken part in their conscious Crusade to enslave the Church. They have wanted to create an artificial, politically correct Orthodoxy, acceptable to the secular powerbrokers of this world. This pseudo-Orthodoxy, a lightweight ‘Diet Orthodoxy’, persecuting of piety, Cross-less, fasting-less, comfortable, consumerist and anti-ascetic, is sterilised, diluted, degutted, neutered, castrated and disincarnate.

It is therefore new-calendarised, uniatised, anglicanised, protestantised, modernised, liberalised, finlandised, often beardless and homosexualised, confessionless and repentance-free because of its self-admiring pride, the sense of the sacred and mystery removed together with the iconostasis, and replaced by plastic, steel and chrome, salt that has lost its savour. The Neo-Frankish neo-colonialist process has so far affected some 20% of the Orthodox world, but not the vast majority of the Russian, Serbian and Georgian Churches, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, or parts of the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches and others.

There is conscious resistance to such humanistic modernism and renovationism. The latter have manipulated shallow, spiritually weak, uprooted and so disincarnate, nominally Orthodox intellectuals in the Diaspora in particular, victims of their own pride of mind and vanity. The ascetic alternative to the above Westernised and Western-supported and financed ‘Orthodoxy’, this alternative for which we have fought for most of our lives, comes in the form of the ever-renewed Tradition of the authentic Orthodox Faith – which we may call Neo-Hesychasm. This means the Trinitarian opposition to all of the above, implying:

The continuing recognition of the Fatherhood of authentic monasticism in Church and society; the Sonhood of conscious commitment to the Incarnational, Orthodox civilisational world view and ethos, with its sense of supra-national Orthodox unity (the Patriarch of Moscow taking on the unifying role of the Tsar until the election of the new and coming Tsar, the Patriarch of Constantinople having lost this role in 1453); the Spirithood of an unshakeable commitment to authentic Orthodoxy worldwide, with, implicit in this, the understanding and openness to heterodox to make missionary work among them possible.

Our Mission

It was under the Carolingian regime at the end of the eighth century that Western Europe first began the long process of abandoning the Incarnation, that is, of abandoning Sacral Orthodox Christian Civilisation. In its place it would put the disincarnate dualism of iconoclastic clericalism on the one hand and the secularised State and society on the other hand. For by clericalising the Church, making it into less than the Church under the illusion of making it into more than the Church, a Super-Church, the State and the rest of society were gradually desacralised. The illusion of spiritualising the Church by imposing celibacy on the clergy meant disincarnating the Church from society, thus creating secularism.

As we have said, the first movement to desacralisation can be seen under the Carolingians. This took place through their rejection of the Holy Spirit’s incarnational role in sacralising the material world, that is, through the Carolingian Trinitarian filioque heresy and its resulting iconoclasm. Fortunately the Carolingian Empire collapsed and the part of Western Europe subject to it remained in communion with the Church for another quarter of a millennium. Unfortunately, the Carolingian project was revived by Carolingian-descended, Germanic popes in the middle of the eleventh century and its next stage appeared as papism. And since then the desacralising apostasy has continued inexorably.

As a result, after a thousand years of the degenerative process have gone by, Western Europe has today become, on the one hand, a fascinating complex of tourist-filled, medieval cathedrals and menacing castles, of museums and monuments, where life is observed, but not lived, and, on the other hand, a disfiguring complex of consumerist, financial depravity and amoral technology, of Sodom and Gomorrah. It has been our duty and calling to encourage the reintegration of the last surviving fragments and vestiges of Orthodox Christianity in Western culture back into Orthodox Civilisation, as it has itself managed to survive in its homelands outside apostatic Western Europe.

This has above all involved the then crucified and now risen Centre of the Orthodox Church and Civilisation, Russia, where the Centre is slowly awakening and being restored, as it strives to throw off the old cultural reflexes of the Soviet period. In piercing the veil of Western history and explaining it, in scattering the confusing, in looking beyond and so looking forward to Orthodoxy, which means being radical, we have been hampered. We have been hampered by the political compromises of that part of the Church that was under Soviet Communism. And we have been hampered by the political compromises of that part of the Church that was and increasingly is under US/EU colonial administration.

We have also been hampered by individuals who have compromised themselves with extremisms and deviations of the left side and of the right side, which they have adopted from weakness, in preference to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. The Church is above left and right, above margins and fringes, above both personal and nationalistic compromises. The Church is the Tradition of the Holy Spirit, transcendent yet immanent, beyond history, yet in history, beyond weak humanity, yet incarnate in weak humanity. As the world globalises and moves ever closer to its self-created Armageddon with ever new developments, the Church responds to them and gives the world here and now the choice and chance of Her eternal perspective.

The Struggle Against EU Tyranny

As we know, first new calendar Greece, then new calendar Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria all fell victims to the EU and became victims of its debt colonialisation, from which they will never escape – unless they make the geopolitical choice to join the Eurasian Union (at present Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus), thus freeing themselves from their self-imposed slavery. Moreover, at the present time the EU is extending its tentacles to the Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Serbia.

Since the NATO genocide of 1999, the Serbian government has been under the thumb of Western elites, who, typically, have been trying to force Serbia to allow ‘gay-parades’ against mass public opinion. The EU considers that ‘gay parades’ show that Serbia is ‘civilised’ (!) and has ‘European values’. They will be accompanied of course by all the other compulsory aspects of EU ‘civilisation’ – the destruction of the traditional family, compulsory sex education in schools, compulsory euthanasia, and zombification of the public by EU-programmed media, exactly as we have seen in Great Britain over the last forty years.

All this was very well explained by President Putin, now nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for restraining Arangeddon by averting the massacre of Syrian people by American missiles, in his Valdai Speech on 19 September:

‘We can see how certain Euro-Atlantic countries are in the process of rejecting their roots, including Christian values which constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They reject moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and sexual also. They are implementing policies which put large families and same sex unions, belief in God and belief in Satan on the same footing. The excesses of political correctness are such that people are talking seriously about allowing political parties whose aim is to promote pedophilia. People in certain European countries are embarrassed or frightened to mention their religion. Religious holidays are abolished or called by different names: their essential meaning is concealed, as is their spiritual foundation. And they are trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens the direct oath to degradation and primitiveness, which will result in a profound demographic and moral crisis’.

Praying for the Resurrection of Europe

Already in the nineteenth century prophetic Russian writers and thinkers like Khomyakov and Dostoyevsky described Europe as a cemetery, its gardens well-kept, its lawns manicured, its trees pruned, its cleaned tombs and monuments of great artistic beauty, but still a cemetery, where lie the dead of past history. A cemetery, in Latin languages, cimetière, cimitero, cementerio, (from the Greek for ‘to sleep’), in German Friedhof, in Dutch Begraafplaats, in Swedish Kyrkogard, is, literally, a place of sleep, rest and burial, a churchyard. This is the place where are buried dear ancestors, friends and family, whom we visit and pray for. For the only life in a cemetery is that which we bring there.

A cemetery is the image which conveyed the fact that European culture was already in the nineteenth century dying out because it was rejecting the roots of its culture, and cultural roots are always spiritual. In other words, by rejecting the founding spirituality of its civilisation, Orthodox Christianity, whether actively by fighting against it or passively by not resisting its loss, Europe reduces itself to a land of historic monuments and museums, remarkable, outstanding, but not living. Europe, the historically admirable, far Western corner of Eurasia, is to be visited by becameraed tourists and even pilgrims for its past, but it is incapable of generating new culture in the present and future for lack of spiritual roots.

As the decades have passed, we have found the above prophetic image growing ever truer. The culture of death and the death of culture, whether through wars and concentration camps, whether through abortion and euthanasia, have taken over a secularised but also increasingly Islamised, thus polarised Europe, which is intent on its spiritual and so physical suicide. Our Orthodox churches in Europe are ever more like oases amid the contemporary Western culture of death. They are like cemetery chapels, where, as we pray for the resurrection of Europe’s Orthodox past, we bring the only spiritual life. Today, Europe seems no longer to have any self-belief, any fire in its soul – only ashes where once a fire so keenly burned.

Europe had from the outset the choice between Christ and death. At first Europe chose Christ and many centuries ago before the Great Misfortune, the best of Europe in its hermits prayed to Christ, whether from their lonely rock fastnesses in the wild North Atlantic, from Mediterranean islands or Alpen pastures, or from many other lonely places in Europe. But then Europe replaced the Risen One with a single mortal man, a new Ceasar (‘we have no king but Caesar’, they said), and then replaced Him with all mortal men, thus choosing death over life. Thus, the God of Europe was killed and put to sleep in the great European cemetery. Without God, Europe no longer believes in itself and so is intent on self-abolition

After Europe had killed God, it created a vacuum of faith. And where there is a vacuum, the demons rush in, and so, having pronounced its God dead, Europe then began to kill His creation, man, in the tens of millions. But we do not despair, for one day the hermits will return to the North Atlantic, to the Hebrides, to the whole Kingdom of the Isles, and all over Europe, and they will pray again to Christ for resurrection, just as the hermits of Russia in their forest monasteries and caves pray for resurrection. But this will happen only when the Orthodox Christian Empire is restored. For the restoration of the Christian Emperor in Russia will be the restoration of the Christian Empire, even to the uttermost ends of Europe.

On the Importance of Sobriety

Questions and answers compiled from recent conversations and correspondence

Q: In an article in ‘Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition’ entitled ‘The Present Situation of the Orthodox Church’ and written nearly 25 years ago in July 1989, you wrote about the two extremes to be found on the fringes of the Orthodox world, new calendarism and old calendarism, and the pressures they exerted on the free voice of the Church, the voice of the New Martyrs. You said that these New Martyrs would be canonised inside Russia, providing that the Church could free itself from the Communist government. This happened. So my question is if these two isms or extremes, which were then a considerable problem, are still a problem despite that canonisation?

A: Yes, they are definitely still present, though they are not as influential as they were. This is because the Centre of the Church, that which is outside the extremes, has been much strengthened through the prayers of the now universally canonised New Martyrs.

Q: But why do these isms still exist?

A: Both extremist isms still exist for historical reasons, appearing after the Centre fell, that is, after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Centre ‘did not hold’, ‘things fell apart’, that is, there was a polarisation. This became clearly and immediately visible in Russia in the 1920s with the renovationist new calendarism – although the renovationist temptation had existed for several years before the Revolution, certainly since Gapon in 1905. (Incidentally, Patriarch Kyrill’s grandfather, Fr Vasily Gundyaev, suffered much from that renovationism). And of course there were individuals who then went to the opposite extreme of renovationism, falling into a sort of old calendarist sectarianism.

At the same time Renovationism also became visible outside Russia in Constantinople, which had long been under British masonic influence. Thus, the renovationist Constantinople hierarchy actually recognised the renovationists in Russia, rejecting the saintly Patriarch Tikhon and the legitimate Church. Then, together with the Church of Greece, it introduced the secular (so-called ‘new’) calendar for the fixed feasts. Here a lot of Anglican money, £100,000 of that time, changed hands. Immediately, there was a reaction to all this and old calendarism began.

Q: What has your position been towards these two extremes?

A: It has always been to stand in the middle and support the Centre, even though it fell in 1917. My position has been a consistent straight line, from which I have never wavered, and this as early as 1973 in a booklet which I wrote then and which was published a few years ago in ‘Orthodox England’. My support has always been for a free Russian Orthodoxy, uncompromised by either extreme.

Q: Are you not criticised for this unwavering line?

A: Of course. But, in fact, pressure from the extremist margins only strengthens us. As an example of this, I would like to mention a fellow priest in Bulgaria who wrote to me a little while ago. He has one of the Church calendar parishes in Bulgaria which is under the new calendar Church. Thus he remains faithful to the Tradition, but does not participate in schism. And he receives as much criticism from new calendarism as from old calendarism. This is exactly our situation here, where both fringes criticise us. Interestingly, the fringes often work together and are friends. As they say, ‘extremes meet’. And when we are criticised by both extremes, it is a sure sign that we are doing something right, standing in the middle. Remember that the middle is where Christ was crucified, between the two thieves.

Q: You mentioned how it all began in 1917 with the fall of the Centre in Moscow. But did the extremist pressures get worse?

A: Yes, they did. The Cold War after 1945 definitely made it all worse. For example, in 1948 the USA installed a new Patriarch of Constantinople called Athenagoras. He was flown in by the CIA on Truman’s personal plane from America. When the legitimate Patriarch, Maximos, was deposed and exiled by the CIA, he was heard to say, ‘The City is lost’. This is a close parallel to the situation in the first millennium when a number of heretical patriarchs of Constantinople were installed by heretical emperors. Interestingly, the legitimate Patriarch Maximos V, supposedly ‘ill’, died three decades later in 1972, the same year as the illegitimate Patriarch. Since 1948 Constantinople, co-opted into the anti-Soviet and then anti-Russian war of the USA, has been the plaything of the ‘iconoclastic’ US State Department. The City is lost indeed – but the Church lives on outside the City. Fortunately, the Church does not depend on a geographical location – otherwise there would still be nothing outside Jerusalem.

The situation was no better in the Local Churches that survived under Communism during the Cold War. As regards the Russian Church, the situation worsened greatly under Khrushchev, a virulent and primitive atheist, not just because he persecuted the Church physically, but also because he and the Soviet Communist Party imposed ecumenism on the Church as a political tool in the early 1960s. The other Communist Parties in Eastern Europe did the same to their Local Churches. The idea was to make ecumenism and ecumenical organisations into tools for Soviet propaganda.

Q: What happened when the Cold War ended?

A: Just because the Cold War officially ended, that does not mean that persecution is over. Today the militant atheism of the Soviet Union is gone, but now we have the militant atheism of the European Union. The EU ideology is trying to destroy not only the Local Churches of EU member countries in Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Cyprus, but also the Churches of countries which the EU one day hopes to colonise: Serbia, Moldova, Georgia, even the Ukraine. The victims of such political pressures, some senior bishops, are hostages to this, so we do not listen to the things that their political masters force them to say, especially in Serbia.

Q: Do others listen to these bishop-hostages?

A: You should not listen to hostages. Unfortunately, old calendarists do listen to these bishop-hostages and, in search of self-justification for their schisms, quote them. Thus, they deliberately ignore the 99.999% of the Local Church which is solidly Orthodox and with whom they put themselves out of communion. They want black and white situations, everyone else must be black and therefore only they can be white. This is pride and it is also to fall into the divide and rule game of the powers of this world, which want to divide the Church in order to rule it. It is like refusing to be baptized by the disciples because Judas had been a disciple. And so you remain unbaptized, outside the Church, all because of someone else who put himself outside the Church. This is to cut off your nose to spite your face, to deprive yourself because another has deprived himself.

I would add that old calendarism itself is no better in terms of political dependence. I will always remember one of their bishops writing to me six year ago and complaining that I did not support the CIA. He actually said with great pride that some of his best parishioners in the USA work for the CIA! We also recall how the US ambassador in Kiev actually plotted a schism in the Ukraine. This we know because we stood in front of him as he plotted it with a bishop at the Russian Church’s San Francisco Council of 2006. And that is exactly what that bishop then did and he is now in communion with the CIA-supporting old calendarist bishop. It is a small world!

Q: Obviously, the liberal and modernist threat to the Church, with ecumenism, liturgical modernism, intercommunion and so on, is well-known. But is it still a reality?

A: It is a reality, but mainly for old people. Today, for instance, ecumenism is largely dead. This is why old calendarists are always quoting events from the 60s, 70s and 80s. They look to the past when ecumenism was active. Thus, a favourite hate figure of theirs is Patriarch Sergius – but he died in 1944! The dead present no threat. And most of the modernists I can think of are either dead or else in their 70s and 80s. They are very old-fashioned. All we can do is pray for them that they might repent before their end. But even if we see them as our enemies, the Gospel tells us to love our enemies. Here we see that old calendarism lacks love.

Q: Do the old calendarist fractions have points in common with the new calendarist fractions?

A: Yes, they do, and several things. For example, both are old-fashioned, many of their people are elderly. Both are extremely Russophobic. And both the new calendarist and old calendarist movements are utterly split. This is because they are concerned not with the unity of the Church, which comes from following Christ, but with following personal opinions, which are always divisive, precisely because they are personal. They do not understand the importance of the conciliar mind of the Church, which is above opinions, because it follows the Holy Spirit.

Old calendarism in particular wants dogmatic precision in every detail from every individual. This is not how the Church works, the Church is not a totalitarian monolith. For instance, I have been told that there are now 14 old calendarist synods in Greece, all, it seems, hating each other. Often when one of their metropolitans dies, they split again. Many of these synods only have a few dozen communities under them and often the communities themselves are tiny, at most a few dozen. The synods are often dominated by clericalism. And here we should remember the ordinary people who are hoodwinked into following them. These synods have a large turnover of sincere, but naïve neophytes. I am sometimes contacted by such people from this country. They want to leave the sects where they are and come to the Orthodox Church, which they have just discovered. Such ordinary people are not guilty. This is why they are received into the Church by confession and communion.

Q: Why are both new calendarism and old calendarism Russophobic?

A: Out of self-justification. Both denigrate the Russian Church especially because She is old calendar and therefore from their viewpoint a competitor. They need to justify their isolation from Her and desperately want to see scandals and corruption. Thus, they will repeat anti-Church Cold War propaganda against the Russian Church, whatever the origin, atheist or other. Thus, they seize on the most minor scandal, blow it up out of all proportion and generalise it, rather like the anti-clerical media. One priest is bad, therefore all are bad, therefore they cannot be in communion with a whole Local Church. This is self-justification and also Donatism, as the righteous Metr Philaret of New York described old calendarism.

However, the main impression is not so much of Russophobia, nor even of the rejection of episcopal authority, but of the rejection of the people of the Church, the unChurched but recently baptised masses both of the Russian Church and other Local Churches, who are not good enough for them. This is the contempt of the elder brother who rejected the Prodigal Son. It is the refusal to recognise repentance that is characteristic of old calendarism and also new calendarism. That is another thing they have in common – their elitist, esoteric disdain for the masses. It is just another sign of the pride that infects all schism.

Q: To what extent was the Church inside Russia affected by new calendarism, what Russians call renovationism?

A: There was a serious battle against renovationism inside Russia, but it was over by the 1930s. Renovationism simply died out there for lack of support. People knew that it was a Communist trick. However, it did survive far longer in the foreign parishes of the Church inside Russia and in the Paris Jurisdiction, where many of the renovationists went, so intense was their hatred of the Russian Church. Many of the old emigres brought this renovationism, in fact a sort of ‘art nouveau’ pre-Revolutionary decadence, into the emigration with them and preserved it abroad, long after it was dead inside the Soviet Union. So it survived as a curiosity. However, most of its last elderly supporters have died in the last twenty years.

Q: Wasn’t ROCOR, on the other hand, affected by the opposite extreme, old calendarism or traditionalism?

A: Yes. Communism inside Russia created renovationism which the Church there had to defeat. However, during the Cold War Capitalism created anti-Communism. In ROCOR in the USA this took the form of a nationalist right-wing movement. The supporters of this movement were the very ones who put St John on trial in San Francisco fifty years ago. In the 1960s they accepted a Greek old calendarist monastery into the Church. To their horror the old calendarists turned against the hand that had fed them and tried to take over ROCOR.

Realising that they had failed in their takeover bid, in 1986 many of the old calendarists left ROCOR, but their influence lingered on and the 1990s were a battle ground between that influence and the original ROCOR Tradition. The battle was between the Tradition, such as we knew it in the Western European Diocese of ROCOR, the Tradition which had come out of pre-Revolutionary Russia, and that new and alien old calendarist influence. As you know, in the end, the old ROCOR was triumphant. The alien influence reality affected very few, about 5% of the whole, but led them to leaving the Church in the early 2000s, which was tragic for them, but at the same time allowed the restoration of ROCOR’s old spiritual independence and integrity.

Q: How do you try and remain faithful in the middle?

A: Sobriety is the key to this. The left, or new calendarism, and the right, old calendarism, are equally self-exalted. The Centre is not self-exalted at all and remains sober. Both new calendarism (renovationism) and old calendarism (traditionalism) must be avoided because both equally lead to schism. Schism is always caused by a lack of sobriety. We steer our course by the star of Christ, the star of Bethlehem, in other words, by grace.

I remember in 2007, just after the concelebration between Patriarch Alexis and Metropolitan Laurus in Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow, in which we had all participated with great joy at our unity, two senior ROCOR priests were speaking. One said: ‘Well, we’ve done it’. The other answered, ‘No, father, the grace of God has done it’. And this is exactly the case. The grace of God brings unity in truth (and that is the only real unity, the only unity that exists); the devil brings disunity and untruth.

Q: How do such new calendarist and old calendarist schisms arise from inside the Church?

A: The leaders of the small groups that leave the Church for either extreme are people who have been in difficulty in Church life for decades. But they are tolerated because God tolerates them. Eventually, such people are either healed by the patience shown to them, or else they leave the Church of their own accord.

Q: What lies behind schisms? Why are theological and historical arguments not successful with those who leave? Why can’t the leaders of schism see their error?

A: It is not theology or history that lies behind most schisms, but psychology, that is, personality conflicts. And that is always irrational. Irrational psychology cuts off its nose to spite its face, it resists grace and grace is always rational. For example, seven years ago I predicted that few would return from the Sourozh schism in England, though we would remain open to their return. And, just as predicted, few did come back. Why? Why do tiny minorities, which will clearly die out, prefer occasional services in ‘voluntary catacombs’, in back rooms and sheds, temporary rented premises, to regular services in normal churches? It is because they do not want the Church, they want the inward-looking, sectarian atmosphere of cliques and clubs, of small ponds, where they can be ‘big fish’.

Q: What is the psychology of traditionalist and modernist schisms?

A: I will take one example which I know well – the Sourozh new calendarist schism. This came about from the convert desire to merge Orthodoxy with Anglicanism (the Establishment). This is why the schism was supported at the time by the Establishment Church of England, albeit discreetly, but quite openly by newspapers like The Times and The Daily Telegraph, which support the British Establishment and whose journalists are fed by MI5 and the CIA, just like BBC journalists. However, to wish to merge Orthodoxy with Anglicanism is in fact to state that you remain unconverted to Orthodoxy, under the cloak of culture, hiding behind cultural excuses.

To take a minor detail as an example, they said: ‘Orthodoxy will have to adapt to us because we are English and so, for example, we have milk in our tea even on fast days’. Although this is a very minor detail, it is symptomatic of a far more serious spiritual illness – cultural arrogance, worldliness and nationalism. Thus, I remember that I was contacted at the time by one who complained that I had written that her group practised intercommunion and that was quite untrue. However, I pointed out to her that I had only been quoting from her group’s website which openly boasted that it allowed intercommunion!

As regards traditionalist or old calendarist schisms, they come from convert insecurity, the neophyte’s need to be against other Christians (especially against other Orthodox), rather than for Christ. It is interesting that such groups pride themselves on being ‘converts’. It is strange because we stop being converts once we are integrated, which should happen, at most, within a few years of reception into the Church. For example, the apostles do not speak of themselves as converts. That is unthinkable because they are part of the Church. And this was the same throughout history. Those who are part of the Church are not converts.

Q: Why are so many Anglican converts involved in schisms and hardly any Russians, at least in England?

A: Interestingly, a few Russians are involved, but they are always highly anglicised and want to become part of the Establishment despite their origins. Anglicans are Protestants and they have a very weak sense of the Incarnation. Therefore, for them the Church is just an individual choice, a personal matter, a private opinion, without any collective or social repercussions and so the Church is just a club. In Protestantism individualism is so highly developed that if you do not like the Church where you are, you simply go off and start another one. There is an inability to get on with others, to adapt, to accept and tolerate other opinions in community. That is why there are thousands of Protestant denominations, which to us Orthodox all look the same and indeed are essentially the same.

So the collective, the community, the Church, suffers at the hands of individualism, sectarianism. That is why in England, for example, there are five different small groups of ex-Anglicans who have joined the local dioceses of Orthodox Churches, but they are all split up. They cannot get on with each other or with other Orthodox. The only ex-Anglicans who do get on with each other are those who get on with other Orthodox of other nationalities, who are already integrated into Local Churches and multinational parishes and have forgotten that they were once Anglicans. They are Orthodox.

Q: When will old calendarist and new calendarist schisms end?

A: Only when the Centre has been fully re-established, when we reverse all the decadence of the past 96 years, when we go back to the pre-1917 situation. Thus, old calendarist schisms will exist for as long as the Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian Churches remain officially on the secular calendar for the fixed feasts. Once those Churches have returned to the Church calendar, and they would never have dared leave it before 1917 because the Russian Church would not have allowed it, those schisms will fall apart, only clerical careerists or the ill will be left. As regards new calendarist schisms, they will last for as long as the Centre is not strong enough to quell them, as long as there are conformists whose faith is weak, who swim with the Western tide, who are too weak to stand up to the passing fashions of this world.

Q: If we can slightly move away from this theme, what can we say about the future of diaspora unity between the parishes of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the foreign parishes of the Church inside Russian, outside Russia but still not under ROCOR, as they logically and canonically should be?

A: As you say, logic and the canons say they should be, but there is such a thing as economy – a temporary dispensation for pastoral reasons, for the greater benefit. Much patience is needed to implement the 2007 agreement between the two parts of the Russian Church. We knew this at the time. As you know that agreement involved the Church Outside Russia giving up its representations inside Russia and the Church inside Russia giving up its representations outside Russia. However, as the Church Outside Russia had very few and only very recent representations inside Russia, it was easy to give them up. On the other hand, the Church inside Russia had a lot of longstanding representations and property outside Russia – as a result of the Cold War.

Wisely, no timetable was agreed on the issue of transfer of parishes to ROCOR because this is a pastoral issue. This should all happen calmly, as has happened in Australia, without anyone’s feelings being hurt. So what has been happening since the 2007 agreement is that the foreign parishes of the Church inside Russia are being readied for their transfer to the Church Outside Russia – but I would say that this process will take a generation. We are only at the beginning.

Q: How can such a transfer work in terms of practices? For example, ROCOR practises reception of heterodox by baptism, foreign parishes of the Church inside Russia practise reception of heterodox by chrismation?

A: That is untrue. Practices vary in both ROCOR and in the Church inside Russia. For example, in the Western European Diocese of ROCOR, we generally received by chrismation, as was the universal tradition of ROCOR until the 1970s. The priest would offer reception by baptism or chrismation, explaining why the choice was available. We always found that most chose to be received by chrismation. Practices in the Church inside Russia also vary. I think that once all the 825 or so parishes outside Russia are united under ROCOR, this mixed practice will continue according to the pastoral conscience of each priest. This is not a dogmatic issue, but a pastoral one. We all agree that there are no sacraments outside the Church, but approaches vary as regards the sacramental forms that have survived outside the Church and how we deal with them.

Q: You described how foreign parishes of the Church inside Russia were much affected by the renovationism or new calendarism that was brought out of Russia by certain emigres. Is this still a problem?

A: Much less of a problem every year. For instance, I remember someone telling me how when Bishop Elisey, the new Sourozh bishop appointed after the schism there in 2006, first came to England, he visited one of his communities in the provinces. The priest was an ex-Anglican and when Bishop Elisey got up on Sunday morning to serve the liturgy, he was asked by the priest’s wife whether he wanted a cooked breakfast, like her husband, or not. This came as a shock to him, but not to us, who knew exactly what had been going on in Sourozh for decades.

This was typical of the old Sourozh under Metr Antony Bloom and Bp Basil Osborne, where ‘English culture’ was more important than Church culture, where in fact phyletism reigned. They received Anglicans into the Church very quickly, never taught them much about Orthodoxy, ordained them and then never visited them or checked up on them. Cooked breakfasts before communion, just as in the Church of England, were the result. However, now that the Sourozh Diocese has been brought back to the normal practices of the Russian Church, such peculiar situations belong to the past.

Q: What is the main problem of doing missionary work in the West?

A: Most of our work is with immigrant Orthodox from Eastern Europe and it is a matter of Churching people who were baptised in the last few years. So our problems here are exactly the same as elsewhere in the post-Communist Orthodox world.

However, there is a second layer of work, which is with the mass of Western people who have no concept of what the Orthodox Church is. I would say that here our work is in overcoming a barrier of prejudices, what I call the ‘Dawkins Delusion’, which is the modern Western delusion. This is the problem of very primitive Neo-Darwinianism. This is actually irrelevant to those who have never held Protestant fundamentalist beliefs, like the Orthodox. So first of all you have to explain to these people that the Church has never held weird Protestant beliefs, which they are in revolt against, and then you have to explain that this is why we have no need to revolt against beliefs which we have never had anyway. This makes their Neo-Darwinianism irrelevant. In Catholic countries it is much the same story, but there they are in revolt against Papism. So the problem comes in explaining that we are not anti-Papist like them because we have never been Papist. It is irrelevant to us

Q: Do you not work to convert Anglicans, Protestants and Catholics?

A: First of all, in today’s West there are very few of those and they are mainly very elderly. We do not proselytise among them. We tend to find that those who have actually believed in Protestantism or Catholicism all their lives never become Orthodox. They are unable to learn to think and act as Orthodox. Of course, if they come to us, having understood the errors of what they have been taught, that is a different matter. But we do not proselytise. We wait for the grace of God to touch them. We do not work by human artifice. They must become natural, integrated Orthodox.

The Future of the Multinational Russian Church and Repentance

The greatest crime committed in relation to the Sovereign must be erased by ardent veneration for him and the glorification of his feat. The Russian Lands must bow down before the humiliated, the slandered and the martyred…Then the Tsar-Passion-Bearer will be granted great audaciousness before God and his prayer will save the Russian land from the misfortunes that are borne by it. Then the Tsar-Martyr and those who suffered with him will become new heavenly advocates of Holy Russia. Innocently shed blood will regenerate Russia and cover it with new glory.

St John of Shanghai

We remember some twenty years ago a conversation on the future of Russia with a young Paris emigre of the third generation. He stated that there could never be reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church, inside and outside Russia, until the Patriarchal part inside Russia had repented. When he was asked what such repentance meant, he came out with an answer that was purely political and did not concern the Church. However, we did not believe then, and do not believe now, that repentance is political – it is always spiritual. Moreover, true repentance always begins with demands made of ourselves, not with demands made of others.

In today’s Russia many are at last realising that anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox Communism was the greatest illusion and greatest deceit in Russian history. It was in fact an anti-patriotic, foreign-imposed conspiracy whose aim was to destroy the Orthodox Empire, which naturally included destroying its spiritual essence and historic consciousness, its multinational Church. Indeed, the Russian Lands were to be saved only after a generation of brutal atheist persecution by another catastrophe – the Nazi invasion, which alone renewed national consciousness. However, it was not for another fifty years after that invasion that the country officially and finally rid itself of the atheist regime.

However, that political change, momentous though it was, did not and still does not mean full repentance. Today’s Russian Federation, and all the other now separated lands that made up the pre-1917 Russian Empire, are still not fully repentant – just as the Russian Emigration, its descendants and missions, are still not fully repentant – hence all the divisions between those lands and in the Emigration. Full repentance is when all, and not just some, repent for their ancestors’ sins of slander, deposition and regicide, the slaying of Tsar Nicholas II and the millions who died with him and after him. He who does not love the Tsar, does not truly love Holy Russia. And he who does not love Holy Russia does not truly love God.

Russia and all who belong by birth or by choice to the worldwide Russian Church, in Europe, in the Americas, in Australasia and elsewhere, will not walk the Earth as Resurrected until all realise who the Tsar was. Only when there is true repentance by all will the Tsar be truly glorified. And the Lord will not grant the Russian Lands a new Tsar, and so unity of all Russian Lands, until we sincerely repent for the fact that we allowed and still allow those who rejected and still reject our Faith to blacken his name and ritually murder him and his Family. The Lord will grant the Russian Lands a new Tsar and unity only after profound and general repentance, after ‘ardent veneration for him and the glorification of his feat’.

Here it must be said that it is only with a Tsar in Russia that Orthodox outside Russia will be strong again. For example, Tsar Nicholas II built seventeen churches in Western Europe and a magnificent Cathedral in New York. And that was at a time when there were few Russian Orthodox living there. Moreover, he ensured unity among Orthodox living outside Russia and the Orthodox homelands. It is for those of the Russian Emigration and its missions, including the disincarnate and so not belonging to the Church Outside Russia, to become aware of this. Let us of all nationalities everywhere bring forth fruit worthy of this repentance, as the Patron of the Russian Emigration, St John of Shanghai, calls us to do.

The Chance of Redemption for Western Europeans

One thousand years of error and injustice will be made right. There will be a new Tsar in Russia and a new repentant culture in Europe, as it rediscovers its forgotten soul which it had busied itself burying for a thousand years beneath the ingenious but unnecessary.

Foreword: Faith on Earth

In 1914, nigh on one hundred years ago, Western Europe destroyed itself and all those whom it dragged into its great suicidal war. This was the fruit of the evils which its elites had wrought among their exploited peasantry, working classes and colonies. Little wonder that the country which suffered most in the Great War was Belgium, whose king had wrought so much evil in Central Africa, where perhaps 10,000,000 had perished. However, Great Britain everywhere, especially in the Indian subcontinent and in South Africa, France in Northern Africa and Indo-China, Austro-Hungary (Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Freud all lived in Vienna at the same time) in Central and Eastern Europe and Germany wherever it could, were all guilty. The catastrophe of 1914 had been heralded by the rebirth of European paganism, in Music by Stravinsky in the pagan dissonances of his Firebird and The Rite of Spring, in Art by the Futurists, as well as in Theatre by Strindberg, in Sculpture and Literature.

Indeed, it was ultimately in Alexander Blok’s poem ‘The Twelve’, in which the author saw Antichrist, pretending to be Christ, leading the Russian Revolution, that Europe could have seen its fate for non-repentance. Although the Great War would have left a great scar, the flower of much of its youth dead, it could have been reversed. Russia tried to reverse it, taking the brunt of the attacks in the East. However, it stopped being reversible in 1918 with the permanent installation in the Russian Empire, encouraged by the Western Powers, of a Western-inspired materialist regime and the martyrdom of the Russian Royal Family. The War could have ended in 1917, with Russian troops peacefully triumphant in Berlin and Vienna led by Tsar Nicholas II, as they had been by Tsar Alexander I in Paris in 1814, freeing Central and Eastern Europe from tyranny and restoring Poland and Finland. Instead of this, the War dragged on for another eighteen months and countless more young men died.

And as a result of this apostasy, today we ask the question: When the Saviour returns, will He find faith on earth? Fifty years ago, we thought this impossible – then there was still faith. Today this is not so, for over the last fifty years yet another chapter of the Book of Revelation has been enacted. At the present time we see the gradual development of a global surveillance society, controlled by what is becoming a world mafia-state, the fruit of the intolerance of the new Puritanism. On various false pretexts, freedom in the post-Protestant West is fast vanishing. With miniature cameras, drones, Google Glass, debit cards without which food cannot be bought, that world is fast heading for spiritual endarkenment. And yet over the last fifty years the Russian Church has offered spiritual enlightenment to the souls of this post-Protestant world, especially in the USA and the UK. At first slowly and cautiously and then more openly, Her witness to salvation in the Church of God has become ever more apparent.

Enlightening the Endarkened Post-Protestant World

Although this post-Protestant world is on the very fringes of Church consciousness, of authentic Christianity, the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, then still captive to Communism, did witness here, showing great patience. Thinking that in its spiritual weakness the post-Protestant world, especially ex-Protestants, would find it difficult to adopt the Orthodox calendar, She allowed it by generosity, that is, by economy, the secular calendar; thinking that because of its Western political prejudices and lack of understanding the post-Protestant world might not be able to venerate the Tsar and the other Royal Martyrs, by generous economy She did not insist on this; thinking that in its narrowness, the post-Protestant world might suffer from phyletist nationalism, She translated the Orthodox services wholly into its languages. Over the last fifty years what was once inaccessible has become accessible – there are no more excuses.

It must be said that success has been limited, especially among those who had been practising Protestants, less among those who were blank sheets, starting from nothing. Even among those who have accepted the invitation, there are those who refuse to enter the Arena, and do not become integrated Orthodox, even after fifty years. Also, some ex-Protestants, having joined the Church, then abandoned Her to go off and found their own sectarian ‘churches’, chapels, ‘sketes’ or even deaneries, whether to the left extreme or to the right extreme. Both in the post-Protestant cultures of North America and the United Kingdom, the Church inside Russia suffered many setbacks in its missions, until quite recently politically unable to heed the local experience of the Church Outside Russia. Using less economy, the latter has sometimes had more success (though with disappointments also), because of its local understanding of the ex-Protestant culture.

Here, there are those who have agreed to enter the Arena even after only a few months and so become grounded Orthodox. There is even one Archbishop of the Church Outside Russia who is from such a background, not to mention many other clergy and laity. Why have the spiritually sensitive been able to do this, whereas others have brought first moral scandal and then Protestant-style schism, as in England, or else first moral and financial scandal and then Protestant-style modernism, as in North America? The reason is to be found in psychological motivation. Those who join the Church from a self-serving need, even pathology, do not bear fruit and leave for self-made sects and cults, according to their ‘old man’, their old Protestant culture. However, those who enter the Church because they wish to save their souls and so serve others, do bear fruit. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’. Therefore, ‘Wretched are the impure in heart for they shall not see God’.

Enlightening the Endarkened Post-Roman Catholic World

Today, having reached the limits of what is possible in enlightening the post-Protestant world, the now reunited Russian Orthodox Church is turning to the far vaster post-Roman Catholic world. This world had long been closed to the Church because of its illusion that it is itself the Church, so cultivated by its purposeful deformation of the call to the West to repent made by the Mother of God to Portuguese children at Fatima in 1917. However, its recent wave of moral and financial scandals has revealed the corruption that has existed inside it for centuries and brought at least some to humility. Now the Russian Orthodox Church must battle for the souls of this post-Roman Catholic world. Fifty years ago that world began to fall into the desacralisation and infantilism of secularist Protestantisation and yet, traditionally it had conserved from Orthodoxy the sense of the Mother of God, the communion of the saints and the sacramental sense. There is cause for hope somewhere here.

Unfortunately, Roman Catholicism in the Western world has almost wholly lost its way. According to the design of evil forces, which had long planned its ultimate downfall, and the horror and scandal of its rejected faithful, since the Second Vatican Council two generations ago it has adopted the desacralised sentimentalism of secularist Protestantisation. Whether in North America, the UK, France, the Netherlands or in the Germanic and Scandinavian world, Protestantised Roman Catholicism is in a state of almost total apostasy, its liturgical heritage dumbed down, infantilised and all but destroyed. Western Europe has largely kept only the relics of the Faith. Quite literally, the relics. Western Europe resembles a huge treasure chest of relics, to which modernist Roman Catholicism has thrown away the key. However, a new key is being rehammered and reforged on the anvil of Tradition by the smiths of Orthodoxy. This is the key to the best of the West, the literal relics of its former piety.

Fortunately, there is hope of redemption among the simple faithful, often Orthodox in all but name, in Black Africa, in Latin America, in remoter parts of Southern Europe, in Eastern Europe, in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary and elsewhere, where piety and the veneration of icons have survived and not all are very aged. Here interest in Orthodoxy comes from the faithful of the mainstream, not from extremes, whether of left or right. It is this mainstream that has been rejected by its clerical elite. Thus, pro-Protestant modernists in Poland who seek self-destruction, have no interest in authentic Orthodoxy, at best only in a fake and sanitised Orthodoxy; nor do Roman Catholics in the extreme west of the Ukraine who have joined the Lefevrist group, unable to accept the Second Vatican Council’s Protestant-style, clericalist modernism. However, their extreme right-wing politics, Russophobic and pro-Hitler, prevents them like the rest of the Lefevrist movement from joining the Orthodox Church.

Today it is little wonder that various refugees from the spiritual desert of the Western world, whether post-Protestant or post-Roman Catholic, from the American whistle-blower Edward Snowden to the French actor Gerard Depardieu, look, consciously or unconsciously, to Russia for hope. Since the glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors in 1981, confirmed in 2000, the Church has been renewed, a process which continues as more New Martyrs are canonised. Only a few weeks ago in Paris thousands of demonstrators at mass rallies against ‘homosexual marriage’ and the adoption of children by same-sex couples, chanted ‘Russia, save us’, knowing that such perversions are forbidden here. For fifty years and more the Russian Church has tried to redeem the post-Protestant world, suffering with limited success. It is now our turn to try to redeem the post-Roman Catholic world, a more serious proposition, revealing to it, to its astonishment, its long forgotten roots in Orthodoxy.

Afterword: Redemption by Suffering

In 1917 the West was warned of the evil it was exporting to Russia by the Revelation of the Mother of God in Fatima. ‘Until you stop spreading the evil that you are spreading to Russia and consecrate yourself to Orthodoxy, the Holy Father (the Patriarch) will suffer and all will go worse’. It refused to listen and deformed the message of the Mother of God into self-justification. Then, in 1919, as prophesied, it guaranteed a Second Great War by afflicting the German and Austrian peoples, and not their elites, with an unjust peace. Thus, Russian troops would be triumphant in Berlin and Vienna – but only in 1945 and after the most barbaric of wars, with its camps and genocides, the greatest of which was that of 30 million Slavs, imposed by racist Germany. And even after all this Western Europe still refused to repent and so has gone on with its abortion holocaust beginning in 1964, and in 1989 its destruction of an unfree Eastern Europe, which it had itself created in 1917 and 1945.

However, God gives many opportunities for repentance, up unto seventy times seven. Every generation has its chance. The chances were refused in August 1914, in September 1939, in October 1964 and in November 1989. In December 2014 there is coming yet another chance. Four horrible scars will be left, but there is still time. Since 1914 the old Protestant culture has fallen, its decadence becoming apparent after two generations in the 1960s. Since 1964 the old Roman Catholic culture has fallen, its decadence becoming apparent after two generations today. Once blinded by arrogant hubris, its delusion of self-belief, the old Protestant culture has over the last fifty years disintegrated. It is now the turn of the old Roman Catholic culture. If it understands its error of hubris, it will have the chance to listen to the real message of Fatima, the call to the West to repent of its pride and its poisonous materialist ideology and accept the restoration of Church Orthodoxy in its integrity.

It is by no means certain that this will happen. The post-Protestant world is still offered Orthodoxy, but few accept it. It may be the same with the post-Roman Catholic world. It may be that no restoration of Orthodoxy in the Western world, however partial, will be possible until there is the example of full restoration in Russia. It may be that until the House of Romanov, through the son of a Romanov mother, is restored, even until another War, the fallen Western world will not be ready to listen, understanding at last that its own propaganda about Russia before the Revolution was merely lies. It may be that the Merciful Mother of God must yet appear again, as She did in her Myrrh-Giving Iviron Icon in the 1980s, again witnessing to the New Martyrs and Confessors and confirming her words of Fatima. Only then will the Western world start to repent of the materialist ideology which it has spread and return to the clean Gospel of Christ and His Holy Church in the purity of Orthodoxy.

The White Ideals of ROCOR

In 1917 Russia was taken over by those who blasphemously wanted Christianity without Christ, Eden without God. Thus, they deformed the Third Rome into the Third International, creating Communism under the American Trotsky and others who in Switzerland and Great Britain had also been free to develop their poison. They thought that this was the correct path for Russia. In fact, they had been deceived into bringing Russia under the heel of international occult forces which wanted to destroy it as a spiritually independent entity and as the only spiritual force in the world which was restraining the coming of their Antichrist.

Thus, after 1917 the consciously Orthodox White emigration left their occupied homeland with three ideals. These were: The Faith, the Tsar and Rus. The Non-Christian, and therefore in fact, the Non-White, Russian emigration distorted these ideals into folklore, capitalist ideology and nationalism. However, the conscious part of the Orthodox White emigration knew better. It knew that Faith means uncompromised Orthodoxy – the Orthodoxy of the Tradition of the Holy Spirit, of the Body of Christ, of the Church of God. It knew that the Tsar means the Sovereign Power of the Lord’s Anointed above all the human invention of the sordid worldly politics of left and right. And it knew that Rus means all nations, the whole redeemable part of the world, that which is prepared to be baptised into Christ in the Orthodox context.

These three ideals have guided the White emigration, to which all ROCOR spiritually belongs, through five generations. Although in that time some have fallen away, all those who spiritually belong to the Church have remained faithful to ROCOR. Thus, the Orthodox Faith has remained integral, without compromise and with a worldwide mission; the Tsar remains an ideal for restoration in the future, perhaps not so far away now; as the ability to speak and write Russian language has been lost, Rus has come to mean what is best in the cultures of the whole world, transfigured by the vital ingredient of the Orthodox Christ.

Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Paris: The Vestiges of Europe a Century on

When he was illegally deposed in 1917, the anointed Tsar-Prophet Nicholas II recorded that all around him were ‘treason and cowardice and deceit’. With these words he defined the attitude towards him of the elites of three nations and groups of nations and with these words he defined the whole history of the coming hundred years.

In speaking of treason, he referred to the majority of the Westernised upper classes in Saint Petersburg, who hated the Russian Faith and were so jealous of the Tsar that they blasphemously sought to seize his sacred authority for themselves, thus destroying their country and condemning themselves to death or exile, where many of them later apostasised from the Russian Church altogether.

In speaking of cowardice, he referred to the government in Vienna, and behind it in Berlin, which had sparked off the First World War through cowardice, the fear of granting justice to their peoples, and thus destroyed their countries, their empires and their monarchies, condemning them to abolition and themselves to collapse by 1945.

In speaking of deceit, he referred to Paris, and behind it London and Washington, who though supposed ‘Allies’, had hypocritically undermined Russia, even after the sacrifices of the Russian Armies, who had faced twice as many enemy soldiers and lost far fewer of their own than the Western Allies, miraculously saving Paris on the Marne in 1914 and the forces on the Western Front several times after this. By operating the palace revolution in Russia in early 1917, the Western Allies would bankrupt themselves, becoming colonies of foreign bankers in the USA.

Saint Petersburg, Vienna and Paris are the three centres of the old European culture.

Miraculously delivered and rebuilt after the destruction of Bolshevik atheism and of the later Nazi siege, Saint Petersburg still stands firm because of its Orthodox culture. Vienna, like Berlin, is much weakened, supported only by the vestiges of Orthodox culture feebly conserved in Catholicism. For the same reason Paris is even weaker – though not as weak as London and Washington, which have only the feeble vestiges of Catholicism, feebly conserved in secularist Protestantism.

Today in 2013, one hundred years on from 1913, the year before Europe fulfilled its death wish, the question is this:

Does Europe really want its new culture of atheist Apostasy, with its tyranny and perverted values, or does Europe still want its old culture of believing Tradition, with its freedom and Christian values?

The victory of the old culture of believing Tradition, however unlikely it may seem, is possible, but only if Europe refers back to its spiritual roots. This is why we Orthodox are being called on to gather together not only the faithful remnants among the peoples of Europe, but also to gather together the saints of Old Europe, who were faithful to Orthodoxy, so that they may intercede for Europe and for us. However, little time remains, for, as prophesied, all around are ‘treason and cowardice and deceit’.