Category Archives: Orthodox Unity

Towards a Council of the Orthodox Churches

Introduction

In 2006 I took part in a Local Church Council of the Russian Diaspora. A very divided part of the Russian Church debated its future, whether to enter back into canonical communion with the rest of the Russian Church or not. Suddenly, the division more or less disappeared. We visibly felt the wafting of the Holy Spirit over us. Such is the vital importance of all Church Councils, Universal, Regional or Local. This wafting is the spirit of catholicity, of conciliarity, this is the Holy Spirit, Who alone heals divisions by revealing the clear Will of God.

Universal Church Councils

Who has the authority to call a Council of all the Orthodox Churches? Purists will respond ‘the Emperor of Constantinople’. There is not one, so that is absurd. Greek nationalists will respond ‘the Patriarch of Constantinople’. This is at once divisive and also untrue. And then does a Council have to include all the Local Orthodox Churches in order to have universal authority? Clearly not, for there have been many purely Local Councils, which have with time gained universal authority, for example the ‘Palamite’ Councils of the thirteenth century.

Consultations

In any case, nobody can call a ‘Council’ of the whole Church as such. Any Consultation of bishops can only be called a Council after the event, for the decisions of a Consultation have to be ‘received’, that is, recognised by the clergy and people. Until ‘reception’ has taken place, there can only be a Consultation. This we saw quite clearly with the Consultation of some 150 Orthodox bishops from several of the Orthodox Churches in Crete in 2016, which was, absurdly, called a ‘Pan-Orthodox Council’ before it had even begun! Of course, it failed.

The Need for a Consultation

So let us therefore be realistic. Any head of any Local Church can issue invitations to a Consultation, inviting the heads and episcopal delegations of any number of other Local Churches who wish to attend. Such a Consultation is necessary because at present two of the sixteen Local Churches, Constantinople and Moscow, are in schism with one another and refuse to talk to each other, let alone concelebrate. As a result, the whole Church suffers and is even to some extent in a state of paralysis. The Church needs to hold a Consultation.

Who Could Call a Consultation?

Thus, the head of any Local Church can call a Consultation. Several enjoy prestige. For example, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who is at is the centre of the Church. Or the Patriarch of Bucharest, as his Church is the largest outside Moscow. But others enjoy respect and prestige, for instance, the Patriarchs of Sofia or Belgrade or the Archbishop of Albania. But really any of them. But what would an invitation to a Consultation mention? It should certainly not be restrictive, as that was the error of the agenda-imposed 2016 meeting in Crete.

Two Initial Stages of Consultation

Let us suppose that the head of any one of the fourteen Local Churches sent out a circular letter to the other thirteen heads and invited them, perhaps each with two other bishops, to discuss initially the intra-Church crisis. This would be Stage One of a Conciliar process composed of 42 bishops. If they met, they could talk and, if they agreed, they could go to a Second Stage, which would be for a Consultation of the nearly 500 bishops, who do not belong to the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow, which have over another 500 bishops.

The Third Stage

Observers from Constantinople and Moscow would naturally be invited to the First and Second Stages. A Third Stage would be for all Orthodox bishops, though that would mean Constantinople and Moscow ending their schism. That, at present, is not realistic, as the nature of their schism is political. And as long as both Patriarchates are engaged in politics with States, there is no hope of that. A Consultation, let alone a Council, can only be held among the politically free, which is why no Consultation ever took place during the Soviet period.

An Agenda

So a Consultation is necessary, but why? What would its non-restrictive agenda be? At present, the Church faces two sets of challenges. Firstly, there must be a dogmatic response to the doubts and denials of the contemporary world by affirming the Creed of the Seven Universal Councils. Secondly, there must be a pastoral and administrative witness to the same contemporary world. The first response affirms the Revealed Truth of God, the second affirms Love, that the teaching and witness of the Church is not political and nationalistic.

The Dogmatic Agenda

By affirming the Creed a Consultation would affirm that God is the Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible, rejecting Secularism, which proclaims that the universe is self-made through an inexplicable process of ‘evolution’. It would affirm the uniqueness of Christ, the Son of God and His Salvation, Resurrection and Return and the Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, Who spoke through the Old Testament, and in the uniqueness of the Church and Her Baptism. All these are challenged by the contemporary world.

The Pastoral Agenda

Of a world population of over eight billion, only 200 million, two and a half per cent, are Orthodox Christians. There is little doubt that the mission of the Church has been severely limited by politics and nationalism, not least Greek and Russian. There is a need for new Local Churches to be founded, immediately in the Ukraine, where the lack of a Local Church has caused division and distress, secondly in areas where millions of Orthodox live, in Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania, and thirdly in most of Non-Christian Asia and Africa.

Conclusion: The Alternative

Without a Church Council divisions will continue. This happens when one or both sides refuse to move. For example, ever since 1014, when the elite of the then small part of the Orthodox Church in Western Europe ended its communion with the Church by altering the Creed, it has refused to return to the Creed. Indeed, it has actually justified its change and so remained out of communion with the Church. Thank God, the present conflict between Constantinople and Moscow does not concern the Creed, but it does concern communion. And that is vital.

 

 

 

The Struggle for Catholicity Against Papist Centralisation and for Unity Against the New American Heresy of ‘Corrective Baptism.’

Introduction: Centralisation and Decentralisation: Unity in Diversity

The Church is an image of the Holy Trinity, a Unity of Three Persons in One Essence, of Diversity and Unity, a subtle balance between centralising and decentralising forces. If centralising forces take over, legitimate diversity in Church life can be threatened, as we see outside the Church, in Roman Catholicism. This results in the boycott of the Church, which is no longer seen as being ‘our Church’, but the ‘Church’ of an irrelevant, distant, alien and foreign clerical elite. If decentralising forces take over, Church unity can be threatened by divisions and sects, as we see in Protestantism. This results in the dissolution of the Church into secular fragments, which are irrelevant to spiritual resistance and incapable of ascetic struggle for the Truth of Christ.

The Two Struggles of My Life

Personally, my life can be divided into two halves. The first half was spent in apprehending and comprehending God’s presence in the world, in learning and in serving in the Church in Europe. The struggle then was for the teachings of the Church against ideological compromises, being forced onto the Church by the anti-Christian Western world. That US-led world was trying to impose on all others its One World Government under the name of ‘Globalism’. This meant trying to deform the integrity of the Orthodox Church by imposing syncretistic modernism and ecumenism and corrupting its clerical elite, as Globalism had already done with Protestantism and Roman Catholicism and was then trying to do with Orthodoxy too. This was an attack on the integrity of the Church.

The second half of my life is being spent in England, building towards the inevitable Local Church of Western Europe. This ongoing struggle now takes place from within the largest part of the Orthodox Church here, the millions of the Romanian Metropolias of Western and Southern, Central and Northern Europe. This struggle is for the Catholicity of the Church through the concord of fourteen of the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches. This is because the two remaining Local Churches, Moscow and Constantinople, have tragically fallen into schism with one another because of their rival nationalist centralisations. Through their Papist-style centralisation of finance, power and control they are trying and failing to divide and share out the Orthodox world between them.

The Struggle for Catholicity Against the Papism of Constantinople and Moscow

Thus, the fourteen other Churches, the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, the Churches of Georgia, Cyprus, Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, America, Albania and Macedonia, are fixed between the two extremes of Constantinople and Moscow. True, some are much closer to one or the other, but still they say to Constantinople: Yes, you were once the Patriarchate of the Imperial City, but that was nearly 600 years ago and even then you had no right to interfere in the internal affairs of others. And to Moscow they say: Yes, you are by far the largest in number, but you are still only one among sixteen, so do not try and tell us how we must live and think. The Soviet age is over, so stop denying the diversity and Catholicity of the Church.

The friction can most clearly be seen in the Ukraine. Thus, most, if not all, of the fourteen Local Churches know that what Constantinople did there in setting up a fake Church outside its own territory was wrong, against the canons of the Church. This is very clear, especially through the statements of the heads of the Churches of Albania, Poland and Bulgaria. As for Muscovite centralisation, so reminiscent of the Soviets, it is rejected not only by all others (though in the case of Constantinople, the rejection is clearly politically dictated by the US and so has no spiritual authority), but also in the Moscow Patriarchate, in the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Metr Onufry and wherever decentralisation and new autocephalous Churches are for pastoral reasons urgently required.

We can see all this visibly, if we simply compare photographs of bishops. The photo of the average Constantinople Metropolitan appears to show a bureaucrat with a thin black veil and a carefully trimmed beard, like that of a married priest whose wife dislikes beards. Only the metropolitans are not married, supposedly monks. The photo of the average Moscow Metropolitan appears to show a richly-decorated and rigidly-uniformed military man, at the service of a State army, not of the Word of God. Both show careerists, ‘Princes of the Church’, to use the Roman Catholic term for cardinals. My favourite photo of a metropolitan from one of the fourteen Churches shows a man in a dusty old cassock hauling a bag of cement in a wheelbarrow to build a new monastery.

The Novel and Aggressive American Heresy of Rebaptism

Orthodox Unity is now being challenged by the novel and highly aggressive American heresy of rebaptism. This sectarian heresy of rebaptising Orthodox is known as ‘corrective baptism’, a term quite unknown to the Fathers of the Church and the Saints, because it has been brought into the Church from the sectarian Lutheran world outside. Contradicting the Creed of the Church ‘I believe in one baptism…’, it means rebaptising those who have been canonically received into the Church by the established authority of its thousand canonical bishops. Although the Orthodox in question may have been receiving the sacraments of the Church for years, the schismatics are rebaptising them. This revolt against Church practice is uncanonical, heretical and sectarian.

The practice was condemned by all as long ago as 1976, when the Syshchenko scandal in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) broke in London. Then this same practice, implemented by an uncanonically ordained and very poorly-trained Ukrainian priest, was thoroughly rejected by the ever-memorable Metropolitan Philaret and the then still Orthodox ROCOR Synod as the heresy of Donatism. Sadly, this view is no longer held by some of today’s ROCOR bishops who do not know the Church Tradition. Thus, apart from ‘bishops’ in old calendarist sects, there are now those in ROCOR who have also turned aggressively schismatic, imposing their pseudo-Russian, American old calendarism, which is in fact nothing more than a sectarian Protestant revolt, a new outburst of Anabaptism, the bullying and hypocritical pharisaic rebaptism for ‘the pure’.

This is the first heresy of converts, neophytes who want to be ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’. Such converts do not remain Orthodox because they have not yet cleansed themselves of the post-Schism Western mentality, they still do not know the Pre-Schism Western mentality. For them Orthodoxy is not existential, it is just a decoration added on top of what they do not want to renounce, a cherry on top of the Western cake. Their mentality therefore remains fundamentally anti-Orthodox. And they can go to one extreme or the other. Being anti-Orthodox is not only being pro-ecumenist, pro-modernist, pro-reformist, it is also to be filled with hatred for Roman Catholics and Protestants. Both extremes are equally anti-Orthodox, equally opposed to Truth and Love.

Conclusion: The Dangers of Centralisation and Sectarianism

With their natural Russian flock dying out or leaving them, these bishops are desperate to make up falling numbers by recruiting disgruntled ex-Protestants. These often psychologically unstable extremists have no spiritual roots in the Church. To my knowledge, so far two American ROCOR bishops in different continents are publicly boasting of rebaptising other Orthodox, though others may be involved. Once this news reaches the for now politically unfree Moscow and it has the time to act, there will be trouble for the ROCOR schismatics. So continues our struggle for the Catholicity of the Church against anti-missionary and secular-inspired centralisation, and for the Unity of the Church against sectarian attacks, always towards the new Local Church of Western Europe to be established through a Council.

24 August 2024: ‘Democratic’ Ukraine Bans its National Church

On 24 August the Western-backed and Western-financed ex-President Zelensky (legally he has been a dictator since May) signed a law banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. (Zelensky is by race a Jew and by faith an atheist). This is because this Church is a Non-Western Church (just as the Ukraine is a Non-Western country), only a semi-independent part of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow. This law will be enacted in 30 days’ time. What are the options?

First of all, Ukrainian Orthodox (= the vast majority of Ukrainians) will not attend any of the fake Churches, including the nationalist, pro-Nazi fake ‘Church’, invented by Washington by paying the Greek Patriarch to set it up. This is much to the present embarrassment of that Greek Patriarch, who, he now claims, naively thought that Ukrainians would attend such a Church, founded on theft and violence, encouraged by its gangster leaders, and composed of defrocked or unordained ‘clergy’.

This means that Ukrainian Orthodox will either stop going to church and wait for better times, or else they will try and go to church and get beaten up or killed or be arrested and put in prison. Christian blood on the streets is apparently what the Western Powers and the Greek Patriarch are sponsoring.

Some say that the Russian Patriarch of Moscow, Kyrill, and the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, whose combined ages are 161, could do something else. Patriarch Bartholomew could dissolve his failed, fake Church on condition that Patriarch Kyrill officially gives the Ukrainian Orthodox Church full independence, known as ‘autocephaly’. For only a Mother-Church, in this case, Moscow, can grant autocephaly. And if the Ukrainian Orthodox Church becomes autocephalous, Zelensky’s law will be meaningless.

That would be a miracle. If it happened, all the other Local Orthodox Churches, all 14 of them, would automatically recognise the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as a canonical, autocephalous Church, the 17th member of the Orthodox family. And Moscow and Constantinople could enter back into communion. And this could happen even with a Council of the whole Church.

However, such happiness is highly unlikely. What is likely?

Far more likely is that within the next few months Russia will take over the whole of the Ukraine, partly militarily and partly politically. The Ukraine will either entirely disappear as a nation-state, or else will exist with about one third of the territory it previously had and be fully dependent on Moscow. In other words, it will return exactly to its situation before Communist dictators created it after 1922. 100 years of errors will be over. Then the law banning the Church will be as irrelevant as ex-President Zelensky and his whole illegal government, which will have disappeared by then.

However, in such a case, just as Constantinople failed to force people to attend its fake Church, so Moscow will not be able to force people to attend a Church still dependent on it. As the Russian proverb says: ‘You will not endear yourself by force’. Or as the English proverb says: ‘You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink’.

In any case, the problem will remain. Either the Russian Orthodox Church is a nationalist organisation, or else it is a multinational and missionary Church. It will have to choose. Either it adapts to and adopts other cultures, or else it will remain as a mononational Church with no multinational significance, as some of its senior bishops want.

 

 

Now It Can Be Told: Reminiscences II: The ROCOR Tragedy: How It Entered into Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate and Then De Facto Left It

Introduction: The Background

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, large numbers of ex-Soviet citizens settled in the West. The Orthodox among them, then about 1% of the total, went to wherever there was a Russian-speaking church. By 1990 the parishes of the old and dying ROCOR were almost empty, as the emigres had almost totally failed to pass on the Faith to their descendants. In 1992 I even had to set up a completely new parish in Lisbon for the new ex-Soviet emigres, though still under ROCOR. By 2000 all ROCOR parishes had been revitalised, but with ex-Soviet Russians. Moreover, the ROCOR bishops at the top, now almost all of the second generation or converts, had to ordain many of the ‘Soviets’ priests – there was nobody else left to ordain.

As a result, it gradually dawned even on the strongly anti-Soviet, often rather dry and cold, ROCOR bishops that there would have to be a reconciliation with Moscow. Moscow was, after all, 99% of the whole Russian Orthodox Church, and, by then, ex-Soviet Russians already formed 90% of their tiny émigré Church. Ex-Soviet clergy and parishioners understood nothing of the hair-splitting arguments against Moscow of the old émigrés and their descendants and converts.

They simply concelebrated with Moscow whenever they wanted and the people took communion freely in Moscow churches. Clearly, ROCOR bishops were losing control. The split between Moscow and the ROCOR group had been outlived. It was totally irrelevant to the post-Soviet masses, ‘the mob’, as one aristocratic and monocled (!) ROCOR bishop insultingly called them on the Russian Church website pravoslavie.ru, to the scandal of all!

To Moscow

Thus, the bishops were gradually forced by weight of numbers to lead the few remaining children of ROCOR emigres to concelebrate with Moscow. Having usurped the very elderly Metropolitan Vitaly in New York, who for them had outlived his age and who anyway had dementia, in 2001, ambitious bishops began to move towards talks with Moscow. These talks finally resulted in the historic Patriarchal and émigré concelebration in Moscow in 2007, where I was, I believe, the only Non-Russian priest present. However, even this reconciliation did not stop the bullying and intimidation of the non-aristocratic, not to say peasant, bishop-victims inside the Synod by the ‘princes of the Church’, the political wing of the utterly divided ROCOR Synod.

Their victims ranged from the meek and saintly Slovak Metr Laurus to the equally meek and mild Ukrainian Metr Hilarion, who feared the ‘politicos’, as he openly told us, almost trembling, and to Patriarch Kyrill himself. The latter was astonished and very, very upset by the categorical refusal of the politico bishops to accept the Patriarch’s very generous, canonical and utterly logical suggestion (it was in 2012 or soon after) to restructure ROCOR into Metropolia, in the USA, in Oceania and in Western Europe.

They even rejected his generous offer for a ROCOR bishop to become Metropolitan of a united Russian Orthodox Church of Western Europe, the foundation of the future Local Church. Rarely has there been such a tragic rejection of Divine destiny towards forming new Local Churches. This rejection, some ten years ago now, was in fact the turning-point for ROCOR. From that moment on, it reverted to control by its ‘princes of the Church’ political wing, concerned only with money and property, abandoning its spiritual, ‘Johannite’ (St John of Shanghai) tradition. Their predecessors had persecuted St John, now they would continue, persecuting St John’s spiritual descendants.

Underlying Sectarianism Returns

With this tragic refusal to accept its destiny, ROCOR had preferred suicidal, elitist, exclusivist isolation to playing the leading role in forming future Local Churches in Western Europe and elsewhere. The offer had been made on a golden plate and been rejected. The offer would not be made by offended Moscow again. It was clear that others would now have to play that role. ROCOR had sidelined itself, making itself irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, due to its nationalist exclusivism and pharisaic superiority complex, much, much developed by recent and unintegrated fanatical converts of a Protestant background. Moscow was at a loss, since it simply did not have the candidates with the linguistic, administrative and moral ability to lead its Churches outside Russia.

Thus, ROCOR lost the opportunity to head the establishment of three Metropolias: one to lead to the long-overdue Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Western Europe; in North America to merge positively with the OCA; finally, to set up a new Metropolia for the Continent of Oceania. The task of establishing just a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Western Europe now went to Moscow, eventually through the efficient Metropolitan Nestor, supported by the very small, Paris-based Archdiocese of Western Europe, led by its Metropolitan Jean (Renneteau).

In 2021, ROCOR decided to take part in the American-led schism against the Moscow Metropolitan Jean, leading the emigres to split from that part of Moscow and so even further into self-isolation. The only occasional concelebrations would now be with highly conservative Antiochian, ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’, converts. The rest of the Orthodox Church was rejected. Moscow was secretly, and increasingly openly, despised; Greeks, Romanians and Moldovans openly hated; and in 2024, when the Serbian Orthodox Church invited a delegation from New York to try and bring ROCOR back from the brink, it also failed. No Church can be founded on hatred.

Conclusion: The Future

As one Russian Orthodox Metropolitan said to me of one ROCOR hierarch in 2012: ‘His Russian is superb, better than that of Russians, his liturgical knowledge second to none, but where is his love’? Thanks to sectarianism, ROCOR is rapidly losing its jurisdiction in Western Europe, just as it lost that in Vlasovite ROCOR South America. Now that Moscow is at last starting to send out competent, non-corrupt and non-homosexual bishops to Western Europe, ROCOR is increasingly looking like a small, right-wing American sect, with little influence outside its sectarian converts and their ghettoes.

Today, with the tragic conflict in the Ukraine ongoing, Moscow is isolated by Russian nationalism, but the emigres are isolated by convert exclusivism. The pro-Zelensky attitude of ROCOR since 2022, even demanding that Russian troops stop liberating the Donbass from Kiev-led genocide (!), is not in fact pro-Ukrainian, but pro-CIA. Unsurprisingly, ROCOR is now seen as treasonous by Moscow, but with its Russian-ness it is also seen as totally unacceptable by the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Metr Onufry, just as it was by post-1945 Ukrainian (and Belarussian) emigres.

As a result, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has over the last two years opened up a hundred parishes in Western Europe, which have nothing to do with ROCOR. As for Moldovans, they have been leaving the Russian Church for the Romanian Church, offended by Russian racism, just like the Ukrainians and so nearly all other Non-Russians. It is clear that other Local Churches will have to take on the mantle of establishing a multinational Local Church of Western Europe. Tragically, the dream of the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II of Moscow of forming a Local Church in Western Europe is for now dead. In the future only a radical change of policy and repentance could bring the constituent parts of the Russian Church in the Diaspora, now in schism, back to contributing to that great project, which others have now been put in charge of.

Holy Rus in High Suffolk: An Interview with a Russian Count

Over the last fourteen years I have got to know particularly well a couple who are spiritual children and whom I call the Earl and Countess of Orthodox East Anglia. Nobles of Russian extraction, they have made their home in England and chosen to live in the mystical heart of our local East Anglian Orthodox Church and Kingdom. Count (Earl in the English system) Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, agreed to this extensive conversation after I interviewed his wife over a month ago. With his permission we have slightly edited his words, though his English is excellent.

On the table in the oak-beamed living room, where we conduct the interview, stands a golden samovar, bought in St Audrey’s Ely, alongside a portrait of the Tsar’s Family. Nearby stands a lovely vase with a bouquet of fragrant roses, which the Countess has picked from the garden of their thatched farmhouse in High Suffolk, near the Norfolk border. The Countess has served us tea from her favourite Royal Albert service, the doors to the garden wide open before us. Such is the setting for this second conversation, the recording of which stretched on into the lengthening shadows of the English summer evening.

 

Q: Can you please tell us something about your family?

A: In 1775 the Benckendorff family was awarded an estate of 8,000 acres in Sosnovka in the Tambov province of Russia for services to the Crown. After the Revolution most branches of the family, like ours, remained inside the USSR, but we had to change our name for fear of being murdered by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, one priestly ancestor is a New Martyr. At first, we remained in Russia, but after 1945 we moved to what had by then become the eastern Ukraine, though that region is now back in Russia again after 100 years of Soviet-imposed exile.

After 1917 one branch settled in England. This was the family of Count Alexander Benckendorff, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain between 1903 and 1917. His family found itself stranded in the White Russian emigration, as Alexander had passed away in January 1917. Unlike his brother Paul, who was very close to Tsar Nicholas in Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander was never Orthodox. He had become a Catholic by conviction from Lutheranism and is buried in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral in London.

Q: Where did you meet the Countess?

A: In the Ukraine. There I, a Benckendorff, met and married another Benckendorff, though the Countess was previously quite unknown to me and her branch of the family had also assumed another name. Some time ago I worked out that we are eighth cousins. The way we met was quite extraordinary, neither knowing that the other was of Benckendorff descent and yet feeling that we were kindred souls. Both of us were divorced, having made bad marriages when we were far too young, like so many who were brought up in the Soviet Union. The marriages did not last very long and there were no children. Some years after we met, in 2008, we left Russia and settled in the West.

Q: Did you know about the English Benckendorffs then?

A: No, we did not know anything about the ‘English’ branch of the family until five years ago. To our surprise, we discovered that they had lived in south-east Suffolk, very close to where we first lived before we moved here. Their choice was because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Ransomes farm machinery, made in Ipswich, was used on our estate and there were also contacts with the Suffolk Fisons fertiliser company, which later came to own a very large property called Harvest House in Felixstowe.

And so the family story turned full circle. In any case, Suffolk is where we have made our home and we in no way regret it. This is the land of St Edmund, the patron saint of Suffolk and of England, and we fly his flag here. You introduced us to him and to the other local saints. We respect the Local Church and honour the local saints. That is our Orthodox duty. We had thought of calling our Suffolk home ‘Sosnovka’ from the name of our estate, but we agreed that we must be local and so we named it ‘St Edmund’s House’.

Q: What did you study as a young man?

A: In the 90s I studied history at the University of Kiev and then some years later theology at St Tikhon’s University of the Humanities in Moscow. However, I never taught history, because in the 1990s we had to practise commerce in order to survive. We were fortunate in business because of my knowledge of English and French and my wife’s knowledge of German. We did very well. That is how I came to study as a mature student at St Tikhon’s in Moscow and then we moved to the West in 2008 and England in 2010. Nearly six years ago we bought this old farmhouse. Now I still study theology and the history of the Russian Church and I have also written a novel in Russian under a pseudonym. We also breed roses which involves travel to many places, including to Germany. Financially we have been helped by the investments we made in the past.

Q: As you know, I come from the Suffolk-Essex border where the dry and sunny climate and the soil are ideal for seed growing, which was my father’s profession. He was a sweet pea expert and even has a sweet pea named after him. How did you come to breed roses and not, for example, sweet peas?

A: Like you, Fr Andrew, we love sweet peas, also lilac and many other flowers and shrubs, but both of us have always loved roses more, already in the Ukraine, where in the east the black earth is so fertile and the climate is so good. Some twenty years ago my wife fell in love with roses in a monastery there, where she had the obedience from her spiritual father of maintaining the monastery rose garden. A huge variety of roses is available in Russia and the Ukraine with sturdier stems than in England, even though you have David Austen roses. One of our favourite roses is ‘Zephyr’ from Turchinov. We also love lilacs and again there is a Russian lilac called ‘Beauty of Moscow’. We are introducing Russian roses, lilacs and others into England. This seems to be our mission!

Strangely enough, we discovered that my great-great-grandfather’s cousin, the ambassador Alexander Konstantinovich, and his wife, Sofia Petrovna, who was a Tolstoy, also grew roses. Then their grand-daughter, Natalia Konstantinovna, who passed away only in 2018, grew them. Her husband, Thomas Humphrey Brooke, who was a friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, became an internationally acknowledged expert on roses. He was a close friend of the rosarian Peter Beales at his gardens in Attleborough in Norfolk. Humphrey cultivated over 500 varieties of rose. I know Peter Beales’ son, who has just retired. Roses must be in the Benckendorff genes.

Q: Let us turn to Church matters now. As you follow Church affairs very closely, you know much about the schism between Moscow and Constantinople on account of the Ukraine. Do you see a way out of this?

A: There is always a way out. It is called repentance, the antidote to despair, the antidote that Judas did not take. Beware, he did not take the antidote and hanged himself. What must be done to undo this schism is to work in reverse. This means going back to what caused the schism and reversing it. This means that Constantinople must abandon its pretensions to the territory of the Russian Church in the ex-Soviet Union. These pretensions were formed because the Patriarchate of Moscow refused to grant anyone outside the Russian Federation autocephaly and because Washington paid Constantinople to commit the crime of setting up a fake Church in the Ukraine. Still, if Moscow had given the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly years ago, creating a national Church there, Constantinople would never have meddled, because the Ukrainians would have been satisfied already.

Next, or preferably before that, Moscow must immediately stop its schism with Constantinople, start concelebrating and abandon its excommunications and defrockings, freeing people to act according to their conscience. The schism was quite unnecessary and just brought Moscow into exactly the same isolation and disrepute as Constantinople, losing it all sympathy. Two wrongs do not make a right. How do you say that in English, when both are equally guilty? There is an expression with six and six in it.

Q: Six of one and half a dozen of the other?

A: Yes, that’s it. Anyway, Moscow must also negotiate a canonical solution to the African problem. Either Africa belongs canonically to the Patriarchate of Alexandria or to Moscow, or else the territory must be divided and different geographical regions will belong to one or the other. For example, Egypt, or even all Muslim North Africa, could remain under Alexandria and Moscow could take Black Africa, where it has a lot of political support, though only if it is prepared to set up a real, local, independent African Orthodox Church. You cannot have overlapping jurisdictions on the same territory. We must support the canonical order of the Church internationally.

Q: Is this realistic? Look at the Diasporas, where we have had overlapping jurisdictions for over a century.

A: Things are changing. Look, the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine will be over soon. The Kiev regime is collapsing. Some even say it will all be over for the Dormition, on 28th August. Perhaps not so soon. In any case, the USA is giving up on its Fascist friends in the Ukraine, who have failed. Americans hate failure. What is the way out? One way is if Trump, who is already the real President – some even say that Biden is literally, not just metaphorically, dead – could perhaps denounce the whole Ukraine project. He could say that it was all a fantasy of Biden, ‘Genocide Joe’, as they call him.

Trump must abandon the fake OCU Church that Constantinople set up in the Ukraine with US dollars, denouncing it as created by those who deceived him in Washington in 2018. President Putin will make the freedom of the Church a condition for peace anyway. The Church must be free from the persecution of the OCU, which must return the thousands of churches it has stolen. Trump must give up the illegal sanctions against Russia, release frozen Russian assets and return the stolen interest on those assets.

In this way President Trump can get a photo opportunity of the Two Presidents. He will be shaking hands with President Putin in Moscow (Trump loves having his photo taken) as the great hero, peacemaker and dealmaker, unlike Biden the warmaker and failure. Why, Trump could get a Nobel Prize – those prizes are funded by the CIA anyway, as we saw with Solzhenitsyn. Trump and Moscow can sign an agreement, stating that Washington has no claims to the Ukraine and that Moscow has no claims to the Baltics, Finland, Poland, Romania, or anywhere else west of the Ukraine. This will be historic, but should all have been done 33 years ago in 1991.

Q: What about Moldova?

A: This agreement would include Moldova, unless some minorities who live there along the border with the New Ukraine or Russia vote by democratic referendum to transfer, for example, the Transdnistrians and the Gagauzians. Most of Moldova will eventually go back to Romania. It is historically inevitable. The Patriarchate in Moscow has lost the loyalty of most Moldovans through its centralising racism and many there are already joining the Romanian Church.

Such a deal of the Two Presidents would give both Russia and Western Europe security, making NATO entirely redundant, which is what both President Trump and President Putin want. Such a new security agreement for Europe could be presented as a triumph for Trump (the Americans are experts at PR) and Moscow will be fully satisfied. Russia will set up the third Union State in the New Ukraine, which will be a second Belarus, perhaps also landlocked, as all the south and east of the old Ukraine, which are Russian, as I know, may well rejoin Russia. The Ukraine will be demilitarised and denazified, as Moscow needs. With such a deal both sides will save money and, above all, both will save lives.

Q: Do you think the New Ukraine will retain the western borders of Stalin’s Ukraine?

A: Moscow may well give some extreme western parts of Stalin’s Ukraine, for Stalin’s borders are what Biden and the EU Commissars have been fighting for, back to Poland, Romania and especially to Hungary, our ally. This would be seen as a great victory for the USA and as a great victory for Russia, though it would not be a victory for the Western European elite. But that elite does not count for anything internationally and can be ignored. Moscow negotiates only with Trump, neither with the sick old man before Trump, nor with the Western European puppies who lie and cheat.

With peace in the Ukraine, the Patriarchate in Moscow will also have to negotiate a new relationship with the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kiev, under which I began my Orthodox life. And probably also a new relationship with other parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. Otherwise, Moscow will lose everything there too. A wave of autocephalies must follow. The age of Soviet central planning is over. It was over with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, only the Church authorities did not keep up with changing times.

Q: Why do you say that this will not be a victory for the Western European elite?

A: The Western European political elite, its ruling class, has for eighty years been living off the USA, licking its heels and barking when told to. It has become dependent on the USA, not only a drug-addict enslaved to the USA, but also a vampire that sucks its blood. As in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, that elite does not want freedom. But Western Europe is a very expensive slave to keep and the now bankrupt USA can no longer afford it, just as one day it will no longer be able to afford to keep its other vassals, Israel, Japan and South Korea.

The American Empire is like the Roman Empire which in the early fifth century could not afford to keep Britain and had to abandon it. Western Europe will have to find its own way, control its own destiny, defend itself. Actually, it will be able to slash its futile military spending once the new security agreement or non-aggression pact with Russia has been signed. That is also what Russia wants. It is tired of being invaded by the West.

Today the USA is letting go of Western Europe. This means the UK and the EU, minus Hungary, Slovakia, others like Serbia and maybe later many more like Romania, Greece, and perhaps even Italy. The first three have already more or less negotiated their way out of the EU into BRICS. Freedom from the USA will undermine the parasitic globalist Western European elite of puppies and puppets, banksters and gangsters, unprincipled and hypocritical pawns all of them. They backed the Kiev Nazis even to their own detriment, allowing prices for their peoples to double and letting the Americans blow up the Nordstream pipeline.

That ruling class of perverts will have to resign, if they are not first voted out, or better arrested, because they no longer have the protection of Trump’s Washington. The Western European swamp will be drained. That is why they and their globalist media propagandists like the BBC feel betrayed and hate Trump. As a result of all this, we shall at last see new Western European rulers, hopefully far more respectful of the wishes of the native peoples of Western Europe. Then can be abandoned those satanic and blasphemous pagan festivals like Eurovision and the 33rd Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, which openly mocked Christ, Who was crucified when He was 33. No wonder French cathedrals burn down. If that is Western Civilisation, then there is nothing left to defend.

All these countries can then be at peace with the eastern half of Europe, comprised of Russia, the New Ukraine and Belarus. Importantly, this eastern half stretches on into North Asia, to the Chinese border and the Pacific Ocean. Russia is the gateway to Asia, the future, where three of the world’s four largest economies thrive. We are at last seeing the Gaullist vision of a natural unity which stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Western Europe will no longer be unnaturally cut off, but will rejoin the whole of Asia, of which it is only a north-western peninsula.

All this is possible, though if and when it happens is another story. It may all take many years and I trust more in Vance than in Trump. These are just my thoughts and hopes. We shall see.

Q: Will England take part in this New Western Europe, which will at last become a real part of Eurasia, which geographically it always has been?

A: Ah, dear old England. A good question. I really hope so. If the USA rejects England, it will have to leave the USA. It will not be the fifty-first State of the USA. And with the very fragile, violent and divisive situation in the present fifty States with their 35 trillion dollars of debt, that is not an enviable position to be in. I think England should ally itself with the new, post-American, Eurasian Europe of the BRICS Alliance. Ireland, Scotland and Wales surely will. May St Edmund and the English saints guide England towards this.

But for England to become sovereign again, the oppressive British Establishment ruling class will first have to be removed, with its private elite schools, Oxbridge, Westminster, BBC, Financial Times, Economist, tabloid press like the Guardian, the Telegraph, all those other Daily State propaganda mouthpieces, and the Blairs, Camerons, Sunaks and Starmers. As you have very often written, Father, that elite is alien, not Norman by blood, but Norman by mentality, spiritually Norman, made up of spiritual invaders.

Q: We have got into political affairs. To come back to our question, what in your view was the essential error behind the Greek-Russian schism?

A: Lack of communion. It is vital to remain in communion with everyone. It is a great, great sin to break communion, because if you do this, you cause division in the Church. And the Moscow bureaucrats who surround the Patriarch committed this sin, weaponising communion. And look where they are now: isolated, feared, unloved and scandal-ridden. It is all so Soviet. They have lost all their best friends – they even lost you, Father, who spent all your life fighting for communion and the reintegration of the Russian Church.

Q: Why do bishops break communion?

A: It is always because they want more power. And what do they do once they have power? They introduce novelties in order to justify themselves. This was exactly the case of Rome in the eleventh century. All the innovations they introduced after they had broken off communion from the Church were self-justification for breaking communion. And self-justification is the opposite of repentance.

A thousand years on and the Popes of Rome and the Vatican machine have still not repented, still claiming to be rulers of the Christian world, and so they are still out of communion with us, who follow the principle of the Local, which is the principle of Catholicity. They instead imposed the Centre, that is, Rome. Can you imagine, they tried to impose their barbarous Latin on the descendants of the Civilisations of the Incas, Maya and Aztecs! No respect for the Local!

We must be very strict about keeping in communion. The way back, the return, is in respecting the canonical territories of each Local Church. That is what Rome did not do and instead tried to impose itself by the sword on Orthodox territories, with their crusades, inquisitions and so on. Now Constantinople is trying to do the same, imposing centralisation in imitation of Papism. And Moscow Church bureaucrats tried to do the same, but God has intervened, its Soviet Empire over Non-Russians is crumbling.

Q: I would like to come back to my original question, which we did not answer. Do these considerations give us a solution to the divisions in the Diasporas, where there have been several overlapping jurisdictions for over a century?

A: In the Diasporas, where there are mixed Orthodox populations, responsibility for organising new Local Churches lies with the majority ethnic group, but that majority must respect all the customs of the minorities. This is what Bishop Tikhon, the future Russian Patriarch and Saint, did when he headed the multinational Northern American Orthodox Church before the Revolution. Then Carpatho-Russians and Russian-converted Alaskans were the majority, but minorities like the Syrians, Serbs and others were together with them.

Today the Greeks are the Orthodox majority there, as also in Australia, but unity is blocked because of the political and imperialist style of the Greeks. As long as they have that Hellenist style, unity will be impossible. Only when the Greeks have a Non-Greek Patriarch, will they be taken seriously. As regards Western Europe the Romanians are the majority. Here I am hopeful, because respect is what our Romanian Metropolitan Joseph gave our Russian and Moldovan parishes with our calendar, languages and customs, when we had to flee to his canonical protection from pseudo-Russian episcopal persecution. And we in turn greatly respect and love the Romanians. I love their singing and their simplicity! Mutual respect is vital.

Q: One well-known Russian Metropolitan said that the Moscow-Constantinople schism is as big and as permanent as the 1054 Western Schism. What do you think?

A: That was nonsense. This schism is all about personalities and they are temporary. Here today, gone tomorrow, as you say in English. Neither Moscow, nor Constantinople has renounced or changed the Creed, unlike Rome in 1054. So this schism is not at all on the same level as 1054, it is not a dogmatic issue, but a vulgar issue of territory and personalities. And personalities change and are replaced. In any case, the Metropolitan-oligarch who said that, the bureaucrat was in part responsible for the whole fiasco, is now suspended and completely discredited. Nobody is listening to him any more. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Q: Can other Local Churches play a role in healing the Moscow-Constantinople schism?

A: Of course, and a vital role. The Churches of Jerusalem, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland and perhaps others like Antioch, Czechoslovakia and America, and of course the canonical Church of Metropolitan Onufry in the Ukraine, will play a vital role. Even some bishops in Greece and Cyprus are sufficiently non-racist to understand the reality. Some Local Churches are already playing that role, stressing the Conciliar principle, the principle of Sobornost, that is, Catholicity, which, by the way, is the exact opposite of Catholicism and it is precisely the spirit of Catholicism, that is Papism, which caused the schism. Read the interview with the new Bulgarian Patriarch, who was elected after the American candidate lost and was humiliated and the Greeks had to go home like whipped dogs. His words are inspired.

Q: Do you know Metropolitan Onufry?

A: Not personally, only by sight, but I do know Metropolitan Agafangel of Odessa and Archbishop Diodor quite well and they have the same spirit. The further you are from Moscow, the more you find that spirit.

Q: You mention that the essence of the schism is the lust for power on the part of bishops and the spirit of Catholicism or Papism which lies behind it. Can you expand on this?

A: We are all waiting for the restoration of canonical order in the Russian Church, but this cannot happen until the end of what some Russians call ‘Philocatholicism’. This means the fawning admiration by some Russian bishops of the Vatican power-structure, which is the concept of a Church-State, a Church which is a State, or is even more powerful than a State, as history saw at Canossa. However, I am completely against this word because I respect ordinary Catholics, who are Catholics only because they were born in a certain country and I would never insult or disrespect them. The disease inside the Russian Church is not Philocatholicism, the disease is ‘Philopapism’. That is the real heart of the issue, And, by the way, it has nothing to do with ecumenism. Some of the worst Philopapists are anti-ecumenist.

Q: In that case, can you define ‘Philopapism’ for us?

A: Yes, but first understand that Philopapism is not just a Russian disease, it has long infected Constantinople, where it is called ‘Eastern Papism’, and before that it infected Rome, where it has always been called Papism. In Rome the problem was and is Western nationalism, in Constantinople it is Greek nationalism and in Moscow it is Russian nationalism. In Russia, it is not at all a recent Soviet disease, ‘Sergianism’, unlike as some very politicised, anti-Communist emigres used to imagine, it goes back centuries in Russia too, long before Communism.

It existed, for example, just before the Revolution in the awful persecution of the so-called ‘Name of God’ monks on Mt Athos. It was Tsar Nicholas who stopped that persecution, which had been instigated by Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky), who later became the first leader of the émigré ROCOR. The persecution was carried out by bureaucrats who were more or less atheists. The First World War followed it. And most of those very same bishops who had persecuted simple piety, then abandoned Tsar Nicholas at the Revolution and even rejoiced at his overthrow. Later they had to repent, redeeming themselves at the price of martyrdom or of exile. They had to pay the price for their earlier vile persecution.

Q: What about the Soviet form of Philopapism?

A: The post-Revolutionary bout of Philopapism goes back to Metropolitan, later Patriarch, Sergius, who wanted to ‘save the Church’, just like the Popes and the recent Patriarchs of Constantinople. How can you ‘save the Church’? Christ is the Saviour! The Church does not need saving, it is we, including bishops and patriarchs, who need saving. Who do they think they are? The problem is that the Philopapists see the Church as a purely worldly organisation, just like the Popes of Rome, who used to lead armies in order to defend their Church. In order to defeat the barbarians, they themselves became barbarians! Who then was the gentleman?! From Patriarch Sergius this infection spread down to personalities like Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov), who characteristically died in the arms of the Pope. Some say that he was a secret cardinal. Maybe. That is not the point. From him the disease has contaminated further to this day.

This disease is the mentality that bishops are ‘princes of the Church’, in fact they are perverted oligarchs, just like the Borgias in Renaissance Rome. This is poisonous. It is why I refused to go to many churches when I lived in the Ukraine and Russia. They were an immoral business operation and many bishops there are immoral, chosen only because they know how to make money, not because they believe in God, pray, or are monks. I think many of these new Russian Borgias should go to prison. The current Metropolitan Hilarion affair is only the tip of the iceberg. Others must be trembling now too. The truth is coming out and judgement is coming to them all.

Q: You said that Philopapism goes back centuries in Russia. When did Philopapism begin?

A: It came in after the fall of Constantinople, the Second Rome, in 1453. So began the idea of the Third Rome. Fighting against St Nil of Sora and the hesychast Non-Possessors – St Sergius of Radonezh had been one of them earlier on – the situation came to a head at the so-called ‘Raskol’, that is, the Old Ritualist schism 200 years later. Then the administrative centre of the Russian Church in Moscow was contaminated by Philopapism, which was also encouraged by the idea of the Third Rome, which maintains that Russia has a messianic mission. Russia does have a mission, but it takes place within the multilateral Alliance of Civilisations, which is what BRICS is about.

In other words, Philopapists think that Russia is exceptional, indispensable to the world and therefore anything its rulers do is justified. The antidote to this was in the concept of Moscow as a Second Jerusalem, but that option was cruelly rejected by the Moscow bureaucrats. It is not that I am in favour of Old Ritualism, which was a form of ignorant nationalism, but I am against persecution. What difference is there between the State persecution of the Old Ritualists in the seventeenth century and the State persecution of Orthodox in the twentieth century?

The Philopapist mentality creates pharisees and ‘high priests’, as Christ called them in the Gospel, those who like ‘the first places at table’. Philopapists consider that they are the chosen people and so above the law, above the canons, ‘exceptional’. But this mentality is why the pharisees crucified Christ, Who called them to order, what we call canonical order, and told them that our Kingdom is not of this world. He overturned the tables of these new moneychangers, which is what you did, Fr Andrew, when you chased out the new pharisees who were threatening you and screaming at you in 2021 and 2022. All those who persecuted you are one by one being removed. Bishops are not above the canons.

It is the Holy Spirit Who chooses us for mission, not pharisees. Pharisees think only in worldly terms of money and power, and camouflage themselves with messianism as self-justification for their lusts. It is simply lust for money and power that contaminates these people. Once they have money, they want power. It is always the same old sordid story of corruption and perversion. That is Philopapism.

Q: But Phariseeism itself is universal, isn’t it?

A: Yes, of course. It was this same missionary, messianic mentality which inspired the atheist Jew Bronstein-Trotsky, who wanted to spread the Communism of the Third International (which replaced the Third Rome) worldwide. He also persecuted, leading the Red Army and causing the deaths of millions. But it is not only Jewish, it can be Frankish, Norman, Venetian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, German, Soviet, American, or anything else.

For instance, Soviet messianism strangely resembles American messianism. This is because the struggle between Washington and Moscow is in fact the struggle between the First Rome and the Third Rome, for the USA is the heir to the infallible Popes of the First Rome. ‘We are the exceptional people, the indispensable nation’, the infallible US have been saying of themselves ever since the collapse of the SU (Soviet Union), though its collapse had nothing to do with the Americans. (See how even the initials US and SU and their symbols, the white star and the red star, are the same, just the other way round).

Communism collapsed because it is unrealisable and went bankrupt. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union went to the heads of the US elite. They claimed absurdly: ‘This is the end of history and we have won. As the victors, we can set up a World Empire, called Globalism, we have exceptional authority, therefore no laws apply to us, we can carry out genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Libya and Syria, in the Donbass and Gaza, we can ignore the International Criminal Court. We can do whatever we want’. In reality, this is just the same vulgar old imperialism, absolutism, immorality, cloaked in their smug Protestant self-righteousness and infallibility. It is Philopapism.

In reality only God is exceptional. No human being or country is exceptional.

Q: What do you think of what some call the ‘liberal opposition’ in the Russian Church, clergymen like Protodeacon Andrey Kuraev and the popular pastor Fr Alexei Usminsky? They are also opposed to these Vatican-adoring, ‘money and power’ Russian bishops, the pharisaic Philopapists, as you are.

A: The dissident liberals are opposed to the Philopapists, but not for the same reasons as I am. The liberals are opposed to such bishops because the liberals are in reality rationalistic and modernistic Protestants. Like all Protestants, they are naturally anti-Catholic, anti-Papist. However, like all Protestants they are also generally pro-Western and some are traitors to Russia, just like their corrupt enemies whom they fight and are also traitors to Russia (I make exceptions for some who are just extremely naïve and not very intelligent). We disagree with the liberals because we are not Protestants and we follow the historic Orthodox Faith.

We are not traitors, we are patriots of Russia, that is, of the real Russia, of Orthodox Rus. President Putin is preparing the way for that, for the coming Emperor. He took on not just Paris and Berlin, but the whole West and won. We hope that God gives him time to help cleanse the Church next.

However, I do disagree with the appalling way that the liberals have been treated, with their so-called ‘defrockings’ by the selfsame corrupt bishops. You cannot defrock a clergyman because he has different political views from his bishop under the absurd pretext that he is being ‘disobedient’. The threat of defrocking forced them and many others, in the Netherlands, Lithuania, Spain, USA and in Russia into joining Constantinople – they had no alternative. This is yet another example of the Moscow bureaucracy weaponising a sacrament, this time not the eucharist, but the priesthood. But grace is given by the Holy Spirit, not by pieces of paper signed by jealous or wicked bishops. Thank God, Patriarch Kyrill is beginning to remove them, suspend them or retire them. He has  a lot of work to do.

Q: How is authentic Orthodox missionary work different from American missionary work?

A: If you have a missionary message to spread to others, the message of Christ, then you do not spread it by violence and threats. This is what the ‘Roman Union’ of the Vatican did. This is what the ‘Soviet Union’ did. Now this is what the ‘American Union’ (which is USA and NATO – basically the ‘European Union’) does. They have all used violence and threats. This has guaranteed the downfall of all of them. It is what is happening now.

The American Union, usually called ‘The West’, is collapsing, it too has gone bankrupt. They have done it to themselves, just like the Soviet Union. As someone from the Soviet Union, I can see very clearly how the European Union has become the same. The commissars, mentality and lies of its politicians and journalists are exactly the same. But the Godless are always defeated because they are all from Babylon. Their Tower always collapses.

Authentic Orthodox missionary work does not use violence and threats. I have recently discovered the Russian saint, German of Alaska as an example. What a great monk! And how he has been ignored by Church authorities and was resisted by Russian State authorities (long before ‘Sergianism’!). He is unknown in Russia. St German lived among the Inuit people ‘as one of them’. Not even a priest, he did not impose his language or customs by violence or threats against the people. He did not try and steal their property. He was their servant and defender, not their persecutor or a ‘prince of the Church’. He was the real Apostle of Alaska. He was able to convert people, because he was Christlike.

In this he was just like Sts Cyril and Methodius, Apostles of the Slavs, St Stephen of Perm, Apostle of the Zyrians, St Nicholas, Apostle of Japan, or St Macarius, Apostle of the Altai, he respected others. That is the problem of the Moscow Patriarchal bureaucrats today, lack of respect for others, for the Local. And that is why they are losing everything, they put politics above the Church. If I may paraphrase St Matthew’s Gospel: Seek ye first the kingdom of man, and all these things will be taken from you’. They do not deserve to keep it. God will take it away from them because they are unworthy, just as He took Constantinople away from the Greeks in 1453 because of their racism. St German of Alaska’s way is the only way that Russia could convert the world and in no other way. Any other way is Philopapist.

Q: Whenever we talk, I feel nostalgic, as though I am talking to one of the old Russian emigres I knew in the 1970s, like my godfather, Nikolai Zernov. I would sit in his apartment in Northmoor Road in Oxford and look at the huge picture, almost fresco, he had of the Kremlin ‘before the deluge’, as he called it. Then there were Princess Kutaissova, Elizabeth Lopukhina, Dimitri Obolensky, Nadezhda Gorodetskaja or Lydia Slater, Boris Pasternak’s sister. They all had the same mentality. Why is this?

A: This is because we are Russian emigres like them! But I take your remark as a compliment. All I can say is that though we lived in the Soviet Union, we always kept our family traditions from before. Above all, we never, never accepted any Sovietisation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has increased this Philopapist corruption and perversion today. This has made it and those who are too closely allied with it, like those crazy ROCOR Protestant converts in New York, into pariahs. It is so sad and so unnecessary. They have painted themselves into the corner with their notorious scandals, as you say. Now they are complaining because the rest of the Church at best ignores them and at worst openly mocks them. But how else are you going to treat psychopaths?

Q: Do you have any words of hope for our readers?

A: Yes, there is one thing. You know, I never used to like Trump. I thought he was a clown as well as a criminal and a narcissist. He was also a Russophobe and armed the Neo-Nazis against us and sanctioned us. But recently, he said something very Orthodox, no doubt for the first time in his life and without knowing it. He said: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! I even wanted to buy a picture of this moment, but my wife stopped me. She has no interest in politics and says it is all a waste of time. She prefers gardening and our two cats to politics. She says cats are far more intelligent than politicians.

She may be right, she so often is. But I still maintain that the concept of ‘Never surrender’ is Orthodox, because Christ never surrendered. If He had surrendered, there would never have been the Resurrection. So I say that Trump was saved for a purpose by the grace of God, the bullet missed him, but hit Biden instead and stopped World War III, and we should all repeat: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! Another American said something like: ‘Only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world do change the world’. This is in fact the definition of our fools for Christ. They change the world, corrupt and perverted bishops do not. Why, they cannot even change themselves.

July 2024

 

 

Senator J D Vance: A Question to the Russian Orthodox Church

A member of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), between 1974 and 1977 I studied in Oxford under the ever-memorable Metr Kallistos (Ware), then taught in Greece and went on to study at the St Sergius Institute of Theology in Paris. In January 1981 I was tonsured reader by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Antony of Sourozh (ROC) at the Dormition Cathedral in London. In December 1991, after a decade in which I discovered bishops with mistresses and bishop-freemasons, I was ordained priest by a bishop of integrity. This was the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the successor of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. This ordination followed seven years of service as a deacon in the Russian Orthodox Church. I served faithfully and without recompense as a priest for thirty years, in France, in Portugal, setting up the first ever Russian parish there, and in England.

In May 2012 I was awarded my first jewelled cross in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow by His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill. This was for my efforts in helping to bring the very small, New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) back into communion with the ROC Mother Church and fighting against the American sectarianism which had infected it in the USA. I believe that this was very much in accord with what would have been the wishes of St John and Archbishop Antony. In July 2018 I had the privilege of being in Ekaterinburg on the night of the 100th anniversary of the martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, his August Family and faithful servants, together with the Russian Patriarch and a host of other clergy. Then at midnight I walked the 13 miles together with 120,000 other Russian Orthodox faithful to Ganina Yama, the place where the atheists had first tried to bury the Imperial Martyrs and their servants.

On 10 April 2021, a new and highly controversial ROCOR bishop in London, a young American neophyte who had not long been a clergyman of ROCOR, was not educated in a seminary and was pastorally very inexperienced, publicly declared his intention to break communion with other Orthodox Churches. This included with the Western European Archdiocese of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) – the ROC is over 130 times larger than ROCOR. His unilateral decision came because he no longer accepted the age-old practice of the ROC of not receiving Catholic priests and people into the Church by rebaptism, but by confession and communion. He also told his laypeople that they could no longer take communion in that part of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), where we have had close family members and friends since the 1970s, because they had followed the traditional ROC practice. Thus, ROCOR created a schism with the Mother-Church.

For us this was the imposition of Lutheran-style sectarianism and an attack on canonicity, experience and practice. Excommunication, dividing faithful Russian Orthodox into two separate groups, was unacceptable to us who had strived so long for unity. We are Orthodox Christians, not Donatist schismatics. As we had no desire to belong to a right-wing American sect which is what ROCOR had become, we carefully discussed what our canonical path would be and made discreet enquiries. Finally, after disappointment with the response of the ROC, on 16 February 2022, after four hours of negotiations with the Romanian Orthodox Church involving the chief canonical adviser of His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel, our deanery of twelve clergy, six parishes and church buildings, some 5,000 people, 99.5% of those who had sought canonical refuge, were received into the local Romanian Metropolia, which is three times larger than the whole of ROCOR.

Our theological conscience was unable to agree to being part of a schism. Thus, we entered with joy into the four-million strong Synod of eight bishops under Metropolitan Joseph (Pop) of Western and Southern Europe of the Patriarchate of Romania. It seems then that the ROC wishes to abandon its centuries-old practice of receiving Non-Orthodox by chrismation, or confession and communion, that is, by economy. This was the case of the future martyrs, Tsarina Alexandra and Grand Duchess Elizabeth, received by the future St John of Kronstadt by chrismation. More recently, in the 1970s both Metr Antony of Sourozh (ROC) and the now St Sophrony the Athonite (Patriarchate of Constantinople), both of whom I knew well, publicly rejected the reception of Non-Orthodox into the Orthodox Church by rebaptism. It seems to us that the denial of this issue of principle preceded the catastrophe of the ROC that befell it eight days later.

For within eight days of our transfer to the Romanian Orthodox Church, the ROC fell into the pastoral disaster of multiple divisions in countries outside the Russian Federation, as the conflict in the Ukraine began. At a time when the probably future President of the USA has chosen a conscious Catholic, Senator J D Vance, a man close to the Orthodox Faith, as his running mate, therefore the probable future Vice-President and possibly the succeeding President of the USA in 2028, this is serious. Senator Vance is a friend of the ROC and has openly stated that the Ukraine must make peace with Russia, returning Russian territory to the Russian Federation. This Catholic Senator has denounced the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufry by the Kiev regime and also appears to support the dissolution of NATO. Does the Russian Orthodox Church want Senator Vance to believe that it considers that Catholics are unbaptised?

 

 

What Does it Need to Found a Local Church in the Diaspora?

The Orthodox Diasporas in the Western world have so far given birth to only one new, albeit compromised, Local Church. This is the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), founded over 50 years ago. Much disputed by others, it has unfortunately been a failure – the vast majority of Orthodox who live in Northern America have not joined it and do not wish to. It has not united Orthodox. However, it must be said, it has been a bold failure and its failure is hardly a matter for rejoicing. It was bold because elsewhere founding a new Local Church has not even been tried. We should learn from the OCA’s strengths as well as from its weaknesses.

True, in England, there was in the 1970s an attempt not to build a multinational Local Church, but a multinational or, at that time, trinational, chapel. This was in Oxford and involved émigré Russian (and English) academics, Greeks and Serbs. It was never going to work. The Serbs never took part, apart from a certain rather effeminate bishop who was then ‘disappeared’. It was set up in a tiny, octagonal, Methodist-looking chapel, not at all traditional on the outside. Then the ‘Russians’ left it through ejection and miraculously managed to set up their own English-language chapel elsewhere.

It left Greeks and a tiny number of ex-Anglican, pseudo-Russian Bloomite elitists in their Methodist-looking chapel. Now that large numbers of new Romanian immigrants have set up their own church in Oxford, the whole experiment is best forgotten. The Oxford chapel represents not even 10% of local Orthodox, rather like the OCA representation in Northern America. Why these failures? It is always ideologies that destroy the unity required for a Local Church, because ideologies are always by definition exclusive.

For example, new calendarism (one of the great failings of the OCA) and old calendarism (one of the great failings of the new 2020s ROCOR sect) are ideological enemies, as are political and nationalist ideologies, like those of the Greek nationalist Second Rome and the Russian nationalist Third Rome. Neither of them ever learned from the failure of the First Rome with its equally nationalist ‘Roman Catholicism’ (a contradiction in terms). All of these isms operate against and are destructive of any multinational Church, for any Diaspora Church must by definition be multinational, not nationalist. Only the concept of a Second Jerusalem can be successful. This, for example, was where the Russian Church failed, and three times over. Thus:

In Russian émigré Paris, French liberal intellectualism, imported back from Saint Petersburg, did nothing for the Paris Russians and as a result their jurisdiction became very small because exclusive. But at least, small, they were not corrupted by money, like the other two.

In the émigré ‘Russian Orthodox’ Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the substitution of the subtle moderation of Russian émigré Orthodoxy for the very unsubtle extremism of US convert Orthodoxy. Well-financed Lutheran fanaticism was substituted for real Christianity. That is spiritual suicide, for no-one apart from crazy and uncharitable converts is interested.

The Moscow Patriarchate itself has been badly served both by Soviet nationalism and the corrupting riches of the post-Soviet episcopate together with their sexual perversions, as we can see at this very moment. But what has been rumoured for years in Moscow and elsewhere, is only the tip of the iceberg. The MP and ROCOR have to be cleansed. An antique-filled seaside cottage (cottage, not the antique-filled Victorian house, that is another story) on the south coast of England (in the nineteenth century gay Anglican bishops would also ‘resort’ to south-coast Brighton) is not the solution.

In England, we Orthodox will be neither pro-Soviet, nor pro-American, but faithful to local realities. You can only build a Local Church, if you want it and believe in it.

 

The Bulgarians Rout the ‘Phanar Lobby’: Next in Line – the ‘Lavender Lobby’

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2024/07/03/bolgary_razgromili_fanarskoe_lobbi

 

The following article is a translation of the above Russian article, published in Moscow on 4 July by the well-known Church journalist Anatoly Stepanov. It clearly outlines how by choosing a new Patriarch, the Bulgarian Church has come to support the canonical Church in the Ukraine under Metropolitan Onufry. Thus, it has for the moment defeated the pro-Phanariot lobby and its fake and schismatic ‘Church in the Ukraine’ (OCU), whose main sponsor is the atheistic US State Department. However, it also shows that the US-controlled liberal/ecumenist/pro-Catholic/pseudo-intellectual/celibate lobby which is trying to split the Church is also profoundly homosexual. This is not news for some of us, but it will be to many.

Moreover, this split is not a Greek-Russian split, for apart from the very well-known homosexual metropolitans, archbishops and clerics within the Patriarchate of Constantinople, there are also many others of other nationalities, such as Bulgarians and Russians. Such are also part of this homosexual (‘lavender’) lobby, for instance the notorious but only recently defrocked Moscow Abbot Peter Yeremeev. He was allowed for years and years to continue his activities quite openly in Moscow to the scandal of the faithful. As the article hints, but does not dare say openly, he and others were and are protected by powerful clerical friends of the same narcissistic ‘variety’, who, moreover, as we well know, are also very active outside Russia in corrupting Church life with their boyfriends and persecuting the faithful. Here is a translation of the article:

 

On Sunday June 30, the election of the Primate of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (BOC) was held. This attracted the close attention of Orthodox observers and the public not only in Bulgaria. And no wonder, because the fate of not only the future of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, but also the future of all world Orthodoxy was being decided.

On the eve of the elections, we witnessed open interference in the internal affairs of the BOC by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. On May 19 an extraordinary event took place: a group of Bulgarian hierarchs headed by the most influential in Bulgaria, Metropolitan Nicholas (Sebastianov) of Plovdiv, visited the Patriarchate of Constantinople and openly concelebrated with representatives of the schismatic Orthodox Church in the Ukraine (OCU).

This was not only a challenge to the Bulgarian Church, which, as you know, does not recognise the legitimacy of the OCU, but is also a revelation of the future course of the BOC. And then Patriarch Bartholomew was invited (it is not clear on whose behalf, since there was no decision of the Synod) to take part in the ceremony of the election of His Holiness the Patriarch of Bulgaria and his enthronement.

It was a public act of interference. And how many behind-the-scenes attempts to exert influence, which, for sure, took place both on the part of the American embassy and on the part of ‘our overseas partners’, as the Russian Department of External Church Relations (DECR) has long called Constantinople, which has long been under the control of the United States.

Therefore, many anxiously awaited the decision of the Council of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which was supposed to elect its Primate. On the eve of the final voting, as is known, the Synod of the BOC elected three bishops as candidates for the post of Primate of the Church – Metropolitan Grigory (Tsvetkov) of Vrachansky, who acted as Locum Tenens, Metropolitan Gabriel (Dinev) of Lovech and Metropolitan Daniel (Nikolov) of Vidin.

According to all forecasts, experts gave preference to Metropolitan Gregory, who was considered as a kind of compromise figure, albeit a conditional compromise, since his sympathies for the Phanar were well-known. However, unexpectedly, in the second round of the final voting, Metropolitan Daniel (Nikolov) of Vidin won, for whom 69 members of the Council voted, Metropolitan Gregory received 66 votes in his support. In the first round, Metropolitan Gregory received 64 votes, Metropolitan Daniel – 51 votes, and Metropolitan Gabriel – 19 votes (several ballots were declared invalid).

The decision of the Council became a sensation for many, a joyful sensation. It testifies to the fact that the supporters of canonical Orthodoxy, and it was from these positions that Metropolitan Daniel always spoke, turned out to be in the majority in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and preferred to have as their Patriarch a person who, on the eve of the elections, again clearly and unequivocally outlined his position on the rejection of the Ukrainian schismatics. Moreover, he was the only candidate for Patriarch who spoke directly on this key question

Of course, the results of the vote testify to the shaky balance of power in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church: 69 votes against 66 is the clearest evidence of this.Nevertheless, the decision of the Council is final, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church has a Primate who will defend canonical rules and norms and will not allow the Phanar to establish control over the BOC and deepen the schism in world Orthodoxy.

However, it is clear to everyone that the new Patriarch Daniel is receiving a very difficult inheritance, and his unequivocal rejection of the schismatic actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople will not go unanswered. And we are already seeing the latter answers in the form of dirty tricks. Patriarch Bartholomew, apparently dissatisfied with the results of the choice of the Bulgarian Orthodox, refused to serve the first Divine Liturgy with his newly elected brother, went home, demonstratively leaving his representative, an archimandrite, to concelebrate.

Moreover, he is one who has a very dubious reputation – Archimandrite Kharalampy (Nichev), who was once a cleric of the BOC, but was expelled after a scandal, but was accepted in his present rank in Constantinople. At the same time, this same Archimandrite Kharalampy has a reputation as a person who belongs to the ‘lavender lobby’. Moreover, during the first Divine Liturgy of Patriarch Daniel, Archimandrite Kharalampy, being the senior priest by consecration, led the service as a representative of the clergy.

There will certainly be many more such dirty tricks on the part of the Phanar. But they do not pose a danger, but an attempt to provoke a schism in the BOC from among the bishops and priests dissatisfied with the election of Patriarch Daniel is a more terrible danger. And given the results of the vote, almost half were dissatisfied. It is clear that there is a long distance from discontent to a change of jurisdiction and an attempt to split, but the problem is serious. His Holiness Patriarch Daniel will obviously have to exert a great deal of effort to prevent a split in the BOC. Therefore, it is very likely that he will take some conciliatory actions and steps first of all.

It is very likely that the opposition to the new Patriarch will be led by the already mentioned and very influential Metropolitan Nicholas of Plovdiv, who has extensive connections in political circles (there are rumours that his father served in the security service of the Communist leader of Bulgaria Todor Zhivkov, i.e. he was not the least person at that time). Metropolitan Nicholas has recently become a leader of the pro-Phanar policy in the BOC.

Metropolitan Nicholas is a visible embodiment of the failures of the policy ‘of an Orthodox direction’ of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate, which for a long time banked on him. And it seems that there were reasons for this, in addition to the family ties of the Metropolitan of Plovdiv. He was educated at the Moscow Theological Academy and for a long time demonstratively supported pro-Russian positions in the Bulgarian episcopate. In addition to the DECR, as far as we know, our Embassy also banked on him. So this is proof of the failure of all Russian diplomacy, not only ecclesiastical. As a result, we have now received a deafening slap in the face since Metropolitan Nicholas has become the main propagandist of the Phanar in the BOC, and the DECR and the Russian embassy seem to have got it all wrong.

Moreover, Metropolitan Nicholas not only changed his political orientation, but also committed openly offensive actions against His Holiness Patriarch Kirill. We are talking about his arbitrary restoration to the ecclesiastical dignity of the former hegumen Peter Yeremeev, who was banned in the Russian Church, who has recently been seen several times at the Divine services of Metropolitan Nicholas. And this is not just an insult to His Holiness Patriarch Kirill personally, who approved the decision to defrock the former hegumen Peter, but also in fact the creation of a serious problem in relations between the Bulgarian and Russian Orthodox Churches…..

Hegumen Pyotr Eremeev is a notorious personality. In addition to the fact that he held high positions in the structures of the Russian Orthodox Church, being the abbot of the historic Vysokopetrovsky Monastery in the centre of the capital and the rector of the Russian Orthodox University, he is widely known in narrow circles as one of the most prominent faces of the so-called ‘lavender lobby’ in the Russian Orthodox Church. Believers whispered about this and spoke with sorrow. And his ban from serving was perceived with great satisfaction by many Orthodox believers as a sure sign of the cleansing of the Church from the ‘lavender filth’.

Therefore, the story of the former abbot Peter testifies to the fact that the new Bulgarian Patriarch, in addition to the ‘Phanar lobby’, has another dangerous and influential opponent – the ‘lavender lobby’. It is no coincidence that in Bulgaria they whisper about the non-traditional sexual orientation of Metropolitan Nicholas of Plovdiv. It is also surprising and sad that Russian Church diplomats considered him to be the main supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church in Bulgaria.

By the way, as informed people say, the strange inclinations of the former hegumen Peter began to manifest themselves after his studies in Bulgaria, where he met and became friends with the then vicar of the Bulgarian Patriarch, Bishop Nicholas (Sebastianov) of Znepol. These unhealthy inclinations led Pyotr Yeremeev into a scandal with students of the Moscow Academy, which was the reason for his exile from Moscow to Khabarovsk in the Far East. But then he returned to the capital, supposedly cured of the sodomite disease, a story which turned out to be untrue.

Of course, we rejoice at the election of the new Bulgarian Patriarch, especially realising that we are witnessing the manifestation of the action of Divine Providence in history, which inspires us with hope in these desperate times. But let us be aware that Patriarch Daniel faces the most difficult trials ahead. Therefore, it would be right for all of us to at least sigh before God for Patriarch Daniel of Bulgaria, who is embarking on the difficult path of struggle for the Church of Christ and for the unity of world Orthodoxy.

 

What Will Happen to the Orthodox Church After the Fall of Washington?

The powers of this world have throughout history tried to abuse religious belief by making it into their own nationalist and ritualist institutions. This has been to camouflage and justify their nationalism, that is, their attachment to this world, their worldliness. Chinese, Indians, Jews, Greeks, Japanese, Copts, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs, Latins, Germans, Greeks, Spanish, Russians, French, British, Americans, they have all done it. These are just facts from Church history. How do Christians remain outside and resist an ideology which puts national and worldly issues above Christ, all for the sake of amassing more power and money? There are only two ways of resisting:

Either you are a Confessor, or else you are a Martyr. Thus, St Stephen the First Martyr was stoned to death by the Jews because he upset their nationalism. He was only following the prophets and St John the Baptist, who had told the nationalist King Herod the truth, and Christ Himself, Whom they crucified. Then came such Confessors as St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom. And in the twentieth-century there were the hundreds of thousands of Martyrs all over Eastern Europe, as well as Confessors like St Nectarios of Aegina, St Luke of the Crimea, St John of Shanghai or St Paisios the Athonite. There is nothing new under the sun. The saints are always the best witnesses.

In recent centuries the Church in the Middle East and the Balkans was oppressed by Ottomans, Poles and Austro-Hungarians. Meanwhile the Russian Church was oppressed by Westernising rulers, even more so after 1917. In the nineteenth century and even before, the main Patriarchate outside Russia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, was used as a plaything by the British and French ambassadors. The Western Powers also appointed German kinglets to rule the newly-liberated Balkan countries in their name.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has in the same way become the plaything of US ambassadors there. Meanwhile the Patriarchate of Moscow was being used as a plaything by the Soviet State. Neither the US State of the Soviet State was Christian. Both were, whatever the theory, in practice atheist. This situation has continued by centuries of inertia even after the end of the first so-called Cold War in 1991, but in ways even more terrible than before.

Thus, in Moscow, Stalinist centralisation has continued, repelling all Non-Russians from the Church, as Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova openly described in his recent letter to Patriarch Kyrill. For fifty years we too were treated as second-class citizens by the same Russian Church. None of this is because this mentality has been forced on the Church by the State, but because it has become a bad reflex inside the Church. It is nothing to do with the State. For example, a fragment of Moscow, the New York ROCOR has done this too, completely discrediting itself, mistreating Non-Russians. (As one of its bishops said to me recently, ROCOR is ‘a train wreck’).  The mentality to repel all, including many Russians, has been imposed internally. The only real slavery comes from ourselves, not from others.

We can see the same mentality also in the uncanonical, US-orchestrated actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and elsewhere since 2018. Sadly, Constantinople fell to Greek racist hatred and jealousy of Russians.  It could simply have refused to do any of its horrors. But the $25 million bribe was irresistible to the weak. Since then a second Cold War has begun, with US proxy forces trying to weaken and destroy Russia from the Ukraine. It means that the heavy burden of steering the ship of the Church has fallen to those less politicised, more free, to the now 14 other Local Churches. Their role has been dependent on the political freedom which they have.

Thus, under Communism in Eastern Europe and under the US control of the Greek Churches, the Serbian Church stood out as a beacon of relative freedom and theology. Today, in this respect the Albanian Church seems to have taken the lead as the voice of freedom, though the long-overdue visit of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America to the persecuted Ukrainian Church is also a miracle. The remaining 14 Local Churches are not all united because they do not enjoy the same measure of freedom. They are only relatively free compared to Constantinople and Moscow. For instance, the actions of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople have brought some of the other Local Churches into a state of internal schism.

Specifically, the Cypriot and Bulgarian Churches are now in a state of internal schism as a direct result of the US interference in Constantinople, both direct and indirect. Equally, the US-controlled Patriarchate of Alexandria and Moscow are in schism because of the latter’s interference in Africa. Other Local Churches, like the Romanian and the Georgian, which have a strong national identity, take an independent line, ignoring uncanonical Greek and uncanonical Russian alike. This is despite the attempts by the local US ambassadors, who behave like the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, to interfere in the choice of Patriarchs and policies. This independence is the only way to go. It is freedom.

However, our question is what will happen after the US stops interfering in internal Church affairs. It is our hope that, once political pressure eases, the Greek Churches in particular can take the lead and get out of political distortions and contortions, abandoning imperialist fantasies, recognising new autocephalies, notably that of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and its Diaspora. However, the Russian Church also has to give up its Soviet-style centralisation, which is its imperialist fantasy. It has to grant autocephaly to parts of the Church in now independent countries.

The shadow of the old Imperialism, Russian or Soviet, just like Greek and Latin imperialism, has cast a long shadow on Church life. Its time is up. For the Church does not consist of one Local Church ruling imperially over all the others, but of their entirety, their catholicity – all the Local Churches together. Once political meddling is over, all the Local Churches must hold a Council together. A free and canonically ordered Council, not the 2016 robber-Council farce in Crete. Then the very many long-outstanding issues between the Local Churches can at last be resolved. In freedom. May God’s Will be done!

 

 

A Russian Tragedy of Errors

 

Introduction: Three Fragments of the Church

After the overthrow of the Tsar by traitors in the so-called ‘Revolution’ of 1917, and the ensuing substitution of the Russian Empire for the Soviet Union, parts of the Russian Orthodox Church broke away from it. Although divisions of tiny, temporary ‘catacomb’ church communities formed inside the USSR, divisions were nowhere so obvious as outside the USSR, where there was the political freedom to choose which part of the Church to belong to.

The anti-Soviet Russian emigration split into two warring groups, one quite independent of the rest of the Orthodox Church, the other under the British-controlled and, after British bankruptcy from 1948 on the US-controlled, Patriarchate of Constantinople (1). In any case, both groups were independent of the vast majority of the Russian Church, which was under the enslaved and enhostaged administration of the 99% of the Church inside the Soviet Union. Why did these divisions develop?

  1. The Moscow Patriarchate: Bride of Christ or Concubine of the State?

Like all other Churches the Russian Orthodox Church has had a long history of both dependence on and independence from the State. In this respect, people may think of the independence from the State of St Nil of Sora (1508) and the Transvolgan Non-Possessors (1), of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow (murdered in 1569 on the orders of the centralising Tsar Ivan IV) and of the Old Ritualist schism of the 1660s, which was largely created by reaction to the persecution of the centralising State, which demanded absurd ritual conformity. By 1917 some 10% of the Russian population were declaring that they were Old Ritualists, thus showing the strength of opposition to the centralist State. All the above showed independence from the nationalist State, and many showed faithfulness to Orthodox Tradition, placing the Holy Spirit above corruption.

Under the imperialist Emperor Peter I (‘the Great’) (+ 1725), the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate was abolished and replaced by a Protestant-style Minister of Religion. Soon after this there began the persecution of monastic life, when some two-thirds of monasteries were closed by the German Empress Catherine I (‘the Great’) (+ 1796). Nevertheless, the Church continued to live, under the great St Paisius (Velichkovsky), forced into exile in Romania, and in the Russian Lands, in Sarov and Optina, where new saints appeared, and in Kronstadt, where there began the eucharistic revival, and elsewhere. The grace of the Holy Spirit was active and the deadly bureaucrats of the State apparatus did not manage to quench it, despite their best efforts. They were opposed by Tsar Nicholas II, who, despised and mocked by the bureaucrats in cassocks, had such great saints as Seraphim of Sarov canonised.

However, during this Imperial period most Russian Orthodox omitted to take communion more than once a year and lead an active life of prayer and fasting. Church life became largely an empty ritual, an exercise in ritualism. Here is why the Soviet atheists (most of them, like Stalin, were also ritually Orthodox) came to power: there was no Orthodox conscience and so spiritual resistance to the myths and practices of atheism. Under the Soviet regime, which unsurprisingly admired the imperialist Peter I as their centralising model, the Church was run by the Secret Police. Therefore, the enslaved Church hierarchy of the time adopted a subservient pro-State policy called ‘Sergianism’, in order to ensure its survival. Sergianism was massively rejected by the politically free emigration: hence the divisions. Meanwhile, inside the Soviet Union, ordinary bishops, priests, monastics and faithful people were martyred in their hundreds of thousands.

The remnants of these State-subservient attitudes are still very present in the Russian Church today. For instance, churches in towns and cities usually have professional choirs (if parishioners want to sing, they are forbidden, as in the Russian church in Chiswick, a suburb of London, for example), which reduces the church to a ritualist theatre with a choir to listen to. For example, many ordinary Orthodox in Russia today reproach the Church which appears to be run like a business, the main interest seeming to be profit. Also the centralised hierarchy in Moscow actively opposes clergy who have dissident political opinions from the State about the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. This only creates more scandals.

This centralisation has led to those parts of the Church in independent countries outside the Russian Federation wanting to break away from the centralised control of Moscow. This is for national reasons, for example, there is resistance to the Moscow centralisation on the part of Non-Russians in the Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere. They all seek Church independence and devolution. However, there are also cases of sectarian and schismatic groups which break away from central authority for purely political, right-wing reasons, both inside the Russian Federation, but also outside it, above all in the highly Americanised ROCOR (see below).

  1. ROCOR: Orthodox or Right-Wing?

In 2007 we all at last managed to get the New York-based ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) to rejoin the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate. Otherwise, it would have become a schismatic sect, out of communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. When it reunited with Moscow, it lost some 5% of its 300 parishes. These 5% were extremists who really wanted to be in schism, out of communion with everyone, claiming like pharisees to be ‘True Russian Orthodox Churches’. There were then, and perhaps still are, about four of these tiny squabbling sects, formed in 2007, all cursing each other.

After the wonderful God-sent opportunity of reunion with the bulk of the reviving Russian Orthodox Church and life-giving canonical communion with it for a decade between 2007 and 2017, very sadly, the ROCOR authorities gradually lapsed back into their sectarian temptations from before 2007. Step by step these sectarians took control of ROCOR’s New York Synod in an internal coup d’etat, effectively isolating its ill but charismatic Metropolitan, rejecting all his decisions and using his electronic signature to justify their very strange and deeply uncanonical decisions.

Very sadly, the extremists had learned nothing from being in communion with the Mother-Church for ten years. They had simply camouflaged and justified their pharisaical, schismatic and sectarian tendencies behind their alleged unity with the Moscow Patriarchate. Today ROCOR is out of full communion with Moscow, and so its second state is worse than its first. Instead of Orthodoxy, it has espoused the sectarian American right-wingery of woman-despising ‘Orthobros’ and Trumpism, totally confusing Divine Orthodoxy with mere human conservatism and its lust for money and power.

This pharisaical state of schism and fanatical sectarianism was encouraged by deluded Non-Russian neophytes, who want to be more royalist than the King, more Russian Orthodox than real Russian Orthodox. In reality, these Lutheran and Calvinist sectarians have ended up outside full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, the King they betrayed. They have painted themselves into their own corner, apparently feeling very comfortable in their isolation. Thus, they have renounced their own saints, who were internationally-minded, not isolated, and concelebrated with and gathered together all Orthodox. These include St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, whom the US right-wingers so cruelly suspended and persecuted, leading to his premature death in 1966.

Some suspect that the new ROCOR division has been encouraged by the CIA, of whose largesse ROCOR was a well-known recipient for a generation between 1966 and 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. As participants in the San Francisco ROCOR Council in 2006 we all know that the CIA virulently opposed the ROCOR reunion with Moscow in 2007 and from 2017 on tried to censor and then close this anti-CIA (and anti-FSB and anti-MI5) Orthodox England site through an amateur agent. For a few months he succeeded, causing an international scandal and making ROCOR a laughing-stock among the other Local Churches. Perhaps money exchanged hands here too.

  1. Paris: Orthodox or Left-Wing?

The second part of the Russian emigration which split away from the enslaved Church authorities in Soviet Moscow was the group founded by Saint Petersburg aristocrats and intellectuals and centred in Paris. (Some of them spoke better French than Russian; all spoke fluent French). Originally less than a third of the size of the now US-centred ROCOR, today it is called the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Russian Tradition. In reality it is very small outside France, as it is practically forbidden to expand elsewhere, and now has only some sixty parishes.

In 2019 it too at last rejoined the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, leaving behind in Constantinople, to our open relief, its masonic and modernist wing with its uncanonical practices, losing not 5% of its parishes, clergy and people, as with ROCOR, but over 40% of its parishes, clergy and people. If ROCOR had lost 40% of its body, then it would have remained in full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate after 2017. Too much of the pharisaical, ‘onetruechurchist’, sectarian and schismatic had remained in ROCOR, thus poisoning its potential. Conversely, the much smaller Paris Archdiocese not only remained in communion, but also, to its credit and unlike ROCOR, remained politically free of Moscow centralisation.

Conclusion: Disloyalty to the Testament of the Tsar

In the history of the last generation of pre-Revolutionary Russia under the last Emperor, it is clear that right-wing extremists played as negative a role as left-wing extremists. For example, plotting together, they murdered the Tsar’s adviser, Gregory Rasputin, who was helping him bring the Old Ritualists back into the Church. But this treacherous extremism can above all be seen in the ensuing history of the tragic Civil War between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. Then both sides committed awful atrocities, as described in any history of that dreadful war, where brother killed brother.

Sadly, just like the Reds, most of the Whites did not support the Tsar: it is reckoned that only 10% of them did so. They were the only real Whites. Most simply wanted their land, property and wealth back from the Marxists. Many ‘Whites’ were quite as openly atheistic as the Reds. As a Russian patriot and real Orthodox, the Sovereign Tsar stood above both Reds and Whites, above and outside the vulgar extremes of both left and right, above and outside their centralisation and nationalism. This is his Testament. This is our heritage. Under him there would have been no tragic war between Russian and American-proxy Ukrainians today.

Notes:

  1. https://orthodoxwiki.org/Maximus_V_of_Constantinople
  2. It is interesting that the enemies of the Non-Possessors accused them of stealing money! Nothing has changed. We know of a very greedy bishop in England today who accused a Non-Possessor priest, who subsidised his parish from his own money, of exactly the same thing! Of course, the bishop never apologised.