Category Archives: Orthodox Unity

A Secular Meeting Rejected: A Council Proposed

‘God so loved the world that He did not send a committee’.

The Georgian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, many respected hierarchs and theologians everywhere and now Mt Athos have all decisively rejected several of the draft documents for the meeting of selected Orthodox bishops in Crete in June. Not only this, but they have also rejected the secretive methodology, the terms and the presumptious name of this so far Small, Unholy and Part-Orthodox Meeting. Compromising the Truth of Christ with stale, humanist, political Committeespeak, those documents have now been comprehensively rejected by the people of God.

The secularist organizers of the meeting in the State Department in Washington will have to think again. They may have conquered the Protestant and Roman Catholic institutions with ease decades ago, but the Christian Church tells not of heterodoxy, but another story, quite unknown to them. True, they have appointed two, and probably three, of the Patriarchs of the fourteen Local Churches, cunningly splitting the Serbian Church, and infiltrated other Local Churches, including the Russian, with their liberal, meat-eating agents of treason, with whom they attempt to influence the still free Patriarchs. However, their proposals for a robber Council have already been met with decisive non-reception by the Church.

It is not clear how these thwarted masonic organizers will act now. Their secularist agenda, the laughing-stock of the Orthodox world, has been dismissed. Of course, as usual, their agents have begun insulting the faithful, calling them pharisees, obscurantists and fanatics, trying to ban the word ‘heretic’. That there are a few pharisees, obscurantists and fanatics we will not deny. But they are a tiny minority outside the Church who have run away, refusing to fight inside the Church. They are not the faithful clergy and people who from inside the Church have for decades been calling for a rethink of the whole top-down project, its methodology (behind closed doors by the politically unfree), its lack of canonicity (banning most Orthodox bishops from attending and inviting heretics instead) and its Secularspeak documents, drafted by compromised diplomats, mantra-repeating philosophers and intellectuals, but not by Orthodox Christians.

Perhaps, instead of a mere but very expensive meeting in sunny Crete, we should now hold a Council, at which the Gospel Truth will be proclaimed to the whole world, since most of it has still never heard it. All Orthodox bishops should be invited and none silenced for fear of contradicting politically-bound heads of Local Churches. Documents plainly cobbled together by spiritually dead compromise and still tainted by Diplomatspeak, with their secularist ‘human dignity’ and ‘human personality’, should be thrown away into the dustbin of history. Let us speak the honest language of the Church Fathers and invite no heretics. Instead of wasting time and money, telling us that fasting is important and suggesting in self-contradictory terms that Non-Orthodox may be outside the Church (when we have also always known that they are), the bishops could, in these last days, talk about the things that really matter.

Representing 216 million Orthodox Christians in a world where over seven billion are outside the Church, all our bishops could call the rest of the world to salvation inside the Church, in the fresh and lucid language of the Church. In the clearest of terms they could proclaim and teach the Gospel Truth without compromising themselves by reference to the Western heresies of Christianity, which have poisoned much of the world against their false Christianity (but not against Orthodox Christianity), and translate the service books into the world’s main languages. The world faces its end, its multiple means of self-destruction are plain for all to see. It is now vitally urgent to call it to repentance before that end.

If there is to be a Church Council, let it take as its patrons St John the Baptist, St Mark of Ephesus and St Justin of Chelje. Let it speak clearly of repentance, the teaching on the Church and Her truth as opposed to Western heresies, let us speak of the revelations of the Holy Spirit. Let the Council speak to the nearly seven billion Muslim, Hindus, Buddhists and Secularists (those more or less lapsed from Western and other heresies, however they may still call themselves) and call them all to repentance, to the only-saving and only-resurrecting Truth of Christ. Their gods, prophets and princes are all dead: Christ Alone is not dead, but lives Risen from the Tomb, trampling down death by death. Let the Council say in uncompromised words: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’. Then it will indeed be a Council, and so our Council, and so will go down in history.

Why the Non-Commemorators are Mistaken

In the Gospels Christ tells us that although we are in the world, we are not of it, that although we are incarnate on earth here and now, our destiny is in heaven. Human errors have all been due to the failure to live according to these words. Either to the failure not to be incarnate here and now and to drift away into intellectual speculations and disincarnate daydreams and philosophies: such have been the tendencies either of Western intellectuals or of Non-Christian religions – indeed many such intellectuals have been attracted to Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism, for example, for that very reason. Or else to the human failure to forget that our destiny is in heaven, to concentrate only on the incarnate here and now: such have been the tendencies of the Roman Catholic and Protestant deviations of Christianity, with their concentration on the thisworldly organization of the affairs of men, instead of the balanced God-Man, Christ, the Son of God become incarnate as man and calling us to heaven.

Put in terms of Church history and human deformations of the Church, the first said that Christ the Son of God never became man, the second said that Christ was not the Son of God. The first deformation, denying the Incarnation, went down in early history as Monophysitism, the second, denying possible human salvation, as Arianism. Later, in the fourteenth century, they appeared again, combined in the one heresy of Barlaam of Italy, who said that since God was unknowable (Monophysitism), man would have to rely on his autonomous reason to live (Arianism). Here was the justification for Western humanism and Renaissance paganism and all that has followed to this day – man the measure of all things. St Gregory Palamas opposed this heresy and expressed the universal Christian teaching, distinguishing between the essence and the energies of God. In modern, secular times the same two heresies have appeared as disincarnate, Western liberalism and petty, worldly nationalism.

Thus, today the Orthodox Christian world still suffers from these same constant enemies of the Faith, from petty, inward-looking nationalism of the ghetto and disincarnate, pro-Western liberalism of the intellectuals. In 1453 the latter betrayed Constantinople and provoked its fall and in 1917 it collaborated in the trap sprung by the West in Russia, provoking the February Revolution, later taken over by the Bolsheviks, and then dividing the Russian emigration between true White and false White. Thus, it can be asserted that the New Martyrs of Russia are ultimately the victims of the treachery of Western liberalism, for without Western support and finance the Bolsheviks would never have seized power. Without apostate wealthy aristocrats (including members of the Romanov Family), treasonous generals and Anglophile Duma freemasons, there would never have been any New Martyrs. Their anti-Orthodox and therefore anti-Russian treachery drips with the blood of the betrayed millions.

Then there is the second enemy, nationalism, which, unlike patriotism, which is love of God’s Creation, is simply worldliness, love of man’s creation. It betrayed the universalism of Old Rome, taken over by barbarian-minded Franks, and of New Rome, taken over by Hellenist nationalism. Unlike the petty nationalism of others in the past and today, petty Russian nationalism is worse because Russia has a vocation to defend all Orthodox of all nationalities and to witness to all the fragments of Christianity, a vocation to be Imperial, to be above ghetto nationalism. Examples of nationalism are the treasonous Old Ritualists, who openly supported the 1917 Revolution, a few divisive Russophobic émigrés who sympathized with Hitler, trying to undermine the Church Outside Russia and then siding with Western spies, and in our own times the pro-Old Ritualist Solzhenitsyn. His anti-patriotic nationalism, like that of all Russian nationalists, ironically ended up supporting Western liberals.

On this subject of inward-looking nationalism, there are now in Moldova, the Ukraine and on Mt Athos nearly seventy individuals, mainly monks, including one vicar-bishop and over a dozen priests, who refuse to commemorate Patriarch Kyrill at services. There are two reasons for the decisions of these non-commemorators. Firstly, there was the February meeting between Patriarch Kyrill and the Bishop of Rome in Cuba, for which the Russian Orthodox world had not been prepared although secret preparations for it had been under way for six months, and the vague joint declaration that they issued afterwards. This came after the disturbing document regarding relations between the Church and the heterodox world, released some two weeks earlier in Geneva, in preparation for the meeting of some Orthodox bishops in Crete in June. For some completely incomprehensible reason, this has provocatively already been called ‘a Holy, Pan-Orthodox Council’, when so far it is none of these things.

Seventy people make up 0.00004% of the Russian Orthodox world. We think their first concern is exaggerated. The document issued was after all a diplomatic one, not a dogmatic one and in their sincere simplicity they failed to distinguish between the two aspects. As for the second document, it is only a draft and has already been rejected by several Local Churches and many prominent and well-respected bishops in several countries. Even if it were passed as such, the vast majority, myself included, would either ignore it or tear it up. Such top-down decisions, taken without the slightest consultation with the masses, cannot be enforced. However, I do have a much more serious concern, which I wish the non-commemorators would share. They seem not to realize that since 2014 the Russian Orthodox world has been in a state of war, after an attack on the Ukraine, which toppled the legitimate government and installed an anti-Orthodox, Fascist junta in Kiev, ‘the Mother of Russian Cities’.

This is part of the Neocon-initiated World War, which has reduced a large part of Western Asia and Northern Africa, from the coasts of the Atlantic to the foothills of the Hiamalyas, to terrorist anarchy. This has resulted in the deaths of up to two million and well over ten million refugees, leading to the mass deChristianization of Iraq and Syria. It has also ravaged Eastern Europe, economically and in ex-Yugoslavia, militarily, where part of the population is affected by cancer from uranium-tipped NATO shells and menaced by the US-installed terrorist regime in Kosovo. It has also seen Russian Orthodox forces in combat in Syria, supporting Orthodox and friends of Orthodox next to the Holy Land, by Armageddon. In the post-Soviet world it is one thing for ‘Orthodox’ liberals and nationalists from anywhere in the Orthodox world to criticize or disagree with the Patriarch of Rus’. He may not be ideal (who is?), but to stop commemorating him during what is a World War, is almost treasonous.

From Recent Correspondence (Lent 2016)

Q: Why is there so much opposition among the Orthodox faithful to the forthcoming Council in Crete?

A: Because it promises to be merely a politicized meeting of bishops. First of all, how can you say that you are having a Council when you do not know if it is a Council, because you do not know if the Holy Spirit will be present? We must understand that a meeting can only become a Council if the Holy Spirit is present. This is why meetings only become Councils on their reception by the people of God, who recognize the inspiring presence of the Holy Spirit. So far this looks like a meeting of bishops, with the US, the EU and the Vatican in the background, which is not Pan-Orthodox because it does not include all the bishops or, for the moment, even representatives of all the Local Churches. To call a meeting a Council before the event is presumptious and pretentious, even more so when you call it ‘Great and Holy’.

Secondly, how can you have a Council when only a small selected minority of Orthodox bishops have been invited? Thirdly, how can you have a Council when the most important question, the calendar issue, has been removed from the agenda? Fourthly, how can you have a Council when several Local Churches or authoritative voices in Local Churches have been raised in particular against the anti-dogmatic contradictions in the proposed important document on relations with Non-Orthodox? Finally, many have been disturbed by the date of the opening of this meeting: 16/06/16. It contains the triple six of Antichrist. How could the organizers, so blind to any transparency, also be so provocative as to start the meeting on that date, so greatly perturbing the faithful?

Q: You say that the US, the EU and the Vatican are in the background. What exactly do they want?

A: All thisworldly institutions want an aggiornamento of the Church, like that which Roman Catholicism underwent in the 1960s. They want to introduce into the Church secularism, humanism, new calendarism, homosexual marriage, banning fasting and monasticism. In other words, they want to destroy the Church, they want a modernist, spiritually toothless and spineless Church, degutted of ascetic life, spirituality and the sacred, so that they can adapt the Church to their worldly agenda, reducing it to a mere human institution, as they have done elsewhere. And who is their prince, the prince of this world? Satan.

Q: So you are against this meeting?

A: I did not say that. Let us wait and see. This meeting could produce schism, given the arrogant lack of consultation by its organizers with the monasteries, parish clergy and people, with the people of God. For example, why have they not invited a distinguished monastic elder from each Local Church to the meeting to represent the people of God? And, as I said, a meeting, however unpromising, can become a Council. All depends on the Holy Spirit. Man proposes, but God disposes. Sadly, for the moment, all we have seen is bureaucratic men proposing.

Q: You have reported elsewhere the opening of the Russian Cathedral in Paris in the autumn. What are your hopes?

A: Our hopes are that the statement of Patriarch Alexei II thirteen years ago will at last be realized. In other words, we hope that this will be the foundation stone of a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Western Europe and that that will be the foundation of a future Local Church.

Q: So you want to see in Western Europe a kind of European OCA?

A: Before answering, I should perhaps say that what I want is not really relevant, what is important is what God wants. I will answer only because you have asked.

Not at all, we do not want another OCA. The OCA was a failure firstly because its foundation was politicized, being founded during the Cold War, secondly because it was granted autocephaly unilaterally without consultation with the other far more numerous dioceses of other Local Churches on the same territory, and thirdly because it was founded on compromises of ascetic, liturgical and canonical culture, caused by its protestantization, putting American culture above the Church. This meant that a great many English-speaking Orthodox in the USA, the ones whom it was allegedly designed for, simply ignored it. Personally, if I lived in the USA, I would not belong to the OCA. That is no judgement on the many sincere and pious people who do belong to it or the good work that parts of it do, this is merely a personal statement.

Q: So what do you want to see in Western Europe?

A: What we want to see is what we want to see everywhere, including in North America. That is, quite simply, a Local Church that is fully Orthodox, spiritually pure, politically independent and faithful to the Tradition, but which freely celebrates, whenever pastorally necessary, in the local language and venerates the local saints. What could be simpler? And yet human beings with their compromising political cults or narcissistic personality cults make it all so complicated.

Q: To come back to the OCA, what do you make of the concelebration between Patriarch Bartholomew and Metr Tikhon of the OCA?

A: There are modernist, political dissidents in the OCA who want to become a sub-department of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, in some special American Metropolia, just like the Rue Daru group of ex-Russians in Paris, the ex-Sourozhian schismatics in England, or some schismatic Diaspora Ukrainians. It seems to me that a battle is going on between the two factions there, the modernists who want to leave for Constantinople and those with at least some sense of the Tradition who want to stay as a group under the protection of the Russian Church. Personally, I have always thought that a split is inevitable, with all the parishes in Alaska and most in Canada and Pennsylvania around St Tikhon’s, returning to the Russian Church, perhaps within ROCOR, and the others, like those at St Vladimir’s, going over to the Greeks. That would be logical and at last clear up the canonical anomaly once and for all.

Q: The OCA was founded nearly two generations ago. Why has it taken so much longer to begin even thinking about a Local Church in Western Europe?

A: So much longer? We have been thinking about it for thirty years and more! On the other hand, you do not do things prematurely. In my view, the OCA was premature – it should have remained a Metropolia, English-speaking but faithful to Russian Orthodox Tradition, waiting for freedom in Russia, which came 20 years after its independence.

The main problem in Western Europe has been the delay caused by the Paris schism over eighty years ago. The divisive defection of Russophobic aristocrats and modernist intellectuals from the Russian Tradition to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and a self-invented ‘tradition’ meant that the development of an authentically Orthodox Local Church was greatly delayed because the Russian Orthodox presence was so weakened by their disaffection. For instance, although (or because) the Constantinople Parisians are bankrupt, they are still occupying the (smallish) 19th-century Russian Cathedral in Paris, and therefore a new Cathedral and seminary have had to built and equipped at vast expense and with great political complications.

Q: Does the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR, have a role in the construction of this Metropolia in Western Europe?

A: That depends on the leadership of ROCOR, not on mere parish priests like me.

Q: Does that answer mean that in Western Europe at least ROCOR will become dependent on the Church inside Russia?

A: Not necessarily. Everything is still possible. There are parishes in Western Europe dependent on the Church inside Russia and parishes dependent on the Church Outside Russia that are identical in ethos. Some, sadly, are definitely not identical in ethos because of the hangover from the Soviet past despite transfers of controversial clergy out of Europe by Moscow in the last few years. In ROCOR we patiently wait for that vestigial ethos to die out, as it is dying out. Once it has died out altogether, convergence will come.

Q: You mean that ROCOR in Western Europe will merge with the Church inside Russia or that the Church inside Russia in Western Europe will merge with ROCOR?

A: I don’t know. What I do know is that the most active and most missionary, the most spiritually alive, will dominate. Those who are spiritually asleep will be absorbed. If you do not have younger bishops, resident bishops, active bishops, missionary bishops, bishops who are interested in their flocks and local saints, you will die in your self-made ghetto. This is what happened to ROCOR in South America. This is of course true for all Local Churches and their dioceses in the Diaspora. If you do not live, you will die. Surely, that is not too complicated to understand?

For example, today, just in the eastern third of England, we need twelve priests who can speak at least some Russian and some English – if they are bilingual, that would be perfect. I could name the places where they are needed. But where are we going to find them? We have to encourage men to think about this. That requires leadership, time, effort and energy.

Q: How can you describe the ethos of ROCOR, as compared with the ethos of parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia?

A: The emphasis of ROCOR in the last 25 years especially has quite clearly been on the New Martyrs and Confessors, Anti-Sergianism and Anti-Ecumenism. Wherever within the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia there is veneration for the New Martyrs and Confessors (and it is very extensive), wherever there is resistance to the ideas that the Church must swim with the secular tide of the State and resistance to ecumenist compromises (also extensive), there is joy in ROCOR. However, the fact is that some of the foreign parishes in the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia, suffered in the past from modernism, ecumenism and liberalism, unlike parishes inside Russia. When the ethos becomes identical, then there will be a complete merger, though, as I say, it is not clear which part of the Church will dominate it. That will depend on the leadership of bishops.

Q: You mentioned local saints in Western Europe. Who at present venerates those local saints?

A: It mostly seems to be immigrants from Eastern Europe, who have the sense of saints and relics. Sadly, despite all our decades of efforts, there are few native Western European Orthodox.

Q: Why? I thought there were many converts?

A: That is a myth. There have never been ‘many’ converts. At most about 2,000-3,000 in the heyday and many of those soon lapsed because they were received into the Church for the wrong reasons or for ideological reasons, with certain clergy trying to build up artificial empires, which of course soon collapsed. Most of their children also lapsed. I doubt if there were ever more than 1,000 serious converts.

However, in the last ten years, I have witnessed a change. Converts started coming in numbers in the 1960s after the collapse of Anglicanism. In other words, most converts were from an Anglican background, often of a public school or wealthy background and most were at that time 30 or 40 years old. Well, that generation, what I call the ‘Kallistos generation’, is literally dying out. Some are still alive, but are in their late sixties or older. The vast majority of these are either in the Antiochian jurisdiction which at last has a new, young, local bishop, or else under the Constantinople Vicariate, which is dependent on an elderly French bishop in France, whom I knew when he was a young priest.

Together, about 600 in all, they together form a sort of Anglican Orthodoxy. For example, as far as I know, the Antiochian clergy are ex-Anglican vicars who have not received training in Orthodoxy and do not know how to do all the services; then the people do not know how to sing; the Vicariate situation is similar. I know one such Antiochian community, where the priest has banned any language other than English! This is racism, though I suspect partly it is because the priest does not understand any language other than English, let alone the Orthodox ethos.

Q: So converts are dying out?

A: Not exactly, rather their nature is changing. There are some new converts, but they do not usually have an Anglican background; after all very few English people nowadays do – even in the mid-19th century, only 50% of English people were ‘Anglican’, that is, they belonged to the Church of England. Although there are few of these new converts, at least they are converting properly and not creating a semi-Orthodoxy, an Anglican-Orthodox club.

Q: So what does that mean for these convert communities?

A: It means that many Vicariate communities number fewer than ten, usually quite elderly people, and form a kind of ex-Anglican clique, centred on the dead Metr Antony Bloom. Where they are more numerous, most of the people are Eastern Europeans. In a similar way, ageing Antiochian groups are being saved from extinction by Eastern Europeans, especially church-deprived Romanians. Most of these groups do not have their own premises and use Anglican churches.

Q: So what is the justification for using English in services, if there are fewer converts?

A: There are now three justifications. Firstly, there are still English people, converts or children and grandchildren of converts with the English husbands of Orthodox women, secondly, there are the English-speaking children of Eastern Europeans and thirdly, in mixed-nationality parishes, English is simply the common language. The future is with the second group, children of Eastern Europeans, because they are now the majority of English-speaking Orthodox.

Q: How are they to be kept in the Church?

A: That is the key question. In ROCOR, for example, the London Cathedral lost virtually everyone from its second generation, let alone from the third and fourth. And that is a typical story for all jurisdictions everywhere. Why? Because they had no identity, apart from an ethnic one, which they naturally disowned. It is vital for Orthodox children born here or going to school here to have an Orthodox identity, to know and appreciate our civilizational values, to know that we are simply Christians. The old generations generally failed to do this, their identity was purely ethnic, not spiritual.

Thus, the children went to school, lost their parents’ language and said, ‘I’m English, this is nothing to do with me, it’s only for old people’. Assimilation. For example, there are six Anglican Cypriot priests in the Diocese of London. Why? Because they did not understand Greek, so they left the Greek Orthodox Church. Of course, we can only give children this identity if parents bring their children to church regularly. Those children have to be instructed in Sunday schools and they have to have activities, which creates in them a sense of belonging to the Church. If parents do not bring up their children in the church, then they will be completely lost.

Q: Why do Protestants so value the Old Testament?

A: The Reformation was largely financed by Jews (despite Luther’s virulent anti-Jewishness) and most Protestants have always been pro-Jewish. Cromwell depended on them almost entirely. (Even today Israel depends entirely on Protestant countries, especially the USA; Catholics have always been more sceptical). Thus, the Protestants even use the Jewish Old Testament in favour of the Christian one! For Orthodox, by far the most important book of the Old Testament is the Psalter, which is why you rarely find Orthodox reading the Old Testament (other than Genesis and Exodus), but rather just the New Testament and the Psalms.

Q: Why is the USA forcing countries, like the Ukraine and also African countries, into accepting homosexual marriage? Is Obama a homosexual?

A: I have no idea what Obama is – except that he supported thuggery by toppling the democratically-elected government of the Ukraine and replacing it with a murderous Fascist junta, which has little control of the country outside Kiev. Then there are the US drones which can murder anyone anywhere. As regards his other personal inclinations, I would not rely on internet rumours.

Now for your main question, which needs a historical answer.

When, in the 11th century, Satan set about destroying Christendom, his first target was to desacralize, that is, secularize, the Church. Satan cannot stand the presence of the sacred, the sacred must be removed from the world because it prevents him from realizing his plans to take total control of the world. This he did by attacking the Church at its weakest point, that is, in the Western provinces, where all had been weakened by the barbarian invasions. In the 11th century the Western Patriarchate was converted to secularism, with what had been the Church becoming a State, becoming secular, changing the Creed, controlling murderous armies, the courts and sponsoring invasions etc. In history this is called papocaesarism.

In other words, the first step to Satanization, was to remove the Altar. The second step was to remove the Throne, that is, to remove the sacral monarchy. This act came later and was done in the 17th century in England, in the 18th century in France and in the 20th century in Russia, although it is true that the Western monarchies had been deformed before then, either by parliamentarianism, or else by absolutism, neither of which conforms to the Orthodox Christian understanding of monarchy, which is the presence of the Lord’s Anointed among the people.

Thus, having removed the spiritual content of the Faith and the Ruler, having desacralized the Faith and the King, there remained the third and final stage, to desacralize or secularize the Christian People and popular culture. This means destroying Christian cultural values (a process that was very rapid in the 20th century), destroying the family – very rapid from the 1960s on after the fall of the Second Vatican Council, when fasting was abolished and so now today we have an obesity crisis). Then they also started destroying the identity of the human person in the unisex movement that since the 1960s has resulted in only two generations in a transgender, transhuman society.

This enslavement is a form of suicide. It is why Russian Orthodox Tsardom, the Christian Empire, had to be destroyed in 1917. With its slogan of Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People, the Faith, Tsar and Rus, in English, Altar, Throne, Cottage, in French, Foi, Roi, Loi, its existence was the one thing that made upside down Satanism, with its aim of destroying the Church, the Ruler and the People, impossible.

Q: Can this situation of spiritual enslavement be reversed, or is an imminent end inevitable?

A: Nothing is inevitable because for human beings repentance is always possible. In Russia, the Church is slowly being restored and with Her the ideal of a Spiritual Empire, with a Christian Emperor and People. However, nothing is certain and there are reasons for both profound pessimism and profound optimism. May God’s will be done. On 18 December 1917 the Tsarina Alexandra wrote in her diary: (The Revolution in Russia) ‘is a disease, after which Russia will grow stronger. O Lord, be merciful and save Russia!’ May this hopeful prophecy be true.

The Present Danger

Who is it that will harm you, if you are followers of what is good?

(1 Peter 3, 13)

1916 was the year when the bankrupt British government was taken over by new and alien forces dependent on transnational financiers in New York and the year that the Russian Revolution was planned, in part inside the British Embassy in the Russian Capital. One century on, 2016 is also proving to be a year of great temptation internationally, especially because of Syria, and for the Russian Orthodox Church. Here there is great controversy, as throughout the Orthodox world, about the documents prepared for the proposed Inter-Orthodox meeting in Crete in June, especially that on the Church. Secondly, there has been the surprise meeting between Patriarch Kyrill and the Bishop of Rome, which has upset and disturbed many within the Russian Orthodox Church in particular.

As a result, there are a few clergy who have ceased commemorating Patriarch Kyrill. Then there have been meetings in Russia, the Ukraine and Moldova where small numbers of activists protesting at the use of the word ‘Council’ and the contents of the documents and they have used words like ‘uncanonical’, ‘heresy’ and ‘heretic’. And certain Russian bloggers, well-known for extremism and immaturity, have made dishonest and disrespectful accusations, falling into abuse and gossip, insults and unjust accusations, rumours and innuendo, proving that they are in fact secular-minded, not Church-minded. Our modernist and ecumenist enemies, who want schism from the Church, are rejoicing at the actions of such zealots. they are already imagining the full-scale destruction of the Church.

What should our attitude be?

Firstly, we must pray for the Russian Patriarch. There are those around him who are still under the influence of the humanistic and unOrthodox ‘theology’ of the 20th century Russian emigration, of the Paris School of Bulgakovism and Schmemannism, and have learned nothing from the Sourozh schism. Individuals subject to that ideology, which is what it is, are in fact fifth columnists, who are bringing divisive spiritual impurity into the Church. Secondly, we must rewrite the documents for the Crete meeting, making clear that we will never accept compromises of the teachings of the Church and especially of the teaching on the Church, the main dogmatic issue here. Fortunately, many in other Local Churches, especially in Georgia, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus, are already undertaking this.

We must also make sure that the voices of all Orthodox in the monasteries and parishes, clergy and laypeople, those at the grassroots of the Church, are heard. The Church is not the bishops, and certainly not a select group of bishops, and certainly not a group of uprooted intellectuals and disincarnate philosophers; the Church is everyone, the whole body of the faithful, the people of God, both now and in ages past. That is the meaning of the word ‘catholicity’. However, in doing this, we must show honesty, respect and courtesy, defending the Church and Church Truth from all Her enemies, from left or right, whatever their sect. And we must act without hysteria, from inside the Church, for we know that the Church is not ours, but God’s, and that Christ will always be triumphant in the long term.

The Present Crisis

Q: What has been happening since the meeting of Orthodox Primates at Chambesy five weeks ago?

A: Exactly as Metr Onufry of Kiev predicted, the Crete meeting (‘Pan-Orthodox Council’) is proving divisive, and even before it has begun. As we said at the time, documents issued, above all the document concerning relations with the Non-Orthodox has proved to be unacceptable. The Georgian Church has rejected it and now a petition in the Bulgarian Church is objecting to it, not to mention individual hierarchs in Greece and Cyprus who are also opposed – or that matter people in the parishes like ourselves. Apart from that there is the principle itself of holding a ‘Council’ to which only a few selected bishops are invited!

Q: Would you sign a petition against it?

A: Why should I? I find that idea almost amusing when I know that my bishop thinks the same as me – or rather I think the same as my bishop and, for that matter, all the other bishops in ROCOR. In any case, if you are concerned by a problem in the Church, you do not start a petition – that is a Protestant concept. What you do is talk about it with your bishop. Indeed, that is what I did last January and that is how I know that I think the same as my bishop.

Q: How do you see this problem developing?

A: I think the most interesting thing about this whole debate is how the two extremes have met. On the one hand, the sectarian-minded – there are very few of them, but they make a lot of noise – are refusing to commemorate their bishops. On the other hand, they are being egged on and provoked by the enemies of the Church, the ecumenist liberals – also few in number but noisy – who are doing all they can to create a schism, which would be their greatest joy. Unfortunately, the sectarian-minded are a little simple and do not see the trap that they are being led into. This is so sad.

Q: Has the crisis not been deepened by Patriarch Kyrill meeting the Pope in Cuba?

A: Yes, that meeting has reinforced the crisis.

Q: So are you saying that that meeting was a mistake?

A: No, because, apart from its positive aspects, that meeting has brought everything to a head, the abscess has burst, all is now in the open.

Q: What do you mean?

A: We now see exactly who are sectarian and who are ecumenist liberals. Those on the fringes have revealed themselves. The mainstream now has the task of reassuring the masses, but also challenging the fringes, saying to them, ‘This is the Church, do you agree with Her or not’?

Q: So do you think some will fall into schism?

A: I hope not, but if so, then very few. Moreover, I think that it will be the ecumenist liberals who will leave. Those on the other side are mostly good-hearted, just misguided.

Q: What about the charge that Patriarch Kyrill’s spiritual father was a known heretic, Metr Nikodim (Rotov)?

A: This is absolutely typical of the sectarian-minded. Patriarch Kyrill was 32 years old when Metr Nikodim died. Do these people really think that a young man, now a Patriarch, has not moved on since 1978? Do they really think that people are so stupid that they do not learn from the mistakes of their youth and inexperience? The only people who can think such things must themselves be very young! Unless of course, and that is far worse, the people who think such things have no concept that people change, that they can repent.

Do they not think that the Patriarch has changed in the last 38 years – in half a lifetime? Moreover, he has in that time received grace. I am myself a witness to that – how he has changed since he has become Patriarch. When you are ordained or consecrated, you receive grace, just as you receive grace from any sacrament. Some of these sectarians seem to be deniers of grace, deniers of the action of the Holy Spirit.

Q: Surely you are being idealistic. Yes, there is grace, but there is also temptation and sin. In history there are patriarchs who have behaved as judases, usually from political pressure.

A: Of course there have been those. But they are by far not the majority. The judases were the exceptions which prove the rule. Again there is a defect in the psychology of the sectarian-minded – they are always shocked by the exceptions and make them into the rule. For example, they will say that someone, for the sake of argument, say in the Bulgarian Church, is a heretic and then they conclude that they cannot concelebrate with anyone in the Bulgarian Church, and then, even more ridiculously, they refuse to concelebrate with anyone who concelebrates with the Bulgarian Church. And that is how they end up in a sect, outside the Church.

Q: Why do their minds work like that?

A: Because they are proud puritans. The slightest ‘impurity’, and in their case that means others disagreeing with them, and they are out. They are guilty of premature judgement, they want a pure Church now, which is called Donatism. That is simply not going to happen. The wheat and the tares grow together in this world because the wheat grows stronger on account of the tares and the tares can turn into wheat through the example of the wheat. God is patient with us sinners – so we must be patient with other sinners. We must all wait until the Last Judgement – unless of course people judge themselves by leaving the Church and entering a sect.

Q; You speak of a psychological defect in the minds of the sectarian-minded, but what about the minds of the modernists, the ecumenist liberals?

A: Regardless of which of the two extremes we are talking about, we are not talking about theology, but about psychology and a spiritually unhealthy psychology. For example, the ecumenist liberals will tell you that we must do like the heterodox, introduce organs, shorten our services, reduce fasting etc etc. Why? Because these people have either lost the Tradition or else have never been in the Tradition and therefore they want to do what those outside the Tradition, the heterodox, do. They are so secular-minded that they conform themselves to secularism, to the world, rather than to the Church. Basically, their problem is that they lack the Orthodox Faith.

Q: Is this a serious crisis?

A: For the moment, no, because only a very few people are directly concerned, though all of us know about it and so are indirectly concerned.

Q: So what is the solution?

A: To communicate our concerns to our bishops and to follow the mainstream, avoiding the errors of both the sectarian-minded and the secular-minded.

The Anti-Christian Empire and the Resistance Movement

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

(Matt 10.16)

Introduction: The Case of Britain

After the Norman invasion of 1066 and the ensuing genocide (150,000 dead) and national degeneration into Roman Catholicism, there took place the further degeneration into Protestantism under the tyrants Henry VIII and Elizabeth I (150,000 dead). Then, almost 400 years ago, there took place in these Isles the genocide of Cromwell. Jewish-financed, this left nearly 900,000, mainly Roman Catholic, dead. From then on and until some fifty years ago, the lands of the UK further degenerated into Judeo-Protestantism (so-called ‘Judeo-Christian’, but in fact Judeo-Protestant, culture).

Today, as a result of the centuries of Judeo-Protestant degeneration in its inherent, ever-deepening worship of Mammon in a worldwide commercial empire, the UK has become an anti-Christian country. This cannot even be blamed on the EU, where Mr Cameron has recently been making some window dressing rearrangements – rather like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The fact is that, regardless of the EU Atheist Union, the UK has plenty of its own atheism to go around and it is doubtful whether leaving the EU alone (presuming that the electorate will be far-sighted enough to do that) can save us.

The Worldwide Empire

The British Establishment elite freely takes part in the once secret, millennial worldwide anti-Christian project, now openly called ‘The New World Order’. This anti-Christian project involves not only the UK and all former Judeo-Protestant countries in the Anglosphere, Scandinavia and elsewhere. Ever since the latest chapter in the apostasy of Roman Catholicism at the Second Vatican Council, it has also involved former Roman Catholic countries. In other words, it is irrelevant whether the previous culture was Judeo-Protestant or Judeo-Catholic, the whole Western elite has come to form an Anti-Christian Empire.

Today headquartered in the USA, its elite, now called neocons, has been trying for generations to control Europe and through it the whole world. It has done this by destroying European nation-states, deforming them into artificial international unifications like the UK, France, Germany, Italy, which inevitably led to Europe-wide wars become World Wars, and then to the EU. So it has built its Anti-Christian Empire on the ruins of the nations. The messianic ideology of this Anti-Christian Empire is today called globalism, which it has been spreading around the world especially over the last two generations.

After the dissolution of its main opponent, the Soviet Empire, a generation ago, the Anti-Christian Empire immediately destroyed the surviving Soviet-style remnant in little Serbia and began to destroy its other opponent –the Islamic world. Here the Anti-Christian Empire has over the last generation caused chaos and ruin, as we can see today from the Himalayas to Nigeria, passing through Syria, so dividing and ruling over most of the Islamic world. In this way, having created artificially chaos and war, it hopes to create a popular demand for One World Government to bring order and peace.

The Resistance of Rus

Having killed millions, made millions of others into refugees and created chaos and destruction in a multitude of Islamic countries, though still not having conquered them, the Anti-Christian Empire now faces unexpected resistance. This resistance comes from what is organically reviving in the place of the old Soviet Empire – the Sacral Christian Empire of Rus. The Secularist Anti-Christian Empire fears this Christian Empire most of all. One of its main ideologues, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has even called its ‘greatest enemy’ the Russian Orthodox Church, which is at the heart of this reviving Christian Empire.

The Anti-Christian Empire greatly fears even the present modest revival of the Christian Empire. So much so that its propaganda outlets (‘media’) actually try to make out that the Church is not in fact reviving there or that it is only a tool of the political leaders of Russia, who, they say, shape it as they wish. Of course, in reality, the exact opposite is the case: it is not these political leaders who shape the Church, it is the Church that shapes them, through its age-old culture. Like the pagan Romans of old, the Anti-Christian Empire is happy for there to be any false religions, and therefore not Christianity.

This is because Christianity alone can shape political leaders who can challenge the Anti-Christian Empire. For only Christianity is Incarnational, that is, not some mere private practice, but a teaching that transfigures social, political and economic life also. The Anti-Christian Empire’s fear the revival of this Christian Empire, both inside and outside the ancient bounds of ‘Rus’, for Secularists fear nothing more than the Sacral. It also fears that it may find allies, in the traditional Muslim world, for example in Iran, or in China and India, and also among Roman Catholics who are still free of the Judeo-Catholic degeneration of recent times.

Allies of Rus and Temptations

Here the Christian Empire finds allies in Latin America, Africa and the Philippines. In Eastern Europe it finds allies among traditional Roman Catholics in the Vyshegrad group of Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland. In Western Europe it finds allies among sovereignist, national resistance movements of both left and right. Promoting either the social justice of the left or the traditional values of the right, these national movements are active in France, Germany, the UK, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Austria, Greece and elsewhere. They all oppose the dictatorship of the Anti-Christian Empire.

Having destroyed the Soviet Empire and then weakened the Islamic world, in the early 2000s the Anti-Christian Empire saw itself on the verge of triumph, a triumph that was suddenly snatched from it, to its fury. For ever since the failed invasion of Russia from Georgia in 2008, the reviving Christian Empire has begun to resist, frustrating the Anti-Christians. For as long as there is a Christian Empire, even embryonic, the anti-Christians cannot enthrone their Emperor in Jerusalem. The Christian Empire is the last barrier to their triumph.

This is why they are intent on slandering it and destroying it, for its Sacral Tradition is death to it. Hence the attack on the Ukraine, toppling its legitimate government for a genocidal junta and creating chaos. Slandering and even destruction can come in two other ways also. The first is by infiltrating the renascent Christian Empire with modernism, which is what individuals have been trying to do in recent years and especially now with the divisive draft documents for the Crete meeting of selected Orthodox bishops next June. The second way is protesting against those unacceptable documents in a divisive and even schismatic way, exactly as Metr Onufry of Kiev and others predicted.

Conclusion: On Not Falling into the Trap of the Anti-Christian Empire

Such protests have already begun with several perhaps hot-headed priests in Moldova no longer commemorating their bishops. Other individuals are following. We suggest that this is an error. Two wrongs do not make a right. However understandable, the far better method of protest is, as we have suggested, for monasteries and parishes simply to petition their diocesan bishops stating that we do not accept the draft documents and that if they are accepted in Crete, we will tear them up, refusing to receive them. In any case, we should also know that several bishops in Greece and Cyprus, as well as the whole Georgian Church have already refused to accept these draft documents.

It is our belief that to fall into the temptation of non-commemoration is a simplistic error of schismatic proportions. This is the error of those who cannot see the wood for the trees, who lose the big picture because they are so intent on the details. The Anti-Christian Empire wants us of the renascent Christian Empire to be divided in reaction to the modernist expressions that it has infiltrated into the draft documents: non-commemorators have thus actually fallen into the trap set by the Anti-Christian Empire. Our opposition must take an organic form which respects the episcopal institution. Our canonical fightback against modernist infiltration has only just begun.

Comments from a Correspondent in Wales

‘And the Ukraine, then and now? Who will answer for the murders of laypeople and priests? Who set up the violent demonstrations on Maidan Square in Kiev? Was it not the Uniat clergy? And the Pope? Of course, he is completely innocent. He only cares about Christians in the Middle East, but he could not care a less about the Orthodox Slavs, he has more important things to do like not upsetting the gays and flattering the Jews, ‘his elder brothers in the faith’. Even infants know that all the recent popes have been puppets of those who hold global power behind the scenes. Their task is to level Orthodoxy down because it is the only power in the world that can stop Antichrist’.

Priest Savva Mikhalevich

http://ruskline.ru/special_opinion/2016/fevral/katolicheskaya_cerkov_i_genocid_serbov_vo_vtoroj_mirovoj_vojne_i_posle/

Below we quote comments from a letter from a correspondent in Wales. We quote from it because it raises some very relevant questions, to which we give answers, which may be of interest to all our readers.

Comment: First, on occasions you have written apologies/explanations of your positions which, whilst providing new looks at the development of these thoughts/positions, are not really required: it is clear to any neutral or good-willed reader that you are a Truth seeker and that you are a servant of the Church. Those readers that don’t belong to these groups – we can only pray for.

Answer: You would be surprised how many people there are who are neither neutral, nor of good will, but, very sadly, are full of fantasy and spite.

Comment: On the ‘historical’ meeting of Patriarch Kyrill and Pope Francisco: I think I can see where your position comes from….There are two ways of looking at it, a diplomatic-humanitarian way and an Orthodox way.

Answer: That is why, as I said, a diplomatic or political agreement is binding only on the signatory and no-one else. It is a personal opinion and no more. What you call a diplomatic-humanitarian way’ says ‘we love the sinner’, but there is also a need for what you call ‘an Orthodox way’, that is, a dogmatic statement, which says ‘we hate the sin’.

This situation reminds me of the publication of the heretical ‘Thyateira Confession’ forty years ago by Archbishop Athenagoras of Thyateira. I remember a young convert at the time who told a pious Greek granny that her Archbishop had said that all religions were the same and therefore he was a heretic. She simply replied: ‘If that is so, I will go to church and light a candle for him’. The convert, who came from a Protestant background, was not satisfied. Why? Because those of a Protestant and literalist background do not have the concept of hierarchy, of the episcopate. When they disagree with their ‘church’, they simply go off and start a new ‘church’.

This is why old calendarist sects have not had much ‘luck’ in developing in Orthodox countries, but much more in Protestant countries or in ex-Protestant Africa. This Protestant mentality is alien to the Church. Just because we disagree, we do not leave the Church. Did St Gregory of Nyssa leave the Church? Did St Maximus the Confessor leave the Church? Did St Mark of Ephesus leave the Church? Of course not, they stayed and defended the Church and became saints of the Church, they did not go off and start new ‘churches’. The spirit of sectarianism, phariseeism, intolerance and the ghetto is not part of the Church. We stand and fight as soldiers of Christ inside the Church. All that is permitted is to change dioceses.

In other words, the personal opinions of individual members of the clergy as such do not concern us. We do not have a clericalist view of the Church like the heterodox. The Church is not the clergy, let alone the bishops. The Church is everyone. On the other hand, it is true that if a priest or a bishop or a Patriarch says that he believes AS A DOGMA that all religions are the same and that we do not need the Church for salvation, then of course he is a heretic.

This is why we need not worry about diplomatic and political PR documents signed by clergy, but we do have to worry about the draft document on heterodoxy that is being proposed for the Crete meeting next June, because that claims not to be a diplomatic or a political document, but a document expressing the Orthodox Faith. It is completely unacceptable as it stands because it claims in its first words that there is only One Church, the Orthodox Church and then goes on to contradict that statement in a haze of vagueness.

But even here we should be reassured. More and more simple parish clergy, people and monastics are speaking out against this draft document, let alone bishops like Metr Vladimir of Kishinev or Metr Athanasius of Limassol. One thing we have to understand is that the teachings of the Church are always set out very clearly, without any diplomatic fudging, which is the problem of the draft documents for the June meeting. They are written in Chancelleryspeak, they have no dogmatic clarity and are therefore not Church documents.
I think that the June meeting, if it happens, could be very useful, however. This is because all meetings can be useful, though not always in the way intended. Let us take the so-called ‘Council’ of Florence as an example. What was the use of that? First of all, it revealed the traitors who publicly shamed themselves. All became clear who they were. But above all the ‘Council’ of Florence was useful because it revealed St Mark of Ephesus and he revealed God’s Will. What do we remember about the ‘Council’ of Florence? Only St Mark of Ephesus, who defined the Truth. God can always make good out of bad.

Let us look concretely at what good can come of this June meeting and how even it could become by the grace of God a real ‘Council’ by ‘dogmatizing’, clarifying and defining the Truth.

First of all, it is clear that everything that needs to be said has already been said at the Seven Universal Councils. (We do not talk about ‘Ecumenical’ Councils because that word has been corrupted in modern English. Therefore we speak of ‘Universal Councils’). Roman Catholics like to attack us, saying ‘the Orthodox Church is dead, they have not had a Council since the eighth century – the proof that they need the Pope to give them life’.

Of course, this is nonsense. We have not needed to have a Universal Council because the truths of the Faith have been expressed for all time by the Seven Councils. There will never be an ‘Eighth Universal Council’. On the contrary, Roman Catholics constantly need new councils because they are always changing, ‘updating’, their beliefs, reinventing themselves – because they lost their apostolicity when they invented themselves in the eleventh century and consciously rejected the integrity of the Church heritage of the first millennium.

The Seven Councils dealt with the truths of the Faith for all time. They began by defining the first articles of the Creed, that is, by defining the Holy Trinity and then went on to the Person of Christ and His two natures and then to the Holy Spirit. Yes, it is true that there was the anti-filioque Council of Constantinople in 879, agreed on by all the Patriarchs, including the Pope of Rome, and the so-called ‘Palamite’ Council of 1351, which some pious Greeks unofficially call the ‘Eighth and Ninth Universal Councils’. However, in fact, these simply elaborated on earlier Councils, defining in detail the relations between the Persons of the Trinity, especially the Son and the Holy Spirit, and then in 1351 the nature of the Holy Spirit.

Thus, in the Orthodox Church we have local councils, at which only some bishops are present, that can elaborate on, explain and affirm aspects of the Faith expressed by the Seven Councils. In other words, these councils elaborate on the words of the Creed. And this is what needs to be done today, only not as regards the beginning and middle of the Creed (that has already been elaborated on), but as regards the end of the Creed. There will never be any ‘Eighth Universal Council’, but there could be a ‘Council of Crete’. But what will it be about?

We do not need meetings of hundreds of bishops to tell us that fasting is important or to administrate the granting of autonomy etc. What we need today is a Council to elaborate on one of the last articles in the Creed, concerning the Church. ‘I believe…in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’. This article is what is misunderstood today. In technical terms, what we need is a statement on Ecclesiology. For we believe in ONE Church; there are no Churches, not two or three Churches, only ONE. To say otherwise and talk as the heretics do of ‘the two lungs of the Church’ or ‘the Invisible Church’ or ‘the division of the Churches’ is to reject the Creed. It is as simple as that.

If the present anti-dogmatic diplomatic language and vagueness continues at Chambesy or elsewhere, I can foresee a time when a petition is going to circulate around the 80,000 or so Orthodox parishes of the world, saying: ‘There is only One Church, the Orthodox Church and we do not recognize any statements to the contrary’, and it will be signed by all and then presented at Crete. This is what the present vagueness and haziness could easily lead to. There is only one ‘Undivided Church’ – the Orthodox Church, which lives today because it is the Church of Christ, there is no other, there are merely fragments that have broken away from Her. I hope our bishops are listening.

I have no time to draw up such a petition. I am too busy doing Orthodoxy, looking after grandchildren, doing the washing up, baptizing, visiting the sick, blessing homes, celebrating services and visiting and confessing those in prisons throughout the 5,000 square miles of my three counties of parish. I have covered 300 miles in the last three days alone. But there are those who have more free time than I.

Comment: Metr. Nikodim’s end, at the feet of the Pope, is symbolic…’

Answer: I totally agree. But Metr Nikodim is dead and actually largely forgotten. Personally, I do not even know anyone who prays for him – perhaps they do that in the Vatican. But the real meaning of the Cuba meeting was not about old-fashioned ecumenism. It was firstly to ward off a World War in Syria, secondly to defeat Uniatism in the Ukraine, thirdly to prepare the world to see the leader of the Orthodox Church as the Russian Orthodox Church before the meeting in Crete, and finally it was part of a very successful pastoral visit by Patriarch Kyrill to the Russian Orthodox flock in Latin America, including meeting three local Presidents (completely unreported by the secular media).

And I think that was successful. Syria is all the talk and the Saudis and Turks have been warned off invading Syria to the fury of the neocons, the Uniats are also furious, as are the American diplomats who stand behind the scenes at the Phanar, whereas the Orthodox flock in Latin America is delighted. I think we may now at last see great Orthodox missionary developments in this very, very neglected part of the Orthodox world.

Comment: Do we really believe that the Vatican and the (Jesuit) Pope, those examples of strict hierarchical organisation based on careful cultivation of all levers of power and manipulation, have no influence on the Ukro-Nazi Uniats who are burning and stealing Orthodox Churches? Or on the Ustashoid Catholic church in Croatia?.…Some complaints or discontent of the faithful papist flock after the Cuban meeting should be interpreted cautiously; most likely they are simply down to the effectiveness of Jesuit tactics…

Answer: I think the Uniats really are very disillusioned. Of course, apart from them, we can ignore the sincerity or insincerity of expressions of discontent elsewhere. They are not our problem.

The Spiritual Empire versus the Neocon Empire

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Gandhi

Introduction: Towards an Orthodox Christian World View

I have over the last forty-three years tried to express an Orthodox world-view for English-speakers. No doubt, I have at times, perhaps often, been wrong in my assessments. However, that is not the point: as a human-being I have no hope at all of always being right and have no desire at all to get people to agree with me – all the more so as I can so often be wrong. On the contrary, I have always listened with attention and respect to the reasoned views of those who disagree but sign their names (I never answer or even read in full the illogical and often laughable views of anonymous brainwashed Establishment trolls who are ashamed to give their real names; delete is good for them).

The fact is that disagreements are essential for reformulating views. That is how we can draw closer to the truth, which is the only thing that is important. That can only come from praying about events, not from the secular media in themselves and assuming that they may actually occasionally be telling the truth. Above all, what I have hoped to do in all five decades of writing is to provoke people to think and pray for themselves. If I have contributed in any way to forming living souls and not zombies, then that alone has been positive. At this point in history, one so very different from the situation of the 1970s when I consciously began this task, how can I sum up in a few words an Orthodox view of the present world? Below are some thoughts on the present state of the world.

1. Today’s Russian Federation

Russia has been through several phases in her development. It has passed from seventeenth-century Orthodox Muscovy, isolationist and nationalist because forced into a virtual ghetto by Western and then Eastern aggression, to the Imperial Orthodox period which ended in the pro-Western coup d’etat of 1917. Organized from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg, that coup handed power to the murderous thugs, bank robbers and bandits of the equally Imperial but atheist period that ended officially in 1991. However, in reality, its banditry continued in even fuller flow until 2000 with the utterly corrupt, ‘ex-Communist’, Western-backed oligarchs who pillaged the public assets of the Soviet Union, no longer restrained by Stalinist leaders. (That is the only reason why they hate Stalin). With the miracle of 2000, this phase ended and we have moved to the far more promising period of Sovereign revival that has been unfolding over the last sixteen years.

As a result of the 300 year-old Imperial past, today’s Russia suffers from empire-fatigue, whether Imperial Orthodox or Imperial atheist. It has learned from its previous mistakes and also from the tragic hubris of today’s Neocon Empire, run from Washington, which seeks totalitarian global control. The last thing that the most perceptive and patriotic thinkers and doers of Russia want is the revival of a physical Empire. The only Empire they want is a spiritual Empire, the chance to spread the Light of Orthodox values, beyond the artifices of left and right, throughout itself and around the world, protecting Orthodoxy (as today in the Holy Land) and founding new independent Local Churches. However, for this to take place, the Russian Federation first still needs to restore in full its own sovereignty, that is, to wean itself off its post-1917 dependency on the Western world. This is only possible through referring to its pre-Imperial past in the spiritual Empire of ‘Rus’, before the Imperial Peter I and the Westernizers.

Russia knows that it is only part of this spiritual or Orthodox Rus, which was once even called Holy. Indeed, today’s Rus still consists of five parts: Great Rus (the Russian Federation); Little Rus (most of the north-west and central region of today’s ‘Ukraine’); White Rus (Belarus); Carpatho-Rus (the main part of which is still under occupation and is called by its Kievan occupiers ‘Transcarpathia’; and ‘Rus Outside Russia’. This is the rest of the Russian Orthodox world, in places as far apart as Japan and Latvia, China and Iran, Thailand and Lithuania, Latin America and Tunisia, Kazakhstan and the Philippines, Estonia and Central Asia, North America and Indonesia, Western Europe and Australia. Indeed, there is even a special part of the Russian Church, called the ‘Church Outside Russia’ to look after Russian Orthodox in these last four Western-controlled regions.

Russia’s Fifth Column

Sovereign Russia’s existence has always been challenged by its traitors, humiliated by their Western-imposed inferiority complex; princes from Western Rus bought out by Papal bribery and flattery in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; rationalizing judaizers in Novgorod; Kurbsky and greedy boyars and their Polish advisors who wanted power for themselves and whose first victim was Patriarch Nikon; Chaadayev and aristocrats (many of them ethnic Germans and masons with the title of baron), who became Decembrists in 1825 and their descendants who in 1905 wanted the victory of Japan and in 1917 showed ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’ (the martyred Tsar’s description of their traits) and implemented the Russian ‘Revolution’; oligarch-bandits (mainly Non-Russians) of the 1990s; and today’s fifth column of egoistic ‘liberals’ and ‘pro-Westerners’, orchestrated from the US Embassy in Moscow. These are the Euroatlanticists, the playthings of the Western Powers and they are entirely unprincipled. And they are still powerful in today’s Russia, largely controlling banking, the media and education.

All these traitors have always desperately wanted to be accepted by the West, but they never have been, except as what they are – traitors. The West has only ever used the greed and vanity of traitors as that of ‘useful idiots’ like Litvinenko, Berezovsky or Nemtsov. Believing in nothing except themselves, they are worthy of the maxim of Martin Luther King: ‘If you do not believe in something worth dying for, then you are not fit to live’. Together with these traitors there are other involuntary traitors, the narrow Nationalists and ‘National Bolsheviks’, who on account of their divisive chauvinism also tend to act as ‘useful idiots’ for the West. Although a few of them may be paid by the CIA, MI6 and Mossad, most are simply so enamoured by the vanity of their divisive and sectarian ideologies that they do not need to be paid at all. They cannot see the wood for the trees. Ironically, ‘ultra-Orthodox’ ‘Catacomb’ Orthodox like Nazarov and even thinkers like Dushenov and Dugin sometimes fall into this error of involuntary treachery, which would shock them if they realized it.

Having sold out the sovereignty, that is, spiritual independence, of Russia to Western materialism in 1917, that sovereignty has begun to be regained only since the miracle of 2000 – since the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors, that is, the canonization of all who have resisted Western materialism in death and in life. For they witnessed and witness to eternal and spiritual values, the values that are independent of this world. The restoration of Russia as a sovereign power promises sovereignty for all Eurasia, east and west, and calls to sovereignists in China and Western Europe alike: Join us and refind your sovereignty, independence and freedom from the common enemy – the Neocon Empire (see below). The salvation of real European patriots, as also real of real American patriots, whom we entirely respect, is in the hands of the present Russian attempt to restore its sovereignty and the values of civilizations based on religion and tradition, that is, based on spiritual independence.

Russia’s Allies: Real Islam, China and the Non-Western World

Since Peter I the Russian elite class, whatever its name, aristocracy, intelligentsia or oligarchy, has looked to the West. In other words, it looked in the opposite direction to its homeland and people. Given the multiple barbaric Western invasions and aggressions of the Russian Lands, from the Teutonic Knights to the Swedes, from the Poles to the hordes of Napoleon, from the Anglo-French-Islamist Crimean War to the Kaiser and NATO, passing through the 27 million dead left by the Fascist Germans and their allies, the foolishness of that elite class is apparent to all – except to itself. It is clear that the single and selfsame battle-standard of the West, Catholicism-Protestantism-Secularism, is not at all close to the Church and her Orthodox Tradition. Indeed, it appears that in many respects genuine Islam is much closer than it.

This may seem surprising, but it should not. The facts of history speak for themselves. Russia has always lived with a substantial Muslim minority, centred to its east. That minority did not launch blood-soaked ‘crusades’ against Russia, it did not burn down and pillage monasteries and churches and martyr those inside them like crusaders, it actually fought together with St Alexander Nevsky against the barbaric feudal knights. Amazingly, some of the best allies of Orthodoxy today are Iranian Shia Muslims, Sufis and traditional Sunnis (all totally different from the Islamists of Syria, Kosovo and Bosnia). The proof of this is not only in the common support for the traditional family or the way that Churched Russian women and nuns and traditional Muslim women dress and behave, but also, practically, in the Caucasus and in Syria, where Orthodox and traditional Muslims are allied together against the Western-financed, -trained and -armed terrorists of the pseudo-Muslim IS.

However, Russia also has friends throughout what was once called the ‘Third World’, whether it is in the Eurasian Economic Union, Latin America, Africa, Iran, in Buddhist lands (also closer to Orthodoxy in some respects than the Non-Orthodox West) and, above all, in China – in other words, in well over half the world. The new alliance between Russia and China, forced on Russia by the recent extreme Western aggression on its NATO-threatened borders in Eastern Europe and in the collapsing Ukraine and the US-installed Nazi regime in Kiev, is especially significant. It means that Russian natural resources and technological know-how are being exchanged in local currencies (not in petrodollars) for Chinese manufactured goods. Russia, China, India and the majority of the world stand united together against Neocon imperialism and colonialism.

2. The Neocon Empire

A photograph showing President Obama and the other leaders of the Western G-7 huddled together in Hitler’s former villa outside Munich last June symbolizes their total isolation from the Russian Orthodox world and its allies. They represent what can today be called ‘the Neocon Empire’, the contemporary financial, political and military secularist empire of the Western world, now centred in Washington, but before in London. The photo shows how the Neocon dictators had to shut themselves away from a large Western city, as usual, out of fear of popular protest. The politically correct Neocons are in reality intellectual terrorists (they call themselves ‘liberals!’), they are the modern-day Trostkyists who spread international terror and anarchy through their Nazi, Zionist and Islamist activities. Their plutocratic Empire, based on the dictatorship of banking capital, secularism and military violence, and urged on by their demonic masters, is utterly hostile to the Russian civilizational model that is based on voluntary collaboration, religion and tradition. The Neocon Empire is therefore opposed to all traditional civilizations worldwide.

These ‘progressive’, self-appointed ‘leaders of humanity’ kill millions of babies every year in their abortion holocaust. They illegally seize power in other countries in order to strip them of their natural and human resources. And this they do with virtual impunity, beneath the cover of the corporate media of their propaganda machine. There toil the regime-paid media stooges, such as those locally who write their laughable, tabloid articles for The Times and The Daily Telegraph or who ‘report’ for the BBC, whose voices only the brainwashed heed. Since the early 1980s, when they first started to come to power in the USA, the Neocons have run a Gulag, in which nearly one per cent of US adults are now locked up, and nearly another two per cent are on parole or probation – nearly 7,000,000 people in all. At exactly the same time, from about 1982, the Neocons began to indebt the USA (and other Neocon-ruled countries) through ludicrous militaristic projects and filling their own pockets, a debt now standing at 19 trillion dollars in the USA. This will never be paid off. Outside North American countries, which were stolen by the slaughter of the tens of millions of their native inhabitants who had lived there for thousands of years before they were so cruelly ‘discovered’, the next colonial bastion of the Neocon Empire is the EU of Western Europe.

The takeover of Western Europe began in 1916 when a bankrupt Great Britain was bailed out by the transnational bankers in the new capital of the elite, New York. Then, anti-English figures in Britain like Milner and Balfour seized power behind the scenes in London. This virtual coup d’etat led to Britain becoming the European base for the then New-York-based elite and later led to the US invasion of mainland Europe in 1944. This in turn led to the takeover of Germany in 1945, forcing all German leaders to take an oath of allegiance to the USA (similar to the situation in US-occupied, nuclear-devastated Japan) and the takeover of France by the CIA coup which ousted the anti-NATO French leader de Gaulle in 1968. This was an act of regime change, as the US regularly also practised in its mafia-ridden Italy after 1945; De Gaulle had to go, for he had refused to celebrate the US D-Day invasion of France, seeing that invasion as a US occupation, and he had also defied NATO.

The Patriotic Resistance

The EU is today a project that is dying from its own hubris. That hubris has led it to create and impose the euro and expand imperialistically to Eastern Europe, trying to absorb countries with a spiritually living culture that can never be absorbed by the EU’s secularist straitjacket of death. It was difficult enough for its original lapsed Catholic core acting under US orders to take over rebellious, post-Protestant Britain and Scandinavia; Norway, Iceland and Switzerland it never tried. But even in Western Europe national resistance or sovereignist movements, of both left and right, are now fighting for freedom, and with Russian support. And large minorities in EU-ravaged Greece and Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania, Hungary and Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, all countries that in some way or other defied Hitler’s Third Reich, now also defy the EU Fourth Reich. On the other hand, Croatia and the Baltic States, with their puppet American governments of today, were countries that generally neither defied Hitler’s Third Reich, nor today’s EU Fourth Reich.

As the EU’s power-crazed elite tries to take over Christian Montenegro and Macedonia, Serbia and Moldova, they are finding spiritual resistance all the greater. However, the bridge too far is the EU attempt to seize power in the Ukraine, a fictional country invented by Popes and Jesuits. Its far western, Galician inhabitants also welcomed Hitler’s Third Reich, which recruited two SS divisions there, and so who now also welcome the EU Fourth Reich. Urged on by its pro-Galician US masters, the EU created catastrophe in the Ukraine, awakening the Galician nationalist demons of the 1940s. With blood on its hands, the EU promised what it can never deliver, raising false hopes among a people sorely tried for over twenty years by corrupt, Western-backed oligarchs. Now the junta that the Neocon Empire set up in Kiev is responsible for the genocide of its own people on a massive scale. It is clear that once this EU adventure is over – and that may be very soon – the people of the Ukraine will have to ensure the denazification of Kiev and of the Galician Uniats who were given power by the immoral Neocons.

However, resistance to Neocon colonization and exploitation is also coming from elsewhere. In Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and above all in war-torn Syria, there are many who also want decolonization. The case in Syria is at present the most significant. War began there as a result of attacks from pseudo-Muslim Islamists, trained by the CIA in NATO-controlled Turkey (which despite its civil war the fanatics are now urging to invade Syria) and financed by fanatical Neocon allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and quite probably Israel. The Syrian people strongly resisted, which was totally unexpected by the Neocon elite. Now they are being aided by the Russian Air Force, which is fighting to keep the Christian presence in the Middle East, despite Neocon opposition, their lies about it doing harm and despite Turkish violence and invasion threats. Nevertheless, as a result of Neocon meddling, millions and millions of wretched Syrians have had to seek refuge in neighbouring countries, now as far as Western Europe, whose peoples are also having to pay the price for Neocon policies.

The Neocon Allies: Nazism, Zionism, Islamism and LGBT

We come now to the allies of the Neocon Empire. First of all, there are the Nazis, who, however ironic it may sound, are just like the Zionists. (For we use the latter word in the sense of racist supremacists who want global domination, which is what the Neocons want. This has nothing to do with the Jews, for most Neocons are of course not Jews, just as very many Jews are anti-Zionists). As for the Nazis, they have always claimed that they are racially superior to all others: that is why they can in their eyes be eradicated by Neocon weapons of mass destruction. (The only WMD in Iraq were those taken and used there by the invading Neocon forces). The Western Empire always supported the Nazi sadists, giving them shelter after World War II, whether they were German (like the war criminal Werner von Braun), Croat (like Stepinac, whom they have beatified!!!) or Galician (‘Ukrainian’) sadists. (It is precisely the descendants of the latter who today are active in promoting and supporting the Nazi regime in Kiev).

Secondly, there are the pseudo-Muslims, known as ‘Islamists’. An invention of the CIA in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Islamists included the US-trained Saudi terrorist Bin Laden. It was he and the Saudis who attacked the USA on 9/11 and yet the US elite refused to invade Saudi Arabia and change its barbaric regime. Perhaps because the Neocons already control Saudi oil and gas? Traditional, religious Muslims are not addicted to violence and do not commit suicide. These evil fanatics, who have existed at many points in Muslim history, for example as Ottoman janissaries, are not Muslims, they are Islamists. In other words, they have no more interest in religion than the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ terrorists of Northern Ireland – they are pseudo-religious thugs, motivated only by banditry, egoism, sadism and power politics. And these terrorists, from Afghanistan to Kosovo, from Iraq to Tunisia, from Nigeris to the Sudan, from Bosnia to Syria, from Kenya to Mali, are being used as the shock-troops of the Neocon Empire.

However, the Neocons are not only allied with such sadists, but also with another dysfunctional group; those who designate themselves as LGBT. In history, sexual deformation, like plutocratic luxury, has always been associated with degeneracy, from Sodom to Ancient Greece, from Egypt to Rome, from the Renaissance Vatican to Paris, from pre-Revolutionary Russia (Yusupov and his ilk) to contemporary San Francisco. Such dysfunctional deformations are always the sign of the end of empire, they are always what happens just before empires collapse. We only have to look at the prevalence of another sexual deformation and also crime – pedophilia – in the present British Establishment. It is LGBT-ism which is now being aggressively used by the Neocon Empire as cultural imperialism and homosexual colonialism in order to corrupt and degenerate healthy societies worldwide.

Conclusion: The Coming Collapse of the Neocon Empire

More and more people all over the world and of all political views, not least in Western countries themselves, are now consciously calling for regime change in the US and the EU. They want to say good-bye to dictatorship, to the Neocon oligarchic plutocracy and its myth of democracy. The Western world today very strangely, but very closely, resembles the USSR in the 1970s, just before its dissolution. Inside the Soviet Union we saw then that although the ruling ideology was Communism, nobody believed in it, so, as Solzhenitsyn said, all lived a lie through fear. The collapse of the USSR came about not because of history’s puppets like Reagan or the CIA’s Polish Pope, but precisely because nobody believed in its lie any more.

Naked egoistic self-interest, the degenerate grab for money and power, is no policy for long-term survival, and yet that is the policy of the Neocons. The Soviet Union that was dissolved was replaced by the European Union. And that is why it too will be dissolved and for the same reason – nobody believes in it. Thus, the collapse of the Neocon Empire is coming, just as the collapse of the USSR came, for nobody believes in it any more either. For no empire lasts – all empires are always killed by their own hand, the hand of hubris. The present suicide of the EU makes this clear; the Empire does not have long to live and its collapse is inevitable. We should now be looking ahead, preparing for the aftermath of the Neocon Empire and its replacement.

Patriarch and Pope to Meet in Cuba on 12 February

It has been announced today in the Third Rome and also in Old Rome that Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Pope are to meet briefly at Havana Airport in Cuba on 12 February. This meeting will take place during the Patriarch’s long-awaited eleven-day pastoral visit to the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Latin America, notably to Cuba, Brazil and Paraguay.

This high-level trip, involving visits to the political leaders of all three countries follows repeated invitations. The 15,000 strong Russian Orthodox flock in Cuba will especially greet our Patriarch, but the Patriarch will also recognize the important role played by Russian Orthodox in Paraguay before the Second World War and in Brazil over the last 100 years. However, beyond pastoral matters, this is also clearly a brilliant diplomatic move – for five reasons:

Firstly, it upstages and sidelines the absurd claims of the tiny Patriarchate of Constantinople to make out that it is somehow the ‘leader’ of the Orthodox world, whereas in reality it is fifty times smaller than the Russian Orthodox Church! It also ends the Phanariot myth that only it can represent the Orthodox Church at the Vatican, the real, de facto, leader of the Orthodox Church is Patriarch Kyrill. There will be anger at the Phanar, as it realizes that after nearly 100 years of trying to monopolize attention its diplomatic end has come.

Secondly, this is clearly a move aimed at further undermining the ridiculous pretensions of the sectarian Ukrainian Uniats, who have done so much and are still doing so much to encourage aggression and hatred towards Ukrainian Christians in the civil war that they have fostered in the Ukraine. They will be extremely worried that their official leader, the Pope of Old Rome, is in fact renouncing them and their psychotic Russophobia.

Thirdly, this meeting marks the enormous concern of the Russian Orthodox Church for Orthodox and other Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, who have been abandoned by the West, which has also abandoned the Papacy. Only the Russian Federation has substantially intervened in the war in Syria to bolster the majority there against the Western-trained, armed and financed terrorist movements intent on genocide, as has been made clear by Catholic leaders in the Middle East. Notably, during his visit, Patriarch Kyrill will lead the service at the Syrian Cathedral in San Paulo.

Fourthly, this meeting is taking place outside Europe in the course of a pastoral visit by the Russian Orthodox Patriarch to Latin America. This marks the internationalization of the Russian Orthodox world before the rest of the world. Having settled many of the outstanding problems of the Church inside the Russian Federation and brought numbers of bishops up to 361 and of clergy to 40,000 from the pitiful few 25 years ago, the Patriarch is now looking further afield outside Eastern Europe and the Federation. The second generation of renewal can begin. We can now expect that the Patriarch will make other high-profile visits to the more distant territories of the Russian Orthodox Church, including, God willing, to ourselves.

And finally, this meeting on the US doorstep, specifically in independent and sovereign Cuba, also marks the fact that the uncompromised Orthodox world does not recognize the globalist power grab of the Neocon Empire based in Washington. This move against the New world Order is an outstretched hand to the independent peoples of the world – the vast majority – in an unprecedented missionary endeavour. We cannot but welcome it.

Some Autobiographical Notes

I have been asked a number of questions about how, coming from a simple, earthy English background in rural England, I came to be a Russian Orthodox priest of the Church Outside Russia. Making use of some unexpected time this week, I have looked back through some old papers which I had forgotten and can now answer those questions with some dates.

Q: How did you come to the Russian Church?

A: After a countryside childhood strangely filled with interest in faraway Russia, I started teaching myself Russian in October 1968. I was told to do so in a particular spot in Colchester, which I could take you to now, by a voice heard coming, brought as it were by a wind from the east. So I began to read a lot of Russian literature in translation and Russian history. Two years later, in 1970, I had decided that I wanted to be part of the Russian Church and had begun reading as much as I could to find out about it (very little was available at that time). However, it was only after my sixteenth birthday that I managed to visit Russian churches.

Q: Where? In London?

A: No, my family never went to London, which we always looked on as a different planet, ‘the smoke’ as we still called it. The countryside was our home. I won a bursary and at the end of February 1973 I managed to visit a Russian church in England. This was the tiny Russian Patriarchal house chapel in Oxford, where I prayed at vespers on two successive Saturdays. Then in the same year I won another bursary to visit the then Soviet Union; in fact the first church I visited there was St Vladimir’s Cathedral in Kiev. As I entered those churches, I knew that I wanted to be part of their inner life and that this was my destiny, the whole meaning of my life, regardless of all the barriers that would be put in front of me. I felt that I had always been here, that this was in my blood. (Only in 2004 did I discover any possible though very distant explanation in a Carpatho-Russian great-grandmother – my mother’s mother’s mother). At the end of 1973 I also managed to visit the Patriarchal Cathedral in London, of which I had heard. ROCOR then had no existence outside itself, being largely unknown to the outside world, at least in England.

Q: Which part of the Russian Church did you join?

A: As soon as I was free to do so at the age of 18, in 1974, I asked to join the Russian Church. Of course, there were two parts then. Firstly, I met two representatives of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), who solemnly informed me that I would not be allowed to join their Church since it was in any case ‘for Russians only’. I also met other, rather fanatical and sectarian individuals from ROCOR, who completely turned me away. I therefore took the only option left to me and joined the Patriarchal Church, presuming that this was identical to the Church that I had seen in Russia and the Ukraine.

However, I very soon found out that the small Oxford Patriarchal parish was dominated by two opposing clans – on the one hand, by haughty Parisian-type modernists, and, on the other hand, by Soviet chauvinist nationalists, for whom the Communist Party could do no ill! I gave myself spiritual life by reading Russian theological books I ordered from Jordanville and elsewhere. Visiting Soviet Russia for a second time in 1976 and spending time there, I saw again how the real Russian Church was different from the Oxford cliques. In 1977 a priest I had met in Russia the year before suggested that I study at the Moscow Theological Academy. I would very much like to have done that, but at the height of the Cold War this was absolutely impossible. That was tragic.

Q: What did you do?

A: I did the next best thing and in 1978 went to live and work in Thessaloniki in Greece for one year. Here, I saw how traditional the ethos could be, quite different from the Church of Constantinople, which I had seen in England, but also, unfortunately, I saw narrow Balkan nationalism and came across the semi-Protestant Zoe and Sotir organizations – closer to Methodism than Orthodoxy! However, I also visited Mt Athos and was especially influenced by Fr Ephraim at Philotheou and the very poor and heroic monks at the Russian St Panteleimon’s Monastery. I remember especially Fr Seraphim, Fr Misail (who wanted me to join the monastery and be the librarian) and the choir director from Odessa. These were real, exemplary Orthodox. It was at this point that I decided that I should go and study at a Russian seminary.

Since I had been told (in fact lied to) that Jordanville only accepted Russians, I took the only option left and went to St Serge in Paris. (The two ‘seminary’ establishments of the OCA held no interest for me since they were both on the Catholic/Protestant calendar and deviated in other ways from the ethos and practice of the Russian Church inside Russia. I knew enough from talking to people who had been to them and from my visits to Russia to understand that they were not right for me. I wanted the real thing).

Q: What happened next?

A: I went to study at St Serge in Paris. There I experienced the battle royal between the two factions in Paris at that time. The first, led by Protopresbyter Alexis Knyazev, a wonderful teacher, was the pro-Russian one that was clear-sighted enough to see that the only future was to rejoin the Russian Church, but on some autonomous basis.

The second group, the Fraternite Orthodoxe, led basically by the Jesuit-educated Count, Fr Boris Bobrinskoy, notorious for having celebrated the liturgy in a Catholic convent with the filioque (!) – so as ‘not to offend our Catholic brethren’, was virtually composed of Uniats. Other members included the fantasist and Athos-hater Olivier Clement and a Georgian priest who spent his time extolling the Second Vatican Council. I soon gave up going to their courses. The modernist and manipulative Fraternite was populated by patronizing aristocrats and fantasist ideologues who preyed on naïve Catholics and converts. Descendants of those who had carried out the Revolution, they absolutely hated Russia and had no intention of ever returning to the sobriety and discipline of the Russian Church. Naturally, I supported the first group which alone was authentic and also realistic.

These two groups depended on the Rue Daru bishop, the weak, elderly but saintly Archbishop George (Tarasov). The Fraternite was clearly waiting for him to die and then seize power, which they only managed to do in full twenty years later. Members of the Fraternite, some soon to become priests, used to hiss, mock and boo Archbishop George publicly. It was awful. I believe that Archbishop George, a former WWI Russian pilot from the Western Front, was a saint. Had he been in good health and lived another fifteen years, he would have returned the group to the Russian Church with the status of an autonomous Metropolia.

Q: Where did you go after St Serge?

A: Having met my wife, who is basically of Anglo-Italian-Romanian origin, and married in Paris, we returned to England. We stayed here for three years, trying to find some sort of balanced spiritual life between the extremes of the pseudo-Patriarchal Church and the Church Outside Russia, with their cliques which were not Churchly at all, quite different from the Church inside Russia, which I had seen in 1972 and 1976, and again at St Panteleimon’s on Mt Athos.

Having discovered the scandalous truths about the extremists dominating both groups in England, we returned disillusioned to France and my wife’s jurisdiction (Rue Daru). Here the new German Archbishop had personally promised us that he was going to steer the Church away from the modernist and ecumenist Fraternite Orthodoxe and back to Russian Orthodox Tradition, but using Western languages whenever necessary. Enthused by this sensible direction and the support of Fr Alexis Knyazev, who was still alive then, I was ordained in Paris in January 1985.

Q: What happened?

A: I had fallen from the frying pan into the fire. Within four months I was asked to become a freemason, which I refused to do, thus signing a kind of spiritual death warrant for myself. Through weakness of character, the new Archbishop had by then taken a suicidal path. He was ordaining freemasons and other members of the Fraternite, while also forbidding the use of local languages, doing exactly the opposite of everything he had promised. He was guaranteeing the death of Rue Daru, whose only hope for survival was in fact to return to one or other of the parts of the Russian Church.

So I surrendered to God’s Will. And in 1987 I was granted the grace of meeting the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, a representative of the real ROCOR, just waiting to return to a politically free Russian Church. Coming from Kiev, where I had first been to an Orthodox service, Archbishop Antony showed me the real, multinational ROCOR, which I had read about, but totally failed to meet in London with its nationalism and sectarianism. In July 1988, Rue Daru held a service in honour of the millennium of Orthodoxy in Rus, attended by the modernist Catholic Cardinal of Paris, but from which all Russian bishops had been banned!

It was the last straw and, thanks to God, Archbishop Antony gladly received a group of 17 of us spiritual refugees into ROCOR at the end of that year. This was actually a turning-point for the Rue Daru group, as ever since then the flow of serious Orthodox leaving it has not ceased, giving up the fight to save it. We now realize of course that that fight was impossible and we had undertaken it out of misplaced idealism. The well had been poisoned from the outset. It was also a turning-point for us, from which we have never looked back.

Q: Looking back, what would you do if you had your time again?

A: A purely hypothetical question. Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing. At the time I had no advice at all, except for very bad advice, and there was no internet. Today, there is no doubt in my mind at all that I should have studied in London and then, in 1977, gone and studied at Jordanville. However, if I had not done what I had done then, how could I know all this now? Only experience teaches.

If I had not done what I did do, I would never have understood the Church of Greece, I would never have met the saintly Archbishop George Tarasov, the heroic Archbishop Antony of Geneva and so many other saintly figures, like the last representatives of the real White Russian movement, Fr Silouan of Athos of the Patriarchate (the disciple of St Silouan), the wonderful Baroness Maria Rehbinder, that exquisite Parisian poetess Lyudmila Sergeevna Brizhatova, the last White officer Vladimir Ivanovich Labunsky, and so many others, the representatives of the real Holy Rus in all jurisdictions of the Russian emigration.

Neither would I ever have understood the tragic renovationist decadence and absurd Soviet nationalism within parts of the Patriarchate outside Russia at that time, the two sides of the suicidal Rue Daru jurisdiction (sadly, today there is largely only one side left) and how ROCOR was nearly enveloped by the marginal extremes of narrow Russian nationalist chauvinism and fanatical old calendarist converts, but saved by the holiness of Metropolitan Laurus and the many with him, who so exactly expressed our values in Holy Rus, Eternal Russia.

There is in even this short, forty-year experience a lifetime of joys and sorrows. I have been privileged to know it all. In that sense I do not regret anything, even though I have met many tragic individuals, seen much waste and many lost opportunities, and seen parts of the Russian Diaspora committing suicide through spiritual impurity. However, I have been even more privileged in that I have also seen the old and artificial disunity fall away and become heartfelt unity and so life in the dynamic present and future. The worst, and it was really bad, is over and the best is now and in the future. Over nearly the last twenty years Providence has allowed me to work freely for the Russian Orthodox Church in missionary work in my own homeland of the three counties of the East of England.

Orthodox England

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