Category Archives: Orthodoxy

The Universal Prayer for Peace

His Beatitude Daniel of Bucharest and All Romania has issued a prayer for peace, which is to be read on 24 August in all the Local Orthodox Churches and among Non-Orthodox who sincerely want peace. This date will mark three and half years, 1,277 days, of the latest phase in the tragic, fratricidal conflict taking place in the post-Soviet Ukraine. We have translated it into English and Slavonicised Russian and publish it below. On the eve of the discussions in Anchorage Alaska between the two belligerents, may this prayer come to be used by all who wish for peace. His Beatitude has performed a great service of mediation, which we hope all will follow.

O Lord Jesus Christ, our God, Who art the source of life and of peace in heaven and on earth, pour out the grace of Thy peace on the world troubled by war and hatred. Extinguish misunderstandings and strife between people, and pour humility, peace and goodness into the hearts of all. Calm the warlike and grant them wisdom. Give help to those who suffer, protection to refugees and exiles, and comfort to those who are estranged and saddened, and grant us all the will and strength to help with all our hearts our fellow men who suffer from war.  As Thou hast say: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God!  Teach us to seek peace in our hearts, peace between people and among the nations, as in hearts where there is peace, there is no more strife, love of power or fear, but the comfort of the Holy Spirit, the love of God and of our fellow human-beings. For this we humbly pray to Thee, O Christ our God, for peace among people in every land, for peace among the nations and for the good estate of the whole world, that we may live in good understanding and be able to do without let or hindrance deeds pleasing to Thee, glorifying the love of mankind of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages, Amen.

 

Господи Иисусе Христе, Боже наш, Источниче жизни и мира на небесах и на земле, излей благодать Твою на мир, охваченный войной и ненавистью. Устрани разногласия и погаси вражду между людьми и излей в сердца всех смирение, мир и благость. Усмири воинствующих и даруй им мудрость. Ниспосли помощь страждущим, защити беженцев и изгнанников, утеши оставленных и опечаленных, и даруй нам волю и силы всем сердцем помогать нашим ближним, страдающим от вражды. Ибо Ты сказал: «Блажени миротворцы, яко тии сынове Божии нарекутся»  Научи нас искать мира в наших сердцах, мира между людьми и народами, ибо в сердцах, в которых царит мир, больше нет ни раздоров, ни властолюбия, ни страха, но утешение Святого Духа, любовь к Богу и нашим ближним. Об этом мы смиренно молим Тя, Христе Боже наш: о мире между людьми в каждой стране, о мире между народами и о благосостоянии всего мира, чтобы мы жили во взаимопонимании и беспрепятственно совершали угодные Тебе дела, прославляя Человеколюбца Бога – Отца и Сына и Святого Духа, ныне и присно и во веки веков, Аминь.

Questions and Answers July 2025

The True Faith. The state of the various Orthodox jurisdictions in England today and fifty years ago. The moment when the Russian Church turned its back on Europe. The Oxford and London Russian parishes fifty years ago. Tsar Nicholas in England. The coming end of the war in the Ukraine. The consequent fall of the European elite and of its ideology versus Orthodoxy.

Q: What for you is the True Faith?

A: In my late childhood and early teenage years, I came to three conclusions about what must be the True Faith:

Firstly, the True Faith must be about Christ, as only Christ is God and man, combining East and West, North and South. The True Faith must therefore represent the spiritual reality of Him and not State manipulations of Religion and the Bible, based on nationalism, racism, imperialism, colonialism and all cultures of apostasy, like the White Supremacy Western world.

Secondly, the True Faith must be historical and not some recent invention, neither of the nineteenth century, nor of the sixteenth century, nor even of the eleventh century, for it must go back a thousand years before, to the Scriptures, to the Word of God Himself.

Thirdly, the True Faith must be universal, as is Christ. In other words, the True Faith must be for all races who seek it, accessible to all, that is, to all who are repentant and so seek Christ, and so is not some esoteric or obscurantist religion for one nationality, or for the select few or elite.

Q: Why did you not become members of the Antiochian Diocese when you left ROCOR in 2021, unlike the three Western riters who were purged by ROCOR and went to Antioch?

A: The short answer is that none of us twelve clergy, or any of our thousands of people, had ever been Anglicans, let alone Anglican vicars. You have to understand the Antiochian Diocese exists in this country for them. We have all always been Orthodox and have never known any other religion, so something for ex-Anglicans, however worthy and sincere they may be, has no interest for us. It is irrelevant to us.

Also, Antioch is not European, as we are, and cannot members of one of the four Arab families who operate it. The Church of Antioch here is tiny, consisting perhaps of only a thousand people, mainly ex-Anglicans or ex-Protestants, especially rather puritanical conservative evangelicals. (This puritanism is rather ironic given the behaviour of the former Antiochian Archbishop in the USA and also drives away normal Orthodox, who, like Arab Orthodox, are not puritans).

Another problem of Antioch being so small is that it is desperate to recruit clergy and people, with one recent disaster when they accepted a reject from the mainstream Churches, based in his front room in Liverpool, and another disaster, some years ago, in Belfast. I believe in the latter case that vicar-priest ended up in prison for fraud. Other Non-ex-Anglican clergy under Antioch eventually transfer back to the Local Churches they come from. They cannot take the Anglican mentality, however hard they try to deny their origins.

The long answer is that our first act after we learned, directly, (it was actually boasted of by the culprit!) of the ROCOR schism in April 2021 was to warn the ROCOR Synod of what was going on. As soon as we realised that the whole Synod in New York had been perverted into the new ROCOR, not leaving a shred of tradition and the old ROCOR, and misinformed, our second act was to report to Moscow. When they replied that, although they perfectly understood the insanity of the situation, for purely political reasons they could not receive us, our third act was to join the Paris Archdiocese under Moscow. This had largely been cleansed of liberal French intellectuals and we have many friends and family there.

After Paris was told by Moscow, which could not make up its mind at first, that it would not be allowed to keep us, as the Moscow aim was not to expand Paris but to close it down, our fourth act was to look at our other options. Although three different jurisdictions wanted us, the obvious and only correct option, which we adopted very quickly, was to go with our old friends in the Church of Romania. (Romania had been the original choice of the Paris Jurisdiction when they had quit Constantinople there years before, but occult forces had rejected that choice and it had joined Moscow. So we made the choice for them). The Romanian Church had been suggesting to us for years in case ROCOR turned schismatic and it was supported by Moscow for purely political reasons, we could transfer to them.

So we joined the Romanian Church with the tacit blessing of Moscow, and any other refugees who want to leave the schismatic ROCOR for the Romanian Church have been invited to do so too. We have simply paved the way for the others, who will follow us. The strangest thing about this was that there appeared a lie on the internet that the Romanian Church had not received us! There were actually people who believed this, though not in Moscow. But the lie only discredited him who invented it and those who believed it. Today the culprit for the lie is isolated, shunned and shamed as a liar.

Q: So Moscow is abandoning ROCOR behind their backs? Why did you not opt for the Russian or Greek Churches?

A: As I said, Moscow was not allowed to receive us for political reasons, even though it knew that ROCOR was engaged in its insane schism. As Moscow was not politically free (a very serious fault), it had to go along with the ROCOR schism. This was a turning point and next year, in 2026, all will see the significance of this. Later, Moscow was punished for this lack of principle and has since had to tolerate the recent horrible Russophobic attacks on the Moscow Patriarchate by both ROCOR bishops in Germany.

This is what happens when you compromise yourself with the positions of enemies of Church teaching, even if only once. It is a downward spiral, as you have to accept everything else they do later on. Moscow already regrets it, indeed it is the great loser in all of this, but that was its choice. It was clearly told what was going on, but Metr Antony Sevryuk suicidally rejected the warning and told us to join the Romanian Church. Thus, the Russian Church turned its back on Europe – I don’t think that even now he realises the scale and significance of his error. In one act he had handed over Western Europe, including the local Russians, to Romanian Orthodox jurisdiction.

As a result, the Moscow Diocese in this country is now programmed to become a small embassy ghetto, a dependency, with just its church in London and the small church in Oxford surviving, exactly as it was fifty years ago, the rest has literally been left to die out. Since the British Establishment, like the other Establishments in Europe, has blacklisted Moscow, Moscow has no hope of expansion or incarnation into Western society. Therefore, Moscow is for the time being closed down in Western Europe. There is no future for the Russian Church here. It has had to close its window on Europe, given European political hostility to it, and is looking towards Asia and Africa. It will take a generation for Moscow to turn back to Europe, if ever it does. 2022 will go down in Western European Church history as the moment when the Russian Church lost it.

As for the Greek Archdiocese, it has recently been renewed, as it was dying out. It now has several younger bishops, including one excellent one (if only he could be the next Patriarch!), still has excellent infrastructure and several big parishes in London and some outstanding priests, but it has huge problems. It is profoundly ethnically and politically Greek, compromised by its CIA Patriarch, and, like Antioch and the Moscow Church here, most of its priests are elderly and dying out.

As Archbishop Nikitas told us recently, he has 100 elderly priests to replace in the next ten years and only 3 candidates. It is now not possible to get lots of poorly-educated young archimandrites from Greece, like they did in the 60s and 70s. That source has dried up. Moreover, only one church, the newly-frescoed Thyateira chapel, actually belongs to the Greek Archdiocese. The others are all privately owned by Greek and Cypriot businessmen and restauranteurs, who do as they want.

Q: What then is the future of ROCOR?

A: In rejecting the mission of the Diaspora Church to gather all Orthodox together through its schism and racism towards Greeks, Romanians, Moldovans and rooted English Orthodox in particular, it refused to concelebrate with the mainstream and cut itself off from communion. It has instead concentrated on attracting extremists, the naïve, the vulnerable and the pathologically ill. This is the path of the sect and the cult. And that is what it has become.

Q: Did you know Fr Mark Meyrick and Metr Kallistos Ware?

A: Of course. I first met the then Fr Kallistos in September 1974. He was an old-style, upper middle-class High Church Anglican, with an incisive public school-trained intellect. I loved his lectures and learned a lot from him. But above all, he was a very kind and sincere man. I remember him and pray for him with gratitude, although I was on a quite different wavelength from him.

I first met Fr Mark in July 1976. The problem with Fr Mark, who came from a long line of Anglican vicars, is that he had chosen to live among Anglicans, cut off from the Orthodox mainstream. As a result, he had a tiny community in a Norfolk village, isolated from Orthodoxy. He mainly seemed to be interested in converting young Anglican men and encouraging them to grow extremely long beards! As I had no interest in either Anglicanism or long beards, that was not for me.

Fr Mark (later Archimandrite David), transferred from ROCOR to Moscow, I think, in 1981. This was because of the attempted Americanisation and sectarian fanaticisation of ROCOR, which began at that time and which ended in 2021 with the triumph of American convert ROCOR in Europe and its abolition as part of the mainstream. It is now an American crazy convert colony and has no future. Crazy convert Orthodoxy does not export, as it is culturally alien to Europeans.

Q: Are Orthodox bishops worse today than fifty years ago?

A: Absolutely not. Fifty years ago, I knew three of them. One was a homosexual bureaucrat who ordained his boyfriends. One of those he ordained became an alcoholic, another gave up the priesthood within two weeks. A second bishop was a lady’s man who spent time with his main mistress in a cottage on the south coast, or so I was told. I knew her. A third was an anthroposophist. So we decided to return to Paris, to people who knew the Tradition. Today’s crop of homosexuals and sociopathic narcissists created by being spoiled as children are no better, but also no worse.

Q: What do you remember of the University of Oxford in the 1970s and the Russian chapel, then inside the house in Canterbury Road in Oxford?

A: In those days (and I am told that it has not changed very much since then), there were three ways of getting into the University of Oxford as an undergraduate. In order of importance, these were: aristocratic privilege, wealth, and academic achievement. I was therefore automatically and distinctly third class from the outset. The first two types were there to complete their Norman education, so they could enter the Norman (British) Establishment.

Moreover, those aristocratic or wealthy types who had nearly always attended public schools were shockingly, to me an innocent aged 18, often suffered from Norman homosexuality, like William Rufus. Oxford was riddled with it. Another reason to keep well away. In any case, I was not there to enter the Norman Establishment, though many who had not been to public schools allowed it to happen to them, as they were venal careerists. I was there for exactly the opposite reason, to understand how to de-Normanise. By Divine Providence I studied in the Alfredian College, by tradition (even if not in reality), the only pre-Norman College in Oxford. All was right.

I attended the Russian chapel in Canterbury Road in October 1972 and again in February 1973, when I was sixteen, just before the modernistic, octagonal chapel was built in the garden. The old chapel inside the House is now the library, based on Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, which I helped put in there. That old chapel was charming.

On the other hand, the rather effete University chapel later built in the garden of 1, Canterbury Road was definitely not for the ordinary people of Oxford. The Serbs, who were ordinary people, kept well away, as did most of the Greeks. The few by then elderly Russian academics who were still alive went when they could to one or other of the two Russian churches in London.

Apart from the majority of normal people who went there, there were also wealthy Anglo-Catholic homosexuals, or else those who mistakenly thought that Church Tradition means the same as right-wing political conservatism.

Q: What was the London Russian Church in Ennismore Gardens like at the time fifty years ago in the mid-seventies? And the ROCOR Church?

A: The London Patriarchal church had been taken over by upper middle-class people from wealthy west London, owners of Cotswold cottages, villas in Tuscany or on Greek islands. These were intellectuals, Liberal Democrats, BBC directors, well-to-do academics, lawyers, journalists etc, so rich that they had the leisure time to be enthralled by ‘spirituality’, Orthodox or Buddhist, as spiritual tourists. In 2006 they left en masse for Constantinople, as their hero, Metr Antony Bloom, had died. He was the reason for them joining, so once he had gone, in 2004, it was all over. Their cliquish snobbery continues. Only five years ago I overheard one of these now elderly people saying about a very pious and simple Romanian man, who dared (once) to frequent his clubby (rented) church: ‘I hope he does not come back, but at least he has a degree’. Is that Christianity?

Fifty years ago the Emperor’s Gate ROCOR Church had twice as many people as the Bloomite church, but it was an old people’s home. Apart from two or three Anglican homosexuals, the average age of the parishioners, who were very nice, must have been about 80. The writing was on the wall. It was an ethnic club that had no future, as they had failed to pass on the Faith to their descendants.

Q: Is there anywhere you would go on to a pilgrimage to the Royal Martyrs in England?

A: There are two places: Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Sandringham in Norfolk. Of the two I much prefer Sandringham, which is connected with the Tsar. He is still present there and he dreamed of becoming a Norfolk gentleman-farmer, if ever he had to leave Russia. Things will happen here.

For your interest, here is a full list of the five visits of the Tsar to England, with places and dates:

In 1873 the future Tsar first visited Queen Victoria as a five-year old child. He arrived on the Imperial Yacht at Woolwich on 16 June, stayed at Marlborough House on the Mall, visited Chiswick House on 28 June and on 28 July left for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, staying at Albert Cottage. On 8 August he went to Cowes Regatta, leaving England on 13 August, having spent nearly two months in England.

He visited London at the end of June 1893, having been met at Charing Cross Station, and staying at Marlborough House again. He went to Windsor on 1 July, visited Hurlingham on 4 July and Buckingham Palace on 5 July, attending the wedding of the future King George V on 6 July. He left the next day, having spent just over a week in England.

He arrived on 20 June 1894 to meet the future Tsarina. He arrived at Gravesend in Kent and travelled to Walton-on-Thames via Waterloo Station. He also visited Frogmore, Bagshot, Sandringham, Kings Lynn, London, Eton, Slough, Farnborough, Aldershot and Richmond-on-Thames. On 19 July he left for Portsmouth to cross to Osborne House and Albert Cottage, visiting Newport. He left on 23 July, after over a month in England.

1896 was his first visit as Tsar, with the Tsarina and the Grand Duchess Olga. They arrived at Leith on 22 September and went to Balmoral by train via Ballater. Here he visited Braemar Castle. He then travelled by train via Preston and Oxford, taking the Imperial Yacht at Portsmouth on 3 October.

On Monday 2 August 1909 the Tsar and his family visited Cowes on the Isle of Wight for the Regatta. He stayed at Osborne House, visiting Barton Manor and leaving on 5 August, having given £1,000 to be distributed among the island’s poor.

Q: When will the war in the Ukraine end?

A: This US proxy war against Russia (as Marco Rubio has openly described it) is a war of attrition. First, the Russians ground down first the first Ukrainian Army, then the second Ukrainian Army with old Soviet equipment from Eastern Europe, and now it is finishing off the third Ukrainian Army, with its NATO equipment. Wars of attrition, like the American Civil War and the First and Second World Wars, can go on for years, but they always end very suddenly, as the Second War ended suddenly in Berlin.

We are now reaching that point in the Ukraine, as the Americans are getting rid of their actor-puppet Zelensky. He has got too big for his boots and is too corrupt, resists the puppet-master and has refused peace, which is want Trump wants. The end will come suddenly and, I think, fairly soon. This is why Trump gave him (not Putin) 50 days so Zelensky could be finished off. Either he will get out on a CIA plane or else he will finish with a bullet in his head. When will Kiev collapse? The German-led, Pan-European invasion of the USSR in the Second World War lasted three years and eleven months. So maybe the end to this war will come within the same time span. At present it has lasted three years and five months.

The only danger is that NATO may invade Russia, as it has threatened, then that will be full war. That is possible, if the crazies in NATO have their way. If so, they will be crushed, as NATO has already been demilitarised by Russia. Russia has defeated all the Western Coalitions that invaded it, that of Napoleon, that in the Crimea, that of Hitler, and now this American-led NATO one.

Q: What will happen to Western Europe, once it has been defeated in the Ukraine?

A: The consequences of the defeat of the Western puppet government in Kiev, created and used as a proxy battering ram against Russia, and so the defeat of the whole of NATO, will be tremendous. The West will never get its money back. Worse still, it will never get its prestige back. The West has gone, replaced by the multipolar BRICS world. This will feed through and the old governing elites in Europe will have to be replaced.

This is because all empires decline in depravity and perversion (from Roman emperors to the debauched King Edward VII and now the Mossad-Epstein orgies) or buffoonery (the leaders of Western Europe and Kiev today, if they are not also pedophiles and cocaine addicts). Decadence comes at the end and with it a total lack of sense of reality, as buffoons live in virtual reality, fantasy, just as Hitler did at the end. We can see this clearly in the last 35 years of US leaders, from Clinton-Lewinsky to Obama, ending with the demented Biden and the world’s greatest narcissist, the result of a materially spoilt childhood, Trump.

Q: Do you think that Europe could return to Orthodoxy?

A: Europe, no, but a small portion of Europeans, yes. In the Romanian Church we are preparing for this literally, as you will see next year. We already have ten bishops in the twenty-one countries of Western Europe and a flock of nearly five million. One of those bishops is French, all speak at least one Western European language, if not two or three.

Moreover, our bishops also have a conscience of the importance of the veneration of the local saints of Western Europe. This is unique. I remember the fierce and insulting opposition of the ROCOR bishops to their veneration until 2017, when they finally realised that the tide was too strong for them to swim against any longer and then they stopped persecuting me on that score at least.

It is clear that we are moving towards a post-American Europe, the post-1945 part of the history of Western Europe is over. The American invasion and occupation will soon end. Its old puppet governments, in the UK, Germany, France and elsewhere, will fall. And Eurasia, Russian, India, China, India and Iran, north, south, east and west, the centres of the Heartland, are now co-operating in BRICS. Thus, the Western world, which was formed in the eleventh century has after a thousand years made itself spiritually irrelevant.

Q: Are the media censored in the UK?

A: Yes. The name of the official censor is Ofcom, but censorship relies above all on editorial control. Here news editors are appointed to carry out the censorship duties imposed by the State/Establishment and journalists who are completely mercenary, ‘presstitutes’ as they say. The BBC is a classic case of such censorship, of deliberate non-reporting, deliberate misreporting, and diversion (reporting irrelevant local stories of no interest instead of reporting the actual news).

 

 

 

 

Papism and Protestantism as Infantile and Fascist Deviations from the Church

Foreword: Psychopathology and Fascism

Most Orthodox Christians love God and love their neighbour as ourselves. That is to say, we respect ourselves because we know that, despite our sins, we know that God made us. Those with low self-esteem, usually those who were abused in some way in childhood, belong to the realm of psychiatry, for they do not respect themselves. They are not necessarily humble, they are humiliated – and humble and humiliated are very different things, Interestingly, cult-leaders deliberately confuse the two and use that confusion to manipulate or ‘gaslight’ their victims. Those with high self-esteem, in everyday English, the proud, often from a wealthy background, seek power and domination over others, through politics or religion and, in terms of psychopathology, suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissists are always paranoid and Fascist, regardless of whether they are ‘Democrats’, ‘Christians’, ‘Nazis’ or ‘Communists’.

Introduction

Now, narcissism is precisely the most common Western spiritual disease today. Narcissism is an offshoot of the insecurity of infantility, but it is very common in materialistic or relatively wealthy Western societies. It is a result of a lack of physical suffering which causes immaturity, which is encouraged by the spoilt culture of social media, Instagram, Facebook, Tik-Tok etc. Narcissism is characterised by their insistence on a sort of ‘Papal’ infallibility, ‘I am always right’ and ‘I am superior’, as seen precisely in spoilt children. They insist that they are always right, as they are the centre of the world, which owes them its entire devotion, and they lie to and deal out harsh punishments to those who disagree with them. This sense of entitlement and vanity demands that the narcissist must constantly have his ego massaged. He is ‘right’ in a very authoritarian way (Trump and Blair are the most obvious examples).

The Roman Catholic Deviation of Authority

Historically, Papism has been a local disease of religious authority or rather of religious authoritarianism, which proclaims: ‘All truth comes from me, for I am the Head of the Church’. Papism, historically originating in the pagan Roman Emperors who had themselves worshipped as gods and mediators, is dogmatically closely connected with and justified by the later filioque dogma, which reinforces Papism precisely by dogmatising it. The filioque claims that the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father, does not pass through or irradiate the Son of God, but actually originates in the Son of God. Now, once the Pope of Rome claimed to replace the Son of God as ‘the Vicar of Christ’, this means that the Pope of Rome, purporting to be the source of the Holy Spirit, and so supplanted Christ, has absolute authority, infallibility. This is clearly a spiritual deviation or heresy and has absolutely no foundation in the Gospels.

However, there are Orthodox Patriarchs who also seem to claim absolute authority (they know their names, we do not need to repeat them here). They claim that they can supplant Church Councils, which are the real practical organs of authority in the Church, providing that those Councils are inspired by the Holy Spirit. We must recall that by no means all Councils are inspired, as we saw at the Robber Council in Crete in 2016. For the source of authority is the Holy Spirit, Who operates through the Church, the Body of Christ, Whose Head is Christ. The Holy Spirit wrote the Holy Scriptures and inspires Tradition, which are identical, as their origin is identical. With their filioque spirit, for instance, some Orthodox claim that if their particular Patriarch is not mentioned by name in any particular church, it is not Orthodox, but schismatic or heretical. This may not be systematic, institutionalised, dogmatised filioquism, but it is no less filioquism.

We can see this today in the Ukraine, the Baltic States and Moldova, where because of local State Russophobia and centralised Moscow’s refusal to grant autocephaly to the Local Church in those countries, the Russian Patriarch may not be mentioned by name during services. Therefore, racist fanatics in Russia reckon that those Churches are not Orthodox, but schismatic! These unloving people would deprive tens of millions of Orthodox of salvation. These are the ‘Orthodox’ Papists, who replace the Holy Spirit with a mere Patriarch. They seem to forget that in the majority of Orthodox Churches, the Russian Patriarch (or any other Patriarch) is not mentioned by name in services. Such is the racist ignorance of these nominal Orthodox, that they do not even know that there are other Local Churches, whose Patriarch is not mentioned at services or who do not even have a Patriarch to mention, but a Metropolitan or an Archbishop.

The Protestant Deviation of Salvation by Baptism

Rather like the submission to Islam, the simple confession of Protestantism is said by many to mean at once that ‘You are saved’. This over-simplicity, the idea that a few words mean salvation, is a reaction to the Papist deviation which declares that a few words of submission to Papism also mean salvation. In reality, it is not so simple, we are saved by the mercy of God, not by Papist or Protestant sets of words and formulas. However, in Protestantism, this idea of salvation leads to the Protestant obsession with baptism. Although in reality baptism is only the beginning of salvation, for the Protestant deviation baptism is salvation. This is why fundamentalists, including so-called ‘converts’ to Orthodoxy from Protestant backgrounds, are obsessed with literalism and forms of baptism. They imagine that this makes them ‘Super-Orthodox’, more Orthodox than the Orthodox! It is all a very Protestant, ‘OneTrueChurch’ reflex.

This is a very unloving and censorious viewpoint, typical of very conservative Calvinism and Lutheranism, and like all views which have no love, they soon become heretical. The heresy here is that such ‘Super Orthodox’ deny the Orthodox sacraments of those received into the Church by economy by chrismation or by simple confession, sacraments which those received may have been taking for years. Ironically, it is these ‘Super Orthodox’ who are the real Papists! Thus, such are ‘filioquists’, for they supplant the Holy Spirit with themselves. These quenchers of the Holy Spirit will deny even the validity of emergency baptism of babies in hospital. Another example: if you are dying in a desert and your companion is not baptised, you can baptise him with the liquid in your mouth. Baptism is the only sacrament that laypeople can perform, is accessible to all and with water, the most common liquid on earth.

Another example: There is a well-known story about a 19th century Russian priest who discovered to his horror that because of a snowstorm and a resulting misunderstanding when he had been about to be baptised as a baby, he had not been baptised. The case was referred to Metr (now St) Philaret of Moscow (1782-1867). He declared that all the sacraments performed by that priest were valid, for the grace of the Holy Spirit is in all the sacraments, not just in one. The priest’s status was validated by the sacraments of confession, communion, marriage and ordination which he had received. It is for this reason of a literalist and formal rite that Protestants are forever counting the number of baptised and how many people go to church each Sunday. However, we Orthodox are the baptised who go to Church because we need spiritual support. Orthodoxy is in our values and so in our way of life, not in a Sunday formality or ritual.

Conclusion

We draw the obvious conclusion that you do not have to be a Papist or a Protestant to make errors or to wish to dominate. It is just that in Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, these errors of self-centred authoritarianism and the narcissistic dogmatisation of error, the lack of love, are systematised and institutionalised, because they are dogmatised. However, by no means all Roman Catholics or Protestants consciously confess these errors; most have never heard of the filioque and do not agree with the institution that they supposedly belong to. Systematised errors are called wrong choices or ‘heresies’. However, this does not excuse Orthodox, often ‘converts’, who do the same thing and indeed do worse. They should know better. Sadly, we know many an Orthodox bishop and some priests who fall into these errors of authoritarian exclusivity, which are sectarianism and cultishness – heresy.

 

 

Translation of an Interview with the Russian Chrisma Church Website

Bright Tuesday 22 April 2025

https://t.me/s/chrisma_center

 Part One: The Orthodox World and Inter-Orthodox Relations

How would you characterise the situation of the Orthodox world and of inter-Orthodox relations today? What are the main forces and factors influencing this situation?

In the fifty years that I have been a conscious Orthodox, I have never known such a situation. The Schism, indeed multiple schisms, between Local Orthodox Churches today are unprecedented. This is a crisis.

As you know this crisis began with the action of the Patriarch of Constantinople, whose Patriarchate  received $20 million from the CIA to set up a fake nationalist Church in Kiev, composed of gangsters and murderers. (In reality he only got $15 million, as $5 million ‘disappeared’ in Kiev. Someone has to pay for the villas and the Bentleys….).

The West has used either naïve or else mercenary Ukrainians, exploiting their sense of entitlement, for its purpose, which is to destroy Russia, so it can then plunder its resources, which it has valued at nearly $100 trillion. (The Ukraine itself is irrelevant to these Western war criminals). Setting up a fake Church and using Nazis in the Ukraine were merely parts of the Western operation to weaken, destroy and then dismember Russia. It convinced nobody and failed utterly.

We see then a new ‘Cold War’, though that expression was always absurd. Both the first Cold War and this Second Cold War have been hot wars, which have left millions dead. After its rout in Vietnam, the US decided that Americans should no longer die to expand their Empire, that others should die for it, Afghans in Afghanistan, Iraqis in Iraq, Ukrainians in the Ukraine, ‘until the last Ukrainian’, as the West proclaims.

However, I remind you that the word ‘crisis’ means in Greek ‘judgement’. And this war is the Judgement of God on all concerned, on Orthodox and Non-Orthodox alike, not least the Judgement of God on Ukrainians and Russians. This is the Judgement of those who bear the Orthodox Christian Spirit, dukhonostsy, and those who fight against the Orthodox Christian Spirit, dukhobortsy. Which side are we on? That is what we must ask ourselves.

What are the fundamental positive and negative tendencies in the Orthodox world and in inter-Orthodox relations?

A Schism means that there is no communion between two parts. Negative tendencies are among those who create schisms. Thus, the only positive tendencies are among those who are trying to restore communion, despite the nationalist politicians, money-lovers and ‘Orthodox’ chauvinists, who caused these schisms. And I remind you that there are multiple schisms, although that may not be clear to all in Moscow.

Once Constantinople started in the Ukraine and Moscow broke off communion with it, other Greek chauvinists in Alexandria, Greece and Cyprus, who put their Hellenism above Christ, followed. Then Moscow moved into Alexandria’s canonical territory in Africa, apparently in revenge. There followed another schism and the Non-Greek and Non-Russian Local Churches began to lose sympathy for Moscow, which they began to see as no better than the Greeks, for it too had begun to operate on someone else’s canonical territory.

Then Moscow, through its Soviet centralisation, lost the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which now has over 100 of its own churches in Western Europe, outside the jurisdiction of Moscow. In Moldova there are now also over 200 parishes which have transferred from the Moscow Church there to the Romanian Church. Not a single one is going the other way and others are leaving Moscow every month. Will Moldova declare that it is autocephalous and set up its own jurisdiction in Western Europe, taking its many clergy and parishes there from Moscow? What exactly is this self-destructive streak in the Russian Church, which centralises and then attacks those who object to centralisation in search of freedom and the right to use their own language?

Then Orthodox in Latvia broke away from Moscow with a self-declared autocephaly, Estonia may follow, some in Lithuania have already left. And many liberal clergy and parishes in Western Europe and several liberal pastors inside Russia, like Fr Alexei Uminsky, have left Moscow because of what they see as Patriarchal support for the conflict in the Ukraine. His case sparked a huge scandal and reached the mainstream Western media. How, they asked, did the Persecuted Church of Russia become the Persecuting Church?

Fr Alexei has been well-known for years as a liberal, a charming but very naïve man, in the style of the former Bishop Basil (Osborne). We may not agree with liberals and their anti-patriotic streak, but he was an excellent pastor, sincere and kind, and he received the support of well over 14,000 Orthodox, who were opposed to his defrocking. And yet he was defrocked. Which is the canon that states that a good and loving priest can be defrocked because his political opinions differ from those of his bishop? Then Fr Alexis’ place was taken by an aggressive and militant maximalist, of whom it is asked: Where is the love in his words? Why do Church authorities persecute good pastors? We have received no answer to this question.

However, it is not only the pro-Western liberals who have opposed Moscow, the very conservative bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) have also publicly called on Russia to withdraw its troops from the Ukraine. And yet they have not been defrocked, even though on top of this they fell into schism from Moscow’s Western European Archdiocese and into the heresy of rebaptism, persecuting those who uphold Moscow’s viewpoint.

We are reminded that the CIA has great influence and also recruits in ROCOR and that eighty-three years ago ROCOR bishops supported Hitler and his Russian Fascist Vlasovtsy troops. Moscow appears to have no objection to this anti-Russian position of the highly Americanised ROCOR, which seems to have completely forgotten its Russian and Orthodox origins, despite its name. But inside Russia, it is different….

The falling away of the same New York-run ROCOR into the heresy of rebaptism, rebaptising Orthodox who want to go to its churches, despite the Creed which proclaims that ‘I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins’, and this, apparently, with the full support of Moscow, is serious. Yet ROCOR has since 2017 increasingly become just another American convert sect with cult followers, like other old calendarist sects. It has no knowledge of the real European Orthodoxy and it has become a type of Uniatism, a closely imitated Orthodox rite, but without the inward Orthodox and Christian spirit.

In all this I am reminded of a story from the life of President Putin. At the end of 1989 he was stationed in Dresden in East Germany and that country was breaking up around him. So they phoned Moscow: ‘What shall we do? What must we say?’. And there was no answer. ‘Moscow is silent’. Those words really marked him. But today Moscow is still silent, though this time Moscow means the Moscow Patriarchate, the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church. Moscow is in denial.

Since the refusal of Moscow to deal with the unresolved ROCOR schism and then heresy (unresolved schisms always turn into heresies, look at the Roman Catholics), over thirty churches, 10% of the whole, have already left ROCOR for the Patriarchates of Constantinople or Bucharest. The former has set up a whole vicariate for them in the USA and a whole group with several churches and 15 clergy left for Bucharest in England. The fact is that the Russian Church is beginning to collapse outside the borders of the Russian Federation and Belarus. Why? Because it appears to have no adherence to the catholicity and canonicity of the Church. Moscow is silent.

Here is the fruit of Moscow’s breaking of communion. The Moscow jurisdiction is itself breaking apart. Unity is the most important thing in Church life, but it can only exist where there is love. Now chauvinism is hatred. Little wonder that in view of all this, heterodox, and not only Roman Catholics, say that the Orthodox Church no longer exists, it is broken into warring pieces, it has no catholicity. Moscow is silent.

Do you think that practical unity between the Local Orthodox Churches can be restored? What must happen for this unity to reappear? Could there be some kind of Amman format meeting?

Of course, the restoration of unity is possible, everything is possible. But it will need repentance. You may say that Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is too proud to repent, as he started it all. But there are two groups in Constantinople, that around the present Patriarch and the other, who quite openly declare that their Patriarch is mistaken. I think one of these will be the next Patriarch. The present one is very old and it is clear to all that he blundered in the Ukraine under financial pressure from the Americans, then governed by Trump who gave the Ukrainians military training and weapons, but who has now changed his tune in view of the Russian victory over the US-run NATO in its proxy war in the Ukraine.

However, there is also the schism between Moscow and Alexandria. There must be a solution here too. Moscow lost so much sympathy in the Orthodox world by entering into Africa, Alexandria’s canonical territory.

I think that after the Special Military Operation (SMO) is over in the Ukraine, there must be a Council of all 16 Autocephalous Local Churches. It is the Catholicity of the Church that has been under threat, ever since both Constantinople and Moscow insisted on centralisation. Both want unity, but Orthodox, unlike Roman Catholics, want unity in diversity, on the model of the Holy Trinity. And the word for Council is basically the same as the word for Catholicity in Slav languages. Constantinople and Moscow should not impose some Roman Catholic type of unity, that is, centralisation and rejection of Non-Greeks and Non-Russians.

Which hierarchs, theologians and others are working for the destruction of or, conversely, for the building up of Orthodox unity?

All who work in the Name of Power, Money and Outward Splendour, instead of in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, work for the destruction of Orthodox unity. The latter are the prophetic voices, those of Patriarch Porphyry of Serbia, of the Patriarchs Daniel of Bucharest and Sofia, of the late Archbishop Anastasy of Albania, and of all the others, in Poland, Georgia and Jerusalem. But all are waiting for peace in the Ukraine first. Nothing can be done until then, when a host of decisions will be taken, after the present paralysis is over.

  1. The Russian Orthodox Church. The Ukrainian Question.

What successes do you think that the Russian Orthodox Church has in external affairs, Church diplomacy, its foreign missions etc?

Here there are no successes, only catastrophic failures. Even its embraces with the Pope of Rome discredit the Russian Church. Why do you want to embrace the leader of a Church of so many homosexual and pedophile clergy, whom ordinary Catholics cannot stand? Orthodox and Catholics begin to think that the Orthodox who embrace Catholic clergy must themselves be homosexuals and pedophiles. Birds of a feather flock together, as they say.

One very young, very inexperienced, very racist and very arrogant Moscow Metropolitan said a few years ago, when he learned that masses of Non-Russians were leaving Moscow: ‘Too bad for them’. He did not see that in fact it is too bad for the Moscow Patriarchate, which is the loser, and so much the better for those who leave it. In such a situation, the Russian Orthodox Church should be renamed ‘The Russian Nationalist Church’. Perhaps he would agree to that? Catastrophic failures, indeed.

Only 20 years ago, the Orthodox world was praising the Russian Church, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, the bastion and hope of Orthodoxy. In 2003, His Holiness Patriarch Alexiy II, whom I knew, wanted to found a Local Western European Orthodox Church. And now all is lost! Moscow is losing its Diaspora, of which at least half, if not three-quarters, is made up of Ukrainians and Moldovans, whom Moscow has continually treated as second-class citizens. Last year Metr Vladimir of Moldova himself wrote publicly about this ill treatment to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill. We, who are at the grassroots, have seen concrete examples of this racism and hatred towards Non-Russians every week over the last fifty years. Non-Russians have gradually been chased out of the Russian Nationalist Church.

As a result, the numbers attending Russian chapels and communities in this country, outside the Cathedral in London., are of the order of 10, 20 or 30 people. The numbers are tiny. Conversely, Greek and Romanian churches get hundreds, up to a thousand every Sunday. The Russian Church is dying out. For example, in our Romanian parish we have to give communion from three or four chalices every Sunday to those who have had confession.

I was brought up in the old Russian emigration. Metr Antony of Sourozh, who tonsured me reader in 1981, the St Seraphim-like Archbishop George (Tarasov) in Paris, who had been a pilot on the Western Front in the First World War, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor of St John of Shanghai, and who ordained me priest nearly 35 years ago, and above all the greatest Russian emigre of them all, Vladyka John of Shanghai, the saint, born in what is now the Ukraine, would be horrified by what is happening now. I spent my life working for the unity of the Russian Church; now the young and inexperienced, younger than our children, have been allowed to destroy that unity. Why? Who are these Young Turks who create schisms, sects and heresies?

What would you say are the strengths and the weaknesses of the Russian Church as regards its external activities and in inter-Orthodox relations?

I can see no strengths at all, as it has quite isolated itself from the Orthodox mainstream and at present shows no humility or desire to return to the mainstream.

The weaknesses of the Russian Church are eight in number, as follows:

Centralisation, militarisation, nationalisation, bureaucratisation, oligarchisation of the episcopate (corruption). From here you have a great many cases of careerism, ecumenism, episcopal homosexualisation.

It is all politics instead of pastors, protocols instead of the Gospel of Christ, chauvinist hatred instead of Love. Ask any Ukrainian from Kiev. Ask any Moldovan. Ask any Orthodox in Western Europe.

What could reinforce the positions and authority of the Russian Church?

The restoration, not reinforcement (it is too late for that), of the authority and positions of the Russian Church can only come through repentance and missionary work. The latter can only be successful if it accepts Non-Russians as they are. Otherwise, the Russian Church will die out here, just as the first and second waves of the Russian emigration died out here. You cannot Russify what is not Russian, though you can make it Orthodox. To do missionary work means to decentralise and grant autocephaly to the missions, once they are large enough to stand on their own two feet.

To my mind, the Church of the Ukraine (that is, the Church inside the new borders of the new Ukrainian State, whatever they will be and whatever it will be called) should receive autocephaly, as should Orthodox in Moldova and in the four Baltic States of Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Lithuania. These three should at once receive autocephaly. Otherwise, the Orthodox in those countries will go on splitting into different groups in disunity. It is still not too late to recover Church unity in the Ukraine, Moldova and Estonia in particular. Moscow centralisation only kills unity, as we can see everywhere in the Diaspora.

I have to mention here that the quality of the Russian bishops sent from Russia to Western Europe has been disastrous, apart from the one exception of Metr Nestor, who is excellent. There has been one scandal after another, though I will not go into details here. You cannot hide or censor scandals in the open, internet societies of Western Europe. For example, in London there lives Maxim, the ex-bishop who was defrocked for running a drugs factory with his boyfriend in Saint Petersburg. He was already notorious for his depravity when he was a priest in London, so they sent him back to Russia, where they made him a bishop, along with the two Ignatys! It is all so sad.

And in ROCOR it is no better, we have seen them all pass by here, one an anthroposophist, another a fanatic, one an alcoholic, another a homosexual parading with his boyfriend and his narcissistic and vindictive rages and alcohol, another CIA…God save us all!

How is the Russian Church perceived in the Western world today?

After all the above and then after the Budapest scandal, how do you think the Russian Church is perceived? It has totally discredited itself and is seen as hypocritical. How can the Russian Church be against the LGBT brigade, when it has so many homosexuals? If a priest were homosexual, he would be defrocked, but not a bishop. Strange. It is so sad, when 15-20 years ago the Russian Church was riding high on zeal for the New Martyrs and Confessors, and everything was still possible.

What for you would be the best outcome of the Ukrainian Church problem?

Let us be frank. The Soviet Ukraine, exactly like ‘Europe’ or the UK, is an artificial construct, created for purely ideological reasons. The Ukraine must be broken down into its component parts. It was constructed by three atheist dictators, Lenin who in 1922 gave Novorossija to the Ukraine from Russia, Stalin who between 1939 and 1945 grabbed land from Poland, Hungary and Romania, and then Khrushchov, who in 1954 gave Russian Crimea away to Kiev. It is strange to see how the West, supposedly the advocate of self-determination, freedom and democracy (!), so ardently supports the oppression and injustices of these three Communist dictators! Kiev oppresses all its minorities, some 40% or more of the population, and the West supports that oppression. But then the West is just as atheistic as the Communist dictators, so I suppose it is normal. Atheists everywhere have the same values, whether Communists or Capitalists. They are all oligarchs.

It seems to me that North Bukovina (Chernivtsy) should be returned to Romania, so-called ‘Zakarpat’e’ (Subcarpathian Rus) to Hungary and the two and a half Greek Catholic provinces next to the Polish border (‘U-krajina’) of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and the western half of Ternopol should be returned to Poland (or else they should become an independent Galician State and be closed off by barbed wire from the Orthodox world). Novorossija should be returned to Russia, leaving the ten and a half provinces of Kiyivska Rus, Kievan Rus, to be independent and sovereign. All that would have to be confirmed by self-determination, by referenda, after the full liberation of the Ukraine from the Neo-Nazi Banderists in Kiev and Galicia. Then the canonical Church in the new Kievan Rus State should be given autocephaly by Moscow. Will any of this actually happen? God will decide.

What could change in the Orthodox world after the end of the SMO in the Ukraine?

I think Patriarch Bartholomew will retire or ‘be retired’. There are plenty of anti-Ukrainian Greek bishop-candidates ready to take his place and Trump and Vance would support one of them. Just as Biden supported Patriarch Bartholomew.

More generally, there would have to be an Inter-Orthodox Council, a free one, held in humility, unlike the absurd meeting in Crete nine years ago.

It is a strange thing that the greatest economic and political event in the world in the last sixteen years was the Russian foundation of BRICS in Ekaterinburg in 2009. BRICS is an Alliance of Sovereign Nations, based on the profoundly Orthodox principle of Unity in Diversity, the principle of the Holy Trinity. It is strange that secular countries can follow that principle and hold summits every year, but not the Church, which seems to want Roman Catholic style or Soviet-style centralisation, instead of Councils and Conciliarity/Catholicity.

President Putin has on numerous occasions remarked that: ‘He who is not nostalgic for the USSR has no heart, but he who wants it back has no brain’. It seems to me that there are some in the Russian Church who have not yet heard his words.

Do you have refugees from the Ukraine among your parishioners?  What churches do they attend? How do they see the conflict between the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches? Are there any difficulties with them?

Of course, we have many refugees, who come from the canonical Church of Vladyka Onufry. They attend any churches except for Russian churches. In London they have their own Ukrainian parishes. Russians must understand that the vast majority of Ukrainians will now never attend churches where His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill is commemorated. The Russian Church has lost the Ukraine for ever. We have no conflicts with any Ukrainians, because we accept them as we accept all Orthodox nationalities, including canonical Ukrainians who have been here for many years.

Does the British government support these refugees?

Of course, as do all Western governments. However, that support is political, not humanitarian. One day Western governments will drop them. All that Western governments are interested in is people who are anti-Russian. It is all very hypocritical, they do not care for Ukrainians as such.

  1. Orthodoxy in Great Britain

What is the situation of the Orthodox community in Great Britain? Is it growing? Or is the Orthodox presence the same as before?

There has been massive growth here over the last 15 years. This growth has been by immigration, specifically that of Romanians and Moldovans. Until then, there had been about 300,000 Orthodox here, with 200,000 Cypriots, and some 100,000 Serbs, Russians (mainly from the Baltics), Bulgarians, non-canonical Ukrainians and others. Then, over the last fifteen years, there arrived 1.1 million Romanians and Moldovans, meaning that today 1.4 million, 2% of the UK population, are Orthodox, I in 50, the vast majority Romanian-speaking.

Which Orthodox Churches are the most active and authoritative in Great Britain today?

Without doubt the Greeks and the Romanians. The Greeks now have several bishops, I think, six, and only on Lazarus Saturday they baptised 200 adults, nearly all Non-Greeks, in a mass baptism. They own many churches, though they suffer from the problem of elderly clergy, the result of 30 years of paralysis before their new Archbishop arrived here in 2019.

The Romanians are continually opening or buying new churches and dozens of seminary-qualified men are being ordained priests. I cannot remember when a Russian man was last ordained priest. It must be at least 10 years ago. As a result, the Russian Church is dying out. Other Orthodox, like the Serbs, Bulgarians and Georgians, also live in very small national ghettoes and do not produce their own clergy. As for the very small Antiochian group, virtually without Arab immigrants, they are intent on recruiting minute numbers of Anglicans Evangelicals, which is all rather strange and, just like the very small ROCOR, including their bishop, their clergy are not trained in Orthodox seminaries, but are untrained and the priests are part-time. That level of ignorance creates many problems. Thus, the Antiochians here are proud to give Copts and Ethiopians communion.

What is the attitude of the British government to Orthodox? Does it favour one jurisdiction over another? Is any support given? Are there political pressures on Orthodox clergy?

The British government remains, as always, completely indifferent to all. The government is atheist. There is no support at all for Orthodox, but no political pressure or persecution either. It is a free market.

Do native English, Scottish etc people join the Orthodox Church? If so, what attracts them?

Over the last 75 years some thousands of native people have joined the Church. I am one of them, 50 years ago. The late Metr Antony of Sourozh was one of those who played a role in this movement, though he seems to have converted almost only from the upper class. But a few thousand is a very small number over 75 years and many have passed away in that time. What attracts them? Spirituality, definitely not politics or nationalism. Nationalist parishes never have any converts. The heterodox world is unspiritual and woke. Who is attracted to that? Spiritual emptiness does not attract, just as a desert does not attract. The Faith of authentic Orthodoxy attracts, but not flag-waving nationalism, meaningless ritualism or corruption. Some Orthodox will die out, others will survive and expand. It all depends on spiritual content, or lack of it.

How do Orthodox perceive the immigration of Africans and Asians. Are there conflicts with them, with Muslims for example? Are they frightened for their future?

Forgive me, but this is a very strange question! You live in Russia, where there are two to three times more Muslims than here! Here most Orthodox are immigrants themselves, why should they have problems with other immigrants? The second language in England is Romanian, the third is Polish. I find Muslims especially respectful. One of them told me that only Orthodox are real Christians. They have little time for the others. We have baptised three former Muslims into our congregation, two Turks and one Iranian. One of our Ukrainian parishioners, who has been here for over 15 years, is a builder and helps build mosques for them. What a pity that Orthodox do not build churches! There are certainly no conflicts with such immigrants. We are not racists! Why should we be frightened of them? I do not understand your question.

The Western European Elite Isolated

The Western proxy war in the Ukraine continues, though it is now more or less without the US, which is tired of losing so much money in that entirely unprofitable project. Thus, it is now a Western European proxy war. It seems as though the US will next abandon the equally absurd and loss-making NATO, which Russia has all but destroyed anyway. And the Ukrainians are running out of soldiers to die. Meanwhile, Zelensky has said that he will quit, providing he gets more money. ‘Give me the money and I will go away’. This is typical of a narcissist, whose sense of entitlement is such that he can only be compared to a spoiled brat. Given the new attitude of the US, Zelensky now has to find more dupes to exploit. And the dupes are queueing up for him in Western Europe. This is especially so in the UK, where the proud Establishment is still living in the delusional fantasy of Imperial greatness, although dead long ago, and in vainglorious Napoleonic France, where this fantasy is also shared.

Why do such delusions still exist? Sadly, the greater the empires of the past – the British and the French – and the longer ago they began (in Britain in 1066, in Capetian France a century later), the greater their delusions in the present. Moreover, the British and, in theory, the French, came out as victors in 1945, though they were victors only on paper, their victory was Pyrrhic. In reality, the British had begun handing over their Empire to the US as early as 1916, according to Milner’s Round Table plan. This plan was to destroy the Tsar’s Russia and then use the US as a catspaw to prolong British Imperialism. However, all that was good in the Tsar’s Russia, State-regulated Capitalism and free healthcare and education, survived in the USSR. It proved unvanquished. We clearly see that continuity today – Russia is still the largest country in the world and the largest economy in Europe. The Tsar’s Russia, with even its flag, is rising from the dead. Nemesis is coming for those who tried to destroy it.

The Western European elite has now isolated itself from both the Russian Federation and the New USA. There is no more ‘Collective’ West, for only Zelensky and the warmongering Europeans want to continue their war. Thus, that elite has made itself even more irrelevant and laughable in the eyes of the rest of the world and of its own non-zombified peoples. The future German Chancellor Merz (whom 71.5% of German voters do not support) and the unelected ‘Brussels Empire’ bureaucrat, Empress von der Leyen, have both expressed that isolation very eloquently. As the USA prepares to lift sanctions against Russia, the self-harming and very unpopular EU and UK elites (with about 20% of support) are applying even more sanctions to further destroy their own economies. Given the hostility of the Western European elite to both its Great Power neighbours, east and west, and the complete absence of any positive foreign policies or strategies, what possible future can they have?

First of all, we have to understand why the Western European elite refuses to grasp reality, whereas the USA, under Trump, has finally grasped the reality, that it has been willingly deceived by Kiev and its own former, very corrupt elite. The reason for the obtuseness of the Western European elite is because it is profoundly stuck in that above-mentioned thousand-year-old rut. This comes from belief in its snobbish and arrogant prejudice of its own mythical superiority, that somehow, mysteriously, ‘The West is Best’, that is, ‘We are best’. Conversely, the USA has, at worst, only a 250-year-old mentality of superiority, arguably, it may only be 80 years old, going back only to 1945. After all, we should not forget that the greatest ally of the USA in the nineteenth century was Imperial Russia, indeed Russia probably saved the US Union during its Civil War. And both countries fought together against Germany in two World Wars as allies. Are we returning to that once more?

Thus, the US elite is throwing off that mentality of superiority, which it took on from Western Europe, especially from the British elite. However, in Western Europe we can see how that anti-Christian mentality of superiority was shared by its most important leaders during the 1940s. For example, Hitler hated his neighbours, the Slavs (he slaughtered 30 million of them in his holocaust) and the Jews, just as they did during the Teutonic Crusades. Churchill hated ‘blacks and browns’, Africans and Asians, his imperial neighbours. As for De Gaulle, he hated his neighbours, the Arabs, just as they did during the Crusades against the Holy Land. Typically, by the end of 1940 all the Roman Catholic countries in Europe were run by Nazis. It can be said that this Nazism, the hatred of neighbours, is the common ideology of the Western European elite. Look back to Mussolini in Italy and Ethiopia, the Belgian Leopold in the Congo, the Dutch in the ‘East Indies’, the Spanish conquistadores, or the Italian Columbus.

But what will post-Yalta Western Europe be replaced by? Surely there needs to be a New Yalta? The Old Yalta was 80 years ago and is no longer relevant. A New Yalta would be attended by the New Big Three, Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi (instead of Churchill). ‘Eastern Europe’ (in fact the eastern half of Western Europe) is already making its choice, in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, even in former East Germany, probably in freed Romania next May and, as riots take place against the EU in Sofia, probably in Bulgaria too. Others will follow them. Thus, most of ‘Eastern Europe’ is already deciding on its future – it is in free trade and shared cultural contacts with the Russian Federation. Independent of Russia, it will also be independent of the EU. Western Europe also needs to return to and reintegrate the rest of Asia or, if you prefer, Eurasia. The people want it. After all, Europe is a fake Continent, it is part of Asia and all ‘Europeans’ came to the European Peninsula from Asia.

In other words, the future of Western Europe is also to be with, though in no way under, Russia, that is with the rest of Europe, half of which is precisely inside Russian borders. Today the symbolic head of Western Europe, the elderly and ill Pope of Rome, lies close to death, like his Religion in Western Europe, as also the Protestant groups in Western Europe, which broke off from the Popes, and which are now also dying out in pedophilia. This is also deeply symbolic. Is there a viable alternative in Orthodox Christianity? True, parts of both the Russian Church have been infiltrated through hatred-preaching ‘Orthobro’ bishops and the Greek Church through bribes, but there are other Orthodox Churches, which are free, not subjugated to the USAID of Biden. The other Local Orthodox Churches can help Western Europeans return to their roots and identity. Here is the chance for Western Europeans – to return to authentic, ancestral ‘European values’, from Christ, Who also came from Asia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fourth Edition of Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Now Online

Fifty years since the first of the essays in Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition was written and nearly thirty years since the first edition was published, we have been asked to reissue the anthology, as the third edition has sold out. We have now reissued this work as an e-book under Resources on the Orthodox England website.

http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/oe4/e-books/

From the homepage it is the last item under the resources dropdown menu.

Orthodox England

How did we come to the name of our website and blog, to ‘Orthodox England’?

We are Orthodox, because we are ‘rightly’ Christian, which is all that the adjective ‘Orthodox’ means, and not something exotic or esoteric. In other words, we veer neither to the left, nor to the right, we are neither modernist and liberal, nor sectarian and schismatic, neither new calendarist, nor old calendarist. At all times, all deviations, all that is ‘wrongly’ Christian, can be avoided by adhering to the living inspiration of the Holy Spirit and so to the roots of Orthodoxy, to the words and deeds of Christ in the Gospels and the Apostles in the Epistles, to the lives of the Saints and the Fathers. All this is summarised in the simple fact that Orthodoxy is Christianity, no more and no less.

We are England, because that is where we were born and live by God’s Will, and we do not belong to any political construct, neither to the UK, nor to the EU, neither to the present US, nor to the post-USSR, neither to the white star, nor to the red star, but to the Cross of Christ. At all times, all deviations can be avoided by adhering to the living inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the roots of England. All this is summarised in the words and deeds of the saints of England for over 450 years until 1066 and the words and deeds of its best representatives for the 1,000 years since. We look to the time when we shall have restored our own Local Church, part of a wider Anglo-Celtic Local Church of Four Nations.

And the way to this is through a recovered Western European Orthodox Church.

From Kabul to Kiev and the Future of the Russian Orthodox Church

After his brutal rebuff in Washington (together with Starmer), ex-President Zelensky is now desperately touring leaders of Western Europe, even seeing the Pope, in order to try and get support for his failing regime. The fact is that, regardless of whether Harris or Trump wins in the US elections in a few weeks’ time, the US has abandoned Zelensky’s Ukraine, turning its back on it and disengaging from it. The US media will just stop talking about the Western rout in the Ukraine, as they did in Afghanistan. Kabul or Kiev, it is the same thing. You have lost, sweep it under the carpet, it never happened. The US has to face Israel’s military and economic collapse and its great commercial rival, China. It has no more time for the loser in Kiev. Americans never like losers, so it is walking away from them.

The US has dumped Kiev on Europe and will, as usual, leave Europe, whose tail the US has been wagging for years, hanging out to dry. The US refused to allow Kiev to make deep strikes on Russia, it will not allow Kiev to join NATO, indeed it cancelled the Kiev-NATO Rammstein meeting of 12 October and the majority of the EU do not want Kiev to join it. (Ironically, the only country which enthusiastically supports Kiev’s EU membership is the UK, which itself left the EU!) Yes, the EU may string Kiev along, which will then string naïve Ukrainians along, but Europe has no more arms or munitions to give Kiev, and many countries, like Germany, Croatia, Italy and Slovakia, have publicly said so. Just as the British ran back to their island at Dunkirk in 1940, so the US is running back to the Big Island in 2024.

As for Zelensky, he will also try to run away to the same place. The Russian Army has all but destroyed the suicidal Ukrainian forces which crossed the border into the Kursk province of Russia. 22,000 Ukrainian troops are already dead or wounded. From Kursk Russian forces could cross into Sumy province and take Kiev. For the 7 January? Russia will get on with the reformatting, absorbing and rebuilding of the Ukraine as a New Ukraine under a new government in Kiev, effectively forming a southern Belarus. Russia will take back the Russian south and east, including Odessa and Kharkov. A small slice of the south-west corner may return to Hungary, with autonomy granted at last to Carpatho-Rus (what Kiev condescendingly called ‘Zakarpattia’), and perhaps small slices in the south will return to Romania.

By agreement with Moldova the Russian Federation could take back Transdnistria and probably, also by agreement, Gagauzia. These moves would be extremely popular, but leaving Romania to take back most of Moldova. As for the tiny Baltics, they will die out, until they reach friendship agreements with Russia, once their US elites have been removed. This Baltic situation will be repeated throughout Western Europe, as US elites in the EU and the UK are removed by popular vote – as indeed is already happening. The defeat of the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev will also bring freedom for the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and shame on the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which the US bribed to set up a fake Church for ‘the national Ukrainian religion’, to replace the Church of God.

At this, questions will arise for the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, centred in Moscow. In nearly three years of the conflict in the Ukraine, the Patriarchate has lost control (to the CIA) of its New-York based Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), whose sociopaths have been rebaptising other Orthodox. It has also lost control of the Church in the Ukraine, in Moldova and in the Baltics. In the Western world the Moscow Patriarchate has been discredited, with the Patriarch of Moscow even being banned from Canada, the UK and Lithuania and its parishes there contracting and losing virtually all Non-Russians. The racist rejection by Muscovites of Moldovans, Ukrainians and local people, many of whom had been devoted to the Russian Orthodox Church for fifty years and more, has been scandalous.

It is now difficult to see what the Church authorities in Moscow can do to recover the situation. Moscow is in schism with the Greek Churches. It has invested in Africa, officially a Greek territory. Other Local Churches distrust it. Tens of millions have been disaffected from Moscow, after it betrayed them, in one way or another, including now banned priests inside Russia, who have been forced to leave the country in order to continue. Regardless of the outcome in the Ukraine, that is, the inevitable Russian military and political victory, you cannot force people to be what they are not. You cannot force people to go to church. It may even be that the Russian government will have to intervene in Moscow Church matters in order to bring it round to abandoning its disastrous and suicidal policy of centralisation.

May God’s Will be done.

 

 

 

Towards a Council of the Orthodox Churches

Introduction

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

Universal Church Councils

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

Consultations

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

The Need for a Consultation

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

Who Could Call a Consultation?

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

Two Initial Stages of Consultation

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

The Third Stage

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

An Agenda

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

The Dogmatic Agenda

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

The Pastoral Agenda

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

Conclusion: The Alternative

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

 

 

 

Global or Globalist and the Russian State or the Russian Church

Global or Globalist

It is a cliché to state that we live in a Global world. It is nothing new. The concept was inherent in the term ‘World Wars’, the first of which began 110 years ago. On the other hand, the vision of an interconnected world where all the different nations live together and co-operate in peace, respecting each other’s differences, is profoundly Christian, as in the Seven ‘Universal’ (that is, Global) Councils. ‘For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all, let us pray to the Lord’. However, being Global is not at all the same as being Globalist.

Unlike Global, Globalism means forcing everyone to be the same, preparing the planet for a One World Government under a Dictator, known as Antichrist. The Globalist mafia, with its alphabet soup of US, EU, UK, NATO, UN, IMF, AUKUS, WEF etc, with its Davos serfs of banksters, arms-dealers, police states, spies, Soros, Schwab, Biden, Macron, Starmer (or Sunak), Scholz etc, is a curse, as it is preparing the way for Antichrist. We resist that mafia. We chase out the Globalist elites, for otherwise we shall see our countries and our families die.

Yet, Globalism is here. Who owns the Western half of Europe, that is, Peninsular Europe? The US Globalist elite, a giant with feet of clay, supported by its Globalist client elite in the Western half of Europe, owns those countries. This is why the fall of that half of Europe, of the European Union and the rest, will be like that of the Soviet Union, overnight, like a ripe, red apple that hangs from a tree and then, without any prompting, suddenly falls. Why? Because, eaten by worms, it has rotted from inside. It is ready to fall.

The fall of the West has come through the Ukraine. We speak of the small-scale, with fewer than 100,000 troops, highly-provoked (Russian-speaking Ukrainians had for eight years been genocided by the US-installed, Neo-Nazi Kiev regime and were about to be massacred by Kiev troops) invasion, or rather liberation, of the Eastern Ukraine by Russian forces. To the astonishment of the Russians, the West forbade the Kiev regime to make peace and armed the Kiev regime to the teeth with NATO arms, declaring that it wanted all Ukrainians to die. So Russia turned to Plan B, to wage a war of attrition until the apple falls.

Thus, the West has chosen to commit suicide, defeated militarily by superior Russian arms and politically and economically by Russian-inspired BRICS. Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and perhaps other peoples in the Carpathians and the Balkans of South-Eastern Europe, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and others, if they can free themselves of the US elite’s puppets, will also join BRICS. This will be their salvation. Little wonder that Victor Orban of Hungary has recently hosted the Chinese leader in Budapest and been hosted by him in Beijing. The rest of Western Europe, in the North-East, the North-West and the South-West, will be left aside, until it repents for arming Kiev regime troops and mercenaries and also joins BRICS.

The Russian State and the Russian Church

The conflict in the Ukraine, also as a new country, soon to join BRICS, will be a victory for the Russian State, although not for the Russian Church. The latter has compromised itself everywhere outside the Russian Federation. There senior figures in its administration have persecuted and betrayed lifelong Russian Orthodox faithful, starting in England and then in the Ukraine, then in the Baltics and Moldova, and not least inside the Russian Federation itself.

The recent events in Hungary witness to the tragic decadence that has penetrated the episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church over the last 30 years. It is not a question of one very disreputable and apparently criminal witness and his mother (why was a pervert befriended?), it is the witnesses of audio and video recordings. Nobody who knows anything about the fatal love of luxury of the episcopate of the Russian Church over the last 30 years is in the least surprised. It all just confirms a multitude of witness reports over the last 20 years in particular.

The activities of many senior figures are anti-Russian, shaming the patriotic President Putin and our good friend, Sergei, among his ministers. The recent revelations typify many others. This leaves the episcopate of the Russian Church, both inside and outside the former USSR, to be cleansed by the Russian State. Make no mistake, this will happen. However, the schismatic, money-corrupted, liberal and homosexual (usually the same ones) among the episcopate are not only anti-patriotic, but also, and above all, they are anti-Orthodox.

For Orthodox Christianity does not accept the word ‘exceptional’ or ‘indispensable’. All Local Churches act together in conciliarity and catholicity. No single Local Church, however old, however big, however powerful or however rich, has the right to lord it over the others because it is ‘exceptional’. That error is precisely Globalism, the error of ‘Roman Catholicism’.

Some may admire that; we faithful Orthodox clergy and people do not, for we are not Globalists, since that is a sin against the Catholicity of the Church. Yes, the Great Cleansing of the Orthodox episcopate, Russian Orthodox and other, is coming. The guilty bishops must be trembling. If not, they have a shock coming.