Category Archives: Orthodoxy

Translation of an Interview with the Russian Chrisma Church Website

Bright Tuesday 22 April 2025

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Russian Tragedy of Errors

Introduction: Three Fragments of the Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROCOR: Orthodox or Right-Wing?

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

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

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

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

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

Paris: Orthodox or Left-Wing?

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

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

Conclusion: Disloyalty to the Testament of the Tsar

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

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

Notes:

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

A universal God has been declared! An examination for Orthodoxy

https://spzh.live/en/chelovek-i-cerkovy/80170-a-universal-god-has-been-declared-an-examination-for-orthodoxy

12 May 04:19

1473

A sermon on Anti-Pascha Sunday.

The time of trials is given to us to understand who we are. And not only we but also those who lead, guide and teach us how to live. This applies primarily to the Church because God will judge those on the outside (1 Corinthians 5:13).

As a priest I have experienced in my life the entire period of the recent history of the Church, starting from its revival in the territory of the former USSR and ending with what we have now. But now all Local Churches are undergoing examination, including those whom no upheavals have particularly touched until this time. The spirit of the new “wonderful” world, which is gradually beginning to enter its earthly possessions, offers each of them two options: to serve it or to be gradually destroyed.

The words of Christ that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” apply to the entire Church rather than its individual local branches. Where is the Church of St Genevieve, St Patrick of Armagh or St David of Menevia now?

Just a few decades ago, we had an unprecedented Orthodox boom. Huge editions of patristic books were published. And when the Internet entered society, hundreds of preachers began to teach people around the clock what an Orthodox Christian should be like. Teachers of faith of all kinds have been talking about Christ for almost forty years, but only a small part of them could show Him by their own example. After all, speaking and teaching about God is much easier than following Him.

Thus, we have built an Orthodoxy which externally looks fine but the strength of this structure can only be tested by an earthquake.

I remember a time when a hundred and fifty children could be baptised in a church per day. Where are these 30-40-year-old sons and daughters of God now? Are they living a spiritual life? Do they go to church or even know where it is?

The Lord has looked at us for decades and patiently awaited fruits. But now is the time for harvest. How many ascetics have grown in monasteries, righteous people in parish churches, and hierarchs in eparchial administrations during this time? I don’t know, only God knows.

Orthodox exams are taking place all over the world now. Each Local Orthodox Church is taking them. The best, privileged, one might say, position is held by those Orthodox who are openly hunted: those who are outlawed, persecuted in the media, lied against and slandered. Such a Church simply has no way out: nothing is left for it but to be crucified with Christ.

The worst position is occupied by those Local Churches that have turned from the brides of Christ into State concubines. Of course, they did not immediately decide on this adultery. It happened gradually, step by step. At first, it was necessary to make small concessions, and then to descend lower and lower.

All these processes vividly manifested themselves during the coronavirus period when, for the sake of fear, it was allowed to believe that physical death could settle in the Chalice, which is given to us as the source of eternal Life. Therefore, commune with disposable spoons, don’t trust God, trust the WHO. And do not let people go to services, close the churches for Easter and do not celebrate liturgies. And those who did not obey and did not want to violate their priestly oath received hefty fines.

All this was approved by the priesthood, which obediently adapted to the requirements of the state authority. The next step is to recognise the schismatics, then to start blessing non-traditional LGBT marriages, and so on.

There are also those who at the official level have rejected Christ and the Gospel, replacing them with national ideology and military-political doctrine. The clergy who disagree with this are banned or even imprisoned. But can all these bans be seriously considered canonically justified if they come from people who have become servants of Caesar instead of God, essentially betraying their soul to the devil?

And in recent times, among the faithful, a special type has appeared – “couch ascetics of piety”. They destroy all the “enemy filth” day and night with the machine-gun burst of their comments on the Internet. Their religion is anger. They do not understand that the only thing a person needs in this world is to learn to love the Lord and all people with all their soul.

All we need is to immerse our spirit in God and remain in Him forever. Neither in politics, nor in war, nor in Internet news, but in God. But only a few are capable of hearing this.

Judgment is approaching. Weeds have grown and multiplied all over the Earth. In the Church of Christ, there are more and more propagandists, political officers and simply opportunists. what do they direct the zeal of their flock? To hate sinners! That’s their main goal. The essence of their faith is war with global evil. But they do not see stubbornly that they are this very evil.

The Gospel calls us to be clothed in Christ, to become a renewed person. “No, this is not true,” teach modern preachers, you should kill other people “for the sake of Christ” – this is what we bless and inspire you to do. And yet the first Christians also lived in very difficult times. But for some reason, they did not care at all about the political situation of their empire; nor did they worry about either external or internal enemies.

They were worried only about one thing – whether their name was written in the Book of Life or not.