Category Archives: Orthodoxy

The Resurrection of the Christian Empire

http://katehon.com/article/resurrection-christian-empire

Introduction: The Need for the Christian Empire

Since we believe in God the Holy Trinity, our theological, political and social ideal is to strive to bring Heaven down to earth in the form of a Christian Empire, with as much worldwide influence as possible. This is, after all, what we pray for every day in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. Any other attitude promotes the disincarnate heresies of Gnosticism and Origenism, heresies because they deny the Divinizing Incarnation, that God became man that man might become God-like.

The Christian Empire until 1917

This Christian Empire, founded in the fourth century by St Constantine the Great and then continued in the Russian Lands, was the place of special grace, of a culture that was protected from the perverted values of the apostasy of the West and the paganism of the East. This Christian Empire existed as Holy Rus until February 1917, when the Emperor was overthrown and martyred by the international agents of industry and banking outside it and by Western-inspired apostasy and treason, caused by the loss of Orthodoxy, inside it.

Let us recall that the Empire’s spiritual and therefore moral values were profoundly Christian. Indeed, the social, political and economic values of the Christian Empire went around the world, establishing the Hague Court of Justice, promoting anti-militarism and anti-colonialism in East and West alike. This can be seen in the stance of the Christian Empire towards the appalling scramble for Africa of Western European countries and the Boer War, and towards still sovereign countries like Tibet, Ethiopia, Siam (Thailand) and China.

Internally, there was the establishment of free education, welfare measures and social justice, despite the furious opposition of decadent aristocrats and the greedy rising capitalist bourgeoisie. Externally, there was the building of churches for the missionary spread of Orthodox Christianity outside the Empire, notably in Japan, the USA, Western Europe, China and Korea, wherever there was a consciousness of the need to confess Orthodox Christianity before the heretical Western world and the pagan Eastern world.

Stage One of the Restoration of the Christian Empire

Obviously, we would like to see ourselves, our children and our grandchildren living in such a restored Empire once more. However, the Christian Empire can only be restored when the mass of Orthodox Christians repent for apostasy, becoming conscious that our Faith is not some private piece of piety or folklore, an intellectual hobby, without any incarnational social and political consequences. We must be seized by the consciousness of our duty and the importance of restoring the sacral Empire for the continuation of the world.

Over the last generation, since 1991, we have seen the first stage of this restorative process in the main part of the Empire, at present called the Russian Federation. Mass baptism after 1988 and the gradual rebuilding of the Church, however slow, and then in 2000 the recognition by the Jubilee Council of the first of the New Martyrs, including the Imperial Martyrs. Although this was much resisted by disincarnate fantasists and pseudo-Orthodox ecumenists and renovationists, these were vital steps towards reversing the apostasy.

Then came the consciousness of the existence of the ‘Russian world’. However racially limited that is, this was a further step in the continuing restorative process. Now, a generation on from the collapse of militant atheism, there are at last in Russia Orthodox Ministers of Defence and Education (once a bastion of atheism). We can wish now for an Orthodox Minister of Health, since that too has long been a bastion of the vestigial and primitive atheism of backward-looking materialists. And churches are again being built in many places abroad.

The Next Stage

Only now can we begin to understand that the next stage in the process of healing and restoration must be the understanding of the significance of the Imperial Martyrs and all those attached to them. There will be no restored Christian Empire with worldwide influence until there is a Christian Emperor. And there will be no new Emperor until all have repented for overthrowing and martyring the last Emperor, Nicholas II, his Family and all those around them, and rejecting their values, so despised by the aristocrats of Saint Petersburg.

Those around them include the martyred Imperial servants, canonized in 1981 by the Church Outside Russia, all those who remained faithful to the end, whether suffering martyrdom or not, like Fr Nicholas Gibbes in England who was converted by the Imperial example. Necessary here is the repentance for attitudes towards others at the Imperial Court. It is significant that there are both in Russia and in the emigration those who still justify the slaying of the Imperial Family and also denigrate all those who remained faithful to them.

Notably, there is the case of Anna Alexandrovna Vyrubova (Taneeva), the confidante of the martyred Tsarina Alexandra. In 1923 she became a nun in exile in Valaam and she is known as Mother Maria of Helsinki. She died on 20 July 1964 and her grave in Helsinki is adorned with flowers, yet she is despised and slandered and falsified memoirs have been published. The aim is not just to discredit her, but also the Imperial Martyrs. If she, their close friend, can be discredited, they argue, so the Martyrs themselves can also be discredited.

The Significance of the Imperial Servants

Mother Maria was slandered because her 1923 ‘Memories of the Russian Court’ (1) told the truth about the Imperial Family and Gregory Rasputin. Notably she spoke of the ‘plot of the Grand Princes’. They did not want the truth about the Lord’s Anointed to be revealed. In this affair the atheist regime of the Soviet Union and aristocratic traitors in the emigration were entirely at one. The truth she told contradicted their self-justifying slanders which concealed the real reason for the downfall of the Christian Empire – treason.

The arguments of all the enemies of the Church were filled with their ideology of disincarnate Gnostic intellectualism and philosophical fantasies. These discredit the Incarnate Christian Empire, reducing the Christian Faith to private, individualistic, Protestant-style pietism without any practical ramifications in everyday life. They reject the God-given arrangement of symphony, or harmony, between Church and State, in favour of a system where the world rules and religion is left as a voluntary affair for personal intellectual life.

Therefore, the enemies of the Church had systematically to discredit all those connected with the Imperial Family. And here we come to one of the problematic areas in this process of repentance, to another Imperial servant. For the Revolution did not start in February 1917, but two months earlier, on 30 December 1916. This was 25 years before the next German invasion of 1941 and 75 years, almost to the day, before the dissolution of the atheist Union on 26 December 1991. What happened on that fatal day, or rather, night in 1916?

1916-2016 and the Resurrection of the Christian Empire

30 December 1916 was the night when Gregory Efimovich Rasputin-Novy was assassinated by British spies with the aid of Russian aristocrats. He was the ‘Friend’ of the Imperial Family, an elder gifted and sent by God, but used as a scapegoat by the aristocracy to discredit the Family because he was a simple Orthodox peasant, not one of them. He was slandered by Soviet atheists, decadent Russian émigrés, and the Western Establishment alike. Why? Because their values are all identical in their hostility to Incarnate Christianity.

Thus, I remember in the 1980s hearing the disgraceful and slanderous opinion of a priest (later a bishop) in the Paris emigration about Bishop Theophan of Poltava and Gregory Rasputin. In reality, only when Gregory’s murder is acknowledged and his role representing the faithful Russian people is recognized will justice be done. His murder was the first in the coup d’etat which led to the murder not only of the Imperial Family, but to the murder of millions, the attempt to murder Civilization, to murder the Christian Empire.

This murder was carried out by the Anglo-Zionist Empire (2), founded in 1916 by the internationalist politician Lord Milner, who wrote the Balfour Declaration, Lloyd-George, and bankers like the Morgans and the Warburgs. This Anglo-Zionist Empire has reigned for 100 years. All this time we have been seeking the resurrection of the Christian Empire. But this can only come with repentance for the treason of 1916 and 1917 and the 100-year nightmare that followed. Only when that repentance has taken place, can restoration begin.

Conclusion: Where Do We Come From – Where Are We Going?

When faced with this question, my answer is always ‘from far away’. For we come from White Russia, from Holy Rus, from the Christian Empire. We are the Tsar’s people. We have not chosen the alternative to this, the Anglo-Zionist Empire, now centred in Washington and spreading its tentacles through the UN, the EU, NATO and a host of vassal states and organizations worldwide. All that is the dying past and we have chosen the future, the Coming Christian Empire. It is what we are single-mindedly marching towards, our only destiny.

Notes:

1. For Anna Vyrubova’s memoirs in English about the Elder Gregory Rasputin and his slanderers, see:
http://www.alexanderpalace.org/russiancourt2006/xi.html

2. This term ‘Anglo-Zionist Empire’ was first used by another, like myself also a spiritual child of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the Russo-Dutch political blogger known as ‘The Saker’. We also use this term because it sums up perfectly the imperialist exclusivism of the British Lloyd-George, Balfour, the ambassador Buchanan and the Anglo-German Lord Milner, anti-English but pro-British, all members of the secretive organization ‘The Round Table’. Milner had been responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the British concentration camps of the Boer War, a ruthless war all about gold and diamonds. With his bankster and industrialist allies in New York, for example Crane, Morgan, the German-born Kuhn Loeb, Schiff and the Warburgs, the half-German Milner founded the century of supremacy of the transnational Anglosphere, in 1916 transferring its centre from London to New York. This clique had a more or less Hitlerian belief in the racial superiority of the English-speaking world, backed by Jewish finance (hence ‘Anglo-Zionist’), and had no patriotic loyalty, but loyalty only to global finance. Today they would have been called ‘neocons’. Some, for example the German General Ludendorff, have suggested that this clique was responsible for the death of the patriotic Lord Kitchener, the much slandered lover of England and Russia, in June 1916. Certainly Lloyd-George and Milner profited hugely from his death.

Christ the Invincible Power

Answers to Questions from Recent Conversations and Correspondence

Q: When did you first become conscious of the Russian Orthodox Church?

A: My introduction to the Orthodox Church was through the local saints of England in my native north Essex, notably St Edmund, but also St Albright (Ethelbert), St Cedd, St Botolph and St Osyth. However, as regards the Russian Orthodox Church as such, my first encounter was almost fifty years ago, just after my 12th birthday, in August 1968. As a result of that revelation, I began teaching myself Russian in October of that year in Colchester because I already knew that the Russian Orthodox Church is my spiritual home. However, I had to wait nearly another seven years until I could take part in Russian Orthodox life, as in those days (it is not much better now) there were so few Russian churches anywhere. I only managed to visit any Russian churches in 1973.

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

A: Having been told by two of its members that the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) would not allow me to join it because I was English (I had no idea at that time that my great-grandmother was Russian, I only discovered that distant link much later), I had no alternative but to join the Moscow Patriarchate. They may have been many things in those distant days, but at least they were not racists.

Q: What was your path to the priesthood after that?

A: A very hard one. First of all, since I could not live and work in Russia on account of the Cold War at that time, for my first job I went to live and work in Greece. I thought that was the next best alternative. After a year there and visiting the then Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, I understood that the Balkan Churches were no solution to the need for a Local Orthodox Church in the West. They were all inward-looking, culturally very narrow and hopelessly nationalistic. Later, contacts with Romanians and Georgians told me the same about them and in the Romanian case there is the huge problem of simony. So, with Russia closed off, in 1979 with the blessing of Metr Antony (Bloom) I went to study at the St Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, which I had in my ignorance imagined to be a Russian Orthodox seminary.

Q: What was it in fact?

A: It was the remains of a Russian Orthodox seminary mingled with an institute of philosophy and, frankly, of heresy. It openly preached modernism or Renovationism, which is Protestant-based, and is therefore not even remotely interesting to someone coming from a country like England with a Protestant culture, so alien to me. One English priest, rather harshly, called St Serge a Methodist Sunday School. Very harsh, but there was some truth in it.

Q: Why did you not think of going to Jordanville in the USA?

A: For the same reason as before. I was repeatedly told by members of ROCOR that they only took Russians. Remember in those days there was no internet, no advice, you had to make your own way, you went by what local representatives told you, even if it was incorrect.

Q: What happened next?

A: In 1982 I was offered the priesthood by the Moscow Patriarchate on terms which I can only describe as scandalous. I walked out, never to return, and enquired again at the Church Outside Russia. I got the same answer as in 1974, though I noted that this time there were actually a few ex-Anglicans in a separate branch of ROCOR in England. However, these rather eccentric conservative Anglicans seemed to have no interest in the Russian Orthodox Church, but only in being anti-Anglican and they had a huge interest in fanatical Greek Orthodox sects. Never having been Anglican and having lived in Greece, I had no interest in either. This was all the more frustrating since ROCOR had just canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors and naturally I had their icons and venerated them. Nevertheless, in 1983, I decided to emigrate to France and join my wife’s jurisdiction, the Paris Jurisdiction.

Q: Wasn’t that foolhardy? I mean you already knew about the problem of modernism there?

A: What you have to understand is that in Paris in 1981 they had elected a new Archbishop. Under the very elderly and saintly old one, renovationists had come to the fore, taking advantage of his old age, but the new Archbishop promised us personally that he would sweep them away and return his jurisdiction to Orthodoxy and canonical Russian practice. So this was a time of great promise and even excitement. Patriarch Dimitrios of Constantinople even said at the time that the Paris Jurisdiction would be returned to the Russian Church as soon as it was free. So, with hope in a promising future, in January 1985 I was ordained deacon there.

Q: What happened next?

A: in May 1985 I was offered the priesthood providing that I would become a freemason. I refused, scandalized. Then we became witnesses to the complete takeover of the jurisdiction by renovationists. The new Archbishop ordained them one by one, completely breaking his promise – not because he was a liar, but because he was weak. It was the same problem as Metr Evlogy, the first Paris Jurisdiction ruling bishop; he had never wanted to leave the Russian Church, but he was a weak man surrounded by powerful laymen, mainly freemasons and those who had betrayed the Tsar and organized the February Revolution. It was the end of the possibility that that jurisdiction would ever return to the freed, restored and reunited Russian Church. But I only understood that the meaning of that bitter disappointment afterwards.

Q: Why did you not leave such a masonic group?

A: Not all by far were freemasons and I felt that I had to labour on until God’s will for me should be revealed.

Q: When was that?

A: Without doubt it was in summer 1988 when the Paris Jurisdiction celebrated the millennium of the Baptism of Rus. Instead of inviting the Russian bishops in Western Europe to the Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and returning to the Russian Church in unity, they railed against the Russian Church and invited the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Paris. I was not only scandalized but spiritually distraught. I was an eyewitness to treason and apostasy. It was the last straw. They preferred heresy to Orthodoxy.

Soon after, I met Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR, who told me that he would be happy to receive me and that I had no need whatsoever to labour on in such anti-canonical conditions. I jumped at the opportunity. 17 people left with me, including a priest. So we all joined the Church Outside Russia in January 1989. That was a transforming moment because previously I had only known the Church Outside Russia in England. On the other hand, Vladyka Antony, heir to Vladyka John of Shanghai, though traditional, was not racist or fanatical, but missionary-minded. He lived in a different world from the fanatics in England and we freely concelebrated with other Orthodox.

I remember him telling me about the extremists who were trying to take control of ROCOR in New York. He said: ‘But there’s nowhere else to go’. I have not the slightest doubt that he would have returned to Russia, if he had had the chance. I also remember conversations with him about Metr Antony of Kiev (Archbp Antony came from Kiev), whom he had known well in Belgrade and whose name he had taken. He was the real ROCOR. Real Russian Orthodox. At last. It had taken me 20 years to get to that point! 20 years of facing illusions, lies, broken promises and corruption. You would think it would have been easy, but nothing of the sort. All hell was against the Russian Orthodox Church, a sure sign of truth.

Q: What happened next?

A: Well, I was at last living as a proper Russian Orthodox. Nearly three years later, in December 1991 I was ordained priest for the new ROCOR parish in Lisbon in Portugal.

Q: What was your attitude to the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: We were all just impatiently waiting for it to become politically free and free of renovationism. That happened officially with the Jubilee Council in Moscow in 2000.

Q: So why didn’t the Church Outside Russia join up with the Patriarchate straightaway in 2000?

A: It is one thing to proclaim the truth at a Council, but another for the decisions of that Council to be implemented. For example, after that I can still remember how at the London Patriarchal Cathedral they refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs and also, incidentally, they refused to sell the books of Fr Seraphim (Rose) or anything traditional. Priests and people coming from Russia were persecuted by the renovationists because they were ‘too’ traditional. We had to wait for the Patriarchate to free itself from such Renovationism.

Also, it must be said, we had to wait until the fanatical elements that had done so much harm to ROCOR since they had started infiltrating the Church in the mid-sixties had left us. When the extremists did finally leave, almost at the same time, there was a huge sigh of relief, because then we could get on with being Orthodox. So it was we had to wait until 2007.

Q: How do you know that people are free of Renovationism?

A: Easy: The yardstick is veneration for the New Martyrs, especially the Imperial Martyrs. The renovationists hate them.

Q: How do you know that people are free of sectarian fanaticism of the sort you describe as having infiltrated ROCOR?

A: Easy: The yardstick is the willingness to concelebrate with other Orthodox Christians.

Q: What is going to happen in the future? At present there are countries like England where there are two parallel jurisdictions of the Russian Church, one dependent on Moscow, the other dependent on the Church Outside Russia?

A: According to the 2007 agreement, where there are two parallel jurisdictions, ROCOR should, in time, absorb the Patriarchal jurisdiction. This will probably take a generation, so that no-one will be under any pressure and everything will take place naturally, organically. However, in reality, already nine years have passed and we can see that in certain areas, like North America and Australasia, ROCOR will indeed clearly take over responsibility for those territories, whereas in other areas the Patriarchate will take over, as in South America, not to mention South-East Asia. The problem comes in the mixed area of Western Europe, including the British Isles and Ireland. In this area, only time will tell, clearly it is the more competent of the two that will take responsibility.

For the moment we shall lead parallel lives. There is in any case so much to do. I could start 12 parishes tomorrow, if I had the money to buy buildings and get candidates for the priesthood ordained. The state of Orthodox infrastructure and the general pastoral situation here are so appalling as to be scandalous; no wonder so many Orthodox lapse or become Roman Catholic or Protestant. All we pastors meet with is indifference. Those in authority should hang their heads in shame. Why is there not a church, our own property in every town over 100,000? This should have been done a generation ago. For example the teeming millions of London only have two small churches!

Colchester is the 50th largest town in England (and incidentally the 500th largest in Western Europe). It has a church that belongs to us. But want about the other 49 larger ones? Only five of them have their own churches: London, Manchester, Nottingham, Norwich, Birkenhead-Liverpool. That is a scandal. There is no missionary vision at all. Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK with a population of two million. And where do the faithful of the Patriarchate have ten liturgies a year on Saturdays (that’s all the priest can manage)? In the Ukrainian Uniat chapel. The next time you hear some naïve Orthodox boasting about his Church, tell him that. Orthodox should be ashamed of themselves.

Q: So is there competition between the two parts of the Russian Church locally?

A: No, not at all. It all depends on who has the priests and the buildings. A concrete example. I was asked to visit a prison in Cambridgeshire. Now, since there is no ROCOR presence in Cambridgeshire (because through incompetence it refused to set anything up there in the 1980s), I gave the prison authorities the references of the Patriarchal priest who lives in Cambridgeshire. On the other hand, when there was question of the Patriarchate setting something up in Norfolk (it had lost what it had had there a few years before, also through incompetence), but knowing that ROCOR had a presence there dating back to 1966, it was referred to me. So here is a territorial division. Now, where there is a double jurisdiction, as in London (the only case), something will have to be sorted out. But, as you can see, that will be as a result of competence. Only time can settle such matters. The more competent part, the more spiritual part of the Russian Church will prevail and form a united jurisdiction.

Q: So there is no rigid territorial division in Western Europe?

A: No, nobody wants to impose such a system. Let everything be done freely, let the people choose. Though, having said that, we can observe a tendency for ROCOR to dominate in the English-speaking world. Canada, the USA and Australasia are clear examples. For example, with Archbishop Mark of ROCOR retiring to Germany and the ROCOR Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland being taken over by Metr Hilarion of New York, we can even talk about a sort of ROCOR Brexit. Metr Hilarion will in fact be Metropolitan of New England and Old England. That is an exceptional event, historically speaking, and may be significant, a turning-point.

So it is possible that in a generation from now ROCOR will only exist in the English-speaking world, but will unite all Russian Orthodox there. ROCOR will become ROCA – the Russian Orthodox Church in the Anglosphere. That is one quite organic and natural possible scenario, a united Russian Orthodox Metropolia for the Anglosphere, the English-speaking world. The Patriarchate will look after everything else in various Metropolias, in Latin America, in Alaska, in Western Europe, in Asia etc.

Q: So Western Europe would completely go to the Patriarchate?

A: That is the way that things are developing at the moment. All the young bishops and all the dynamism in the Russian Church there is Patriarchal. ROCOR only has three ageing bishops and is not opening any new churches.

Q: Is there a difference between ROCOR churches and Patriarchal churches?

A: I think there is a small one, in general. Strangely enough, ROCOR is at one and the same time more Russian, but also more local, more integrated. We have done the translations, we print in English, we speak the local languages and know the local laws, we were born here. At the same time, however, we are utterly faithful to the best of the Tsar’s Russia, never having endured the Soviet period and Renovationism. ‘To quote the saintly Metr Laurus: ‘We are for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy’. We are Imperial priests and people.

Q: What about your own relations with the Russian Church inside Russia?

A: We are very close to all those who are Churched in Russia and they feel close to us. For example, in Moscow one of the closest friends of ROCOR has always been Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov), whom some have even suggested will be the next Patriarch. (Bp Tikhon has been in the news recently, since he outraged the British Establishment by inviting students from Eton College to experience Christianity in Russia; not something the atheist Establishment likes). In general, those who especially venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors at once feel at home in ROCOR. I have this nearly every Sunday. People from different parts of Russia, from the Ukraine, from Moldova and elsewhere say that they feel at home, whatever the language, the atmosphere is like at home. In my native town of Colchester, that is a great thing that we have such an oasis of Orthodoxy.

Q: Who are the unChurched in Russia?

A: You find all sorts of people. There are those on the right hand side who mingle superstition with Orthodoxy, for instance, those ritualists who think that holy water is more important than holy communion, who mix in pharisaic sectarianism, puritanism and judgementalism, or, on the other hand, those on the left hand side, who mix in Soviet nationalism, love of the tyrant Stalin, or modernism. But all that is superficial, the majority make their way to the Church sooner or later. You do not waste time on the convert fringes of the Church – otherwise you might end up thinking that that is the Church! A terrible delusion!

Q: Why have you stayed faithful to the Russian Church despite all the difficulties that you have faced over nearly fifty years?

A: Because the Russian Orthodox Church is the Invincible Power. History since 1917 proves it. The gates of hell have not prevailed – and shall not prevail – despite all the enemies and traitors, both external and internal, we have faced. Judas betrayed, but the other apostles triumphed. So tragedy becomes joy. The stone that was rejected is become the headstone of the corner. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!

About Ionan Orthodoxy: An Interview with Archbishop George of London

12 May 2041

Q: What is the territory of your Archdiocese?

AG: As you know, our Archdiocese is part of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe under Metropolitan John. This stretches from Ireland to Austria and Iceland to Sicily and includes the Latin, Germanic, Celtic and Basque peoples of Western Europe. Our Archdiocese includes the four now sovereign nations of England, Ireland (which was finally reunited five years ago, if you remember), Scotland and Wales. At present we have four bishops, myself, Bishop Patrick in Dublin, Bishop Andrew in Edinburgh and Bishop David in Cardiff. For our Local Synods we always use our premises on the Isle of Man, the only place from which all our four nations are visible.

Q: Why did you take the name Ionan for your Archdiocese?

AG: Originally, the name ‘Diocese of the Isles’ was suggested for the Archdiocese, but this was considered too vague, since there are isles all over the world. Then the name ‘Isles of the North Atlantic’ was suggested, so forming the acronym I.O.N.A. This conveniently refers to the Ionan Orthodox monasticism of St Columba, which originated in Egypt and came to Ireland via Gaul. Since St Columba’s monastery on Iona spread to England via Lindisfarne and from there Orthodoxy went south, converting much of England, and authentic monasticism had always been the one thing missing here, we felt that this was a good name.

Q: How did ‘Ionan Orthodoxy’ come into being?

AG: As you know even into the early 21st century there were two forms of Orthodoxy in Western countries. The first was that which looked back to the ethnic homeland, which meant that in each Western European country there was a multitude of dioceses, called jurisdictions, each living in a sort of divisive ethnic ghetto and using mainly a language other than English. This was all right for first-generation immigrants, but it did not work for second and subsequent generations, who were simply assimilated into the Non-Orthodox milieu. And after three generations, 75 years, abroad, the first generation always died out and so the Church with it. It happened to the Russians in England (arrived by 1920) who had died out by 1995 and to the Greek-Cypriots in England (arrived by 1960) who had died out by 2035.

Q: What was the second form of Orthodoxy in the West?

AG: Seeing the obvious short-sightedness and failure of the above form, there were second and third-generation Russian intellectuals who by reaction took the opposite stance. Their second form of Orthodoxy consisted of merging all Orthodox, whatever their background, into a melting pot. Their common point was the lowest common denominator, that is, the ethnic identity of the (Non-Orthodox) host country. Their policy was then to sell this as the new and substitute ethnic identity of a new Local Church. This second form only developed in full in North America, where immigrants had begun arriving much earlier than in Western Europe, at the end of the nineteenth century, and where people were far more cut off from the roots of Orthodoxy than in Europe. In Europe we did not want to repeat that mistake.

Q: What was that mistake?

AG: It was the attempt to create an ‘American Orthodoxy’. That was a mistake because it put a culture, Non-Orthodox at that, above the Church. This was not a theological movement, but merely a sociological movement of adaptation and conformism. For example, through the inferiority complex of immigrants, most Orthodox churches in the US adopted pews and many of them organs, one institution tried to use a guitar accompaniment to the Divine Liturgy and adapt the theme tune of the cowboy film ‘Shenandoah’ to it. In other places the Divine Liturgy would be stopped at Christmas in order to sing Protestant Christmas carols!

Someone at the time drew a cartoon of an ‘All-American Patriarch’, a clean-shaven man in a clerical collar with a foolish grin on his face and a glass of coca-cola in his hand, like an advert for toothpaste. Of course, this was only a carton, but it did sum up the situation. At that time when the USA still ruled the world, there were actually individuals in the US who arrogantly and blindly imagined that this second form of Orthodoxy there was the only true form of Orthodoxy, that it was at the centre of the world and that it was their duty to colonize the rest of the world with it! In reality, of course, it was a mere provincial backwater experiment, to be allowed to die out quietly because this experiment simply pandered to the weaknesses of the host country. It placed the Church of God below heretical culture. That was blasphemous, which is why it was racked with scandals.

Q: But did the same temptation not occur in Europe, even if it did not have time to develop to the same extent as in the USA?

AG: Yes, of course, it occurred; human nature is the same everywhere, it was just that it took on different forms according to the local heterodox culture. The same thing has happened among unChurched, semi-Orthodox people in Greece, Romania and Russia. It is simply the heresy of phyletism. And make no mistake, it is a heresy because you can lose your soul in it – that is what a heresy is.

For example, in France a whole jurisdiction catered for a kind of ‘philosophical and aesthetic Orthodoxy’, ‘l’Orthodoxie a la francaise’, as one might say. This theory of Orthodoxy, or theorizing about Orthodoxy, did not present the Church as the Christian way of life, but as a complex and highly intellectual philosophy, full of long words and isms, which no-one really understood. Of course, it could have been expressed in very simple language, which everyone knew already. But as long as it sounded theoretically and philosophically fine, ‘cosmique’ as they used to say, all was fine, but of course, it was not fine and that jurisdiction died out, as it was built on sand, not on the Rock of the Faith. This theorizing was about the god of the philosophers in the language of philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the language of the fishermen of Galilee. You simply cannot build a Local Church based on Non-Orthodox culture! That is common sense, but you could not say that out loud to those who were taken up by such delusions.

Q: What about in other countries in Europe?

AG: It happened everywhere, not just in France. For example, in Germany the first liturgical book to be translated was the Typikon. In other words, Orthodoxy there was confused with the Non-Orthodox German mindset and produced an Orthodoxy of rules, a stubborn, black and white system, without any flexibility, any understanding of the human component, which is what it is all about. They lost their way by confusing the means (the services) with the ends (the salvation of the soul). For instance, I remember one German priest refusing to give a woman communion because she was dressed in trousers. Well, she was of course wrong, but a few decades ago there was a fashion for women to dress in trousers (fortunately, long since over now). That was bad, but what right did the German priest have to excommunicate that woman? Suppose she had died in the night after she had been refused communion? That sin would have been on the conscience of that priest.

Q: And in England?

AG: It was the same thing again. The national weakness here was not theorizing or creating a book of rules, but it was to adapt Orthodoxy to the British Establishment, to create a compromised ‘Establishment Orthodoxy’, a ‘British Orthodoxy’. This State-controlled and State-worshipping Orthodoxy, that of converts from Anglicanism, was of course just a repeat of the Anglicanism that had long ago been invented by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. There were even two whole but tiny jurisdictions dedicated to this State-approved pietism. It was all salt that had lost its savour. Some such people used the treacherous, half-Norman Edward the Confessor as the mascot of their ‘Establishment Orthodoxy’. Of course, it all came to nothing and has died out now, largely a fantasy of the late-twentieth century and the curious personalities who reigned supreme in the bad old days then. It was very oppressive because, as they were emperors in new clothes, you were not allowed to contradict them!

All these examples show the danger of compromising the Faith with local culture. And all those who did so have now died out, as withered branches. And that is the answer to your question, how did ‘Ionan Orthodoxy’ come into being. It came into being as the only living alternative to the two false alternatives – the ghetto or worldly compromise.

Q: So what do you base ‘Ionan Orthodoxy’ on?

AG: Simply, we put the Church and the Faith first. If we put the Kingdom of God, Orthodoxy, first, then all will fall into place, including the language that we use in services, which today is for about 90% in English, regardless of the ethnic origin of the parishioners, regardless of how well or how badly they speak another language. We are united by Orthodox Christianity, not by ethnic origins, and we are carried forward by the faithfulness to the Church and Her Tradition of the younger generations, who are all primarily English-speakers.

Q: You now have over 350 parishes in the British Isles and Ireland, all established quite solidly and with their own clergy and premises. Every city and town over 50,000 and the area around it is covered. This is quite unlike even 25 years ago, when the Russian Church, a small minority at that time, had mostly tiny communities with services once a month, borrowed premises and a suffered from a huge shortage of priests to go out and do vital missionary work in the area surrounding their churches. What about the other jurisdictions, which collectively still have over 50 parishes outside the Archdiocese?

AG: We live with them as good neighbours. People are free to join us and free to remain outside us. As you know, the parishes outside our jurisdiction are composed mainly of elderly people who settled here from various countries 50 years ago or more and they use very little English in their services. Virtually all the young people come to us. Time will show which way things will go. Live and let live.

Q: What is the future? Do you think of autocephaly?

AG: The Western European Metropolia, with just over 2,000 parishes now, is united, with six archdioceses, Iona, Scandinavia, Germania, Gallia, Italia and Hispania. True, the Metropolia has autonomy, but at the present time there is no desire at all for autocephaly. True, 2,000 parishes is more than in some other Local Churches, like the 700 parishes of the Hungarian Orthodox Church which recently became autocephalous, but a lot fewer than in others. Take China for example. That is still also an autonomous part of the Russian Church, even though it now has over 25,000 parishes. And the Russian Church Herself did not become autonomous for centuries, only after the Empire had fallen in New Rome. At present, I cannot see any reason to become autocephalous. That situation may of course change, especially in China, but not yet. It all takes time.

Q: Are you saying that autocephaly granted prematurely can be dangerous?

AG: Definitely. And especially in Western Europe.

Q: Why?

AG: Because Western Europe has for over a millennium veered between extremes which we do not want to repeat.

Q: Which extremes?

AG: The first is that of despotic centralism. This was the extreme of the pagan Roman Empire, which Charlemagne foolishly tried to revive and fortunately failed to, but it was indeed revived after 1050, causing Western Europe’s schism from the Church, and that lasted until the anti-Latin nationalist outburst of the Germanic Reformation. After that, despotic centralism was tried again by warmongers like Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, and then by the EU Fourth Reich – and we all know how that ended.

Each time there was a reaction to this despotism – nationalism, and that led to terrible fratricidal wars in Europe, like the so-called ‘Wars of Religion’ in the 16th century, just as centralism created the World Wars. We do not want those extremes, we must follow the golden mean of unity in diversity, which is what we have in Ionan Orthodoxy and in the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe in general. Europe has to be a Confederation of Nations, not a Union, a United States of Europe, but not a series of warring, nationalist states either.

In the same way, the Tsardom of Rus, as it is now called, successfully overcame provincial Ukrainian nationalism a generation ago and reunited huge territories, one sixth of the world. However, it only did this by rejecting the old centralism of the Soviet Union, which had done so much damage to its credibility. Once it had done that, again on the basis of unity in diversity, all of Eastern Europe joined in a free and mutually beneficial economic confederation with it, throwing off the shackles of the old European Union, which was in fact just a repeat of the Soviet Union.

Q: Will you drop the word ‘Russian’ from the name of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe? Most of your faithful are either not Russian or else do not speak it.

AG: In the bad old days of Western nationalism, for example in North America in the Cold War, they detested the word ‘Russian’ and dropped it. Now we are more enlightened and we all understand that ‘Russian’ does not mean nationalism and means uncompromised, unsecularized Orthodoxy. We exist because we have been helped to exist by the Russian Orthodox Church, the only multinational, Imperial Orthodox Church. I think we should keep it. Do you remember the old Roman Catholic Church, as it used to be called? Well, there were hardly any Romans in it!

Q: Why has the Western European Metropolia been so successful?

AG: Without doubt because of the sacrifices made to underpin it in the twentieth century and since. The Church is built on blood, sweat and tears. We should remember with gratitude the prayers and work of those who went before us. For example, I can remember decades ago, how people wanted more English in the services. So, one bishop said yes, do the service in English. What happened? The people who had been clamouring for more English could not even put a decent choir together to sing just the Liturgy! Some of them said that the singing was so bad that they preferred the Liturgy in a foreign language, in which it was properly sung. In other words, you have to make sacrifices in order to achieve anything. We owe a great deal to those who sang properly in English, showing others that the Liturgy in English could be just as beautiful as in Slavonic. Actions speak louder than words.

Yes, mistakes were made in the past, but we learned from those mistakes. Take for example our English translations which stretch back to the turn of the 20th century, nearly 150 years ago, those made in the USA with the blessing of the holy Patriarch Tikhon by an Episcopalian Isabel Hapgood and by Orlov in England. Those were foundation stones. Yes, those translations have been improved and on the way we have seen archaic translations in a Latinate, Victorian style like those of Hapgood or even with 16th century spelling, we have seen those made into street English as well as into soulless, jarring academic English, all sorts, but today we have definitive translations, avoiding all those extremes. It is easy to criticize, but the fact is that without those tireless efforts of the past, however mistaken they sometimes were, we would not be where we are now.

Let us first of all thank our recent fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters in Christ who went before us, who built our Church, our parishes and our souls. Our Metropolia, in effect, the Church of the Old and the New Europe, would not exist without them. But let us also thank the saints of the first millennium. Through venerating them, we have earned their prayers and because of their prayers we are here today. We are built not on dead souls, but on spiritually alive souls, whether of the distant past or of the recent past. Always on spiritually alive souls: Remember that.

A Secular Meeting Rejected: A Council Proposed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Battle for the Soul of Europe

I am sometimes asked why the Church has not so far proved very attractive to native Western Europeans. Yes, it is true that since the 1960s in particular, small numbers of native Western Europeans have joined the Orthodox Church. However, the total number throughout Western Europe amounts to only a few thousand, certainly no more than 10,000. And of those many swiftly lapsed and quite a few others could not in the end accept authentic Orthodox Christianity and devised instead a sort of adapted Uniatism (in Catholic-culture countries) and Protestantism with icons (in Protestant-culture countries). With their Roman Catholic and Protestant cultural background, such unintegrated newcomers inevitably formed their own inward-looking groups, separated from the Orthodox mainstream.

The answer to the question why the Church has not proved attractive is precisely because so many native Western Europeans have generally been unable to free themselves from the cultural conditioning and ethnocentric prejudices of their Non-Orthodox background. It is interesting to see that some Americans at least have relatively fewer problems in this domain; they are sometimes more flexible and less attached to a Non-Orthodox cultural identity. Nevertheless, this difficulty in accepting pure Christianity comes about because the greatest failing of Western culture is to think itself superior to all else; how, in these circumstances, can people of Western cultural background acquire the humility to admit that their culture is mistaken and that it must be purified by repentance?

Thus, I have seen case after case over the last forty years or so of Western academics in particular, suffering from towering pride in their own culture, who refuse to accept a ‘foreign culture’, which they despise as in some way ‘oriental’. They prefer to stay in their semi-Christian, semi-pagan world of pale-faced ‘Jesuses’. But Christ was an oriental, He was not a European. The tragedy of such a West is that through its ethnic pride and institutional racism it puts itself above God and His Church, above the Truth. Such is the situation of Old Europe. But Old Europe is dying or is even already dead. Only a few old people go to church, the young have abandoned it; Catholicism, discredited by papist persecutions and now pedophilia, has had its thousand-year day, and Protestantism, discredited by past intolerance and narrow Puritanism, has had its five-hundred-year day. The world has moved on. A New Europe emerged long ago, within a generation of its Second World War.

This New Europe is by and large a continent of faithlessness to Christ. Yes, it still has its museums and medieval buildings, but this is not for living, this is for tourists. The New Europe has been shaped and is still being shaped by two forces, two sets of belief. The first force is the mass Secularism of the USA, the Coca Cola culture which began appearing in Europe as soon as its first bout of suicide, the First World War, had taken place, for instance in 1920s jazz; there followed a second wave during the Second World War with chewing gum and the rest; a third wave of ‘pop’ and jeans came in the 1960s; a fourth wave of ‘globalism’ (= Americanization) has come since 1989; and in the last few years a fifth wave of the chaos of mass immigration has appeared in Western Europe and is now submerging several countries and their traditional identities.

Modern culture is the soulless culture of concrete, glass and plastic. Its hideous and inhuman post-War architecture is all about this, as is its music, art, furniture, its whole culture. I can recall sitting in a café in Cambridge with an ‘antediluvian’ White Russian émigré in 1975. In the middle of the conversation, he suddenly said: ‘This place is not evil, it is just spiritually empty’. His definition was precise. However, as we said at that time, nature abhors a vacuum; wherever there is no prayer, spiritual emptiness is formed and that is always filled by the demons. And that is exactly what has happened over the last forty years. At first they began abolishing marriage and legalizing pornography. Very quickly they invented a huge and very profitable abortion industry, legalizing child murder, and after that there appeared perversions and pedophilia. And now the countries that resist these sinister and evil trends, mainly in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, are being forced, like the Ukraine, through economic sanctions (warfare) to accept them.

However, there is a second force that is at work in shaping the New Europe. This is Islamism. Greedy local industrialists began inviting masses of poor Muslims to settle in Europe in the 1950s. Their cheap, hard-working labour could be exploited to make vast profits. However, what was once a stream of Turks in Germany, Algerians in France, Pakistanis in Britain and Moroccans in Belgium has become a flood. Through mass immigration the one per cent Muslim minority has become five per cent, ten per cent, twenty per cent and in some European cities fifty per cent and more, forming there a townscape of minarets and also of terrorism. There is no greater example of this dual invasion than the recent atrocity at the airport in Brussels: a concrete, glass and plastic monstrosity, indistinguishable from any other modern airport, was ripped apart by Islamist suicide bombers. New Europe.

The problem is of course not in the relatively innocent ‘cultural Islam’ of elderly Muslims, but in the form of militant Islam, Islamism, which is practised today by a good many of the young, exasperated by the recent Western aggressions and war crimes in the Muslim world. Rather like Judaism and all too often like medieval Catholicism and post-medieval Protestantism, Islam never knew that God is Love and that it is our task to love our enemies and forgive. It is a militant and aggressive religion, especially in its fundamentalist Sunni Islamist form, as spread and financed by the great ally of the West, Wahhabite Saudi Arabia. Western Europe is thus sandwiched between aggressive US Secularism, as anti-Christian as you can get, and Islamism, with its fundamentalist god of hatred and revenge, sandwiched between MacWorld and Jihad.

Only by referring back to its native roots, its soul, can the New Europe find its way between these two extremes and so survive. However, as Old Europe is dying and dead, where can it retrieve its roots? The answer is in the Church, in the uncompromised ascetic, canonical and liturgical Tradition of Orthodox Christianity, that which patterned the distant past of Western Europe and today can be expressed in Orthodoxy in the native languages of Western Europe. Like the distant past of the first millennium, the future also is Orthodox. True, some may say that Orthodoxy has not worked so far, only a few thousand native Europeans have approached the Church. However, most of those Europeans, though by no means all, came from the Old Europe and brought baggage with them, making them unable to convert in full and even leading many to lapse. Today we are dealing nearly wholly with people from the New Europe.

The New Europeans are blank sheets. You do not need to spend time explaining to them the sometimes subtle differences between the Church and heterodoxy. They have no idea what heterodoxy is. All is much easier and, as far as I can tell, though the New Europeans are fewer, they are more serious. Devoid of cultural baggage, that is, devoid of pride and prejudice, they adapt much more quickly to the Church and Her Orthodox Christian Faith than the Old Europeans ever did. True, some predict that the time will come when direct persecution will start in Western Europe and we will not, for reasons of ‘health and safety’ (= hatred of the Church) be allowed to baptize (unlike Jews and Muslims, who will still be allowed to circumcise – that presents no problem, it seems). Well, then we shall charter ships and go to Russia and to freedom and baptize persecuted Europeans there.

Some may think that we are talking about a distant future. Sadly, I think not. The present extraordinary acceleration towards Antichrist suggests that we may well see such a situation even in our lifetimes. We only have to think of the social and moral transformations that have happened in Western Europe in the last twenty-five years, let alone the last fifty. Even older films of our ancestors make them look as though they came from another planet. They would probably not even recognize present-day society as their own. What will the future bring? We cannot be certain. Of course, mass repentance, however unlikely, is still possible. We do not despair, but live in hope, for miracles do happen. Old Europe has gone, but the New Europe can still choose, between MacWorld, Jihad and the Church of God.

The Present Danger

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

(1 Peter 3, 13)

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

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

What should our attitude be?

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

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

On Modernism

From Recent Correspondence on Modernism

Q: What is modernism?

A: Modernism, often called renovationism in Russian, is merely secularization, that is desacralization, under the camouflage of the word ‘modern’.

Q: How did you encounter modernism in the Orthodox Church?

A: Between 1973 and 1980, I met a great many modernists: Intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals. First the Parisians living in England, then those in France itself, where Paris was the source of all the problems. In France in 1985 I also encountered freemasonry among such ‘Orthodox’ modernists. It was very widespread among them then and perhaps still is.

Q: So you met modernism very soon?

A: Yes, it was actually presented to me as the norm, as real Orthodoxy!

Q: But you rejected it?

A: I was seeking the source of the sacred, not the secular! So I instinctively and automatically felt that modernist Orthodoxy was a fake, not the real thing, but I also knew that from experience, my own and through having observed Church life, the real thing, in Russia.

Q: Which modernists did you meet?

A: The well-known names: in England, Nicholas Zernov, the then Fr Basil Osborne, Metr Antony Bloom, Fr Lev Gillet, Fr Sergei Hackel, Fr Nicholas Behr, and in France Fr Boris Bobrinsky, Fr Elie Melia, Olivier Clement, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Nikita Struve, Konstantin Andronikov, Fr Jean-Claude Roberti, Fr Jean Gueit, Fr Alexander Schmemann and many other lesser known names who simply followed the fashion that they set, including those active in Syndesmos.

I have to say that these figures are nearly all departed now, part of a generation that was deeply compromised by modernism. Indeed, I also met many who had personally known well those who had led modernism in the previous generation, for example Archbishop John (Shakhovskoy), Fr Nikolay Afanasyev, the former Marxists Fr Sergius Bulgakov and Berdyayev, Fr Paul Florensky, Yevdokimov, Fedotov, Zander, Zenkovsky, or Mother Maria Skobtsova. Many of them had relatives who disagreed with them completely.

Q: I notice that you have not mentioned two well-known members of modernist clergy in England.

A: There are two well-known exceptions because they are lesser, more subtle figures in modernism, shall we say, semi-modernist, that is, modernist under the cloak of traditional. One dead, one still alive, they belong to the ‘spiritual’ school of modernism, which is still popular and they are revered by naïve newcomers and all the Tradition-less.

It is important to distinguish between the different grades of modernism, from the primitive to the sophisticated. For example, I have seen Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) mentioned as a modernist. I can see where that comes from (his interest in St Simeon the New Theologian and his ecumenical contacts), but he cannot be compared to the above.

Q: Why are such ‘moderate modernists’ revered?

A: As they say, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Q: Did you meet Metr John Zizioulas?

A: Not then. I only met him about eight years ago.

Q: And Fr John Meyendorff?

A: No, I never met him, but he was among the more moderate, except on fasting.

Q: What was your reaction to all these figures?

A: I instinctively knew that they were wrong but at the time I could not explain why, because I did not have the tools or arguments from experience and from theological study to answer them. For example, I understood that their philosophy was characterized by pride, they all thought that they knew better than the Church. They were above the Church. And this pride was characterized by intellectual fantasies, the result of a lack of rootedness in reality and spiritual reality, the Tradition. And the characteristic of this was their inability to provide spiritual food. They fed the brain – to the point of their books and talks giving you headaches – but they were incapable of feeding your soul, leaving you dry.

Q: Why were there, and why are there still, so many modernists in the Orthodox Diaspora?

A: There were and are so many – relatively speaking – they are in fact very few, they just make a lot of noise – in the Diaspora because these people encountered the West directly and never having had any roots in the Tradition, they wanted to mix their superficial Orthodoxy with Western culture. Uprooted from an Orthodox context and denying monastic life, they did not want the spiritual purity of Holy Orthodoxy, but compromise, they wanted to swim with the Western tide. That is why all modernists are essentially ecumenists and secularists. They try to conform the Church to the world, instead of conforming themselves (the world) to the Church.

Q: And why was Paris the centre of modernism?

A: Paris was where the French-speaking aristocrats and intellectuals from Saint Petersburg who had carried out the Revolution under Western influence and with Western backing had chosen exile. A great many of them were freemasons, some, like Yusupov, had been very interested in the occult and hypnotism. Paris was the place of their exile, where they were called to repentance. In other words, this is where the most spiritually decadent Russians, nominal Orthodox, highly protestantized, in the sense of secularized, went to live.

There were two groups. First, there were left-wingers, like Bulgakov, Berdyayev and Mother Maria, but most were right-wing constitutionalists or republicans who wanted either the British model or else the French model of political organization. None of them of course wanted Orthodoxy. All broke away from the Russian Church and her liturgical and canonical disciplines, in other words, they broke entirely away from the Tradition. This they did on the pretext of seeking ‘freedom and creativity’! The saddest thing was that they did not understand repentance.

Q: Why did they not simply become Protestants or Uniats – that would have been honest?

A: Because they were pretentious, which is a disease of intellectuals. They wanted to be different and lord it over others through their ‘exotic’ differences. If they had simply been Protestants or Uniats, no Western-Establishment figures or ecumenists would even have looked at them, they would have lost their exotic tag and been forgotten as immigrants. But by setting up a Westernized branch of Orthodoxy, they attracted attention and admiration. In other words, they, or rather their descendants, were courted by those who wanted to destroy the very Soviet Russia which they had themselves created in 1917, in order to replace it with the sort of degutted Russia they did briefly create in the 1990s until the revival in 2000. For secularist Western Establishments they were all ‘useful idiots’.

Of course, these modernists were peddling a fake Orthodoxy, but Anglicans and others knew no better and gave these semi-Orthodox a false authority by buying their books and listening to their talks. If you say modernist things with a Russian accent, you are suddenly exotic and interesting. Some of these émigrés even faked Russian accents to sound more Russian! There was a lot of acting going on in order to hoodwink simple people, even hypnotism. If you look, you will see that almost all their books were bought and read either by Non-Orthodox or else by converts who knew no better.

Q: Why do so many intellectuals fall into modernism?

A: Because they live uprooted lives in their heads, and not their hearts. So they are prey to fantasies. If you are an intellectual type, you must have a strong spiritual or ascetic life to balance it out. For example St Justin (Popovich) was an intellectual, but it did not, forgive the pun, go to his head. So anyone can become a saint, even an intellectual, but such saintliness exists despite intellectualism, not because of it.

Q: What is the antidote to modernism?

A: First of all, let me say that the antidote is not the censorious condemnation and ritualism of the pharisees. That also comes from hardness and dryness of heart, lack of compassion. It fails to take account of the need for pastoral dispensation, true ‘ikonomia’. The first victims of modernism are the modernists themselves.

The antidote to modernism can never be in another ism, but in the Church. And that antidote is in seeking spiritual food, not intellectual food, and spiritual food comes from holiness, which comes from asceticism, which is exactly what the modernists reject. That is why they dislike people going to the sources in Eastern Europe and Russia, especially Mt Athos. In true Protestant style, modernists hate anything that is beyond the rational, mysterious. What can be more ‘irrational’ and mysterious than holiness? They lack the sense of the sacred.

Holiness is one of the four characteristics of the Church, which they reject, since they reject the Church. For them the Church is not One – there are many ‘Churches’; the Church is not Holy (which is why they desacralize everything), but to be reformed; the Church is not Catholic (in the Orthodox sense of being the same everywhere and at all times), because the modernists reject everything outside their 20th century mental ghetto; and the Church is not Apostolic, because they reject the Faith of the Apostles, the inherited Tradition. The antidote to modernism is in holiness, that is, in the saints.

Q: But some of these modernists were much interested in saints?

A: You have hit the nail on the head – ‘interested’ in saints. Interested in saints – how very fashionable! They were interested in the outward events in the lives of saints, but not in becoming saints. They intellectualized or externalized everything, making it abstract, into a philosophy – they did not live the Faith. Theirs is an outward or Uniat attitude to the Faith, which is of course why many of them had sympathies with Uniatism, like Solovyov did. They loved to talk about ‘techniques’, techniques of icon-painting, techniques of Church singing, techniques of celebration etc. These techniques they analyzed constantly. They spoke about hagiography – but did not want holiness. They spoke, they wrote, but they did not do, they did not fast and pray and there is no holiness without fasting and prayer.

Q: Do you think that modernism has a future?

A: Yes and no. Most of the well-known names of modernists belong to those who have died in the last 75 years, many in the last 25 years. And modernism is strangely old-fashioned in the present post-modernist world, which is characterized by cynicism. The only answer to cynicism is faith, not half-faith and half-faith is what modernism is: Halfodoxy instead of Orthodoxy. In that sense modernism is over because it has no answer to post-modernism, which it created. And yet it is not over.

For example, I remember the words of Metr Antony Bloom, when real Orthodox started coming to his church in London around the year 2000. They were naturally, like the rest of us had been decades before, very shocked by what they saw. He said that it would take fifty years to convert these people to Orthodoxy (that is, to his Bloomism). In other words, the truth is that it will take fifty years to convert the modernists to Orthodoxy. There is still the hangover from the past and it will take time for the vestiges of modernism to die out. In that sense, modernism is not over.

Q: Some would be shocked by your listing of Mother Maria Skobtsova as a modernist. She was canonized by the Rue Daru group with the blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

A: As you know, that top-down canonization was controversial and you would be hard put to find a single icon of her even in any Greek Church in the world, let alone in others. In other words, her canonization was purely local and actually very political. Veneration for her simply does not exist in most of the Orthodox world, given her very strange life and anti-Orthodox writings. Having said that, however, we must say that in her concentration camp death, she, like millions of others, must have cleansed herself.

Q: So is she a saint?

A: I would say that her destiny has not been revealed to us. Let us remain silent. We do not know. We simply do not know the measure of her repentance in Ravensbruck. It may well have been deep and complete, as surely it was for millions of others. In the hour of death, people become realistic, which is why the memory of death is ascetically so important. Here we have a vital point. There is no place for personal dislike, still less hatred, for these individuals. Like the rest of us, they made their mistakes, it may be that many of them repented before the end, though of course the damage was done by then. We should pray for all of them. Some of them had good hearts – they were poisoned by their heads.

For instance, I remember Fr Alexander Schmemann, He was a charming and interesting man – though of course we agreed on nothing. But I still pray for him. Or there was Elisabeth Behr-Sigel the feminist Protestant pastor. She said appalling things about ROCOR, which just showed how ignorant she was of Orthodoxy. But I prayed for her when she died. Even though modernists persecuted us and slandered us, it is important to pray for them, not only does it help them, but it helps us too, it stops our hearts from growing hard. We must always pray for our enemies. We are Christians.

What is disturbing is that those who canonized Mother Maria canonized her not for her sacrificial death, but for her anti-Church musings – and that is not to venerate her, but to malign her. When people die, we should try to remember only the good things about them. Personally, I think her writings should be made secret because they are shameful, the fruit of someone who had not yet been converted from being a Social Revolutionary.

Q: What form does modernism take today?

A: Modernism now tends to have a more philosophical, ‘spiritual’ form, in any possible way so as to blur the clear and dogmatic. This is very cunning, as we have seen with the new documents for the Crete meeting next June (if it takes place). For example, in Greece, you have the case of the philosopher Yannaras, in Russia you have the case of the Kochetkovite sect, in Finland you have a very active group, including clergy, though they are so extreme that they are very isolated, even having abandoned Orthodox Easter. They go back to the notorious Archbishop Herman (Aav), and that continued through Archbishop Paul, Archbishop Leo and now Metr Ambrose. But this is purely modern Lutheranism.

Q: What are the themes of these modernists?

A: On the one hand, there are still the crude renovationist practices taken from 1920s Russia, where such modernism more or less died out under Stalin. Such practices include letting laypeople do the proskomidia in the middle of the church and generally desacralizing the services, which is an abandonment of the priesthood. Remember that modernism, as I said, is essentially secularization, the opposite of sacralization. So first it had to destroy the sacral Emperor (the Tsar), then their next task was to destroy the priesthood – equally sacral. Linked with this destruction of the priesthood are the many divorced and remarried priests among the modernists, the uncanonically ordained and all the anti-liturgical practices, which include shortening the services and introducing the so-called ‘new’ or Roman Catholic calendar, which has always been the first stage in falling away from Orthodoxy.

On the other hand, today, as a result of the tide of secularization or desacralization that the modernists have never been able to resist and even welcome, the latest fad among them is pushing to introduce female priests and homosexual marriage into the Church. The latter movement is strong in some of the parishes in Finland, which are basically Lutheran with icons. Of course, whenever there are homosexual clergy, that push is even stronger because there is self-interest, self-justification.

Q: Where is modernism in general strongest today?

A: Although there are the debased remnants in Europe in the ever smaller Paris Jurisdiction (all the big intellectuals are dead), and there are still those in the USA as well as in Finland, now there is a group of people connected with Fr George Kochetkov in Russia. The disgraced Protodeacon Andrei Kurayev is among them, and the murdered Uniat Fr Alexander Men still has a few disciples. Then there is the provocateur Fr George Mitrofanov, as well as Fr Alexei Uminsky. However, I think they were all stronger in the 1990s than today. They too are figures from the past and I think they will die out, like the others. Now we are in the 21st century, it is time to grow up.

Q: Given this continued modernism, aren’t you pessimistic about the future?

A: As regards modernism, our Christian life is a combat, a struggle, it always has been and always will be. We will fight these anti-dogmatic currents, just as we combated the old modernism. Thus, we, like all Orthodox, combat and reject the absurd documents prepared for the meeting in Crete in June. However, Christians are always optimists because however grim the situation is now, Christ will triumph at the end of history.

The Present Crisis

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

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

Q: Would you sign a petition against it?

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

Q: How do you see this problem developing?

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

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

A: Yes, that meeting has reinforced the crisis.

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

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

Q: What do you mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Why do their minds work like that?

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

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

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

Q: Is this a serious crisis?

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

Q: So what is the solution?

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

Comments from a Correspondent in Wales

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

Priest Savva Mikhalevich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spiritual Empire versus the Neocon Empire

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

Gandhi

Introduction: Towards an Orthodox Christian World View

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

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

1. Today’s Russian Federation

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

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

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

Russia’s Fifth Column

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The Neocon Empire

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

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

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

The Patriotic Resistance

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

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

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

The Neocon Allies: Nazism, Zionism, Islamism and LGBT

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

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

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

Conclusion: The Coming Collapse of the Neocon Empire

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

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