Category Archives: Orthodoxy

Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Available Again

This anthology of 100 essays, first published in 1995 and now with a new foreword, is at last available again from:

frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. 3rd Edition A5 495 pp.

Price: £15.00 + £2.80 p & p in the UK. Unfortunately, Air Mail to the USA is now £12.85 (surface post, which can take up to two months, is £8.00). Please make payments by Paypal button from the website: www.orthodoxengland.org.uk

From the Back Cover

Today many search for an Undivided Christendom and the traditional teachings of the Early Church, which go beyond the latter-day divisions and disputes of Roman-Catholic, Anglican and Protestant. And amid the chaos of recent years many have discovered the Orthodox Church and Her Faith, drawn from the first millennium of Christianity. In this book the author, an English Orthodox priest, looks at the authentic Orthodox Faith, beyond the historical and cultural vicissitudes surrounding it, and pinpoints its relevance to us. He writes: Orthodox Christianity is the Faith revealed to the repentant in their quest for the Holy Spirit. Should we accept it, we would thus accept the struggle for the Holy Spirit; and in so doing we would accept the struggle to build Jerusalem here, ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.

Foreword to the Third Edition

For we hope that the Lord will deliver Russia and the Russian people from the dread years of evil which have now lasted for 70 years. Russia can be reborn only through the repentance of the Russian people, through faith in God, through living the Divine commandments. Therefore the rebirth of the Russian people – the rebirth of personal, social and national life – must be founded on the Holy Orthodox Faith and their life must be built on this. And then once more, as of old, Russia will be Holy Rus, the House of the Most Holy Mother of God.

Prophecy of the Ever-Memorable Archbishop (later Metropolitan) Laurus (1987)

All my life I have been haunted by the European world that was lost by the consequences of the tragic events and sacrifices of August 1914, now exactly 100 years ago. Growing up with nineteenth-century grandparents and great-uncles who had fought in the First European War and with tragic maiden great-aunts, I knew that all of us had to live with those consequences. There has been no peace in the world since then, since the profound injustice of the victory so cruelly and ironically snatched from the Russian Empire in 1917 by Allied treachery and then the German treachery that made the slaying of the Russian Royal Family inevitable. And that, in turn, made the destruction of Germany in the Second European War inevitable, with Russian troops taking Vienna and Berlin. And that, in its turn, made the Cold War inevitable.

That War dragged on until 1991. Then the Slav, Romanian, Georgian and Albanian Churches all lived beneath the yoke of atheism and had virtually no free voices. As for the smaller and weaker Greek Churches, they were compromised by US control. Thus, the impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, at one time financed by Anglicanism, had come under US control in 1948, when Patriarch Maximos was deposed by the CIA with threats to his life and despatched into a generation of exile in Switzerland, uttering as he went the words, ‘The City is lost’.

Those were dark days of the betrayal of the Church and, virtually alone, the Church Outside Russia spoke on behalf of us all. For during the Cold War proud anti-Incarnational modernism and ecumenism (heresies, like sects and cults which are created by heresies, are always based on pride), in either their crass, pseudo-intellectual, humanist Protestant/Catholic form, as often in the US, or in their subtle, pseudo-spiritual, personalist Buddhist/Hindu form, as often in Europe, were everywhere. ‘Orthodox’ academic theology was then dominated by that spiritual decadence which may be called ‘captivity theology’. In its intellectualism that ‘theology’, ignorant of the Lives of the Saints, utterly failed to see that Orthodoxy is a striving for holiness, which is simply a life lived with prayer in conformity with the Tradition

This was the academic theology of ‘Orthodox’ intellectuals, who had studied either in Protestant centres (Oxford, Cambridge, Strasbourg, centres in Germany etc) or else in Roman Catholic centres (especially the Gregorian University in Rome, but also Paris, Louvain, Jesuit Fordham etc). The academics infected naturally reflected the proud cultural prejudices of those establishments where they had studied, resulting not in an Orthodox, but a ‘Halfodox’ vision of the world. An associated mixture of ecumenists, liberals and modernists, those intellectuals wished to reduce the Church to a mere religion, a theory and an institution, just like the Western denominations. This was, consciously or unconsciously, spiritual treachery.

Their ‘theology’, in fact philosophy, reflected the humanistic personalism and spiritually empty symbolism of that age. Most of those intellectuals have now died, if not, they are very elderly. The generation of disciple-imitators that succeeded them has even less conviction or talent. It is hardly surprising – modernism is incredibly old-fashioned in a post-modern world. With the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, that age of decadence seems increasingly distant. I remember at that time, and I mean nearly 40 years ago, being told by an ‘Orthodox’ academic at one of those above-mentioned universities that if I was not satisfied with their food that did not satisfy my soul, I should ‘go and live in Russia’. During the Cold War that was not possible; therefore I took the next best option, to frequent the last emigres of the first generation of the White emigration in Paris and the Church Outside Russia.

This anthology of essays was written between 1974 and 1995, precisely at that time when the Church Outside Russia was isolated, indeed virtually besieged, under attack from all sides and from inside, by the extremes of modernism and ‘traditionalism’ alike. Indeed, as I came to realize, the Church Outside Russia was then one of the few points of freedom anywhere in the Orthodox Church. Figures in it expressed words of truth similar only to those of the lone Serbian theologian St Justin of Chelije, canonized in 2010, and other figures on the Holy Mountain and in the monasteries of the Carpathians.

Rejoicing in the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors in New York in 1981, when the Orthodoxy hierarchy was still paralysed in the homelands, at that time we also tried to reclaim for the Church the ancient holiness of Western Europe. We knew that all holiness can only come from the Church, as we daily confess in the Creed. Our task was to help gather together the remaining living spiritual and cultural forces of the dying West and to call it back to its roots in its ancient holiness that it had for the most part renounced. This desire is very much reflected in this book. Sadly, since that time we have seen the final death-throes of once Christian-based Western civilization, witnessing the disappearance of the old culture.

For after 1991, and with great speed, the demons that had operated in the atheist Soviet Union migrated to the atheist European Union, whose spiritual deadweight has been reinforced by the atheism of North America. Only a few years ago President Putin of the Russian Federation, made wise by the failure and defeat of atheism, warned the then Prime Minister Blair that demon-inspired atheism was literally a dead end; naturally, he was ignored, for deluded arrogance never listens to wisdom. Indeed, ever since 1988 the Church that President Putin belongs to, the multicultural and multilingual Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Church of God, has been reviving, re-opening or building three churches every day somewhere on the planet.

Together with it there is reviving the social, political and economic life of the Russian Federation, the Russian Lands (Rus) and even other parts of the Orthosphere. In 2007 in Moscow we witnessed the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church and the re-establishment of canonical communion, a long-awaited miracle of our times. Our great hope of 20-40 years ago for the messianic restoration of Holy Rus, so great that it was a belief, has been coming true through repentance. We have no illusions that we may not see our hopes for the full restoration of the Sovereignty of the Tsar realized, or, much less likely, Europe liberated from its self-imposed ideological yoke, but at least we know that we are on the way. There is much to do, very far to go, but the direction is the right one.

Nearly twenty years on now since the first edition, this book is here reprinted, a few typographical errors corrected, spelling updated, long paragraphs divided and a few minor precisions and corrections made. May this third edition of these essays be a help to all those who seek. May it guide them to the spiritual awareness of the Church and Civilization of Holy Rus and that Orthodoxy is Christianity and that all else, whatever its legacy from ancient Orthodox times, is ultimately but an ism, a distortion and a compromise. ‘For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith’ (1 Jn. 5, 4).

Glory to Thee, O God, Glory to Thee!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

August 2014
St John’s Orthodox Church
Colchester, Essex, England

Why Does the Western Elite Want to Destroy Russia?

The Western elite began setting up an ideologically-driven, Non-Orthodox (in fact anti-Orthodox) Empire in north-western Continental Europe at the end of the eighth century by reviving Roman paganism and Old Testament iconoclasm. Ever since then, in order to justify itself, it has aggressively expanded, attacking all centres of Christian Faith outside itself. This first became apparent when the elite’s Emperor Charlemagne had the ‘Libri Carolini’ written in c. 790 and declared Christians (‘the Greeks’) to be heretics because they remained faithful to the Christian Church and Creed of the Seven Universal Councils. As soon as the Western elite was strong enough, in fact during the eleventh century, it took over Rome, founding its own semi-pagan ‘Church’ and attacking Christendom not only in words but also in deeds, its crusaders finally sacking and looting the Christian Capital in New Rome in 1204.

Having during the eleventh century founded its centralized papist Superstate, of which today’s EU is a re-creation, merely replacing semi-pagan Catholicism with the pagan ideology of bread and circuses, post-Christian Europe expanded with blood. Beginning in southern Italy and Sicily, it had already taken genocide to England (‘1066 and all that’) and then to the Celtic Lands before it took it to New Rome in 1204. Massacre by crusade and inquisition was similarly employed in its expansion to the Iberian Peninsula, the south-west of France and Eastern Europe. Later the same genocide would take place in the Americas, Latin and North, by the British in Ireland (1 million dead in famines), India (15 million dead in famines), Tasmania, South Africa and Kenya, and now the same genocide of the ‘natives’ is committed by Israel in Gaza and by CIA-directed Uniats in the Ukraine.

The 1204 Western attack on the European Capital of New Rome weakened it and led to its fall to the Muslim invaders of Europe in 1453. The West has always used Islam as a proxy for its evil purposes. If the Church were to survive, it would therefore need to move to another centre. This was Russia. Indeed, even before this transfer took place, the Western elite had already begun attacking Russia, notably in the thirteenth century its Teutonic crusaders launching vicious attacks against it, effectively stabbing it in the back from the west while it was being attacked by the Mongols and Tartars from the east. In the early seventeenth century Poles and Lithuanians invaded Russia, which ended in the invaders’ defeat in 1612. In 1812 ‘Twelve Western Tribes’ under the anti-Christian Emperor Napoleon invaded Russia and suffered a terrible defeat. But Western invasions were not to end there.

Thus, in 1854 Britain and France, again allied with Muslims, again invaded Russia, preventing it from liberating Christians in the Balkans from Ottoman oppression and from protecting Christians from Islam in the Middle East. And this was to be repeated again and again, invaded by Germany in 1914, when Russia was betrayed by its so-called allies, Britain and France and its own fifth column of aristocrats, and invaded again by Germany in 1941. And today invasion is being attempted yet again in western Russia (now called the eastern Ukraine), as the combined Western elite of the USA and its EU colony, back the Western proxy puppet regime in Kiev. Why have there been six Western European invasions of Russia over the last 400 years and not a single Russian invasion of Western Europe, excepting that of Eastern Europe entailed by the need to defeat Nazi Germany in Berlin?

First of all, Christian Russia must be destroyed by the Western elite, as its mere existence proves that the ideology of Western ‘Christianity’ is a deformation. The elite can brook no rivals. Although there are other parts of the Orthodox Christian world, in Romania, Greece, the Balkans and elsewhere, they are small and can be dismissed as mononational folklore by the West. However, the multinational Russian Church is different. It is three-quarters of the whole Church, covers one sixth of the planet and 62 countries, carrying on its shoulders the rest of the Orthodox Christian world. This was why the Satanic powers of the Western elite tried to destroy Russian Christianity in 1917, exporting to Russia its materialist ideology of greed based on bloodshed. This is why the Satanic powers of the West are again trying to destroy Russia’s reviving Christianity in 2014 by destroying the Ukraine.

Russian Christian Civilization, called Holy Rus, is based on original Christianity, unlike the West, which is based on the paganism of manmade materialism with a ‘justifying’ superstructure of judaising deformations of Christianity. Hence the millennial confrontation of the two Civilizations, Christianity and the West, Holiness and Unholiness, Faith and Materialism. This was why the West exported its materialist greed and love of profit to Russia, first contaminating its elite and then, once that elite had betrayed its sacral monarchy, contaminating with blood the rest of the country. This contamination by a failed materialism resulted in the final treachery by the pro-Western Gorbachev. Despite this, Russian Christian Civilization is still alive at the core of the Church. The West attacks Russian Civilization, Holy Rus, precisely because of its universal character, which the West mocks as ‘messianic’.

The Western elite mocks this universal character because Holy Rus is the only serious rival to that elite’s own ‘messianism’, which it calls ‘globalization’. This claims that the ‘West is best’, a ‘chosen people’ ideology that appeals to all that is basest in humanity. This is why the unprincipled careerists of the Western (and, outside the West, Westernized) elite tries to reduce the universal character of Russian Orthodoxy to mere folklore, as it has largely done to Greek Orthodoxy. Holy Rus has taken the main thrust of Western invasions because the Western elite knew that Holy Rus, stretching from the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean, is the only spiritual force that stands in its way to global control, the only spiritual impediment to its materialist expansion, that is, the only force that stands in the way of world evil, and has saved innumerable peoples from desecration by the Western elite throughout history.

Most recently we have seen this in Syria, but most strikingly we have seen it in Siberia where the native peoples, unlike their relatives, the native peoples of North America, were not massacred by Western genocide and herded into concentration camp reserves, but survived and flourished under Russia. Holy Rus resisted the basis of Western materialism, greed and bloodshed, and replaced it with the desire for the collective good. Having defeated Western materialism in its genocidal Communist form, Holy Rus seeks the restoration of its Faith, its sacral monarchy and its peoples; only in this restoration can it again become the Third Rome and so resist the elite’s New World Order. This special worldwide mission of Russian Christian Civilization opposes the West, showing the way out of the suicidal Western culture of death, the dead end which has led the world to its present apocalyptic situation.

On the Spiritual Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

Introduction

The living beliefs of St John of Shanghai swim against the tide of the world and are remarkable examples to all of us for the three following reasons. First of all, although he lived outside Russia he expressed faithfulness to Holy Rus, which for him, as shown in his sermon on the 950th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus, is a living reality, not a dream or myth, as it is for unbelieving modernists a la Schmemann. This faithfulness to Holy Rus, even though it was enslaved beneath the Soviet atheist yoke, entailed his constant prayers for the Patriarch of the Russian Church (shown by his words to the then Fr Vladimir Rodzianko) despite the Patriarch’s political enslavement and so separation from free Russians. It also entailed St John’s opposition to those who fought against Russia, under the tragic and misguided illusion that that they were fighting against the Soviet Union.

Secondly, St John was faithful to the Tsar, already in the 1930s enjoining his canonization against those of both left and right who opposed it. Thirdly, he believed in the Russian Church not as a national ghetto, but as an organism with the worldwide calling to convert to Orthodoxy, as he clearly expressed at the Second All-Diaspora Council in 1938. These three virtues, faithfulness to Holy Rus, faithfulness to the Orthodox Monarchy and faithfulness to the Russian Church’s calling to preach to the heterodox and unbaptized world, are matched by three opposing temptations. These can be found among the still unChurched (and this includes clergy and laity), among those on the fringes of the Church and those outside the Church. These three temptations of spiritual impurity are liberalism instead of faithfulness, conservatism instead of faithfulness and heterodoxy instead of faithfulness.

Liberalism instead of Faithfulness to Holy Rus

This is the temptation from the left, with its renovationism, modernism, new calendarism, liberalism, ecumenism and freemasonry. We have met its spirit in ‘Orthodox’ freemasons in Paris, in cultish, Hindu-style gurus with a name-worship mantra or psychic hypnosis and even occultism, inspired by Blavatsky and Steiner, in those who cannot stop speaking of ‘hypostasis’ and ‘theosis’, rather than living the commandments of the Gospel, in ‘cowboy’ copies of liberal Protestantism and liberal Catholicism camouflaged by long Greek ‘theological’ words, in the elderly or now dead renovationism of the old KGB-selected Moscow Patriarchal representatives from before the fall of atheism, in well-read converts who reject new immigrants from Eastern Europe because they are not liberal intellectuals like themselves, and in ideologies driven by personalities, not by spiritual realities.

Conservatism instead of Faithfulness to the Orthodox Monarchy

This is the temptation from the right, with its phyletism, nationalism, naïve idealization, old calendarism, right-wing emigres and converts who support and accept money from the CIA or MI5, the cultivation of the museum ethos. We have met its spirit in Greeks who tell Non-Greeks to go away, in those who ban the use of languages other than their own, in nationalist Ukrainians who have nothing to do with the Church because they are driven by politics, not by Christ, in those who fall into schism on account of minor errors rather than the general correctness in the Church, in those who schismatically divide the Church, falling into the temptation of the Church’s enemies who want to divide and so rule Her, in converts from conservative heterodox who bring prejudices into the Church, in those who self-justifyingly confuse psychology with theology, serving self and not the general good of the Church.

Heterodoxy instead of Faithfulness to Missionary Work

Authentic missionary work is about conforming the world to the Church, and not as some compromised people have suggested, supporting the errors of those outside the Church through their own syncretism (‘all religions are the same’), founded on indifference. Also, if heterodox are prematurely received into the Church, they may bring spiritual impurities, either in the form of agendas for ‘reform’ or else of reactions to their heterodox past. Thus, there may be ex-Anglicans still with their Protestant mentality who want a ‘refomed’ Orthodoxy in their own image, since they, received prematurely and not yet ready for the Orthodox Church, are unable to cast off their own personal, cultural and spiritual prejudices. Either such will mature, or else they will lapse. Unable to cast off their Establishment class views, whether of left or right, they will never become Orthodox, however well-read.

Conclusion

The title of this essay is formed by the words of the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus (+ 2008), said to me in May 2006, on the need to conserve the integrity of the Holy Orthodox Faith. However, his words were in the same line as those of three generations of Russian bishops of the Diaspora before him, of Archbishop Antony of Geneva (+ 1994), of St John of Shanghai (+ 1966) and of Metropolitan Antony of Kiev (+ 1936), the first First Hierarch of the Church Outside Russia. They all agree, in words as in deeds, that any immixture of spiritual impurity in the Faith is a dead end precisely because it is unspiritual and what is unspiritual by definition brings death. It is for us to follow with care their words, deeds and lives, so that we do nor err from the Tradition of the Church through impure influences from outside Her. And this we can do through faithfulness.

Answers to Questions from Letters

Below are some answers to questions in recent correspondence.

Q: In your recent article ‘Truth and Mercy’, were you expressing prophecy or just wishful thinking?

A: As usual, I wanted to make people think outside the restrictive box that the secular media offer and also to comfort the weaker from the despair that is offered by those media. In both these respects from feedback it is clear that the article was successful. That article describes a possible and spiritual outcome of present world events.

Obviously, I am not a prophet, but it is clear that what is being played out in the world today, in Gaza, with massacres by US-armed Zionists, in Iraq and Syria, with massacres of Christians by Qatari-financed terrorists, and in the Ukraine, with massacres of Ukrainians by CIA-organized terrorists and mercenaries (all these events are very closely interconnected) is of vital importance. This year we are reaching another huge turning point in history, as great as that of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

However, there is a prophetic element. That article, ‘Truth and Mercy’, was based on prophecies of several holy people, of St John of Shanghai, Schemamonk Aristocleus, Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan, Fr Paisios the Athonite, Elder Jonah of Odessa and others. However, we must remember that all prophecies, theirs too, are conditional on repentance – and repentance is not certain. What I am saying is that if we do not go in the direction of ‘Truth and Mercy’, then we will go in the direction of the end of the world. There is no middle way, no compromise, as people of fantastical Anglican culture always imagine that there is. Today, we are going either towards repentance, or else, to Sodom and Gomorrah and unspeakable catastrophes before Antichrist. I want to give people hope. Catastrophe is not inevitable.

Those who think with worldly criteria do not understand that article, they find it fantasy. This is because they think in secularist, political terms only, which by definition exclude Providence, the Divine and the miraculous, from their thought processes. This is because their thought processes are not Orthodox, not Christian, they are deceived, for processes in the real world are not directed by secular forces. In reality, human affairs are directed by spiritual forces, either Divine or else, as we can see around us and throughout the history of the last 100 years, Satanic. The Divine is possible, but the Satanic, what in the Old Testament is called ‘the wrath of God’, is also possible. It is our choice. Such is human freewill.

Q: You mentioned St John of Shanghai. Why does he stand out as THE saint of the emigration?

A: Firstly, because he was a saint. That in itself is exceptional, especially with all the pseudo-saints and pseudo-elders of the Russian emigration, with false claims and personality cults, developed by themselves and then, much worse, by their disciples after their deaths. Secondly, because he was universal. He affected all Continents and spoke to all nationalities, Eastern (Chinese, Japanese and Filippino) and Western (European and American). And thirdly, because he was a monarchist, a ‘Tsarist’ to the core.

Q: Why is that significant?

A: Because that is the litmus test for the understanding of Orthodoxy today. The restoration of the monarchy in Russia for the benefit of the whole Orthodox world and indeed for the benefit of the whole world is the only direction in which we can go. Those who have not understood this have not really become Orthodox. They are disincarnate, semi-Protestant, they do not understand that Orthodoxy is the religion of the Incarnation, of the last two fingers when we make the sign of the cross. They think that Orthodoxy, and religion in general, is just a private matter, a personal theory, without any practical and public ramifications. That is a heresy. I wonder if they know how to make the sign of the cross properly. They may be full of doctorates, but I am sure they do not hold the last two fingers, representing the Divine and human natures of Christ, together. They would do well to learn from the last illiterate village greybeard in Moldova, or for that matter in Galilee.

St John is the guide to this as he possessed the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. So many converts treat Orthodoxy as ‘comfort Orthodoxy’, a kind of part-time hobby or ego-trip. Christ, that is, Orthodoxy, is not that. A hobby or ego-trip is starters, comfort eating; what we have to do is to get to the main course, the meat dish, which is in the arena. Only when we have been in the arena with the wild beasts that attack us, as they do because they are our main course – can we get to the sweet, dessert, which is paradise. As they say, you cannot get to paradise in a Rolls-Royce.

Q: What is the situation among new Orthodox (those who have been baptized in the last 20 years or so) in the Church inside Russia? Have they come to what you have called ‘the arena’, ‘the main course’?

A: That is an interesting question and the answer varies. I can remember how in the 1990s, many newly-baptized in Russia (and they numbered tens of millions) read books by Metr Anthony of Sourozh and other Russian purely intellectual and theoretical writers who wrote for Non-Orthodox in the West. In other words, they read what was appropriate for outsiders and beginners, introductions. Fortunately, a great many in Russia now, especially because of the influence of authentic monasticism (that is so sorely and disastrously lacking in the West) have got past that stage. They are no longer outsiders, converts, but insiders, Orthodox. Now they read the lives of the saints and of elders like Fr Paisios, Fr John Krestiankin and Fr Nikolai Guryanov. In other words, they have indeed got to the main course. This is encouraging.

Q: A historical question regarding the Tsarism of St John: Why did the White Counter-movement fail after the Revolution?

A: It failed precisely because it was not White. It had no single and unitive leader (that could only have been a Romanov) and it was not even firmly monarchist behind Tsar Nicholas. Even individual Whites like Wrangel and Kolchak were compromised by people around them, who were not white. Few had a pure motivation and so the White movement failed. Archbishop Averky writes very clearly about this, as several other Church writers too.

Q: Some say that St John would have been against the Church inside Russia. What would you reply?

A: The Slavonic service book that I have always used is that published under Metr Anastasy, the second First Hierarch of ROCOR. According to it, in the great litany we pray for ‘all the Orthodox Patriarchs’ before we pray for our own ROCOR bishops. This was the real Church’s position before sectarianism started creeping in through US old calendarism in the 1960s (I strongly suspect that that old calendarism was financed by the CIA), which tried to surround, abduct and divert spiritually the noble and venerable Metr Philaret, before being partly rejected by Metr Vitaly (who was then surrounded, abducted and diverted literally by it), and then rejected completely by Metr Laurus.

This traditional ecclesiological position was also the position of St John. One whom I knew, Fr Vladimir Rodzianko (later Bishop Basil), recorded St John’s words: ‘Every day I pray for Patriarch Alexis at the proskomidia. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer is still the same. By force of circumstance we have been cut off from one another, but we are still one liturgically. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we are with Her and in Her. Administratively, for the sake of our flock and well-known principles, we have to take the way that we have taken, but this in no way breaks the sacramental unity of the whole Church’.

You see pre-2007 ROCOR had two parts – the main patriotic part (those who loved Russia because she is called to be Orthodox and to save the world) and a smaller, but powerful political/ideological part (nationalists who always put their personal advantage and interests, financial or political) above the Church. Remember how it was that political wing that actually put St John of Shanghai on trial in San Francisco in the early 60s.

As a result of the actions of this political, ideological wing, many left ROCOR in England, for example, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The sectarians tried to take over in London and elsewhere. We lost at least four priests at that time as a result of them – and that was just in one small diocese. The older generation were squeezed out; the situation by the mid-1980s was dire.

Q: Were you affected by that situation in England personally?

A: Very much so. We emigrated as a result of it. I came to ROCOR not through the situation in England, but through Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who had nothing to do with the old calendarist nonsense that had come over from America. He had remained faithful to the Tradition, to the ecclesiology of St John, who had preceded him in Western Europe. Like St John, he received by chrismation. Vladyka Anthony said that we must belong to a ROCOR that did not concelebrate with Moscow, but only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. But he and his clergy concelebrated with everyone else, with all other Local Churches. Before he died 20 years ago, I know that one priest from inside Russia had already concelebrated with him, while remaining in the Patriarchate. Vladyka Antony, like St John, was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev, whom both had known in Belgrade. They are my spiritual lineage, my spiritual ancestry, that of Universal, and not sectarian, Orthodoxy. Metr Laurus belonged to the same spiritual family.

Such were the views too of hierarchs like Bp Alexander (Mileant) and Bishop Mitrofan (Znosko-Borovsky) of the generation before, whom I met. They were ardent patriots, not of Russia, but of Orthodox Russia. And that was the reason why we could not be under what was then called the Moscow Patriarchate, which outside Russia was dominated by individuals who displayed Soviet patriotism, which came from fear, and so was alien to us. All of us thought like Dostoyevsky – that a Russian who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. So there was no indiscriminate nationalism for us.

Q: What happened to the political wing?

A: It left the Church over a period of 20 years, from 1986 on, mainly leaving for various sects, including various old calendarist sects. I would remind all that both St John and Archbishop Antony had parishes under them on the new calendar (for the fixed feasts). In St John’s case, they were Western rite parishes.

Q: What about St John and the Western rite? Surely his support of Western rite means that we too should support Western rite today?

A: People who say such things have completely forgotten the historical context. St John’s Western rite worked with former Catholics (not with Anglicans and other Protestants) and he did this before the revolution of the Second Vatican Council, before, in other words, before the Protestantization or rather Americanization of Catholicism. At that time, in the 1950s, there still was a Western rite. That is the fundamental difference between then and now. St John was striying to save those who were at the end of a culture and bring them to Orthodoxy. Today that culture is all but dead – it only exists among a few upper class people or the very elderly and dying. There is no future to it, which is why the Western rite is also elderly and dying, where it is not actually dead.

For fifty years there has not been a living Western rite and you cannot renew and then modify a rite that is no more. This is why all Western rite experiments, though motivated by pastoral concerns, the best of intentions, have ended in failure. There is only one living rite today and that is the Orthodox rite. I know. I have seen the Western rite failure in France.

Q: How and why does the Russian Orthodox view of Catholics and Protestants inside Russia differ from that in the Church Outside Russia?

A: There is not a great deal of difference, but there is a difference. I would say that the view inside Russia is more pro-Catholic, but more anti-Protestant (indeed Protestants there are called ‘sectarians’). The reasons for this are as follows.

The Russian (not Ukrainian) experience of Catholicism is that of a pre-Vatican II, Eastern European confession which has a hierarchy, monastic life and sacraments, clergy who dress as clergy, believes in the Mother of God and the saints and even venerates icons. It therefore sees in Catholicism an admittedly provincialized and primitivized but still potentially Orthodox Church. It has no experience of the reality of the protestantized and infantilized Catholicism of the post-Vatican II world, as it is in Western Europe. When it discovers that, it is in a state of culture shock.

On the other hand, the Russian experience of Protestantism is that of sects which are rabidly anti-Orthodox and can hardly be recognized as Christian at all. This experience was much reinforced by aggressive American evangelical preachers who came to Russia in the 1990s and tried to bribe Orthodox into joining them. Clearly, the experience was entirely negative and hence in Russia Protestants are called sectarians.

Q: So who is right?

A: The Church inside Russia is right in Eastern Europe. The Church Outside Russia is right in its domain, in Western countries, among Western people. Catholicism and Protestantism are so variable, they are not monolithic; we have to look at the local realities of both before we decide on our attitude and the use of economy or akrivia.

Q: In various Local Churches you can find heterodox customs. How can we tolerate them?

A: We can tolerate them because we are not sectarian, but tolerant! However, that does not mean that we observe such provincial customs ourselves. We do not cultivate the fringes, but the broad mainstream of the Church. For example, I remember an ex-Anglican Antiochian priest (in England they are all ex-Anglicans, virtually without training), wanting to introduce little girls to serve in the altar because he had seen a bishop in Syria doing this! I told him that just because others had adopted Uniat customs out of pan-Arab nationalism, that did not mean that we have to. The same goes for so many customs, from certain Carpatho-Russian chants preserved in their emigration in the US and which are pure old-fashioned Catholic chants (which the Catholics have now lost), or Bulgarian icons, which are not iconography, but folk art, or beardless Ukrainian clergy as in the OCA (another Uniat hangover) etc. In other words, we do not prolong decadence, but let it die out by itself.

The lack of discrimination is typically Anglican. It is the inability to distinguish between the essential Tradition and eccentric local customs which may have nothing at all to do with Orthodoxy. Thus, in one community of the Rue Daru group in England an ex-Charismatic, ex-Anglican priest, also untrained, has his converts calling out names for commemoration during the service! It would be better if he joined the Pentecostals, especially since he maintains that he is better off without a bishop (who is in distant Paris), so that ‘I can do whatever I want’.

In general, Rue Daru claims to be of the ‘Russian Tradition’, but that was thrown out of the window there 26 years ago in 1988. If you are of the Russian Tradition, then you must be part of the Russian Church, observe the Orthodox calendar, have confession before communion, wear Russian vestments, have women wear headscarves, keep the canons and traditions of the Russian Church. As one correspondent in France wrote to me, the Russian Tradition never stayed a single night in the vast majority of the tiny convert Rue Daru communities, which Russians simply boycott because there is no Orthodox Tradition there. Once you have seen and above all experienced the real thing, you know what is false as soon as you see it.

The Last Bastion of Orthodoxy

But that which ye have already hold fast till I come.

Rev. 2, 25

Introduction

For 100 years, ever since 1914, the world has constantly been at war. This is because, before the final and inevitable triumph of Christ, a One World Government must come to power in Jerusalem. Hence the recent preparatory visit there of Pope Francis, accompanied by an imam, a rabbi and a Greek Patriarch. The assaults on all the Orthodox Churches are to be seen in the light of this preparation. However, the main obstacle to the enthronement of that government, and it will be an enthronement, is the resurgent Russian Orthodox Church. This is why the multinational chorus of the Western media, orchestrated and fed as one by the powers that be, so violently expresses its hostility to this last bastion of the Church of God on earth, so proving its importance.

The Seven Ancient Churches

The first phase of the assault, launched as long ago as 1909, was on the Seven ancient Churches. First to be tempted was the tiny and impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, weakened by flattering its Greek nationalism or phyletist Hellenism. The assault was then spread to the three other tiny and impoverished but also ancient Patriarchates in the Middle East and the rest of the Greek-speaking world in Greece, Cyprus and Albania. Today, as the Patriarchate of Constantinople is tempted by Uniatism, the faithful in its jurisdiction, led by the monks of Mt Athos, resist and look to freed Russia for deliverance from the chains of modernism, ecumenism and even apostasy, provoking the question: Will these Churches survive until 2054?

The Seven New Churches

The second phase of the assault was on the Seven youngest Churches. It came first in the Balkans, by bombing and dividing Serbia, bribing Romania, Bulgaria, as also the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, into the EU and attempting to undermine Georgia. Then came the attack on the Seventh Church, the Russian. First, they tried to attack her through Syria and the Middle East, but this failed. As President Assad said this week: ‘Russia has saved Syria and the whole Middle East’. So the assault entered a second phase, through the Ukraine, where schism, a civil war and genocide have been instigated, just as they were in Serbia. The aim is to destroy the unity of the Russian Church so that the Russian State, now reviving under the Church’s influence, can also be destroyed.

Conclusion

Thus, the powerbrokers of this world have attempted to destroy the whole Orthodox Church, subordinating it to this world. In the first fifty years of the third millennium they wish to make all fall away from Orthodoxy, just as they made all fall away from Orthodoxy in the Western fifth of the Church in the first fifty years of the second millennium. So they turned to the Russian Orthodox world, undermining its vulnerable, protestantized outer fringes with renovationism. Now they are turning to the marches of the Russian Orthodox world in the western Ukraine, where they continue the genocide of Orthodox under a puppet President who made his oligarch’s fortune not from chocolate, as his PR advisors claim, but from arms-dealing and even worse. Now all is at stake.

The Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

The title is an expression used in an inspiring conversation with the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus at the ROCOR Council of San Francisco in 2006. Below are a number of recent conversations, both actual and also from correspondence by e-mail, regarding current Church matters, all of which illustrate the search of all conscious Orthodox for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy in the Light of the Resurrection.

Q: What recent changes have marked the Church inside Russia?

A: A generation has now passed since the commemoration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988 and the world-changing events that followed it, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of the passing of that generation, in the last few months there have been major changes, with the retirement in Kiev and St Petersburg of both Metropolitans Vladimir and in Minsk that of Metr Philaret. Thus, all three most senior Metropolitans in the Russian Church inside Russia have retired through age and ill health. This is the end of the old generation of those who were connected with the highly controversial and politically-minded Metr Nikodim (Rotov) of the Soviet period.

Those of his disciples who are still alive have all had to adapt since the Jubilee Council of 2000 with its rejection of sergianism and ecumenism and canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs, and then the acceptance of the reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia in 2007. In other words we are now entering the second generation since the collapse of secularist-atheist ideology in the Russian Lands and so the resurrection by the purity of Holy Orthodoxy of the crucified Church inside Russia. These three senior posts that have changed hands are symbolic of a more general generational change, as Lazarus’ grave-clothes have fallen off.

Q: What do you mean by ‘Lazarus’ grave-clothes’?

A: I liken the resurrection of the Church inside Russia to the resurrection of Lazarus. This was an incredible and astounding miracle, but we should not forget that Lazarus’ grave-clothes did not smell good because the decomposition of his body had already begun. These grave-clothes are represented by the deathly, Soviet and post-Soviet (not yet Russian), phenomena and problems that have accompanied the resurrection of the Church inside Russia.

Q: What phenomena?

A: For example, inside Russia in the 1990s they were so short of priests that they ordained very easily. There were several disasters here with clearly unworthy ordinations and subsequent defrockings, sometimes for sexual misdemeanours, sometimes for financial misdemeanours. I have met such priests – I know what I speak of. Then there was the confusion between Stalinism and the Church and the total misunderstanding or even rejection of the Royal Martyrs – all as a result of the brainwashing from old Soviet propaganda and lies. Then there have been the phenomena of pro-Catholic clergy (like the assassinated Fr Alexander Men, a suspected Uniat) and the events surrounding Paris-style Russophobes, including the modernist, pro-Protestant Fr George Kochetkov, suspended at one point by Patriarch Alexis as a ‘neo-renovationist’, and the recent scandals concerning Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev and Professor Zubov (a close friend of the late Olivier Clement), who both had to be sacked. These are all people who to some extent still live in the Soviet thought world. They have never managed to shake off the spiritual and intellectual impurity of the past and so make the transition from that old-style Soviet conditioning, paradoxically mixed with a superficial Orthodoxy, to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

The same thing happened outside Russia, where the Church inside Russia had several unworthy and scandalous representatives, uncanonically ordained, or other representatives who are now very elderly as they were appointed in Soviet times. Fortunately, the unworthy ones have mostly died out or been moved, some very recently. According to the 2007 agreement the Church inside Russia has to prepare its parishes outside Russia (except in China and Japan, which is part of its canonical territory) for their canonical handover to ROCOR. His Holiness understandably wants this process to go smoothly, without hurting anyone’s feelings, especially those of the elderly. Therefore it will take a generation before it is completed and all moves to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Q: Surely there were impurities in ROCOR also?

A: ROCOR had from the start two wings. One was the political wing whose identity was nationalistic, cultural and anti-Communist rather than simply Orthodox; the other wing, which could be called the ‘Johannite wing’, as represented by St John of Shanghai, was the mainstream of ROCOR. Our view was and is Christian. I can remember how the political and nationalist wing dominated in certain parishes, for example at the former ROCOR chapel in Paris or at the old London Cathedral, as it used to be, when it had several members who worked for MI5. Significantly, those parishes have not survived, but died.

This was because the politically-minded elements refused reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007 or even before. As one of our archbishops said before 2007, reconciliation with the repentant Church inside Russia, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, would lead to a ‘purification’ of ROCOR. That is exactly what happened. Spiritual impurities such as extremism, phariseeism, sectarianism and fanaticism could not bear reality and love others or the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, and so that political wing left the Church for various sects. Several of the small communities concerned in North America were dominated by individuals who worked for the CIA or the Canadian Secret Services.

Q: What do you make of current political changes in the Ukraine?

A: Two weeks ago the US removed the gold reserves of the Ukraine. Then the CIA took over a floor in the offices of the Ukrainian Secret Police in Kiev and the head of the CIA, John Brennan, went to Kiev on Lazarus Saturday. The head of the CIA does not visit a foreign country without a very good reason. It was no doubt with the intention of hoping to further destabilise the Ukraine and then run it, just as it did countless Latin America banana republics and Italy and Greece after the Second World War.

Sure enough, just after that, the CIA began issuing black propaganda, sheer lies, for example about alleged persecution of the Jews in the eastern Ukraine or that President Putin had tens of billions of dollars in private bank accounts in the West, implying that he was a thief. Naturally the Western-media were fed those lies and naturally reported them. The Times of London (part of the Murdoch tabloid empire) was especially keen to report these slanders and lies.

For instance, as regards the Jews, everybody knows that the Jews were massacred by the Uniat Ukrainian SS in Galicia, the western Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler and where earlier anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place. These are facts of history. Many members of the Ukrainian (= Galician) SS, with Polish nationality, came to live in the UK and especially the US, after World War II. I know; I met some of them 30-40 years ago; some of them were frightening and admitted to killing Jews.

Today, at least 150 US mercenaries, probably being paid for by the CIA, are active against the people of the Ukraine, given that most Ukrainian soldiers and police refuse to use violence against their own people – indeed 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already asked for Russian nationality. Other soldiers in the eastern Ukraine have simply joined the insurrection of the Ukrainian people against the junta. We cannot see this crucifixion of the Ukraine, orchestrated in Washington and Brussels and carried out by their paid puppets in Kiev, as being successful.

Q: Why not?

A: First of all, the Ukraine is bankrupt, which is why the bankrupt US called on the world to ‘save the Ukrainian economy’. But it is too late. Prices are doubling. The poor people of the Ukraine, exploited and impoverished for 23 years by corrupt oligarchs, are spontaneously rising up against the unrepresentative, US-installed, separatist Kiev junta and its terror tactics. That regime seized power from the democratically-elected government in Kiev by violence and murder; now it is facing opposition from the Ukrainian people, who are using the same techniques as it did, in order to seize back power from it in turn. As it is written, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. But there is chaos.

Q: Does any of this have any significance in Orthodox terms? Is it not all political?

A: All of this is highly significant for us. Today’s Russia is at last just beginning to position itself as a spiritual power, opposing the secularist atheism of the Western elite. This was Russia’s traditional role – to protect Christian civilisation both from Western barbarians and from Eastern hordes. Thus, it repelled the Mongol-Tartar yoke, encouraged moderate Islam, repelled the Charleses, Napoleons and Hitlers, liberating both Paris and Berlin, and supported the Church in the Holy Land, the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Outside Eurasia Russia has always helped the peoples of the developing world, aiding them to throw off the yoke of colonialism, as did Tsar Nicholas II during the Boer War in South Africa and also in Tibet, Thailand and Ethiopia. Even the Soviet Union merely continued these policies in Africa (the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria), Asia and Latin America.

The Russian Orthodox civilisational model, the Christian one, is quite different from the Western Catholic/Protestant model, which calls itself ‘Judeo-Christian’. Thus, the ‘civilised’ Judeo-Christian West and ‘Western values’ destroyed the native peoples of the Americas and Africa, enslaving them, massacring them like wild animals, sending them into concentration camps (‘reservations’), as the British were still doing in Kenya and Malaysia in the 1950s. Christian Russia, on the other hand, spreading across Eurasia into Alaska, left the native peoples in peace, not enslaving them or systematically exploiting them, but making them into equal allies. Today Western ‘civilisation’, which has reached its final stage of degeneration in Europe and the USA, has come to a dead end by trying to subjugate the whole world to its ruling transnational atheist elite and its corrupt New World Order pseudo-democracy. That, in fact, only gives a false choice – between one atheist oligarch and another.

Only Russia can potentially deliver the world from this civilisational dead end by providing a Non-Western and spiritual alternative. This is a geopolitical challenge and a historic turning-point. The US military-industrial complex, to use Eisenhower’s terminology, has bankrupted itself with its lust for global hegemony and us finally meeting its match in the resurgent Russian Lands. The New World Order, the near-millennial and ever accelerating movement of the Western world to enthrone Antichrist in Jerusalem, has been stopped for the moment.

The Russian Lands (Rus) are, it seems, returning to fulfilling their destiny as the last restraining force in the world, the last bastion of True Christianity. The Ukraine is a litmus paper, an acid test of this. If the Ukraine were to fall, that is, to lose its Orthodoxy, that would lead to the enthronement of Antichrist. The situation is on a knife edge, which is why so many icons in Russia and the Ukraine are at this moment giving off myrrh. We have to understand that today’s division in the Ukraine exists as the result of two historic injustices, which have to be righted

Q: Which are these injustices?

A: These two historic injustices are the events of 1054 and 1917, which are interconnected. In 1054 semi-barbarian, provincial nationalists, filled with the pride, greed and ambition of Roman paganism, rose up in heresy against the Church of Christ, the Christian Roman Empire, and declared that they were the true Church! And persecution followed 1054, with 1204, the sack of New Rome by barbarian Catholics, which in turn led to 1453, the fall of New Rome, not to mention the Western Crusades against the Russian Lands (including today’s ‘Ukraine’), and all the anti-Church horrors that followed, including Uniatism.

The second historic injustice was in 1917 when the descendants of the same provincials performed a coup d’etat in St Petersburg, overthrowing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed on behalf of traitors, cowards and deceivers from inside the country who had lost their Faith. This atheist coup resulted in the martyrdom of the Christian Emperor and the destruction of his Empire, which had been about to end the First European War and liberate Constantinople (so preventing the Armenian genocide), Vienna and Berlin.

The atheist coup of 1917 also culminated in 1991 in the destruction of the legacy of the Christian Empire which had been built up over centuries by the Tsars and their peoples. That 1991 collapse of the legacy of the former Orthodox Empire, the Soviet Union, was inevitable because its atheism had denied the Faith of a Faith-based Empire. Today, in 2014, we are merely seeing the attempt to deepen that geopolitical fall, again using provincial nationalists, this time from the far west of the Ukraine, as its pawns. All that is happening now was prophesied by Solzhenitsyn in 1998. Thus, as he said then, the US and its EU colony want to dismember and separate the Ukrainian part of the remains of the Orthodox Empire, the Empire’s weakest link.

Q: Why is the Ukraine the weakest link of the former Orthodox Empire?

A: The word Ukraine is composed of two ancient Slavonic words meaning ‘at the border’ – though interestingly it could also be translated as ‘on the edge’. It was first recorded in the 12th century in this sense of a narrow strip of borderland and there exists an interesting academic article on its origins and uses for many geographical areas, including the area near Kazan. However, in its modern and non-historical sense – and so a sense completely unknown to the greatest ‘Ukrainian’ writer Gogol – the word ‘Ukraine’ was invented only in the late 19th century by the Hapsburgs. Then it was reused by the Soviets and the Nazis, and today by the US and the EU – by five empires all thoroughly hostile to the Orthodox Church. Indeed, decades ago I met old Ukrainian emigres, adults before the Revolution, who told me that they had never heard the word ‘Ukraine’ until the 1920s, when the atheists brought it in.

The contemporary Ukraine is the weakest link because at present it includes and is now run by never denazified, ultra-nationalist, Uniat Galicia, which until 1939 was part of eastern Poland. This is a schismatic, Catholicised area, which lived under foreign and anti-Orthodox – Polish and Austrian – rule for centuries. The majority of its population, just like that of the rest of Western Europe, now has no concept of uncompromised, unsecularised, non-1054 Christianity, that is, of Orthodox values. Until that area returns to Poland, or else becomes independent, it will continue to create chaos in the rest of the ‘Ukraine’, the 85% of it which is known to history not as ‘the Ukraine’, but significantly, going from east to west, as New Russia, Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia.

Q: So does this mean we should support President Putin?

A: He is only a politician and, like all politicians, he makes mistakes. The Ukraine, in some form or other, has a right to exist as an independent state, just like Belarus. It is an integral part of threefold Rus – Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus are the primary territory of Rus, the three Russias. I suspect that President Putin thinks the same thing. The last thing he wants to have to do is to send in tanks. However, he has to defend his country and Russian people against extreme Western aggression – which is what he did when he restored the Crimea to Russia amid the jubilation of its people. Otherwise the Crimea would have been invaded and occupied by the US military and its ports would have become NATO naval bases, closing off the Black Sea to Russia.

Our objection is not to an independent ‘Ukraine’, but to its domination and division by an anti-Orthodox and unrepresentative, US-installed, puppet clique in Kiev, which would mean that the Ukraine would become just another bankrupt and pillaged Western colony, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya etc. Divide and rule is ever the Western policy. Our support should go to the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, as he was the last ruler of All Rus, and not to politicians. We support the saints – politicians only count inasmuch as they support the saints. Again we fight for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, not for politicians.

Q: Why has the BBC been so incredibly biased in its reporting of events in the Ukraine?

A: Since the Second World War the UK Establishment elite has become the poodle or colony of the US ruling elite (a relationship that the UK Establishment has flattered itself into calling ‘the special relationship’!) and it has taken no account of the peoples of these islands. The BBC, even more than other Western media, is biased because it is an inherent part of that Establishment elite, in the pay of a secularist-atheist regime and its secret services. It is therefore hostile to Christianity, especially to uncompromised Christianity, that is, Orthodoxy, just as it is hostile to the people, from which it is ever more distant.

The BBC has become particularly subservient to the Establishment since it dared to criticise the Blair regime’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, for which the Blairites sacked the BBC Director General and intimidated BBC journalists. Now the BBC just seems to parrot whatever MI5 and MI6 tell it. I know two BBC journalists who have also worked for the secret services, which infiltrated the BBC from its inception in the 1920s; there must be many more of them.

Thus the BBC talks of the Neo-Nazi Uniat Galician terrorists in Kiev, who overthrew a democratically-elected government as ‘heroes’, but calls the Ukrainian citizens who are rising up against foreign oppression and US mercenaries in the south-west, south, east and north, ‘pro-Russian activists!’ Nor has the BBC reported on the wave of dissatisfaction in Kiev at the doubling of many prices and the very large anti-junta demonstrations in Kiev….

Q: Some would say that your views on the Ukraine are political and that Orthodoxy should be apolitical. What would you say to this?

A: Precisely by saying that they are ‘apolitical’, such people are making a political statement. For them Orthodoxy is, like Protestantism, just a personal belief, a private affair, a mere theory or hobby, which has no public and practical ramifications, no Incarnational consequences. This is a denial of the Incarnation of Christ. What they are saying is that Christianity should have no influence at all on society, including on economics and politics, and should just be a set of private opinions or personal fantasies for futile discussion and theoretical debate.

In the meantime, they say, we should just swim with the secularist-atheist tide of US/EU apostasy, to which such people, some of them nominally Orthodox, are spiritually enslaved. However, our Faith, if it is real, has practical consequences. This is what these secularists refuse. For those who are secular-minded, religion has no importance, but for us what counts is the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. The many icons now giving off myrrh in Russia and the Ukraine only prove the spiritual significance of these current events.

Q: With the events in the Ukraine and the new puritanism of political correctness, will there be a witch-hunt and persecution of Russian Orthodoxy in the West?

A: Not yet. We have not yet come to this point; that will come later. Then we may need Russian passports and in any case have to take refuge in Russia in order to get baptized and practise our Faith. But we are not there yet.

Q: So much for the contemporary situation of the Church inside Russia. What is the situation of the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR? Some say that it no longer has any reason to exist, since the Church inside Russia also has parishes outside Russia. What is the role of ROCOR in this new reality?

A: The Orthodox diaspora, whether in Europe, the Americas or Australia, and of all nationalities, has experienced two temptation or deviations in the last 100 years or so. The role of ROCOR is to avoid them. These are the deviations of the superiority complex and the inferiority complex.

The first deviation is that of the nationalist ghetto, of the superiority complex. This means that the Orthodox Faith is preserved as if in a museum, without any reference to the surrounding world (because of the superiority complex towards it), to the reality in which the children and grandchildren of the immigrants go to school and grow up. This ethos can be called the ‘three-generational syndrome’, since after three generations such a faith dies out, as it no longer even speaks in a language comprehensible to the descendants of the original immigrants. ‘Three generations and you are out’. I have seen countless Russian parishes in France and England disappear completely because of this mentality. It was the fate of the old London ROCOR Cathedral (but this will not at all be the case of the new parish that has risen phoenix-like from its ruins), exactly as was foreseen by many in the 1970s and 1980s, but also of many parishes abroad under the Church inside Russia, which are not independent of Russia, as is today’s ROCOR.

The second deviation is that of the conformist ghetto, of the inferiority complex. This means the ‘let’s swim with the tide’ mentality. Again I have seen countless examples in France and England. ‘Let’s give communion to Catholics, after all they are Christians’ (Paris jurisdiction). ‘Now we are in England, we baptize our children in the Church of England’ (as one well-known Russian academic in Cambridge did). ‘After all, we really do not want to be different from the others’. ‘The English do cremations, so we’ll do them as well’ (the old Sourozh jurisdiction). ‘The Protestants have pews in church, so shall we’ (Greeks and Antiochians). This is the deviation of those of weak faith, the ecumenists, liberals and modernists, who do not really believe in Orthodoxy, just like the Uniats. Indeed, the atmosphere in modernist churches (as sometimes in Finland, for example) is exactly that of Uniat churches.

It is to be noted, however, that, initially at least, both these deviations are psychological, and not at root theological, though in a second phase, they are then justified theologically, clearly by a false theology. ROCOR must avoid both these deviations.
Q: So what is the role of ROCOR? What is authentic Orthodoxy in the Western world?

A: Authenticity is faithfulness to the best, and not to the worst, in both attitudes. This means being both traditional and open, both strict and merciful, but without excesses and extremes, which would mean being unfaithful. We must be faithful to the incarnation and to the spiritual, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Our calling, the establishment of authentic European Orthodox culture, as also of authentic American and Australian Orthodox culture, means being both faithful and international = fruitful. ROCOR has an opportunity to do this, depending on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, that is, inasmuch as we can be both faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and also be incarnate, settled and permanent here (unlike most parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia). At least, this can be the case, for as long as our spiritual existence is tolerated in the increasingly intolerant West.

Q: Do you have examples of these deviations in the specific situation of Orthodoxy in the UK?

A: Here in the UK we have two ‘renewed’ jurisdictions, those of the Romanian and Russian Churches, which in recent years have increased in size from one parish or a few parishes to many parishes, simply by immigration. However, we also have the older jurisdictions like the Greek, which used to be the biggest but is now beginning to die out, just like the Russian in the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians immigrated in about 1920 and so after 50-60 years, in the third generation, began to die out. The Greeks (more precisely Cypriots) mainly immigrated here in the 1950s and 1960s – 50-60 years ago – and so too are now dying out. This is the ‘three generational syndrome’, which I mentioned above.

There are also two tiny ethnic English jurisdictions under the Patriarchate of Antioch (anti-Greek, anti-Russian, Antiochian’, as some Anglicans say) and the Paris Exarchate (the old Bloomite Sourozh jurisdiction). These are deaneries because they are both only a few hundred strong and mostly composed of ex-vicars and converts from Anglicanism. The Exarchate is particularly weak and small and is tending to die out. They failing to pass on their ‘Anglican-Orthodox’ Faith to children and grandchildren and so are dying. Their possible possible survival can only come from attracting Greeks, Romanians and others, not from attracting Anglicans.

Here I am much more optimistic about the future survival of the Antiochian Deanery, which is rapidly becoming Romanian. However, it still has to ordain clergy who are not ex-Anglican vicars. Here there is a very useful lesson to learn: all ethnic jurisdictions die out – including ethnic English jurisdictions. In other words, successful parishes – of all jurisdictions – are non-ethnic, that is, they live if they accept those whom God sends to them, without ethnic ghettoism, including Anglican or ex-Anglican clubbishness. In other words, they live only if they put the Faith above nationality, only if they put the Kingdom of God first.

Q: Does this mean that the convert movement in the UK has stopped?

A: The convert movement (I would prefer the word ‘trickle’) in the UK was only ever basically in England and it was always very small, concerning at most 2,000-3,000, many of whom were received by various jurisdictions without preparation and soon lapsed. There is still at least one ex-Anglican priest, like the late Metr Antony Bloom, who perhaps is his model, who receives within one week! You can imagine that his turnover is large. In 18 years he has not grown. It is true that the convert ‘movement’ has declined as the old generation of converts dies out, but it has not stopped. What it happening today is that Anglicans have largely stopped joining the Orthodox Church and trying to become Orthodox, which actually they often did not succeed in doing in any case.

Q: Why have they stopped?

Firstly, because Anglicanism is itself dying out, so there are even fewer Anglicans than before. Secondly, because those who are interested generally find Orthodoxy ‘too hard’ and either do not try to become Orthodox (if they try at all) or else give up very quickly, especially if they have been received prematurely by one of the ethnic English groups.

Q: So there are no more converts?

A: There are still converts, but they come more and more from the vast majority of English people who are not Anglicans. However, though there are fewer converts, they are now generally more serious. They are refreshing, blank sheets, without the cultural prejudices and baggage of Anglicanism. Here there is a future. English Orthodox culture could only be born when that prejudiced Establishment Anglican culture was dead. Authentic Orthodox culture could never be built on a compromised, semi-Orthodox, semi-Anglican faith.

Q: How are people being converted today?

A: There are two ways. One is through information about Orthodoxy which is today on the internet and then brings them to Church services. The other is through Orthodox wives whom they marry and who convert them. Orthodox wives are often very good missionaries.

Q: You have not mentioned those who did not support the reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church in 2007 and left to join various sects which existed already. How do they fit into the picture? Do they suffer from the superiority complex of the nationalist ghetto? Surely they do not suffer from the inferiority complex of the conformists?

A: They do not belong to nationalist ghettoes, as much as to ideological or psychological, sectarian, ghettoes, usually very Russophobic and very right-wing – such was the case even before they left ROCOR. In the USA, from what one of their bishops proudly writes and tells me, they seem to be linked to the CIA. There are among these people, and most are converts from Anglicanism or other forms of Protestantism, some very sincere and pious people, but also some with psychological problems. It is tragic. Sects are always based on hurt pride which then turns to hatred.

Such protest sects make themselves irrelevant, not only because they are tiny (often fewer than ten in number over the whole country), but also because they have played into the hands of this world by painting themselves into irrelevant corners. They have no influence because they focus so much on small and often ritualistic detail and individual opinions, with a negative, ‘anti-everything’ mentality. What they lack is a conscious, logically consistent and integral Orthodox world view, an overview. That is very important and all Orthodox need to develop such a world view.

Q: Do you think that the Inter-Orthodox Council will actually take place in 2016?

A: On paper, no, especially since the amazing, absurd and pretentious claims of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Ukraine, as described in the statement of Patriarch Bartholomew on Palm Sunday, which was surely written by the CIA. In the 1970s there could be no Council because the Russian Church inside Russia was controlled by the KGB; now we have Constantinople controlled by the CIA. That statement alone has surely set everything back until after the death of Patriarch Bartholomew.

However, everything is still possible – if the Greek Churches can overcome their vanity and inferiority complex, which the American State Department so plays on and exploits, and if they and the other Balkan Churches can overcome their phyletism (nationalism). Thus, at present three problems are outstanding and until they are solved they will stop this Council taking place.

Q: Which are?

A: Firstly, there is the territorial dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. Secondly, there is the dispute between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and, thirdly, that between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).

These three problems all have to be solved before even a proper agenda (rather than the old, secularist, Protestant-style 1970s one) can be agreed. So 2016 is possible, but the Patriarchate of Constantinople will first have to liberate itself from outside political interference from the US government, which is forcing it to interfere in the Ukraine and Mt Athos, and from the Vatican. So Constantinople must demonstrate that it is free and independent and can actually speak with an Orthodox voice and not a Greek nationalist and Uniat voice. Metropolitans Andrew and Seraphim of the Church of Greece have already warned it about this quite clearly in their 89-page letter asking for the repentance of Pope Francis.

Q: Do you think in this context that the Church inside Russia could take back the autocephaly of the OCA in order to ease negotiations with Constantinople?

A: I think that for the Church inside Russia the OCA is a bargaining counter. We all know that there is a problem with the autocephaly of the OCA, the brainchild (not heartchild) of the highly controversial Fr Alexander Schmemann. Firstly, it was granted during the Cold War by the self-same, highly controversial Metr Nikodim (Rotov), whom we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, and whom the Roman Catholics claim to have been one of their cardinals. So it was dubious from the start.

However, secondly and much more importantly, how can you give a jurisdiction autocephaly when it has been in schism from you for decades (as was the pre-OCA Metropolia) and, above all, when it only includes a minority of the Orthodox who live on the same geographical territory? However, the Church inside Russia will not cede these points if Constantinople does not first abandon its own anti-canonical errors elsewhere, for example on Mt Athos, in the Ukraine, Estonia, Finland and Paris, returning Russian Church property to the Russian Church.

Q: What could happen to the OCA, if Constantinople did stop such anti-canonical interventions?

That would be a miracle, so who knows? I suppose one solution would be to take back the OCA’s autocephaly and grant it autonomy instead. Alternatively, you could wait until the present generation of OCA bishops, many of them in difficult and compromised situations or retired, die out. Then, after that generational change, you could pick up the pieces and reincorporate the ex-OCA into the Russian Church in North America, though letting ultra-liberal, dissident pieces which are perhaps beyond redemption (St Vladimir’s Seminary?) join Constantinople or simply go back to the Episcopalians. The OCA too can only survive if it moves towards being a group based on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Bright Monday 2014

Euroatlantic Aggression Against the Unity of Holy Rus

To speak of a new Cold War between the Western secularist world and the Russian Christian world is absurd; the Western aggression of the Cold War never finishes and has been going on for centuries, at least since the age of Daniel of Galicia (1205–1255) and St Alexander of the Neva (1221-1263). True, sometimes that Cold War heats up, as in the thirteenth century, as in 1612, 1812, 1854, 1914 and 1941. Or, as in recent years, with the attempted US-funded and EU-backed Georgian invasion of Russia in 2008 and now the US-funded and EU-backed seizure of power by mainly Catholic Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine in 2014.

The roots of this aggression, ‘the ‘Cold War’, were sown over a thousand years ago, when what had been the western part of the Church assumed the ideology of papism. This ideology, known as the filioque and stating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Pope of Rome, meant that what had been the western part of the Church became a papocaesarist State, its self-proclaimed task to conquer the whole world. This globalist imperialism was in the sixteenth century inherited by a new vital force in the West, Protestantism, which asserted that all male believers are popes, not just one, so ‘democratising’ the filioque.

Today and since its long-awaited appearance in the 1960s, there is the new vital force of atheist secularism, which asserts that all, believers or not, are popes, so further democratising the filioque and making faith completely irrelevant, for the Holy Spirit proceeds from all human nature, not just from white males, but also from atheists, pagans, homosexuals, transgenders etc. So the process of apostasy that started in Rome long ago spread outside it. Rome was only the carrier of the virus that will lead to final apostasy and the end of the world.

In today’s Ukraine we see how all these forces, Catholicism (in its Uniat form), Protestantism (in the new self-appointed President), secularist atheism (in the ideology that rules all these puppets), and also schismatic and apostatic ‘Orthodoxy’ under the married ‘monk’ Denisenko who concelebrates with Catholics) the apostate front is complete. All the filioquists are together, all united, all ready to accept the rule of Antichrist, as long as the West rewards them with their toy of Ukrainian nationalism.

Yesterday in Brussels President Obama, himself the apparently lapsed Muslim leader of the collected atheist and agnostic heads of Western European states, made a clear statement of naked aggressive intent against the Christian world. He called for the stationing of more NATO troops throughout Eastern Europe, asserted that Might is Right and that a big bullying power (the USA) has the right to take over a small, bankrupt country (the Ukraine), using the puppet junta that it has put into power there. Thus, in a speech full of historical lies, the US President denied freedom and democracy, the right to self-determination, of tens of millions of Little Russians and Carpatho-Russians, now under the yoke of the Euroterrorist junta in Kiev.

To sow discord between Orthodox Christians using nationalism as the sword with which to rule and divide has always been the Western technique. Thus, in the Balkans, almost a century ago, it began to divide off the small and weak, if ancient, Greek Orthodox world from the rest of the Orthodox world, experiencing success in Anglican-subsidised Constantinople and British-controlled Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria and Antioch. Then under the masonic Patriarch Myron, it tried to pluck Latin Romania from the Orthodox Christian orbit. Today it works ardently in the same direction in EU Bulgaria, in bombed, much divided and bribed Serbia and at this very moment in puppet-regime Ukraine.

Thus using the weakness of nationalism to divide the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Orthodox world (for which nationalism the West then reproaches it!), the West hopes to disrupt the Inter-Orthodox Council which may take place as early as 2016. Now is the time of testing. If semi-modernist, Western-financed representatives of Local Churches at that Council do not return to the fullness of the Orthodox Christian Tradition, regarding for example ecumenism, the liturgical calendar and other practices, it will turn out not to have been a Council at all, merely a failed Conference. It will then be for the Russian Church to organise a real Council, attended by all the bishops of all the free Local Orthodox Churches.

Euroatlantic aggression against the unity of Holy Rus means a clear choice between Western Secularism and Orthodox Christianity. Whose side are you on?

The Victory of Martyrdom and the Victory of Confessordom

In the 20th century the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia won a great victory against Western materialism in its Communist form, a victory won mainly through martyrdom. With 600 martyred bishops, 200,000 martyred priests, monks and nuns and millions of martyred laypeople, its sacrifices were an immense example to the whole world, as long as that world wished to see it and not be blinded by its cultural prejudices causing it to hate the Church of God.

At the same time, living in outward freedom, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia won a great victory against Western materialism in its secularist form, a victory won mainly through confessordom. With figures like Metropolitans Antony, Anastasy, Philaret and Laurus, Archbishops Averky, Antony of Geneva, Tikhon, John and Antony of San Francisco, and a host of faithful priests, monks, nuns and laypeople, it resisted the ways of the Western secularist world, remaining faithful to the best of the Tsar’s Russia.

At one point, during the decadence of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the Church Outside Russia was indeed virtually alone in speaking on behalf of authentic Orthodoxy and combatting the modernist and ecumenist compromises of new calendarism, while the Church inside Russia was paralysed, a hostage of the Soviet atheist regime. The Church Outside Russia opposed Frankish-style ‘Orthodox’ ‘theology’, which fills the brain with mere academic theories, but does nothing to nourish the heart, and the attempts to create a Western Establishment Halfodoxy, in fact an anti-Orthodoxy, instead of real Orthodoxy.

The victory of the Church Outside Russia is apparent in that the now free Church inside Russia is speaking with the same voice and spirit as the Church Outside Russia. Ecumenists, immoral bishops, personality cultists, syncretists who wish to merge Hinduism with Orthodoxy in ashrams, are all of the past. Today the old decadent modernism and ecumenism, so prevalent in the Patriarchate of Constantinople for example only a few years ago, is dying out, its remaining representatives mostly in their 80s.

This double victory of both parts of the Russian Orthodox Church is apparent in the forthcoming Inter-Orthodox Council to be held perhaps in 2016. (The 2015 date prematurely announced was always unrealistic, given the amount of work there is to do in preparation). This Council was unthinkable, as St Justin of Chelije pointed out in the 1970s, as long as Eastern Europe suffered under Communist persecution and the Greek Churches were chattels of the CIA. If the Patriarchate of Constantinople can be persuaded to accept the autocephaly of the Churches of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and of America, and if the Patriarchate of Jerusalem can renounce its imperialist ambitions in Qatar, then a Council as early as 2016 is still possible.

With the Patriarchate of Constantinople now having accepted the Orthodox principle of consensus, as against the papist system of majority voting, the Local Orthodox Churches together will have to prepare an agenda, as the old one was long ago hopelessly discredited. It is true that because this Council is to be held in Constantinople, where resources are very limited, only about a third of the 800 or so Orthodox bishops will be able to meet. However, it may be that after this initial Council there will come another and more significant Council, which could be held for example in Russia, where there is the infrastructure to hold a Council of 800 and more bishops.

However, it is good that this Council is to be held. The heterodox world will learn something. It will help to put an end to the decadent drift in the smaller and spiritually weaker new calendar Local Churches and could also end US and EU meddling in Orthodox Church life. This could also put an end to the cultural isolationism and nationalism of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the other new calendar Local Churches. It was, after all, the cultural isolationism of Western Europe that brought it into the Great Schism in the 11th century, when it replaced God by Western man with its filioque heresy.

Then the Western world cut itself off from the Church of Christ and the Holy Spirit and propelled itself forward into fallen humanisation. It entered the ever deepening and tragic ideology of its filioquist civilisation and its ensuing inevitable secularism and atheism. If the new calendar Churches can be brought back to the Orthodox calendar and its ascetic and liturgical ethos, this will be a mighty example for the heterodox world. Perhaps the Council, gathered together in unity, could even speak prophetic words to the contemporary world, like St John the Baptist before the First Coming – repent for your sins before the Second Coming.

The Triumph of Orthodoxy

Today, on this the Sunday of Orthodoxy 2014, we pray to the saint of Little Russia who conquered the world, St John of Shanghai, Western Europe and San Francisco, for the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

The Meeting

The meeting of many, but not all, leaders of the Local Orthodox Churches in Istanbul, so inconveniently-timed in the first week of the Great Fast, has ended. The absence of all Orthodox leaders, notably of the Patriarch of Antioch and Metropolitan Rostislav of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, is much to be regretted. If the meeting heeds the words of the Russian Church, it will hopefully lead to a radical revision of the proposed, secularist agenda, which sounds like a provincial version of the now much discredited, fifty-year old Second Vatican Council.

As Patriarch Kyrill underlined, old-fashioned ecumenism is at an end – except perhaps in US-funded Constantinople, whose representatives are referred to as ‘our transatlantic colleagues’ by Russians, who see it as an American colony. The intervention of Patriarch Kyrill and others also explained to Constantinople that no decision can be rammed through by a small group of foreign-funded modernists; all decisions must be agreed on by consensus, by all bishops of every Local Church, and not just by a few of some Local Churches, if those decisions are to be ‘received’ by the Orthodox faithful.

Nationalism

Archbishop Chrysostom II of Cyprus, one of the smallest Orthodox Churches, rightly mentioned the problem of nationalism as the major problem of mononational Local Churches. For example, we only have to think of Mt Athos and the recent ‘shock’ meeting of a racist (‘phyletist’) Greek minister with a Chinese Orthodox monk on Athos, which led to the proposal by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to limit the number of Non-Greek monks there to 10%!

Another example of this is the Greek nationalist philosophy of Metr John Zizioulas, which was largely shaped by the disincarnate and intellectualist ideology of semi-Orthodox Paris Russian thinkers. Other examples are the ownership of the Russian church in Budapest, disputed by Constantinople despite Hungarian law, or the situation of the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, whose canonically-elected leader is not recognised by Constantinople.

The Ukraine

The meeting in Istanbul came against the background of the recent Western-financed and orchestrated overthrow of the democratically-elected government in Kiev. This was supported by an estimated 3,000 to 5,500 Western mercenaries, mainly flown in and armed from the USA. The non-representative junta, come to power in an Orthodox country through violence and intimidation, has a President who is a Baptist pastor, a Prime Minister who is a scientologist and a homosexual Minister of Internal Affairs! The spontaneous reaction and decision by most of the inhabitants of the Ukraine, 83% of whom are Russian-speaking, to attach themselves to Russia, bringing about the possible break-up of the Ukraine in its present and temporary form, was inevitable.

The present anti-democratic Western aggression, led by President Obama and his ill-informed ideologue-advisors, is backfiring. Brought about by a deeply spiritually deficient West, the birthplace of the two most genocidal and atheist ideologies in history, Communism and Nazism, it is bringing Russian liberals, previously pro-Western, to revise their erroneous views and is encouraging oligarchs to return to Russia, repatriating their assets. They ask themselves: Whose side are we on? On the side of the bankrupt Galician junta and their regional language, representing scarcely 15% of the Ukraine, or of the real Little Russia and sorely persecuted Carpatho-Russia, whose leader has just been sentenced by the Neo-Nazis in Kiev to three years in prison against European law? In other words, on the side of the atheist West or the Christian East?

Today Orthodox Rus prays to the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas for the Triumph of Orthodoxy, both in Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia, as well as in Istanbul and in the rest of the weaker Orthodox world.

Outposts of the Empire: A Brief Catechism of the Christian Resistance Movement

1. Question: It is said by the atheist globalists and secularist indifferentists that there is only One God. How do Orthodox Christians respond to this statement?

1. Answer: There is indeed only One God. And as a result of this fact all members of the Church of God, all Orthodox Christians, are different from others.

2. Question: How are we Christians different from Buddhists?

2. Answer: We are different from Buddhists, for they do not believe in any god, they worship a dead Indian prince, the Buddha.

3. Question: How are we Christians different from Hindus?

3. Answer: We are different from Hindus, for they worship thousands of mythical gods or demons, for they do not know the One God.

4. Question: How are we Christians different from Jews and Muslims?

4. Answer: We are different from Jews and Muslims for they only have their own partial understanding of the Old Testament – an anthropomorphic Old Testament god, the god of vengeance and hatred – not the real Old Testament God, who is made completely known in the New Testament. Rejecting the Revelation of the New Testament, they do not know that God is Love and Forgiveness, as expressed in the unique revelation of the Holy Trinity, Which is the Revelation that God is Love.

5. Question: How are we Christians different from Roman Catholics?

5. Answer: We are different from Roman Catholics, for they secularised the Holy Trinity, blasphemously replacing God with a mere man, an earthly substitute and replacement, a ‘Vicar of God’, who could, for instance, issue infallible decrees to massacre, for Roman Catholicism asserts that the Holy Spirit proceeds from him.

6. Question: How are we Christians different from Protestants?

6. Answer: We are different from Protestants for they replaced the Holy Trinity with themselves, rejecting man made in the image of God and instead making God in the image of each man, each making their own manmade ‘church’ according to their own imagination, this creating today’s secularist culture of egoism, the ‘iChurch’.

7. Question: How are we Christians different from Western secularists?

7. Answer: We are different from Western secularists, for they have replaced God with Gold, Materialism and the worship of the Holy Dollar. This is idolatry.

8. Question: So Who is the One God?

8. Answer: There is indeed only one God and He is the God of the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Christianity.

9. Question: What today is the main enemy of the Church of God, Orthodox Christianity?

9. Answer: Today, and for a thousand years already, the main enemy of the Church, of the Orthosphere, of the Eurasian Christian Empire, is Western secularism. Firstly calling itself Roman Catholicism, its ‘crusaders’ filled Jerusalem with blood, sacked the Eurasian Christian Capital of New Rome and then sank their greedy claws into Russia through more ‘crusading’ knights. Secondly, in part receiving the name of Protestantism, it set about secularising and nationalising the Churches of Christ through political meddling, finally bringing about the Western materialist Revolution of 1917. Thirdly, in its ultimate secularist form of modern Western atheism bent on world hegemony, it is set on destroying the final centre of resistance to its worldwide evil and the reign of Antichrist it wishes to establish by annihilating the reviving force of the Orthosphere, centred in what for the moment is called the Russian Federation.

10. Question: What specific forms of attack on the Church does Western secularism take?

10. Answer: Its attack takes a two-pronged form, the ancient pagan Roman prongs of divide and rule.

11. Question: How does attack by ‘Divide’ work?

11. Answer: Secularism’s first form of attack – ‘Divide’ – works through those who have a conservative, but not Traditional, mentality. ‘Divide’ takes two different approaches. This can take the form of nationalism and nationalistic division. The nationalist attack conditions its victims to believe that the most important thing in Church life is not Christ and so Unity, but their nation, in other words, that being Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serb etc, is the most important thing of all. But the nation is an attachment to the world, a form of worldliness, and to put any nation above the Church is idolatry. This attack can also take the form of ghettoisation, conditioning its believers to divide themselves from others, for some obscure reason, whether of language (converts), calendar (new calendarism or old calendarism), or dogmatisation of personal opinions regarding, for example, the toll houses or the interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Whether nationalists or ghettoists, the victims of ‘Divide’ are all people who cannot see the wood for the trees and divide themselves from the rest of the Church, this weakening her collective witness and also making their tiny sects and subgroups irrelevant.

12. Question: How does attack by ‘Rule’ work?

12. Answer: Secularism’s second form of attack – ‘Rule’ – works through those who have a liberal, but not Traditional, mentality. It involves substituting ‘Halfodoxy’ for Orthodoxy, using liberalism, modernism, renovationism and ecumenism to secularise Orthodoxy. Halfodoxy is used by the American or Western Empire, centred in the USA but with a very powerful tentacle in its puppet EU, to attack continually the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Orthodox world through the temptation of money. This means bribing those areas of the Orthosphere that are on the fringes of Eurasia Christendom, always its weakest and poorest parts, whether in Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, the Middle East, the Western Diaspora, Romania, Bulgaria, or more recently in Serbia, Georgia, Syria and the Ukraine. By creating Halfodoxy, the only form of the Church beloved of, not feared by but courted by and also mocked by, secularists, secularism can rule. This is because Halfodoxy is spiritually neutered and castrated, a balkanised toy, a petty nationalistic and provincial ethnic plaything of secularism, with no more spiritual force than pathetic Uniatism, the tiniest and most mocked provincial branch of secularist Roman Catholicism.

13. Question: How does Orthodoxy fight back against Secularism and its ‘Divide and Rule’, its dividing into sectarian conservative ghettos and ruling over liberal ‘Halfodoxy’?

13. Answer: We fight back with the fullness of the Tradition, with Patristic Orthodoxy, Spiritual and Incarnational Sovereignty and Orthodox International Identity. We fight back by striving to restore our Orthodox Empire, avoiding nationalistic or ghettoistic dividing and ruling by the secularists through Halfodoxy.

14. Question: Who is the Head of the Orthodox Empire?

14. Answer: Christ.

15. Question: Why do we at present have no earthly head of the Orthodox Empire?

15. Answer: Because Orthodox in Russia fell to the apostasy of Western secularism and murdered the last earthly head of the Orthosphere. Until we have all repented for this, we will be unworthy to have a new earthly head, unworthy of the Final Restoration.

16. Question: What is the role in this process of Final Restoration of our monasteries and parishes in the Diaspora?

16. Answer: We in the Diaspora are outposts of the Eurasian Christian Empire, oases, islands and missions of the Orthosphere, embassies of spiritual resistance to Antichrist, spokespeople for our Christian civilisational values against atheist Western secularism. Our role is to gather together all the spiritually vital forces in these last times, to save and convert whatever we can for Christ and His Holy Orthodox Church from the tide of atheist Western secularism.

Orthodox England

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