Category Archives: Papism

Why We Reject both Roman Catholic and ‘Orthodox’ Popes

Real Orthodox Patriarchs and bishops claim only spiritual authority. However, there are a few Orthodox Patriarchs and bishops who appear to claim temporal power also, just like Roman Catholic ‘Popes’, whose power they seem to admire. Those Popes have consistently claimed both spiritual and secular power. But what is the origin of the claim of the Roman Catholic Popes to this?

The earliest and most famous forgery which justified this blasphemous claim is known as the ‘Donation of Constantine’. It was fabricated in a Papal scriptorium, probably as early as the 750s, in order to get military support from the Germanic King, Pepin the Short, against barbarians attacking Rome. In any case, the earliest known allusion to it is in a letter of 778, in which Pope Adrian I asks Charlemagne to endow his Church with land and income.

According to this document, several centuries earlier Emperor Constantine the Great had, out of gratitude for a cure from leprosy, ceded ‘to Pope Sylvester (285-335) and all his successors until the end of the world all the imperial insignia’, that is, the totality of ‘the imperial greatness and the glory of our power’. Constantine also allegedly ceded to Pope Sylvester ‘both our (the Lateran) Palace and the City of Rome and all the provinces, localities and cities of Italy or Western regions’. However, from a simple attempt to get protection and sponsorship from a local Germanic king, the Donation of Constantine was to be turned into the centrepiece of a massive enterprise of falsification.

The first Pope to abuse the Donation came three centuries later. This was Leo IX, in a letter sent to Patriarch Michael of New Rome (Constantinople). The Pope cited a large portion of the document and this led automatically to the Western Schism of 1054. Having supposedly received full temporal power over the West, the Popes strove to transform all its kingdoms into Papal fiefs and their kings into vassals. Thus, in 1059 Pope Nicholas II gave Orthodox southern Italy and Sicily (if he could conquer it) to the Norman bandit Robert the Cunning (in Old French ‘Guiscard’), on condition that he pay him homage.

Next, in 1066, Pope Alexander II gave England to another Norman gangster, William the Bastard, on the same condition, this betraying the people of England too. Then, in January 1077, Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) forced the German Emperor Henry IV to humble himself before him and recognise his suzerainty at Canossa. The (English) Pope Adrian IV (1154-1159) next betrayed Ireland, granting it as a ‘hereditary possession’ to the King of England, Henry II, because ‘all the islands are supposed to belong to the Roman Church under ancient law, according to the Donation of Constantine, who richly endowed them’.

To justify their power-grab project of universal monarchy, from the twelfth century onwards the Popes employed an army of legal scholars who developed a new canon law, using forgeries to make their new system appear to be the oldest. The purpose was to invent precedents for the sovereign authority of the Bishop of Rome over the Universal Church on the one hand, and over all Western secular sovereigns on the other hand. Slowly but surely, from one coup d’état to the next, thanks to its magic weapon of excommunication, the Pope became the overlord of Europe, receiving allegiance and tribute from countless kings.

However, the forger of the Donation of Constantine gave the Popes spiritual supremacy not just over Western Europe, but over the whole world. Thus, Constantine the Great is made to decree that the Bishop of Rome ‘shall govern the four Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople (which did not exist at the time of Constantine as Patriarchates!), as well as all the Churches of God throughout the world. The Popes who will now preside over the destiny of the most holy Roman Church will be the highest, the head of all priests all over the world and all things will be regulated according to his decisions’.

This Papal claim of supremacy over other Patriarchs was yet another betrayal of the original ‘Catholic’ (= Conciliar, in the Orthodox sense of this Greek word) constitution of the Church. This was an attempted coup against the principle of brotherly entente that was the condition for the Holy Spirit to guide the whole Church. Already, in the year 1001, in response to a request from Pope Sylvester II to ‘restore’ to the Holy See eight counties of Italy, the highly-educated, half-Greek Western Emperor Otto III had denounced the ‘negligence and incompetence’ of the Popes, as well as ‘the lies forged by themselves’ written ‘in letters of gold’ and placed ‘under the name of the great Constantine’.  He for one clearly had no illusions about the forged Donation.

While the Donation was used as a legal document by the Papacy from the eleventh century, its authenticity or validity were challenged. At the beginning of the 13th century, Walther von der Vogelweide, a poet close to the ‘Holy Roman’ Emperor Frederick II, though not disputing the origin of the Donation, saw it as a great misfortune, which reversed the natural order of the world and caused infinite suffering to Europe. Frederick II had his lawyers declare it unlawful: Constantine simply had no right to make it. As for the Italian poet Dante (1265-1321), he wrote:

Ah, Constantine, how much evil was born,
not from your conversion, but from that donation
that the first wealthy Pope received from you!

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 19, lines 115–117

However, by the 15th century the fraudulent origin of the Donation began to be recognised widely through a fairly simple critical analysis (for example, how could Constantine evoke the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which did not even exist then?). Yet no official apology was ever presented by the Vatican for its fraud. In fact, nothing changed fundamentally in the attitude of the Papacy and, although already unmasked as liars, in 1870 they resorted to the absurd claim of ‘Papal Infallibility’.

Today US Presidents, who from their Roman temple in Washington act as successors to the Popes as the ideological leaders of the Western world, do exactly the same thing. They operate by coup d’etats, overthrowing other governments by ‘regime-change’, thus exacting allegiance and tribute from today’s puppet ‘kings’, and issuing illegal ‘excommunications’ (now called sanctions), proclaiming that US Presidents too are infallible and ‘exceptional’.

We reject the Sanhedrin of the scribes and pharisees, for we belong to the Church of Christ. However, this essay is not an anti-Roman Catholic polemic. Ordinary Roman Catholics are the first victims of this fraud of Papal power. They have our sympathy. And as we mentioned at the very beginning of this article, a few individual Orthodox Patriarchs and bishops also try and claim more than spiritual authority. In reality, our Church is the one of married priests, church communities and families, all together, for we all have a family life. As for more spiritual things, we go to monasteries and hermits, who are celibate by Divine calling, not by the ordinances of mere men.

Orthodox Patriarchs and bishops are administrators and spiritual guides like the apostles, and they should most certainly have nothing to do with money, property and power, which all inevitably lead to corruption and moral decay. And if they are involved with this corruption, then they are not with us, but are against us, the ordinary people, parish clergy, monks and nuns, as they make themselves into mere ‘princes of the Church’, exactly like the Popes. For their spirit too is precisely that of Papism, even though they may dare to call themselves ‘Orthodox’, which they are not.

 

 

Papism or the Holy Trinity: The Multipolar Structure of the Orthodox Church

The only alternative to the Holy Trinity is hell.

Archpriest Sergij Bulgakov

Introduction: The Remaking of the World Order

The settlement after the Second World War made by a victorious USA and USSR is over. The red star Soviet Empire, given birth to by British-orchestrated regime change begun in blood on 30 December 1916, ended on 25 December 1991. The white star American Empire, given birth to by the Truman Doctrine, formulated on 22 February 1947, ended on 24 February 2022 with the tragic events in the Ukraine. Both had lasted for three generations. The Age of Empires is over. The whole World Order is being remade.

The Ukrainian Tragedy

The recent events in Ukraine, very accurately described by the President of Poland as ‘the drowning man who is drowning his rescuer together with himself’, can only be described as the Last Crusade of the West. However, those events do not just mean the dissolution of the old Ukraine, invented by the USSR from 1922 on, and of the old NATO, they are symptomatic of much more. The Ukraine is only one of the historic shifts that are taking place in the world, where we are witnessing the rebirth of a multipolar world.

That varied and multi-centred world existed a millennium ago, before ‘the West’ took on the demonic idea that it was exceptional, proclaiming that it had the right to dominate the whole world through the arrogance of the ‘crusades’. The first of these began officially in 1095, though in fact they had started before that, in Italy and Spain and in 1066 in England. The last one was not Pope George Bush’s ‘Crusade’ against Iraq in 2003. It is the attack on Russia today, Pope Joseph Biden’s Crusade, which is the Last Crusade.

The alphabet soup of old institutions that my generation has grown up with are gone or else will inevitably go: the USSR (gone already), NATO, the EU, ASEAN, the OECD, the IMF, the WTF, the G7, AUKUS, the UN, the UK (to split into its different countries), perhaps the USA too, are next. Through ‘BRICS’, which is set to replace them all, we are heading towards a Planetary Alliance of Sovereign Peoples. The alternative is a neocon-inspired nuclear Wasteland that even T.S. Eliot could not have nightmared of.

BRICS, already more powerful than the G7, soon with eleven members, is the future present. This is the multipolar world of Russia, China, India, Africa, Latin America, Oceania and all the others. This is the Alliance of the seven billion of Planet Earth. The remaining one billion on their islands and on their Western European peninsula will be obliged to join and co-operate with this Alliance as equals, or else die. The old Western millennium is over and, ironically, the new millennium has been given birth to by this Last Western Crusade.

The Multipolar Structure of the Orthodox Church

The old Western-controlled world had a unipolar or totalitarian structure, which has its origin in the unitary, centralised Papist structure of the second millennium of Western Europe. This is not the structure of the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church, also called the Orthodox Churches, now numbers sixteen. Why the paradoxical use of the singular and the plural, Church and Churches? This use is only as paradoxical as that found in the essential Gospel Teaching of the Holy Trinity: God is One, but also Three.

It is this Tri-unity that is at the basis of this rebirth of a multipolar world that is taking place before our very eyes. In other words, the multipolar reality of the ever-expanding BRICS is based on the very description and definition of the structure of the Orthodox Church(es). The ‘Papism’ of the Western world is thus the opposite of the Trinitarian model of the Holy Trinity, as seen in the Orthodox Church(es). It is therefore no surprise that BRICS has basically been founded by Orthodox Christians from Russia.

The Orthodox Church(es) has also known the temptation of ’Papist’ or unitary rule. But each time those centripetal, that is, unipolar or ‘Papist’, tendencies have been defeated, just as centrifugal or splitting forces have also been defeated. The whole Orthodox world is now awaiting the outcome of the tragic conflict between NATO and Russia in the old Ukraine. We all know that the resulting New Ukraine will be one that is viable. (Remember how foolishly an unviable Germany was created after 1919, resulting in a new War).

The Russian President is not only a politician, but also a Russian Orthodox layman. As a provincial intelligence officer, he lived through the collapse of the USSR and the human catastrophes that ensued. As he proclaimed several years ago: ‘He who does not regret the USSR has no heart; he who wants to restore it has no brain’. As for the future structure of the Russian Orthodox Church, for example in the New Ukraine and in other former Soviet republics which are now independent nations, he has no interest in it. He is a politician.

Conclusion: Multipolar Orthodoxy

Such matters will be for the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy to sort out, inevitably in consultation with the fifteen other Local Orthodox Churches. We believe that the Russian Orthodox Church will follow the multipolar model and grant independence (autocephaly) to its different constituent parts. This is not because the Russian Orthodox Church wants to follow multipolar politicians, but because it is part of the whole Orthodox Church, whose structure is inherently theologically multipolar, that is, Trinitarian.