Category Archives: Pastoral Matters

The Latest ROCOR Scandal – This Time in Australia

https://news-pravda.com/world/2025/06/29/1477487.html

It is with great sadness that we have heard from multiple sources (a google search confirms all) of the latest Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) scandal, this time in Australia. There it has made all the main newspapers and media, though of course it will probably not make the largely ROCOR-run, anti-Greek, and heavily censored ‘orthochristian’ website.

Indeed, the Australian story has done nothing for the American Synod (ROCOR), which had already been publicly shamed in a court case for its blatant lies about Fr Alexander Belya and his Vicariate, as shown by the very expensive court case which it lost, and also for its blatant lies about the ‘Colchester Diocese’ in England. Here ROCOR lost half its Western European diocese through its anti-canonical, anti-Moscow schism, racist and sectarian persecution, slander and greed.

As a result, in all the nineteen churches combined of its so-called ‘Western European Diocese’, it is doubtful if on an average Sunday there are even 1,500 people inside them, many of which it does not even own. The ROCOR scandal in Geneva, with the vicious persecution and expulsion of the most faithful of the old ROCOR, all disciples of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, also remains unresolved. The Old Pre-Revolutionary Tradition ROCOR has been killed off by the New Convert ROCOR. St John of Shanghai has ben put on trial and suspended by the American Synod for a second time.

Now in Australia, after the sentencing of the ROCOR pedophile priest from Bombala, publicly known about for over seven years, though in the 1990s they had wanted to make him a bishop (!), another cleric, Fr Boris Ignatievsky, has made a shocking statement typical of ROCOR clericalism: ‘The sheep must not judge the shepherds’. Several of the Russian ‘gyprocker’ clergy in Australia, have already been responsible for scandals, including alcoholism, infidelity and wife-beating. Little wonder that our dear friend in Australia, a priest of integrity, Abbot Sergei Shatrov, left monasticism and the priesthood and became a taxi-driver. (Fr Michael Boyko, another Jordanville graduate, also left the priesthood and became a miner).

It all comes after the arrest and court case involving the notorious Fr Seraphim (Scuratov) in England back in the 1980s (the one whom they also wanted to make a bishop!), and the equally disgusting sexual scandals in the USA, in Boston, Blanco, Jordanville, Platina and Virginia. In the latter case a ROCOR monk left after being approached by a pervert-monk, went to his ROCOR bishop to talk of his trouble and then got touched up by the no less pervert-bishop, who claims to be ‘canonical’. (The monk threw off his monastic garb and walked away in disgust). Is all their monasticism composed of pedophiles? The half a dozen still active bishops of ROCOR (a generation ago, there were twenty – there are several who have ‘retired’ with disgust at the manner in which the new American Synod operates) do not know what to do.

The American ROCOR Archbishop for Australia, a former traditionalist Roman Catholic, rebaptised into ROCOR, is now spreading traditionalist Roman Catholic-style anti-birth control booklets, also to the scandal of the faithful. Russians have no truck with this. The pastoral crisis is in full swing here too. The ROCOR policy of sending out convert American bishops, who have no idea of the Russian Orthodox pastoral and cultural realities outside US convert ghettos, to the ROCOR colonies overseas, has been shown to be a catastrophic mistake.

Meanwhile, at their headquarters in Moscow, certain senior metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church (I know two of them, who informed me so) are thinking of replacing the ROCOR bishops with their own. They wanted ROCOR to be an embassy Church for them to improve their image abroad. In reality, ROCOR has made their image worse. Moscow is just waiting for the key old one to die, for he ‘zasidelsja’, has stayed on for too long. Most of the increasingly small numbers of ROCOR laypeople who are left would follow Moscow bishops. As for many former ROCOR clergy and faithful, they are now scattered as refugees from gross injustice, in the Patriarchates of Constantinople or Romania.

Moreover, both Patriarchates are keen to take even more of those fleeing the anti-canonical and schismatic actions of the rebaptising and anti-family ROCOR Synod. Therefore, they will take them all without letters of leave, which have no value or importance, as the new ROCOR is a schismatic group, which continues to persecute, in the harshest of ways, faithful clergy and people.

Scandals always accompany the decadence that comes before the end. It is just another nail in the coffin of the corpse of what was even twenty years ago a Russian Emigration Church with a largely respected and even glorious history. Sadly, a Persecuted Church has over the last generation become a Persecuting Church. All we can say to all is: Keep well away from ROCOR, approach it at your peril, for the old ROCOR is dead, killed by crazy converts, with their sexual and financial scandals.

To repeat the words of Fr Boris Ignatievsky: ‘Condemnation is a form of pride’. But the American Synod has been condemning the good and faithful for decades. Now it condemns the parents of outraged sons, who denounce pedophile clergy. Presumably then, in their view, pedophilia is a form of humility?

One commentator has asked: How did the Bombala pedophile get away with it for so long? All I know is that he had a terrible reputation when he was in Jerusalem in the 1980s. And all I can say is that either the bishops concerned are stupid, poor judges of character, or else, less charitably, they operate just like the Roman Catholics, as a gay mafia, protecting their own. One or the other. Sad, but true. The need for an Inter-Orthodox Council becomes ever more obvious to us, though apparently not to the majority of the bishops.

 

 

Convert or Converted? The Psychodrama of the Unconverted

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long, and is kind; love envies not; love vaunts not itself, is not puffed up.

1 Cor 13, 1-4

Religious psychosis, my ‘magical Orthodox thinking’, inspired by my obsession with listening to pseudo-elders on the internet, destroyed my life…I was living in fantasies that allowed me to escape reality and totally neglect my real responsibilities because I was setting myself an impossibly high standard of Christian probity and constantly failing.

Letter from a convert in the USA

Foreword

The worst case of a convert I have come across was in 1997, a young woman who had spent twelve years as a nun living in a cave in a Greek Old Calendarist sect in Greece and had come to realise that she had wasted her life. The only parallel I know of is that of that scandalous convent in the Urals led by the now fortunately defrocked Sergei Romanov, and which I visited in 2018. Time and again I return to the same conclusion: Keep to the mainstream, where there are families and children and flee from those who boast that they are not in communion with others. The Orthodox Church is the Catholic Church, that is the Church of Catholicity, of Conciliarity, and not of a lack of communion and so sectarianism, where there is no Church, only psychological manipulation.

Converts and Converted

The Apostles were all converts. How Christ gathered them together is recalled in the Gospels, for example the callings of Andrew and Peter the fishermen and Matthew the tax-collector. Then in the Acts of the Apostles we read about Saul the Persecutor who became Paul the Apostle on the Road to Damascus. However, we never think of the Apostles as ‘converts.’ Why? For the simple reason that they were converted and so their status as ‘converts’ ceased – they had become Orthodox Christians, like the rest of us. Although we were all once ‘converts’, even when we were children, we were then converted. For to remain a ‘convert’ means to remain in an infantile state. Those who think of themselves as converts need to grow up, to become adults and cease the things of children.

Pathology and the Convert

And now we come to the tragedy of ‘converts’ in contemporary Orthodox Christian life, and not only in the Diaspora, understanding that there is no theology here, only psychology, and often pathology, the manipulation of the vulnerable. For many of them do not want to know about the reality of Orthodox life and the services in Orthodox parishes and Orthodox families and how we live. Having listened to various fantasists and misguided idealists on the internet, often they straightaway want to become monks, which is impossible because to be a monk, obedience is essential. But Orthodoxy as monastic life is not accessible to them. For that would be to run before learning to walk. And that means falling. We have to start at the beginning, not to start at the end.

Pride at the Root

This is pride and it is pride that always goes before the fall. The problem with such converts is that they have entirely missed the point. They may join the Church, but this is not the same as ‘becoming Orthodox’, that is, being converted. To ‘become Orthodox’ does not mean keeping certain external monastic observances, such as growing long hair and (if a man) a long beard, (if a woman, wearing floor-length skirts and covering her hair with what looks like a table-cloth), dressing in black or talking with exotic words and incessantly and very boringly about the Typicon, ritual regulations, the canons, ‘the Fathers,’ or individual clerics. All this is irrelevant and ordinary Orthodox parishioners do not do such things, it is boring. Just look at them! Love is the sign of Orthodoxy.

Love at the Root

The essence of Orthodox Christianity is to acquire love for God, for others as for oneself. All external observances and long and boring issues about clerical personalities are irrelevant. Otherwise. it is all ‘sounding brass or a clanging cymbal’, because they have no love, as the Apostle Paul wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. And tragically there are ‘converts’ who even after fifty and sixty years have remained ‘converts.’ This is because they have no love, for love is the fruit of maturity, which is what they do not have, precisely because they have remained ‘converts’, infantiles, for they have never become Orthodox Christians. As Fr Seraphim (Rose) quoted an elderly Russian woman saying about a ’convert’ some fifty years ago: ‘He is certainly Orthodox, but is he a Christian?’

Afterword

Indeed, this disease of ‘convertitis’ has nothing to do with Christianity. It is always characterised by negativity, hypercriticism and interference in the lives of others. This dissatisfaction with others (real Orthodox are dissatisfied only with themselves and are generous and indulgent towards others) always results in the abandonment of Orthodoxy and schism, even if it takes them 50 or 60 years. There have been many contemporary examples, in the Old Calendarist schisms, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian (ROCOR). The convert disease of ‘illusionment’ always ends up in disillusionment, which, by definition, can only come from ‘illusionment’, which is called in Greek ‘plani’, in Russian ‘prelest’, in Romanian ‘inselare’, and in Latin ‘illusio’. Such a waste of life.

 

 

 

 

 

Papism and Protestantism as Infantile and Fascist Deviations from the Church

Foreword: Psychopathology and Fascism

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

Introduction

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

The Roman Catholic Deviation of Authority

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

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

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

The Protestant Deviation of Salvation by Baptism

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

 

 

Article 1500: Visit of Vladica Atanasie, Tonsures and Ordinations

 

www.saintjohnsorthodoxchurch.com

www.facebook.com/stjohnsorthodoxcolchester

https://roarch.org.uk/parishes-england/

On 10, 13 and 14 June, many of us gathered to prepare our Church and Hall for Vladica’s visit. We tidied, cleaned, hoovered, mopped, polished and painted, setting everything up for the big day. On Saturday 14 Vladica Atanasie (Rusnak) and Archdeacon Paul arrived back from consecrating the church in Padua in Italy and reached the hotel we had booked for them just outside Colchester at 11.30 pm.

Vladica arrived at church at 8.45 on Sunday morning, All Saints Day. The Liturgy began at 9.30, after six men, Georgian Cosma, Nicolae Briscan, Florin Murgu, Vadim Khoruzhenko, Ilie Nuno and Antonio Brailescu, had been tonsured readers at the Third Hour and Reader Sergiu Novitchi has been ordained subdeacon at the Sixth Hour.

During the Liturgy Deacon Sergiu Smantana was ordained priest and Subdeacon Sergiu Novitchi was ordained deacon. (Unlike in the Russian Church, ordinations in the Romanian Church in Western Europe are carried out free of charge and are therefore no candidate is forced to wait years for ordination for money reasons. However, all candidates must be qualified and have studied theology and pastoral care or be in the process of so doing).

The Liturgy was concelebrated by Vladica, Archdeacon Paul, seven priests, Fathers Andrew Phillips, Ioan Iana, Leonid Tauleanu, Grigorie Mereacre, Mihai Constantinescu, Alexandru Visan, Nikolai Bulat and our two deacons. Vladica Atanasie (Rusnak) is himself Moldovan, as were four of the priests and one of the deacons who concelebrated. As usual, both choirs, the Russian-English choir and the Romanian-Moldovan choir, with Moldovans, of whom there were many in church, singing in all languages.

With about 250 people in church, communion was as usual from three chalices, with about 70 children and many of our faithful friends coming to us from the Greek monastery in Tolleshunt Knights. The Liturgy finished at 12.45 and Vladica gave Fr Andrew various awards, including a second epigonation in honour of St Athanasius, the right to wear his mitre, awarded by a now departed bishop (Eternal Memory!) in 2020 for 35 years’ service, and a third jewelled cross. (Vladica Metropolitan Joseph had already given Fr Andrew the right to celebrate the Liturgy with the holy doors open until ‘Our Father’). The Liturgy was filmed by a representative from the Romanian Patriarchal Trinitas TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6kyDa_nho

After the Liturgy, we all ate in the Hall, which had been decorated by our Moldovan and Romanian parishioners and beneath our two marquees in the garden. Vladica spoke to Russian speakers in Russian and others in their own languages, Romanian, English and Italian. Vladica will be returning to his Colchester parish in a few months’ time and will then ordain the next batch of candidates. It was made clear that Vladica would like to gather others of Non-Romanian nationalities into our Archdiocese. He mentioned to us that he has ordained 16 men to the priesthood and the deaconate since 10 May 2025. In Italy, where he served before, he set up 31 parishes on the old calendar. Vladica is about to start a doctorate on the subject of ‘Autocephaly’, a theme that has been dear to our hearts for some 50 years.

Vladica will be returning to us next on our Christmas, 7 January 2026. Everyone is very happy!

 

 

Questions and Answers (January-May 2025): On Pastoral Work, the Church and other Christians, Miaphysites, Homosexuality, the Russian Church, Sister Vassa, the Suicide of ROCOR, English and England

Pastoral Work

Q: On the internet you have been called ‘popular but controversial’. Do you think that is fair?

A: That question again! My answer is that I don’t know if it is fair. It is not for me to judge. Popular? Our church is always packed with hundreds, but many other Romanian and Greek churches in this country are also packed in the same way, so that does not mean anything. Controversial is a more interesting comment. Let me explain why.

My priority over 40 years as a clergyman of the Church has always been pastoral work. Therefore, I have always been ideology-free and nationality-free. All are welcome. And for some that may be controversial. For instance, I have always said that if tomorrow 1,000 Chinese people turn up wanting to be baptised, then I will set about that and learn some Chinese on the way. This is exactly what we did when 1,000 Romanians and Moldovans turned up some 12 years ago. I learned some Romanian and found a pious Romanian who was able to become a deacon and then a priest. Since then he has completed seminary and is now completing his masters.

Another example. During the covid scandal (for that is what it was), all the bishops closed down their churches. Not a single one resisted the fraud or went to prison for remaining open. I kept our churches open. True, we hid as in the catacombs, we forbade parking in front, entrance was by the side door, we did not turn the lights on and did not ring the bells and people came in and went out in twos and threes. People of all nationalities came from all over the eastern side of England, from up to 150 miles away. I also went to give people communion in their houses in that area, including all over London, which had turned into a church desert. The others were hiding, ‘for fear of the Jews’. Western and Westernised secularist and atheist governments had achieved what Stalin had not achieved. I suppose my actions were perhaps ‘popular but controversial’.

Some will say that that was irresponsible, I could have spread covid. I did not. I told those, and nearly all of our people are under 40, who felt ill or had weak health to stay at home. But that was only common sense, I am sure they were doing that anyway. Just like ‘social distancing’, which in fact was anti-social distancing, which was also common sense. When we are ill or risk falling ill, we stay at home, we avoid others, especially the vulnerable. We don’t need governments to tell us that! We are not zombies.

Throughout history the Church authorities have had to make up their minds whether they are with Christ or with the State. So it is today. I am with Christ. So were the fools in Christ in Moscow and Saint Petersburg (the capitals where the State authorities did not allow other saints), like St Basil the Fool and St Xenia. St John of Kronstadt worked in a port with its bars and brothels. The snooty aristocrats did not want him, a dirty peasant, in Saint Petersburg.

Likewise, St Seraphim of Sarov lived in the middle of nowhere with bears – the authorities did not want ‘a dirty peasant’ among them and when the pious Tsar had him canonised, the atheist aristocrats, who later overthrew the Tsar, mocked the Tsar’s ‘obscurantism’. Bears liked him more than aristocrats. As for the very recent Elder Nikolai (Guryanov), the Soviet and also post-Soviet Church authorities not only kept him away from towns, but exiled him to a tiny island on a lake, as far away as possible from where large numbers lived. Contempt and persecution by furious bishops who love money and power over Christ have always been our lot, they have never wanted us in a large city. Popular but controversial?

The Church and Other Christians

Q: Where is the True Church?

A: The True Church is where there is Love. Wherever there is hatred, there is no True Church and so no Orthodoxy.

Q: Which Christian group is closest to the Orthodox Church, the Catholics or the Protestants?

A: Neither! Let me explain.

There is an absurd black and white belief, usually adopted by self-justifying converts who know very little and understand even less, that outside the (Orthodox) Church there is nothing. If, on the contrary, we are to make a very broad generalisation, perhaps we could say the following in answer to your question:

The Miaphysites, who are made up of the six groups known as Ethiopians, Eritreans, Copts, Armenians, Syriacs and Malankara Syriacs, totalling some 50 million people, are by far the closest to us. Very crudely speaking, we could say that they have three-quarters of Orthodoxy, whereas the Roman Catholics (who do have the concepts of bishops, priests, saints and sacraments) have only half, and the Protestants (who have only the misinterpreted Scriptures) have only a quarter of Orthodoxy.

The Miaphysites (Non-Chalcedonians) believe what St Cyril of Alexandria also expressed, that Christ has One Nature (‘mia physia’), which is both Divine and human. This was refined by him and all Orthodoxy into the Dogma of the Universal Council of Chalcedon in 451 that Christ is One Person in two natures, Divine and human. For some Orthodox, that seems like the same thing as Miaphysitism, the difference is only semantic.

For many others, however, this is much too vague and unrefined. Apart from the central questions of the Miaphysite attitude to the Council of Chalcedon itself, to the following three Universal Councils and the issue as to whether for them Christ is fully Divine and fully human, with Divine and human souls, minds, wills and energies, there are questions of the Canon of Scripture, the recognition of saints, circumcision etc. These issues divide the Miaphysites from Orthodoxy.

Thus, Miaphysitism disagrees with Orthodoxy about the Person of Christ. Official Roman Catholicism disagrees with Orthodoxy about the Holy Spirit, through Whom the Head of the Church, Christ, is present, replacing both Christ and the Holy Spirit with the Pope of Rome, then the ‘leader of the West’. And Protestantism has no Church, it does not know the Body of Christ, which is why it says strange humanist things like, ‘the Church is wrong’, ‘the Church made a mistake’, ‘the Church has to change’, ‘we must reform the Church’ etc

Q: The new Pope has taken the name Leo XIV, apparently since he wanted to balance conservative and liberal forces in his Church. What do you think of him, and if you were elected Pope, what name would you take? And what would you change, if you could?

A: Your second question greatly amused me, as there must be several billion people who could become Pope before me!

I had obviously never thought about it, but maybe on reflection I would take the name Zacharias II, as Pope Zacharias (741-752) was the last Greek Pope of Rome. Above all, he is an Orthodox saint. I would certainly start by reverting to the Creed, that is, abandoning the filioque, and allowing married men to become priests, stamping out the perversions caused by compulsory celibacy.

As regards your first question and what I think of the new Pope, I don’t know. He may wear a Russian priest’s cross and have an appreciation of liturgies other than the new Roman mass, but that does not mean anything. Actions speak louder than words. Give him a year.

Q: What went wrong with Catholicism in the 1960s? Why did it abandon so much from before?

A: I was not there, but I have understood the following from eyewitnesses.

In the 1960s, rationalist intellectuals seized hold of Catholicism and decided that it needed ‘updating’, as though it were some sort of corporate secular organisation that needed rebranding. They forgot, or probably never even knew, that the Church services are made to inspire prayer, contact with the other world, and so must have the sense of the sacred, the mystical, the otherworldly, the numinous. Instead, they made their Church resemble the world, destroying any sense of the sacred. And so they discouraged prayer and people stopped going to their churches. Why go there? It resembled the world around them. It was no longer different, ‘special’.

But let us not get it out of proportion. There was much that was wrong with it centuries before the 1960s.

Q: Who do you hope will become the next Archbishop of Canterbury after the pedophile scandal with Welby?

A: I have no idea. I just hope the next one actually believes in God, unlike the last one

Q: Why is there so much homosexuality among the Orthodox episcopate today?

A: Homosexuality always come in times of decadence. That is your reply.

As Fr John, the rector of the very large Mayfield parish (3,000 Orthodox) in the USA, explained to me in 2007, the worst thing is when bishops form a gay mafia (in the US, this is called a ‘lavender mafia’) and then gang up against married priests and their solid families. Closet homosexual bishops are jealous of their common touch, experience and knowledge.

In those days, this concerned the OCA, today it concerns the Russian/ROCOR and Constantinople Churches. Thus, in the Russian Church inside Russia, another three bishops have just been deposed, though it is not clear whether this was for embezzlement of money or again for perversion, as in the Grindr scandals previously.

Q: Why did the Orthodox Easter coincide with the Catholic Easter this year?

A: What you mean is that in 2025 the Roman Catholic Easter coincided with the Orthodox Easter. This happens every five years, when Catholicism observes the Paschalia and the canons.

Q: What do you think of the icons that have been displayed in recent years in a great many Non-Orthodox Churches?

A: Sadly, they are used only as superficial decoration and you cannot venerate them. The Non-Orthodox would not venerate them, do not even know how to venerate them or actively prevent Orthodox from venerating them in horror at our veneration. Icons there are only a fashion from the 1970s, but it has gone no further than a fashion.

Q: What for you is religion?

A: Religion is State manipulation, as Marx said in his definition that ‘Religion is the opium of the masses’. (What he did not mention is that mass murder is the opium of the Marxists).

As a priest, I am not a man of religion, but a man of faith, for faith is defined as the perception of spiritual reality.

Q: Do Orthodox accept conspiracy theories?

A: Some surely do. But the problem with such theories is that they always identify a human enemy – the Jews, the Freemasons, the Catholics, the Trilateral, the City of London, the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese etc. Therefore, they are all wrong, because they have partial or temporary truths. There is only one enemy; the devil, and he can and does work through all and any of us or them, not just through one group.

The Russian Church

Q: Should we pray for Patriarch Kyrill, inasmuch as he has stated that the Russian war against the Ukraine is a ’holy war’?

A: Your question contains so many misunderstandings that I hardly know where to begin!

Firstly, we should all pray for each other and especially for our enemies, if you consider that you have any. Secondly the Ukraine and Russia have been at war with each other for years, since 2014, when the Kiev regime began its genocide of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. It is above all a Kiev regime war against Russia. It is catastrophic, for it is a civil war.

However, this war was only possible because the mass of both Russians and Ukrainians have lost their faith. Real Orthodox Christians do not kill one another. To present the war as a war between an Orthodox side and a Non-Orthodox side is absurd. Neither is Orthodox, the masses are atheists, with abortion rates twice that of ‘decadent’ Western countries, divorce rates at the same level and social decomposition and an ultra-low birthrate current. This is in reality a proxy war, a geopolitical struggle which pits US-based atheist Globalism against Russian-based Nationalism, which nobody except Russian nationalists can support.

The conflict is only a religious question inasmuch as the Kiev regime, strongly supported by the Globalists, persecutes the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and, on the other hand, inasmuch as certain priests inside Russia have been persecuted and exiled for having different political opinions to the warlike Russian nationalist views promulgated among others by certain Russian bishops. The grounds for the persecution in the Ukraine could have been avoided, had there been a canonical, autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its autocephaly granted by Moscow. For thirty years nationalist Moscow refused to grant this autocephaly, thus creating the Kiev nationalist accusation that the Ukrainian Church is a slave of Moscow and to some making it appear true.

Our sympathies naturally go to the persecuted, not to the persecutors, wherever those persecutors are. However, that does not mean that our prayers do not go to the persecutors too. Indeed, quite the contrary. For example, we pray publicly at every liturgy ‘for this land, all the Royal House, all those in seats of authority and the armed forces’, with whom we may not at all agree. Prayer for others does not mean that we agree with them! That is a purely secular, not to say atheistic, understanding. We pray especially for those who disagree with us so that their hearts may be softened. That is why the first Orthodox prayed for the pagan Roman emperors, such as Nero. Such prayer is good for us too, as it protects us from ill feeling. All the more do we pray for those who persecute us. We do that all the time.

There is no such thing as ‘a holy war’. In that Sister Vassa Larina and all the other liberals right. Why do they have to persecute so cruelly such an innocent and harmless, if misled, head in the clouds idealist as Sister Vassa? The ‘defrocking’ of her and experienced pastors, outside Russia, where ROCOR is systematically purging itself of all the old traditional ROCOR and replacing them with crazy lickspittle converts, fobbing the experienced off with meaningless medallions and then retiring them, however young they are. This is the same as inside Russia, where experienced pastors are ‘defrocked’ for holding different opinions to narcissistic bishops is sacrilegious. In Russia and in the Netherlands they even threatened pacifist clergy with criminal courts. However, whether inside and outside Russia, it is exactly the same Stalinism.

For the bishops who defrocked Sister Vassa were not forced into persecuting her by Moscow – it was worse than that, they did it voluntarily. With their greed for money and power, they too are merely Sergianists, like those in the USSR who persecuted the New Martyrs and Confessors. That is spiritual suicide. ROCOR bishops pressed the self-destruct button some years ago, in about 2017, when they cast aside Metr Hilarion in an internal coup d’etat and the crazies took over.

However, Sister Vassa, who has quite rightly called the attitude of the new ROCOR ‘Neo-Sergianism’, has now made the mistake of joining those who, financed by the CIA, want to invade Russia and also openly persecute the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Since Sister Vassa is American, does this mean that she too supports the CIA and is anti-Russian, like the ROCOR bishops? Some ROCOR bishops and priests are CIA – is she also CIA? That too is Sergianism – putting pro-Ukrainian political beliefs above the Church. Sergianism is not only Russian. Its origins are after all in Protestant Holland, whose Erastian attitudes were taken to Russia by Peter I. We must pray for Sister Vassa that she will come to understand. To be anti-Russian is the same as being anti-Ukrainian. We must be pro-Christ.

Q: What did the Church of the Russian Emigration have to teach the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: Very simply, that we must always put Christ above the State. This includes the pre-Revolutionary Russian State (all too many in the Emigration suffered from cultural nostalgia for that uncanonical and unjust system, but it too was also in part run by practical atheists – 90% of the emigres simply wanted the old, corrupt system, and their money and land, back), as well as the Soviet atheist State or the post-Soviet atheist State. We render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

That is what we teach them, that is what St John of Shanghai, the greatest saint of the Emigration taught and still teaches today through his life. Even less universal and even somewhat controversial figures from the Parisian Emigration, like the locally-venerated Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), who had nothing to do with Essex (I know, I was born in Essex!), Mother Maria (Skobtsova), and Metropolitan Antony (Bloom) taught this, the first as a rather inaccessible art nouveau period philosopher, the second as one who like so many others sacrificed her life for someone younger, the third as a conscious convert presented the logic of Orthodoxy to other converts.

Instead of teaching that Christ is above the State, after 2007 many of the remnants of the Russian Emigration and their naïve converts did the opposite. They copied the Sergianist vices of the Moscow Patriarchate (which had their roots entirely in the uncanonical, Protestant-style, Erastian administration of the pre-Revolutionary State), falling prey to the love of power and especially of money. It is very, very sad. The ‘Church-Business’ inside Russia is why even in the last six years Church attendance there has halved from 2.6% to 1.3%. They have restored the pre-Revolutionary Church – yes, the worst of it!

The reconciliation of ROCOR with the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) in 2007 was absolutely vital as ROCOR was on the verge of becoming a sect, already many in ROCOR were saying that they would join the MP in any case, if there was no reconciliation. Some had begun leaving in the 1990s. The new ROCOR shows utter disloyalty to St John, about whom one new, very effeminate, luxuriously dressed, ill-educated ROCOR bishop, who does not know even the basics, told us that he walked without shoes only because his shoes were uncomfortable!! It is interesting to see how such bishops today persecute the legacy of love of St John even today, trying to close churches dedicated to St John, persecuting and bullying his spiritual descendants, threatening them with incredible violence and rage (‘Cut their heads off’) and only paying lip service to St John, as his relics are a source of income. ‘By their fruit ye shall know them’. And these people call themselves Christians…

Today we see resistance to the State above all only in the Ukraine through the heroism of the much-persecuted Metr Onufry of Kiev. But Tsar Michael will come and sweep the old post-Soviet vestiges in both the Russian Federation and the Ukraine away.

Q: Why does the Russian Church have relatively strict practices?

A: We must recall that Russia was converted by Byzantine monks, so it lacks the parish tradition, which is so much alive in Greece and Cyprus and is much freer and easier than the monastic tradition and its practices. Today, the Russian Church is often obsessed by rules and a certain militarisation, for nearly all there today are converts. This is also a sociological phenomenon.

Q: Why in Russian churches in Russia are there women who come around and clean the icons with cloths every few minutes?

A: This comes from Soviet accusations about hygiene, that Orthodox are dirty. So the Church in the USSR reacted to it with this over the top hygiene obsession.

Q: Who do you prefer of the two sister-saints, the Tsarina Alexandra or the Grand Duchess Elizabeth?

A: Both were converts, but the Tsarina went further into Orthodoxy than her sister, who got stuck in the convert politics of trying to mix Orthodoxy with a Western mentality, hence her ‘reforms’, specially designed nuns’ uniform, deaconesses, and her support for murder. However, Elizabeth was finally purified by her sacrifices for the poor and, above all, by the blood of her martyrdom.

Q: What exactly is a mass baptism?

A: For me, it means the baptism of hundreds or thousands. When it is just a matter of a ten or twenty, or fewer than a hundred, that is a group baptism.

English and England

Q: What version of the Bible do you recommend for home reading?

A: The Revised Standard Version, or RSV, as blessed by some Orthodox bishops back in the 1960s.

Q: In English do you write matins or mattins?

A: The English word comes from the Latin ‘matutina’, which does have two ts, but I think that matins with one t is the most common spelling.

Q: As you appear to dislike the House of Windsor, do you consider that you are a Jacobite?

A: I support only one Royal House, the House of Wessex. All the others came after the Schism and the near-millennial Norman Occupation.

 

 

Regrets and Hopes in 2025

Q: In the New Year we tend to look both forwards and backwards. Can you tell us what regrets you have about the past? And what hopes do you have for the future?

A: I have three regrets, but a hope that far outweighs them all!

My first regret is the killing off of the Western European Archdiocese of ROCOR. We always used to concelebrate with everyone, with Constantinople, with the Serbs etc. We also had parishes on the new calendar with us. There was no problem with any of this and we were pleased to live like this. This was our tradition of being on good terms with all the Local Churches, faithfully handed down to us without change from pre-Revolutionary Russia. It used to be the norm for the whole Russian Church.

However, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who ordained me and whose spiritual child I am, was attacked by sectarians from the USA for keeping to this tradition, just as his predecessor, Archbishop John (Maximovich), was suspended and put on trial by those very same CIA-financed sectarians in the USA. There are narrow and racist, politically-minded pharisees, who cannot tolerate openness to other nationalities, unlike St John and his successor.

In 2007 we finally defeated the US fanatics, we ‘drained the swamp’, as they say, and brought ROCOR back into canonical communion with the rest of the Russian Church. However, ten years later, the CIA, working hard through its Cold War-founded select but powerful network of clerical agents in New York and elsewhere – their names are well-known to us, for many of them were recruited long ago – subverted our victory. They did this by having collected ‘dirt’ on individuals (they especially like to recruit homosexuals, who are then compromised and in debt to them), for, as they like to say, ‘every man has his price’, often literally. In this way they infiltrated the Church and created what they had long wanted – sectarianism and schism.

I realise that the New York group was desperate to find bishops, but there is a minimum level. They should exclude CIA agents by thoroughly vetting and training candidates for the episcopate in seminary and monastery, and also exclude homosexuals, narcissists and money grubbers, before they consecrate anyone. The liturgical, historical and legal ignorance of the CIA generation of recruits should not be such that they get arrested twice in one day in two different countries! Candidates should also understand the canons, especially those of the First and Second Council under St Photios. And they should also be equipped linguistically, which is so important in Europe. Communication by google translate has made a laughing-stock of that jurisdiction.

Then came the shock of 2017, a very recent convert, knowing little apart from American culture, which he tried to impose on everyone together with his American language. This was teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. Lacking all respect for local traditions, the new convert made nasty racist attacks on all Orthodox nationalities, Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians and Moldovans, demanded ever more money at every stop, persecuted the faithful, tried to close our churches, flew off into hateful rages, insisted on ‘protocols’ and micromanaged bureaucracy, and set himself up as a guru, just like the invaders of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan had done before him. ‘I’m American, I know everything and you owe me complete obedience’. That was the attitude. There is nothing Christian in any of this, just neophyte arrogance.

In December 2020 he went into schism. That was the last straw for all of us. Despite his guru claims, he was not followed. Clergy in Western Europe ignored him and continue to concelebrate with others, including with the Moscow Patriarchate, from which he had also gone into schism. But for us who have always fought against sectarianism, this was the end. We will ever uphold the traditions of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and of his successor Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who would have supported us. We will never, on principle, support schism and sectarianism. As St John Chrysostom said: ‘The sin of schism cannot be washed away even by the blood of martyrdom’. We pray for him that he will repent before the end.

My second regret is that so much time has been wasted by others. I have been held back. I could have done so much more, but was not allowed to, for reasons of racism, jealousy and politics. I hope I have a long life because there is so much more to do towards building the Local Church of Western Europe. Thirty-six hours a day would not be enough. Parishioners are praying for me that I live to 100. They want me to baptise their grandchildren. Of course, maybe I won’t live until next week, I don’t choose. As God wills.

My third regret is that the Moscow Church administration, with all its vast potential, fell into exactly the same nationalist and racist trap as the Greek Church administration. It began to exclude Non-Russians, not just Ukrainians, but even their own children, from their once multinational Church, despite the warnings of my dear friend, the late Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, who died in mysterious circumstances in Moscow in 2020, aged just 52. This ‘Russian world’ concept is exactly the same racism as Hellenist nationalism. They have lost everyone outside themselves, Ukrainians, Moldovans, those from the Baltics, those from Western Europe, isolating themselves from the mainstream, just like the Greeks.

As a result, the responsibility for building the Local Church of Western Europe has fallen to the Romanians, together with the old calendar, Russian-speaking Moldovans and those of other nationalities, including canonical Russians, who are likeminded, like ourselves. Will we manage to do it, overcoming nationalism, keeping our hundreds of thousands of Western European-born Romanian and Moldovan children in the Church through a new Local Church? We shall do our best to do so.

And this is my great hope, far greater than all these details of history, that I shall live to see our Local Church emerge from the hundreds of thousands of Orthodox children, not just Romanian and Moldovan, but those of many other Eastern European nationalities and of those whose ancestors have lived in Western Europe for generations and centuries, including our own six children, six sons and daughters-in-law, and twelve grandchildren so far.

Thus, we hold firmly to the tradition of the Western European diocese of ROCOR, of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church. Nothing will be lost. This year we have an important project towards this. It is all under way and hopefully it will be completed and revealed before the end of 2025. Unity, not sectarian schism, is the way forward and that is our way and always has been!

Thank God for the Romanian Church. Through our Church we have been able to keep Russians and Ukrainians together (only a few nationalistic and ritualistic Muscovites did not stay with us), just before their conflict hotted up on 24 February 2022, not to mention Moldovans, Romanians and others. I know that we are very grateful to Metr Joseph and he is grateful to us, as he wants to build a multinational Church. In a few days’ time our new Archbishop Athanasy, a Russian-speaking Moldovan, will be enthroned for us. Glory to God!

 

Our Archbishop Athanasius of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

The Most Reverend Athanasius of Bogdania, Vicar Bishop of the Diocese of Italy, was elected on Friday 25 October to the dignity of the Romanian Orthodox Archbishop of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The newly elected Archbishop of Great Britain is 42 years old and has been a bishop of the Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church since May 2018.

He was born on 17 January 1982 in Chisinau in the Republic of Moldova, being the first of the two sons of Eugen and Ala Rusnac and also speaks Russian. He has held Romanian citizenship since 12 October 2010.

He was tonsured monk on 8 December 2008 and then was ordained deacon. On 16 April 2009 he became a priest for the chapel of the Diocesan Centre and the Dormition Monastery in Rome. Between 2009 and 2018 he served at the ‘Dormition of the Virgin Mary’ Chapel next to the Diocesan Centre in Rome.

On 15 February 15 2018, he was elected Vicar Bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Diocese of Italy, with the title of Bogdania , and on 1 May he was consecrated bishop.

Archbishop Athanasius was an engineer. He studied between 2000 and 2005 at INSA Lyon (Institut National des Sciences Appliqués de Lyon – France). He obtained the degree of Engineer with a Master’s degree, his speciality – Telecommunications and Networks. He also followed a specialisation internship in the field of IT (MT Systems – Lyon, France).

Between 2006 and 2010, he attended the ‘Saint-Serge’ Faculty of Orthodox Theology in Paris, as did Fr Andrew Phillips, but that was over 25 years earlier. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in pastoral theology in 2010. Between 2010 and 2012, he attended a Master’s course in Practical Theology (Canon Law), at the Faculty of Theology ‘Andrei Șaguna’ in Sibiu. Master’s thesis – ‘Principles of Canon Theology in the Diaspora, with special reference to Italy’.

The Archdiocese of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as well as the Diocese of Ireland and Iceland, were established on 29 February 2024. The new dioceses are part of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe.

There are over a million Romanians living in Great Britain who currently have 100 parishes, branches and Orthodox missions, as well as three monasteries.

An article from 2020

The life story of the hierarch baptised at the age of eight. From Communism to the Italian diaspora.

The youngest Romanian hierarch, Bishop Atanasie de Bogdania, turned 38 on Friday 17 January 2020. The hierarch gave an interview in which he talks about the story of his life, beyond the already known biography during his almost two years of service as Vicar Bishop of the Diocese of Italy.

Bishop Atanasie de Bogdania was born in Chisinau during the atheist Communist regime and was baptised around the age of eight along with his brother and father. He first became an engineer in Telecommunications and Networks in France, and then a monk in Italy, being a close disciple of Metropolitan Joseph of Western and Southern Europe and of Bishop Silouan of Italy.

His Eminence’s father was a university professor, and his mother worked in a publishing house, things that did not allow them to have visible faith in society. Both the wedding of the parents and the baptism of the children took place after 1990.

‘My father, after Communism fell, with great joy went to the first church he came across, a place of worship that had recently opened because the vast majority of churches had been closed, and asked the priest to marry him. The father, being an experienced minister, asked him: ‘Are you baptised?’, «No!», «But children?», «No children are baptised!».

“In this context, all three of us were baptised: me, my brother, the current deacon Mircea and my father. Shortly after, the parents got married,” recalls the hierarch.

“So, the first encounter with God consciously took place right when I received the Sacrament of Baptism at the age of 8. I remember the gestures that the priest made, the songs from the choir, the emotion of the people who surrounded us, that “How many of you have been baptized in Christ, have also clothed yourselves in Christ”, all of this left a mark on me”.

The Archbishop says that the Most Reverend Metropolitan Joseph and the Most Reverend Bishop Silouan formed him.

“At that time I was young, at 18 I arrived in France and with other colleagues from the INSA Lyon Faculty we went together to monasteries, churches and meetings with young people organised by the parishes. Such great openness, the natural way in which the hierarchs behaved, the way in which they approached people, opened in me this leaning towards Theology”.

This was followed by theological studies and various ministries within the EORI (Romanian Orthodox Episcopate of Italy): Diocesan Secretary, Administrative Counsellor, Exarch of the Monasteries and Diocesan Vicar.

On 15 February 2018, the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church elected him Vicar Bishop of the Diocese of Italy, with the title “of Bogdania”. The consecration took place on 1 May 2018 in Rome.

His Eminence defines his ministry in Italy as a “family” one and relies heavily on the closeness between the clergy and the faithful.

“I try to spend as much time as possible in the territory, that’s why I feel close to the priests, with whom I have a very good relationship. I was godfather to many at their ordination, some I trained with, others I trained and I think we are a real family”.

“This is what I would like in the future: to be a family, together to carry the achievements, but also the hardships. I would like us to be as responsible as we have been until now, that is, to work together for our salvation.”

Although he has been a bishop since 2018, His Eminence has served for ten years in the administration of the Diocese of Italy. “During the ten years of activity, much has been done materially, but the biggest achievement is that our churches are full, people love and seek the Church. That is why our responsibility is very, very big. But in the family everything goes together, both good and bad, to the glory of God”.

 

A New Publication: The Benckendorff Papers

The interviews taken with a Russian Countess and a Russian Count and posted on this site on 22 June and 31 July 2024 have now been published and illustrated in an A5 booklet of 43 pages under the above title. The booklet is available from frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. The cost is £2 in Great Britain and $5 elsewhere. The easiest way to pay is by Paypal, using the above e-mail.

Q and A August 2024

Corruption Inside the Church

Q: Having seen the corruption of the new ROCOR episcopate, do you now think that those who, like Metropolitan Vitaly, warned that ROCOR would be corrupted by contact with the Moscow Patriarchate and so left it between 2001 and 2007, were right.

A: Not at all! You do not leave the Church, whose episcopate had at the time not yet been corrupted, to join a sect!

As for the corruption of ROCOR, that was the choice of those who did it to themselves, it was self-corruption. The episcopate of the Patriarchate in Moscow never imposed any corruption, just as the Russian State never imposed any political compromises on the part of the episcopate of the Russian Church. It is far worse than that – they imposed corruption on themselves by personal choice!

It is a bit like someone who goes to work in a jeweller’s shop, becomes a jewel thief and then blames the owner of the jewellery shop for his corruption. All bishops should know that there is such a thing as personal responsibility and a conscience. Clearly, they did not and I suspect that that is because they had lost their faith and become atheists, ‘princes of the Church’, as they liked to call themselves, Catholic cardinal-style. In any case, they live like atheists. As a result, we have ‘Orthodox’ killing each other in Russia and the Ukraine. This is the Judgement of God.

Q: How do you cope when you see open corruption among bishops?

A: The Church is like a mountain stream that goes down to the lowlands and becomes a fairly slow-moving river. The destiny of the water is to go to the sea, just as our destiny is to go to heaven. However, in the mountains the water gets mixed up with stones and in the lowlands the water inevitably gets mixed up with the mud. We have to live alongside the stones and the mud. It is our job not to get mixed up with either the stones or the mud, but to keep flowing (with the flow of the Holy Spirit) in the top half of the river, where the water is clean, though we do go up and down to some extent. Sadly, there are those who do get mixed up with either the stones or else the mud. Even so, as long as they don’t get caught up in the river weeds or else bogged down in the stagnant mud, they can still rise up away from the mud and get cleaned.

However, we must not fall into the sin of those who, disgusted by any possible contact with the mud, get out of the river altogether and sail down the river in small boats, some of them luxuriously fitted out, for the imaginary ‘pure’, while condemning everyone else in the river, who are in contact with the mud. These people are proud sectarians, pharisees and Donatists. They are disincarnate, that is, not part of the river, not part of the Church, cut off, judging others in their pride. As such they are actually worse than those who are in contact with the mud. At least they still have the chance of going upwards into the flow and of being cleaned by that flow. These people in their boats do not even have the chance of being cleaned by the flow of this river of eternal life, the streams of living water, but remain isolated in their self-pleasing ’comfort’ and pride.

Q: What do you do when you are slandered by a bishop? You have personal experience.

A: I pray for the four slanderers, three of whom have repeated the bishop’s slander, for the one in Colchester, the one in Ipswich, the one in Tiptree and the last in London. All their terrible personal problems to the point of alcoholism come from the fact that they tell lies and slander.

Q: Why have so many Irish-Americans joined the Orthodox Church?

A: What an interesting question. I can remember 50 years ago the then Fr Basil Osborne remark that many who had then joined the Orthodox in the USA had Irish names.

I think it is part of a general situation that those who join the Orthodox Church in Western Europe and Northern America come from oppressed minorities in their countries of origin. For example, in Germany many join from Saxony, in France from Brittany, and in England from those of peasant origin. In other words, those of the elitist Establishment background either do not join, or else, if they do, they do not stay the course, and soon abandon it, like so many Oxbridge professors and those from the London elite in England.

The Non-Orthodox World

Q: Will old calendarists go to hell?

A: This is the second time you have asked an outrageous question. I realise you are new to the Church of God, but where does this desire to condemn all others come from? Where does this hatred come from? If you are really concerned about the salvation of others, pray for them in silence. Last time, it was the same question about Protestants, from where you come. Save your own soul and leave others aside. It is none of your business. Stop meddling and heal yourself.

Q: I recently met an Orthodox woman who does not believe that bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ? Is this typical?

A: It is typical of an Orthodox who has become an atheist. I would not judge a Church of 200 million by one very lapsed example.

Q: I have started going to an Eastern Orthodox church, with the aim, hopefully, of being baptised eventually. I am contacting you because I’ve heard horror stories about people joining, then going through real turmoil in their lives. I understand that no spiritual journey or growth is painless, but I wonder to what extent is joining the Church going to destroy me. I’ve seen commentary like this online, people saying essentially that they’ve been ruined by joining the church. As a man of your station within the church, I just want to ask – is this reasonable? Or is it just hyperbole?

A: The Church ruins no-one’s life! Only sects and cults, which attract the proud, do that.

However, in the Orthodox Church we have long been besieged by psychopaths and sociopaths, misfits in society who think they can fit in to the Church and that they will find their place here. They do not. They seem to pick on the Orthodox Church, as they find us ‘exotic’. Though some of them have been thrown out of the Catholic Church or the Church of England, for obvious reasons.

I have myself received three such individuals in the last 35 years, so am also guilty. Sadly, what I did for them did not help them, as I had hoped it would. However, as they did not repent, it could not help them. They should have seen a psychiatrist first. Sadly, too, there are Orthodox clergy who receive many such people, with disastrous consequences, I mean several people every single year. The worst is, when one of these pathological individuals becomes a member of the clergy and begins to receive others like himself. And the worst is when of these individuals becomes a bishop! You can imagine how much damage that can do!

I hope you find your place in the Church. The main thing is to be sexually normal and be able to hold down a normal job. That makes a huge difference.

Q: Pope Francis has recently published a document stressing Primacy and Synodality. Could this be a positive opening acceptable to the Orthodox Church?

A: On the surface Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism have much in common: the Holy Trinity, Christ God-Man, the Mother of God, the saints, bishops, priests and therefore sacraments. Even the words Catholic and Pope are Greek!

However, the reality is radically different. The Roman Catholic understanding of the Holy Trinity is quite different because of the filioque, the understanding of Christ is full of ‘Jesusism’, that is, suffering human nature which overshadows the victorious God-Man, the Mother of God is called the Virgin, despite the fact that virginity is no guarantee of holiness and may express mere puritanism and forced clerical celibacy, the concept of the clergy is deformed through compulsory clerical celibacy and therefore the concept of the sacraments is deformed also. The same thing with those words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Pope’. The first means having the same faith as always and in all cultures, which is clearly not the case with ‘Roman Catholic’, which means imperialism, spreading the Roman mentality worldwide, and the second does not mean a distant tyrant, but a loving father!

Only if Catholicism first renounces the filioque and the Papal claims, can we sit down and talk. However, the reality is that Roman Catholicism is on the brink of splitting yet again, this time with Archbishop Vigano. This follows all its other splits, the most numerous being those in the sixteenth century, when protestors against its corruption broke away from it in large numbers.

Q: What do you make of the recent statement that the Church of England no longer has churches, but communities?

A: The word ‘church’ comes from the Greek word ‘kyriakon’, which means ‘the House of the Lord’. It can be said that parishes are church communities and monasteries monastic communities, but they are not simply ‘communities’. The renunciation of the word ‘church’ simply indicates that the ‘Church’ of England is now fully secularised and is officially a network of clubs. In fact, that is what many have long suspected, so nothing new here.

Pastoral and Liturgical Matters

Q: Did you bless people to get the covid vaccine?

A: The covid vaccine is not a dogmatic issue, but a question of personal choice. Thus, two people came to me for a blessing at that time, three years ago. This was because they both worked for the NHS and risked losing their jobs if they did not agree to it. Therefore, I blessed them to take the vaccine on condition that they make the sign of the cross over the vaccine as it was injected. They both did so and both have been fine ever since and, above all, kept their jobs.

Q: My name is Clyde and I am a Glaswegian. I want to keep my Scottish roots. If I enter Orthodoxy, what saint’s name could I take?

A: I presume you are called after the River Clyde in Glasgow. Why not take the name of another famous place in Scotland, which is at the source of Scottish Christian national identity: St Andrews? And so take the Christian name Andrew.

Q: What is the point of the liturgical fans? I have heard that they were basically introduced as fly swatters.

A: I think the fly-swatting was purely coincidental! The fans symbolise the wafting of the Holy Spirit over the Gospel and the eucharistic gifts.

Q: How do you explain the disastrous demographic situation in Western and Westernised countries?

A: For over two generations Western and Westernised women have been told that they should live, behave, think, speak and dress exactly like men. The only natural result is the demographic crisis.

Q: Why do so many British people have tattoos nowadays?

A: Because they partake of modern pagan culture. It seems that even the name ‘Britain’ comes from a word meaning ‘the tattooed’. This was recorded by the Greek explorer Pytheas in the fourth century BC. It seems to me that the Western world has rejected Christianity over the last century and more especially, each people has revived its native paganism. Thus, Hitler’s Germany was profoundly pagan, in Scandinavia they have revived Norse pagan mythology, in the Ukraine pagan symbolism is now used everywhere, in France they have returned to full hedonism etc. In Britain this has resulted in the use of tattoos, essentially war paint, which accompanies the aggressiveness of pagan life, both ancient and modern.

Q: When did the Flood occur, according to the Orthodox reckoning?

A: According to the Septuagint (the first parts of which were written down in 272 BC, which means that it is some 1,000 years older than the rabbinical/Protestant version of the Old Testament), the Flood took place in about 3,243 BC, that is about 5,267 years ago. If you follow the dating in the much later Jewish Massoretic text, with its chronology corrupted by later rabbis, the Flood occurred in about 2,348 BC – before the rule of Gilgamesh, who lived in about 2,700-2,600 BC, before the Great Pyramid was built in Egypt in 2,600 BC and before the stone circle was erected at Stonehenge in about 2,500 BC.

Q: I have read on the internet that Fr Andrew Phillips is ‘popular but controversial’. Why do some consider that you are controversial?

A: Because I tell it like it is. The truth is always controversial. There is nothing more hated than the truth. As they say: ‘If you tell the truth 99% of the time, you may survive, but if you tell the truth 100% of the time, they will certainly try and destroy you’. Look what they did to Christ. As He said, ‘The truth will set you free’. Those are the words I will have on my gravestone.

Q: Did you know Fr David (Mark) Meyrick of Walsingham?

A: Yes. I knew him quite well, having first met him in 1976. I have great admiration for him, some of his icons have been inspirational.  However, it was a pity that he did not found a permanent church, but just rented a room. This meant that after his death, it all began to fall apart. I also thought it very strange that he did not dedicate his tiny chapel to an Icon of the Mother of God, which would have been appropriate in Walsingham.

The Curses

The Western world stands on the brink of a threefold worldwide war of its own making: against Russia, against Iran and against China. It is the moment to recall the fate of those who do not live according to the Beatitudes:

Cursed are the spiritually proud, for theirs is the tyranny of hell.

Cursed are those who mock, for they shall never find comfort.

Cursed are the arrogant, for they shall be heirs to the demons.

Cursed are those who hunger and thirst for unrighteousness, for they shall never be satisfied.

Cursed are the merciless, for they shall receive no mercy.

Cursed are the soiled in heart, for they shall see satan.

Cursed are the warmakers, for they shall be called sons of the devil.

Cursed are those who persecute the righteous, for theirs is the tyranny of hell.

Cursed are you when you revile others and persecute and utter all kinds of evil against the righteous falsely on satan’s account.

 Be consumed with mourning and sorrow, for dread is your fate in hell, for so you persecuted the prophets who were before us.