Category Archives: Pastoral Matters

From Recent Correspondence (June 2015)

Q: From the Church point of view, what do you find newsworthy this month?

A: What a difficult question! There has been so much and the month has not ended yet. There has been the declaration by the Pope of Rome that he may consider returning in repentance to the Church Easter (true, his declaration was very vague and there are other, less repentant interpretations), his meeting with President Putin (despite violent US opposition) and the Pope’s approval of the Russian struggle against the anti-Christian European elite. There has also been the tragic EU-manipulated Synod of the Church of Serbia. And then there has been the inevitable closure of the St Sergius Institute in Paris at long last – over 30 years in the making – after its Archbishop asked it to return to Orthodoxy and it refused.

Politically, there has been the G7 meeting in Hitler’s villa outside Munich and the realization that the G7 is now a rather irrelevant US-led Western ghetto, a little huddle with their backs to the wall, unable ever to pay off their own debts, all the more irrelevant since India has now signed a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union. Then there is the Greek debt crisis (Greece’s debt is only about half of US debt per capita) and the possibility that Greece will at last free itself from EU slavery, after so naively and foolishly joining it thirty years ago. Perhaps economic pain is what Greece needs to lead its people to repentance, just as atheist oppression led Russians to repentance.

However, although it is a very minor event internationally, I would like to mention the transfer of the dismissed Metropolitan Jonah of the group known as ‘The Orthodox Church in America’ (OCA) to the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). Even ten years ago, let alone thirty years ago, such a move would have been unthinkable, even impossible. The only similar event was in 1976 when Metr Antony (Bloom) requested a transfer to ROCOR. (Ironically, that was at the same time as Metr Antony (Bloom) had himself so wrongly refused to receive the then Fr Kallistos (Ware) into the Russian Church from Constantinople.) Metr Antony’s request was quite rightly refused by Metr Philaret for very good canonical reasons. However, in this very different case Metropolitan Jonah has been accepted by the ROCOR Synod in his retired status.

Q: Could this be the beginning of a movement towards ROCOR?

A: Not necessarily, I think it is a personal choice, but it is still symptomatic of a movement of repentance. The OCA is canonically adrift. Where is it going? What is its identity? What is its future? It is a fragment of the Russian Church adrift for the understandable historical reasons of former Uniatism and for political reasons. It used to be a hotbed of modernism. But today if you look at the most solid parts of the OCA, in Alaska, in Canada and in Pennsylvania around St Tikhon’s, it is clear that it is part of the Russian Church, but, for historical reasons, it is not yet part of the canonical and universally recognized Church Outside Russia. And yet that is clearly what the majority of the OCA is, part of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. I think this event marks the beginning of healing for the OCA.

Q: Surely part of the original problem was ROCOR itself?

A: There was once a problem with politically-minded, nationalistic individuals in ROCOR, but that is in the past. We have moved on and that generation has left or else died out. Today we are in a completely different situation. Indeed, the last two Metropolitans of ROCOR have been Non-Russian, one a Carpatho-Russian Slovak, the present one a Canadian of Ukrainian origin. This means an opening to the whole multinational Russian Orthodox world outside the Russian Lands. ROCOR is moving towards our ultimate aim, to our universal mission, to prepare the path, as St John the Baptist of old.

Q: You ask questions about the identity and future of the OCA, but surely the same questions can be asked of ROCOR?

A: I disagree with you. Our identity is clear, it is in our name. We are that part of the Russian Orthodox Church that is Outside Russia, that is, outside the Russian Lands. On the one hand we have to be absolutely faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and its Tradition, on the other hand, we have to express ourselves in the language of the country where we live and through the culture of that country, as seen through Russian Orthodox eyes. That is our missionary witness. And that is our future.

Q: Is that not what the OCA has done?

A: The best of it yes, but sadly some in it have lost, or never even had, the Tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church. For example, only a quarter of the OCA parishes keep the Church calendar, others in it have misunderstood and imagined that just because they live in another country and culture, they can therefore compromise our Faith. Instead of looking at the world through Russian Orthodox eyes, they tend to see Russian Orthodoxy through the eyes of the world. That is very clearly the path of apostasy.

Q: You mention the Synod of the Serbian Church. What is the problem?

A: The problem is the new persecution of the Serbian Church. It is worse than the Communist persecution. The episcopate of the Serbian Church is being herded like a flock of intimidated sheep into a corner, threatened by the EU wolf, behind which stand the USA and the new threat of NATO bombing, uranium-tipped shells and even nuclear war. And do not judge, until you have faced persecution yourself.

Q: Why do Serbs not stand up to defend their Church?

A: Because there are too many ‘Serbian Orthodox’, but not enough Orthodox Serbs.

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: I mean that any country only has value inasmuch as it is Orthodox or has values which are accepting of Orthodoxy. As Dostoyevsky said: ‘A Russian without Orthodoxy is rubbish’. That is the same for every country in the world. When I read of drunken British yobs on a stag night in Prague, do I think that they are English? Of course not. Sadly, the same disease is affecting every country in the world. It is the disease of apostasy. And nominal Orthodoxy is not enough to resist that disease.

Q: What has happened to the St Sergius Institute in Paris?

A: It has closed. A lot of money has disappeared. Archbishop Job is trying to restore Orthodoxy there after thirty years of weak bishops who allowed anarchy by promoting the anarchists. It may never re-open. It is another nail in the coffin of the Paris Exarchate.

Q: What is the situation in the Ukraine?

A: The civil war goes on as the puppet junta in Kiev kills the Ukrainian people. The US State Department is now bribing the Patriarchate of Constantinople to involve itself in schismatic groups in the Ukraine, thus compromising next year’s potential Council. But we have hope that by next year the war will all be over and the Ukraine will be free again. Sadly, however, I do not see any sign of repentance on the part of the US and the EU which, as one British politician rightly said, has blood on its hands in the Ukraine.

Q: And in Syria?

A: There too the war goes on, financed by fanatics in Western-backed Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who have created millions of refugees. In Libya Western intervention has also once more proved to be catastrophic and now 65% of Libyans want to flee, looking back on the Khadafi period almost as paradise, rather as many in impoverished and colonized Eastern Europe now regret the Soviet bloc with all its obvious faults. Today, for instance, a decent salary in Romania is 150 euros – per month – if you can get a job at all. This is all the fruit of Western meddling, divide and rule by reducing to poverty. The result of such meddling is mass migration and the break-up of families. The West has caused this. Rule Number One is that you do not destroy something until you have something better to replace it with. But that is exactly what the West did to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as also in Syria, Iraq, Libya etc.

Q: As regards Syria, surely it is the Muslims who are themselves to blame? They are killing each other?

A: When children argue and those children follow a religion which, like Judaism, has no concept of forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, you do not give them expensive arms to kill each other with. But that is precisely what Saudi Arabia and Qatar (and Israel), backed by the USA, have done, whether in Syria, the Lebanon or elsewhere. Remember that Al-Qaeda and Islamic State are CIA inventions to defeat the Soviet Union and divide the Muslim world. The whole Muslim problem began when Britain and then the USA backed Israel as a Western bridgehead in the Arab world. When Western nations turn into terrorist states (that is how Western nations are perceived in the Muslim world) and invade Afghanistan and Iraq, do not be surprised when Muslims turn to terrorism. The radicalization of Muslims was caused by Western governments. Appalling Western terrorism breeds appalling Islamic terrorism.

Q: When did the West set out on this path of apostasy? To what extent was race a factor?

A: I think that there are many misconceptions as regards race and the Western Schism. For example the Neo-Platonist Philip Sherrard presented the Schism as a kind of philosophical dispute between ‘East and West’, between ‘Greek and Latin’ between Plato and Aristotle. True, there was the problem of the Franks, but not for inherent racial reasons, as some modern and rather embittered modern Greek philosophers would have it, but simply because of the mentality which the Franks happened to be the first to adopt. And any race can adopt an anti-Church mentality, as the 20th century showed us. Such racial simplifications completely overlook the multinational nature of the Church. The Church includes Latins like St Hilary of Poitiers and St Ambrose of Milan, Syrians like St Ephraim and St Isaac of Nineveh, Egyptians like St Antony the Great, Georgians like St Nino, not to mention Slavs and so many other nationalities, including Orthodox ‘Franks’ from the period before Charlemagne and from today.

Another point is that although, quite rightly, historians look back to Charlemagne as the real initiator of all the problems, with his massacre of the Saxons and corruption of the Creed, his ramshackle so-called empire was very short-lived. There was a revival of Orthodoxy in the West after him, for example under the Empress Theophano at the end of the tenth century. There was no Schism until the eleventh century and that lasted 100 years; in other words the Schism was not a single event, but a process.

We can do no better than quote the Catholic religious historian, Christopher Dawson: ‘It was not until the eleventh century that the religious bond which united East and West was finally destroyed and Western Christendom emerges as an independent unity, separated alike in culture and religion from the rest of the old Roman world’ (The Making of Europe, P. 47). He relates this to the tenth century and whether ‘feudal barbarism was to capture and absorb the peace-society of the Church or whether the latter could succeed in imposing its ideals and its higher culture on the feudal nobility’ (P. 271). ‘It was not until the eleventh century that the military society (of the barbaric world of northern paganism) was incorporated into the spiritual polity of Western Christendom’ (Pp. 287-288).

In other words the tragedy of the West was that it left the Church and adopted instead the aggressiveness of ‘feudal barbarism’. This, allied with technology, is what lies behind the West’s aggressive imperialism of the second millennium, from 1066 and a couple of decades before that, onwards, and also of the opening years of this already deeply tragic third millennium. We can see this quite clearly in today’s regular gun massacres in the USA. What a culture! Aggression and violence and a society of obesity and mental illness….And you call this civilization?

Q: There is much criticism in the West of President Putin. They have demonized him, making him into a hate-figure. What is the truth?

A: The CIA-fed propaganda is quite shameless, not to say primitive. Of course President Putin, like contemporary Russia, has many faults, but unlike the West, they are both going in the right direction. That is what is important. The name Putin comes from the word ‘put’ which means ‘the path’, ‘the way’. And that is exactly the spiritual meaning of his name, for he is only an instrument. He is not the destination, just part of the way to where we want to go.

Q: What is that destination?

A: Today the atheist West is preaching spiritual death throughout the world. Russia’s spiritual meaning is to preach spiritual life. This is the universal meaning of the coming resurrection of St Seraphim of Sarov for which we must prepare. The West has chosen vulgarity over nobility. We shall not follow. Sadly, we must recognize that when Antichrist comes, he will speak English. It is for us to show him that not all English people will listen to him, that there is a faithful remnant, as in every country throughout the world, that we can speak of nobility, not of vulgarity. It is becoming rapidly apparent, even to those who before resisted – such is repentance – that Orthodox need a Protector, a Guardian, a restored Emperor. A repentant Greece today looks to Russia, a Russia that has thrown off the curse of atheism and apostasy. Many others do the same. We shall not surrender! Christ is victorious!

The Church and Converts

Introduction

To speak of ‘converts’ in a Church context should sound strange. After all, we never speak of the Mother of God or of the Twelve Apostles or of the Apostle Paul as ‘converts’. And yet they certainly were converts in the sense that they became Orthodox, not having been born to Orthodox families and brought up as such. And the same is true of millions of other Orthodox, including other saints and martyrs. They found their way and nobody called them ‘converts’. So why should we speak of ‘converts’ today? The problem is simply one of integration – or rather lack of it. The Apostles and all the others integrated the Church, that is, they not only joined the Church but rapidly BECAME Orthodox, with every fibre of their being. Only as a result of lack of integration are there today ‘converts’, that is, individuals who are unintegrated into the Church’s way of life and thinking. They come in two forms. What are they?

Two Types of Convert

Firstly, there is the convert who is not converted. Harsh though it may sound, he is like the dog who returns to his own (spiritual) vomit, in the Apostle Peter’s words (2 Peter 2, 22). He comes to the Church with his personal baggage, his own agenda, his own theories and even fantasies, he has ‘read all the books’, he ‘knows everything’ already and wants to impose his curious personal views or anti-Orthodox Establishment conformist views on the Church (see 2 Timothy 3, 7). He is so proud that he believes that he does not have to change, but that the Church has to change – in order to fit in with him! Since he is part of the Establishment, he is superior to a bunch of immigrants and peasants from Eastern Europe!

Sadly, there are many such individuals and there are those who, without any discernment and psychological understanding, prematurely receive them into the Church, long before such individuals have the necessary simplicity and humility. Such individuals never even begin to think in an Orthodox way, let alone begin to live in an Orthodox way. Their religion is all theoretical, headborne, bookish. They are indeed ‘converts’, that is, unconverted. The saddest cases are among those who, having been members of the Church for a few days (yes, it happens) or at most a few months, are then ordained. The damage they do is incalculable; many are later defrocked.

Secondly, there is the opposite extreme of unconverted converts, but they too are wholly conditioned by pride. This is the over-zealous. We see such ‘converts’ or neophytes (‘there is nothing worse than a neophyte’) in modern Islam; some of the worst suicide bombers are converts. Fortunately, in the Church we do not have violence, but there is intellectual violence. These ‘converts’ are those who suffer from ‘zeal not according to knowledge’ (Romans 10, 2), and, as is often said, what a pity that cradle Orthodox do not have such zeal, but what a pity that such ‘converts’ do not have the practical knowledge, borne of experience and time, of cradle Orthodox.

In reality both zeal and knowledge together are required. Just as the convert who is not converted and does not repent always sooner or later lapses, so the over-zealous also lapses, nowadays often into old calendarist sects. In ROCOR for years we tried to moderate such converts, but some we failed with and they caused us trouble and eventually lapsed, finding themselves outside the Church. Clearly, their problems were never theological, but psychological, sometimes even pathological.

What is to be done? We suggest three remedies:

1. Avoid Separation

What must be avoided at all costs is setting up convert groups separately from the rest of the local diocese of the Church, for example in separate – and indeed separatist – ‘deaneries’. This often happens when there is no local bishop and the bishop of another nationality decides, sometimes through lack of any interest in the local situation, to ‘delegate’ responsibility. Given that the essence of the problem of ‘converts’ is the fact that they remain precisely ‘converts’, they need to frequent cradle Orthodox, not live separately. Otherwise, how else will they learn and live the Faith?

We have seen the pernicious effects of ‘deaneries’ in various jurisdictions. One such cultish and sectarian ‘deanery’, in France, used to order its members to dress in black and the men all seemed to have to have long hair and shaggy beards, as ordered by their guru! The Russian faithful used to call them ‘the crows’…Of course they soon ended up outside the Church. In another case, nearly all the members of a deanery were normal, integrated Orthodox, but it was the convert dean himself who left his deanery and the Church – again the bishop of another nationality lived in another country and did not know what was happening.

In a third case there was an untrained clergyman in a deanery of untrained clergy who gave communion to Non-Orthodox; the dean did nothing about it; the bishop of another nationality was again an absentee living in another country. Other Orthodox naturally refused to concelebrate with the clergyman – so he was totally isolated. One clergy member of this deanery, ordained a few days after joining the Church!, was then arrested by the police for criminal affairs. The scandals went on…..But they could all have been avoided if there had been no administrative separatism. Administrative separatism leads to convert groups becoming marginal, indeed, becoming withered branches. They are on their way out of the Church.

2. Debrainwash First

The second thing to avoid is prematurely receiving those who have ‘baggage’, generally those who have belonged to a heterodox confession, especially clergy who have been trained, or rather brainwashed, into a heterodox way of thinking. They think they know it all when in fact they know nothing. I well remember visiting a group set up by such an individual who had been ordained prematurely. The group certainly was rabidly anti-ecumenist but not Orthodox, but I was never able to put my finger on what felt so deeply wrong and spiritually unhealthy. Another visitor to the group expressed it for me. An ex-Anglican, he described the group as ‘old-fashioned Anglo-Catholics with icons’, with all the strangeness of such a community. Another sectarian little group was described to me as ‘an upper middle-class Anglican club’ and a third group as ‘a clique for well-off Anglicans only’.

Individuals should never be received into the Church, let alone ordained, until they have got their heterodox past out of their systems; and that can take years and even decades. A heterodox past is, sad to say, a spiritual poison, and must be evacuated before the life-giving spring of Orthodoxy can take the newly vacant place. Care must be taken here with age. Age makes it much more difficult to integrate. Why? Simply because there is so much more baggage from the past, so much more to jettison. We have often found that one who is 20 when he is received into the Church often only begins to be fully integrated when he is 40, in other words, it takes one year inside the Church to overcome every year spent outside the Church. This may sound strict, but we know individuals who have been in the Church for decades and they have never integrated – usually because they have refused to mix with other nationalities – with cradle Orthodox – either because they think they know everything and have nothing to learn, or else because they are simply racist. So much depends on attitude, on being open and showing willingness to learn – or not; the one year for one year need not be binding.

Any Orthodox community must be inclusive; sadly this is far from the case. There are several groups where I have never felt at home because, like the mass of English people, I have never been an Anglican or had any heterodox background. Orthodox from Eastern Europe also simply boycott such groups and prefer to stay at home because they there is no spiritual nourishment to be had in such groupings, just very tiresome and ‘clever’ chit-chat. We know that something feels wrong, that there is no prayerful atmosphere. Such groupings are inwardly sectarian, cut off from the mainstream, even though they may be in a canonical jurisdiction. Even sadder is when such groupings actually try to impose their ideology and calendarism (new or old) on cradle Orthodox. True, such groupings do attract a few Orthodox from Eastern Europe, but they themselves are recent and unintegrated converts, uneducated in the Faith as a way of life, or else long ago lapsed. They like such ‘easy’ groups where there is no confession, you can sit down and fasting is little observed.

3. Ensure that Cradle Orthodox Communities are Receptive

the first two problems are brought by converts, there is a third problem and this is caused by cradle Orthodox. If new Orthodox are to be integrated, it is clear that they must frequent cradle Orthodox who want to integrate them. But how can this be done if the cradle Orthodox are themselves closed, preferring to live in a self-created ghetto? Here local anecdotes are countless. One convert was told by a Greek priest ‘to go away’ (actually he used much ruder language than that, but we shall not repeat it). Another was told that he could not join the Greek Church because ‘you are not dark enough’. A third was told that he ‘cannot become Greek’ as he did not have the ’right blood’.

Little wonder that the Anglican Diocese of London has six priests of Greek origin: having been born in this country and lost their Greek language, they decided that the Greek Church was no place for them, even though they were ‘dark enough’. Sadly, these Greek examples that come to mind are only the tip of the iceberg and all nationalities and all countries are concerned. Clearly the people concerned, clergy included, have never understood the last words of St Matthew’s Gospel about ‘teaching all nations and baptizing them’ (Matt. 28, 19). Nobody wants to join a ghetto and in case there is little to learn from the ghetto because it is a club, just as ‘ethnic’ as convert clubs.

Theological ignorance or simply racism? Whatever it is, such churches clearly have no episcopal leadership and deserve to close down – which is exactly what happens to them, as we have seen countless times both here and abroad. The immigrants die out and so do their uncared for churches. That is their own fault. Those who live in the ghetto die in the ghetto. In the words of the Gospel – and however harsh they may sound, these are the words of our Lord – ‘Let the dead bury their dead’ (Matt. 8, 22).

Conclusion

In real Church life, and not sectarian and cultish Diaspora hothouses of a few inward-looking neophytes, there is no such things as ‘converts’, there is simply the Church. Why? Because where the Church is the Church, people seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all other things are added unto them (Matt. 6, 33). In other words, such new Orthodox, not ‘converts’, have a healthy attitude and bring no personal agendas, no impositions on the Church, no racism, remain open-minded, show willingness to learn and mix with cradle Orthodox (if possible even visiting countries where Orthodox parish and monastic life has existed for centuries), putting the Kingdom of God and humble righteousness first. And this is the key to swift integration, this is the end of ‘converts’.

Our Hope for a Russian Orthodox Church in Norwich (Update 1)

Half-Way!

On Friday 8 May, Fr Andrew saw on the rightmove website a leasehold property for sale for £50,000 in Norwich at 134, Oak Street. It is 60 square metres and is at present used as offices and rooms for a cultural centre. It has electricity, heating and water and is in very good condition. It is so cheap because it is leasehold, in other words, you have to pay £100 in rent per month for the ground it is built on. This amount is fixed until 2032. The lease itself is even longer – it lasts until 2047.

On Wednesday 13 May we organized a visit to these premises, attended by 9 people.

By Friday 15 May, Orthodox in Norwich had generously promised to donate £5,250.

On Monday 18 May Fr Andrew received Archbishop Mark’s blessing to buy the building if possible, meaning we could start obtaining pledges to donate.

On Thursday 21 May we heard from the surveyor that it would cost £3,000-£5,000 to knock down the internal walls and make good the floor and ceiling, so we could use this building as a church. This was lower than Fr Andrew had estimated.

On Wednesday 27 May we heard that our offer of £42,500 had been accepted. However, since conversion and furnishing costs will come to £12,500, this meant that we should need £55,000 in all.

On Friday 29 May we submitted the planning application for change of use from offices to a place of worship. This will take 6-8 weeks but should result in a positive answer.

On Wednesday 3 June we launched a public internet appeal for the remaining £49,750, given that £5,250 had already been pledged.

By Wednesday 17 June, total gifts and pledges had reached over £31,000. Can you help us reach our target of £55,000?

All donations, when required later this year in July or August, will be made to our charitable trust: East of England Orthodox Church (Registered Charity No 1081707). But please remember that we prefer pledges to actual donations for now. To make a pledge, please inform us at this address: frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. May God bless you for considering the Russian Orthodox Community in Norwich in your alms.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
17 June 2015

In Gethsemane

(Our Acknowledgements to Don Mclean)

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/donmclean/vincentstarrystarrynight.html

Starry, starry night
By the walls of Zion grey,
You look out at end of day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

Shadows on the hills,
See the homes and the twinkling light,
Feel the breeze and the starry night,
Beneath the olives on the darkened land.

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me,
And how you suffered for eternity
And how you tried to set them free.

They would not listen, they did not know how,
Perhaps they’ll listen now.

Starry, starry night,
Shooting stars that brightly blaze,
Scudding clouds in fearful haze
Reflect in Christlike eyes of china blue.

Colours changing hue,
Morning fields of amber grain,
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the Saviour’s loving hand

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me,
And how you suffered for eternity
And how you tried to set them free.

They would not listen, they did not know how,
Perhaps they’ll listen now

For they could not love you,
But still your love was true,
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night

You gave your life, as only Christ can do
But I could’ve said, O Saviour,
This world was never meant for
One as beautiful as you.

Starry, starry night,
Icons hang in holy halls,
Famous heads on famous walls,
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget,

Like the strangers that you’ve met,
The ragged men in ragged clothes,
The crown of thorns and bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me,
And how you suffered for eternity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will.

A Vision for the Future Orthodox Church in Western Europe

Sadly, vision has all too often been in short supply when it comes to a future Orthodox Church for Western Europe, On the one hand, there have been those, whom I have known personally, who failed to rise to the challenge and simply rejected the concept, preferring the ethnic ghetto and nationalist club and hiding behind Slavonic or Greek. On the other hand, there have been those who wanted to create ‘une structure d’attente’, a temporary structure waiting to be absorbed into Roman Catholicism, in the notorious and legendary words of one Jesuit-educated senior priest of the Paris Jurisdiction over 35 years ago.

At present one view is that the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople should make autonomous its Western European group or ‘brotherhood’, as it has already done in Finland and Estonia. This would be based on extreme liberalism and a copying of modernist Roman Catholicism (Roman Catholic calendar, no confession, intercommunion, no iconostasis, clean-shaven clergy, masonry, an upper middle-class pseudo-intellectual ethos with as many members as possible holding degrees in philosophy etc). Such an exclusive club is in fact just as ethnic as the ethnic ghetto; worse, it is class-ridden as well.

Only recently, I have come across two cases of Russian Orthodox being refused confession by such groups because they did ‘not have any sins’. One 25-year-old Romanian priest- ‘theologian’ actually told one that confession was ‘no longer necessary’. The other was told that ‘since you have not murdered anyone, you do not need confession’. Others have been told that they must abandon the Orthodox calendar. Another who attended the chapel of a tiny convert group defined it as ‘an upper class club for Anglicans’. All that happens is that the faithful are scandalized and quit such groups in search of ‘real Orthodox’.

I quote these sad examples because it is clear that the Church of the future can never be built on such practices because they are exclusive. Just as nothing can be built on a mononational and monolingual (be it Greek, Slavonic, Romanian, English, French or German) ethnic narrowness. The future will be built on inclusivity. And that inclusivity will not be built on a modernist, anti-Orthodox ideology, whose tone is set by the CIA, but on respect for the feelings of the faithful (and not lapsed) Orthodox people. The Church is the people; we are not clericalists in the Orthodox Church.

The Church of the future will be built on uniting different nationalities of Orthodox, not on dividing them by minimalism, built on being inclusive, not exclusive. The most anti-pastoral aspect of this is the attempt to impose on faithful Orthodox a degutted, pseudo-Orthodox, modernist ideology. If convert and semi-Uniat Orthodox want faithful Orthodox to come to their churches and chapels, then they must first become Orthodox themselves. ‘Halfodoxy’ has no attraction to us whatsoever. We do not ask for an acceptance of another language, simply an acceptance of the Orthodox Faith and Tradition.

Why I Am Russian Orthodox

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats

Most people belong to one religion or another simply because they were born to a particular family in a particular country. Thus, most Indians are Hindu, most Arabs, Afghans, Indonesians and Iranians are Muslim, most Tibetans are Buddhist. Similarly, most, though not all, Catholics have connections to Latin countries and their colonies (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Angola, Niger, Brazil, the Philippines etc). And most Protestants belong to Germanic countries (Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, Britain and the countries of the former British Empire, the USA, Canada, Australia, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa etc).

Similarly, most of the 216 million Orthodox Christians, belonging to the family of the at present 14 Local Orthodox Churches, are Orthodox because they belong to certain nationalities – mainly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe (Syrians, Serbs, Albanians, Greeks, Georgians, Romanians, Bulgarians etc). These are mononational Churches. But even most of the non-mononational flock of 164 million Russian Orthodox of 65 different nationalities, are Orthodox because they have been born to a particular family.

However, with prayer, experience of life and thought there are those Russian Orthodox who become conscious Russian Orthodox and come to have a consistent and logical Russian Orthodox world-view. In my own case this is what began to happen to me when I was twelve years old and, living in England, saw the film ‘Dr Zhivago’. This, curiously, was the beginning of my own pilgrimage. By the time I was in my twenties, after experience, prayer and thought, I had worked out a consistent and logical Russian Orthodox world view and I have tried to live by it ever since, despite my human weaknesses.

Such a world-view takes into account our universal Orthodox Christian beliefs, found in the Scriptures, that the universe and mankind were created by God; that mankind fell from bliss into sin and so paganism (institutionalized sin); then was cleansed by the Flood in the time of Noah; restored by the Coming and Resurrection of Christ the Son of God Who trampled down death by death, which truth we live by following the Church, the Body of Christ, through the Holy Spirit Who was sent down to us; but that nevertheless near the end of time the world will be destroyed by sin and the apocalyptic coming of Antichrist, who will be enthroned in Jerusalem, only to be dethroned by the Second Coming of Christ at the very end.

The knowledge through faith that the world will end through the rejection of Christ (for Antichrist is by definition the rejection of Christ) means that we have always known that mankind will fall back into paganism. In other words, sin will be institutionalized, it will become systematic and accepted as the norm. This is exactly what was prophesied already in the New Testament. For example: ‘But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of stress. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, slanderers, profligates, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of religion, but denying the power of it: from such turn away’ (2 Tim 3, 1-5).

Today’s question then is how can it be that the Western world – once Christian – has fallen into such a state of depravity, which its elite is now spreading by force and bribery throughout the world? How has the Western world become the ‘missionary centre for institutionalized sin’, the centre which, like an anti-St John the Baptist, is preparing the way for the coming of Antichrist, the building of whose Temple in Jerusalem US Protestants, for instance, are actively funding? It is very difficult for one who belongs to the Western Catholic/Protestant world to understand this paradox.

The understanding of this paradox is and always has been abundantly clear to Christians who do not belong to the Catholic/Protestant world, but belong to the Orthodox Church. We look at the world from ‘outside the box’. Thus, the Orthodox Church has for centuries believed and prophesied that Antichrist and the end of the world will come as a result of the activities of Non-Orthodox outside Her. To take but a very recent example, we have St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1948). At the height of the dark night of Stalinist persecution of the Church in Russia he prophesied that the port of Saint Petersburg would one day fill with ships of Western people who would not be allowed baptism in their own countries and so would come to Russia for baptism. Eighty years on that time is now coming.

The question may be asked why Orthodox, though respecting the sincerity, beliefs and values of individual Catholics and Protestants and eagerly co-operating with them in the areas where we fully agree, cannot be Catholic or Protestant, but insist on belonging to the Orthodox Church. The answer is simple: for Orthodox Christians, Catholicism and Protestantism are part of the problem: of course it is the isms that are the danger, not the individual people, whom we regard not as enemies, but as naïve victims brainwashed by their isms. Thus, where did the modern secular, anti-Christian and repaganized world come from, how did it all come about, where were its seeds sown?

The secular, anti-Christian world came into being because it is a degeneration from Protestantism, it is post-Protestantism. And Protestantism is a Western cultural phenomenon of the 16th century, in England for instance created by the bloodthirsty monster Henry VIII. Protestantism created modern Capitalism (Mammonism) and commercial empires like the British and the American with their massacres of Hindus, Native Americans, Confederates, Africans, Boers, Vietnamese, Iraqis etc. For Orthodox who have belonged to the Orthodox Church since the day of Pentecost in 33 AD, Protestantism has in any case no attraction whatsoever, as it is a recent invention and, moreover, is conditioned by simply being anti-Catholic. Since Orthodox have never been Catholics, that cultural conditioning which created Protestantism by reaction to Catholicism is completely irrelevant.

If Protestantism is at the root of the modern world and is fundamentally a sort of anti-Catholicism, what then is the Orthodox view of Catholicism? Surely it is closer to Orthodoxy? Catholicism is clearly older, more historic, it existed before the 16th century, it has a veneration for the Mother of God, the saints, it has a liturgical sense, sacraments and a priesthood – it has so much spiritual wealth, like Orthodoxy, that Protestantism simply does not have. However, for Orthodox, Catholicism has existed only since the 11th century – it too is recent, albeit less recent. It too is ultimately a manmade adaptation of Christianity and the Church, a compromise which has put local culture above the Eternal Truth of the Church of God. Relative to Protestantism, it is a step nearer Orthodoxy, but it is still a step away.

For Orthodox, Catholicism is a religion adapted from Orthodoxy (hence the closer connections than with Protestantism, which is an adaptation of Catholicism, a step further away) for the justification of aggressive Western political aims. This we saw with the Papal-encouraged Norman Invasion of England in 1066, the next Crusades soon after, the invasion of Ireland, the sacking of the Christian capital of New Rome (Constantinople) in 1204, the invasions of the Teutonic Knights, the Inquisition, the cruel conquest of what we now call Latin America etc. The centre of (Roman) Catholicism, Rome, was not where Christianity began; that was Jerusalem, which is the spiritual and historic centre of the Orthodox Church. In Orthodox eyes Rome is reminiscent of pagan Rome, Babylon, which is why the first Christian administrative capital was in newly-established New Rome, a city without a pagan past, a new city for a new, Christian era.

Thus, for Orthodox, Catholicism, is also part of the problem. Catholicism is simply the first stage of the degeneration of the Western world after it had left the Orthodox Church. The second stage, even further from Orthodoxy, as we can see with ‘women-priests’ or the practice of homosexuality, which large branches of Protestantism, unlike Catholicism, accepts, is Protestantism. The third stage is the aggressive secularist ideology of the anti-Christianity of the modern, post-Protestant Western world with its imperialism and colonial exploitation; militarization; genocidal World Wars; the removal of Tsar Nicholas, ‘he who restrains’ (2 Thess 2,7), through the anti-Orthodox Revolution in Russia and creation there of a Zionist-run militant atheist State, which had been so carefully planned and financed from London and New York; concentration camps; atomic bombs; puppet regimes; banana republics; invasions of peaceful countries; revolutions (‘regime changes’); massacres; search for absolute global domination through debt-enslavement to bankers etc.

In a word, the leaders of the Western world, the global elite, are attempting to spread worldwide their ideology of anti-Christianity, which has carefully and progressively been built up on the foundation of a thousand years of Western history. Through deformation after deformation after deformation we have turned full circle, from a Western Europe which was Orthodox Christian at the end of the first millennium after Christ to one whose elite is today not only anti-Christian but increasingly openly Satanic in its promotion of and reversion to paganism. What are we to do? We, in the Orthodox Church, and particularly in by far the largest and strongest Orthodox Church, the Russian, are those who lead resistance to the project of the global elite, who wish to see the enthronement of Antichrist in their rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem so that they can rule the world by deception.

That is why the global elite, in the literal words of its representatives like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Tony Blair or Carl Bildt, speak quite openly of their desire to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church. They want to do with us what they long ago did to the Protestant world and, since the protestantizing Second Vatican Council over fifty years ago, to the Catholic world, in other words, to castrate us spiritually, to degut us and neutralize us as the centre of spiritual resistance to their One World Project. They want to do with the Russian Orthodox Church what they have already tried to do with two or three of the much smaller and weaker Local Orthodox Churches, replacing the Patriarchs with their own candidates, telling us what to say and do, destroying our Faith, ‘modernizing’ us. They will not succeed – because our Master is Christ; theirs is Satan.

An Appeal to Buy a Russian Orthodox Church for Norwich

In the East of England there is at present only one multinational and multilingual church faithful to Russian Orthodoxy with its own urban premises. This is St John’s Church in Colchester. God willing and with your support, we may now be able to buy a second one, in Norwich, exactly 60 miles, 100 kilometres, to the north of Colchester.

Why Norwich? For the last four years I have been visiting Norwich and some of the 200 Russian Orthodox there, mainly recent immigrants from the Baltic States, especially from Estonia. I have baptized several in their homes, married couples in Colchester, buried, blessed houses, listened to confessions, visiting every few weeks, sometimes twice a month.

We have thought of dedicating our community to St Alexander Nevsky. We attempted to begin liturgies using the Greek Orthodox church building in Norwich, but were impeded. How are our people and English people and others interested in the witness of the Russian Orthodox Church, to be cared for pastorally? Only from a church building.

Now we have found such a suitable building. At present offices, it is a single-storey building near the town centre, so with free parking, about 10 metres (30 feet) long by 6 metres (15 feet) wide. It has heating, lighting, a kitchenette and toilet, all in good condition. Although small, it seems ideal as a basis for starting Russian Orthodox life in Norwich.

And such life is required not only by Russian speakers, but also by Romanian, Bulgarian and English Orthodox. Most of our regular parishioners, only one of whom has a car, live within easy walking distance of this building. With our low offer of £42,500 miraculously accepted, this building, we estimate, would cost a total of £55,000 to buy and convert.

Within 24 hours of viewing the building, eight parishioners had already pledged £5,000. For those for whom £50 is a lot of money, this is a considerable sum. Archbishop Mark has enthusiastically blessed us to start public fund-raising. And so we are launching a campaign to gain pledges to raise the extra £50,000 required.

Perhaps you know someone who is wealthy? Perhaps we can find ten people who can each donate £5,000? Perhaps we can find 250 people who can each donate £200? Can you help us by making pledges? May God bless you for considering the Russian Orthodox Community in Norwich in your alms.

All donations, when required later this year in August or September, will be made to our charitable trust: East of England Orthodox Church (Registered Charity No 1081707). But please remember that we do not want donations now, only pledges. To make a pledge, please inform us at this address: frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

2 June 2015

Orthodoxy: Creationist or Evolutionist?

Little has been written about the Orthodox viewpoint on Evolution. Why? Primarily because it is not a question that concerns the Church, but rather concerns the various forms of Protestantism outside the Church. Interestingly, the controversy on the theory of evolution also concerns Catholicism less – for the reason that Catholicism, until recently anyway, has conserved more of the sense of the Church than the various Protestant sects.

Thus, unlike Protestant groups, Orthodox are not obsessed with the Old Testament (except for the Psalter), for we see the Old Testament through New Testament eyes, the eyes of the Church. Orthodox are more interested in saving our souls than abstract arguments like how long did each of the Six Days of Creation last and what was the nature of Noah’s Flood. Nevertheless, since we live in a world where secularist, that is, post-Protestant, culture prevails, we have to have answers to such questions.

This is all the more the case when on the fringes of the Orthodox Church we can find individuals influenced by both Evolutionism and Creationism. Thus, the largely Episcopalian-oriented and modernistic St Vladimir’s Seminary in the OCA has looked favourably on Evolutionism, similarly modernists in the Greek Archdiocese in North America or individual modernists of the Paris School or the notorious provocateur and now discredited Deacon Andrei Kurayev in Moscow. On the other hand, under the influence of evangelical ‘missionaries’ working in Russia in the 1990s, some recent converts in Russia (and also in Greece) have fallen under the influence of Creationism.

Does this mean that mainstream Orthodox take an intermediate stance between Creationism and Evolutionism, somewhat like many modernistic Catholic intellectuals? No. Evolutionism (and it is only a theory) is simply anti-Orthodox; it is the atheist product of nonsensical Darwinism (‘man descended from the ape’), which, amoral from the start, soon turned immoral and evil, into Communism and Nazism (‘the survival of the fittest’ i. e. those who hold our atheist ideology or belong to our master-race); since man is merely an intelligent ape, he can be slaughtered by the million, just as we slaughter millions of animals in abattoirs.

The fundamental ideology of Evolutionism is atheism. As Bible-practisers (rather than mere Bible-believers), Orthodox believe in Creation. However, we dislike all ‘isms’ (which are always manmade, not Godmade). Thus, we dislike the literalism and fundamentalism of Creationism. And if we were to use an ‘ism’ to describe ourselves, it would certainly not be ‘Creationism’, but ‘Creatorism’. We believe in the Creator, not in Creation, which is merely the Creator’s handiwork. We confess ‘I believe in One God the Father, the Almighty, Who created the heaven and the earth’, not in ‘One Creation’.

And mention of the Creed should remind us that is the Creed that we confess; everything else is not a dogma. Thus, if Orthodox disagree with what I say below about the Six Days of Creation or Noah’s Flood, that is fine. All I am doing is putting forward suggestions, not dogmatizing what in the end is only opinions. Opinions which in no way contradict the Scriptures (something that modernists constantly do) must be looked at. The Book of Genesis is like a telescope and enfolds all the ‘prehistory’ of mankind into a few chapters and pages, therefore there is room for interpretations and therefore controversy. For example, the Book of Genesis does not contain dates – we can only suggest them. Here we should be careful not to fall into putting scientific theories above Biblical facts.

The first common controversy is what is meant by ‘a Day’ in the Six Days of Creation, 24 hours – or more – or less? The answer to this is we do not know. Apart from St Ephraim the Syrian, who says precisely 24 hours, no Church Father seems to be bothered by such a question. In fact, all we can say is that each day, before the creation of sun and moon on the fourth day, may have lasted exactly 24 hours, but equally may have lasted a split second or else short periods of perhaps thousands of years.

Why must we answer thus? Because we do not know, all we know is that God is Almighty and therefore can do anything. To limit God is mere human rationalism. In general, our feeble human understanding cannot understand what it is meant by a day; together with the Fathers, we would do better to think of ‘Six Acts of Creation’ rather than ‘Six Days’. The Holy Scriptures, and in general the Holy Fathers, are not interested in Chronology, but in facts. God created everything; that is what is important, the when and the how are unknown to our over-tidy and over-inquisitive minds.

When was the world created? We do not know from the Scriptures because they do not say, except that it was five and a half ‘days’ before God made man. However, the Church, not the Scriptures, does give the symbolic date of 5,508 BC – that is, 5,500 years (five and a half ‘days’) before the Birth of Christ) for the date of the Creation. Thus, symbolically, the date of the Creation is five and a half days before the date of the creation of man, who had to wait 5,500 years until his ‘re-creation’ through the Birth of Christ. Some people take all this literally and that is fine because no modern theory can actually and irrefutably contradict.

However, if you prefer modern scientific theories (which are only ever-changing hypotheses) and prefer to believe in billions of years, that is also OK. The age of the universe is not a Church dogma. Nevertheless, a symbolic date does not necessarily mean an unreal date. Given the fact that all techniques of scientific dating have been put into doubt by facts such as that rocks created only 210 years ago by volcanic eruptions have been ‘scientifically’ dated as hundreds of millions of years old, no ‘scientific’ dating can be trusted. The fact is that the universe may have been created in 5,508 BC. Of course, if you prefer to think otherwise, that is fine. It will not endanger the salvation of your soul, which is our only basic concern.

We believe that Noah’s Flood took place. The Bible says so (Genesis 5-10; Matt. 24, 37; I Peter 3, 20; 2 Peter 2, 5 and elsewhere) and indicates that it took place in the fourth millennium BC, between about 3,300 and 3,500 BC. Moreover some 140 different human cultures affirm it, from the very garbled Gilgamesh version of the Flood to the perhaps far more interesting Australian Aborigene version. However, there are difficulties of interpretation – above all was the flood local or universal? Again, there is no Church dogma on the matter and we can believe as we wish. However, I believe, like most Orthodox, that it was universal and this for many reasons.

First of all, if the Flood were only local (and archaeologists like Woolley long ago confirmed that naturally there were local floods in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago), why spend a century building a massive Ark (the largest vessel in world history until the 19th century), why not simply walk away, as Lot did from Sodom? Why were all the animals (except for sea creatures), the whole gene pool of the then animal world (and so of all modern breeds), taken into the Ark, as also the whole gene-pool of humanity (Genesis 10, 1) ? If the Flood had only been local, that would have been unnecessary. Why do the Scriptures speak of the destruction of all humanity and all creatures (Genesis 6 ,7 and 7, 21-22), if they do not mean that?

How else do we explain sedimentary layers thousands of feet deep, fossil graveyards, fossil fuels, the destruction of the dinosaurs, frozen mammoths, glaciations and the ice caps of the Poles, the deepening of the oceans and the raising of the mountains (Ps 104, 8), continental shelves, the later continental drift and separation of continents and so separation of languages after the Tower of Babel, if there was not a universal Flood? All these phenomena witness to the pre-diluvian world, proof of Noah’s Flood, as witnessed to also by countless folk traditions.

Moreover, recent research has suggested that many antediluvian civilizations existed before the Flood, and their remains can be found under the seas as ‘underwater kingdoms’. Folklore from all around the world has always spoken of earlier, pre-diluvian civilizations, such as Atlantis, and they are spoken of in the Book of Genesis (5 and 6, 1-4) before Noah, including a civilization of giants. Archaeologists confirm them, as they also confirm post-diluvian civilizations, of which Western civilization is one, although in the case of Orthodox civilization, it would be clearer to speak of a post-Resurrection civilization.

In other words, we are saying that a universal flood confirms all that has been found on earth. The homing instincts of animals would have directed them to enter the Ark, given that they had a century to gather from the single continent or Pangaea (‘dry land’ – Genesis 1, 10) where they lived. There would have been no problems feeding and caring for them in the huge Ark if they hibernated and the animals would have no problems breathing when the floods rose over the then in any case much lower mountains as the atmosphere would have been raised above sea level.

The amount of water required for such a flood would be explained by the pre-diluvian water vapour canopy over the earth collapsing (Genesis 7, 4) and ‘all the fountains of the great deep’ bursting forth (Genesis 7, 11), water under the earth, breaking. The only reason why none of this could not have happened fewer than six thousand years ago is ‘scientific’ dating, which we know can be be inaccurate by billions of years. Here science, that is, the microscopic amount of human knowledge and understanding, is irrational, as it is built on countless flimsy, hypothetical theories, which are constantly changing. The Bible, however, deals with facts. Only our interpretations vary.

On the Date of Easter 2015

1. When is Easter?

By the 4th century the whole Church had fixed the Christian Easter as the first Sunday after the end of the Jewish Passover, which begins on the first full moon after the spring equinox and lasts for seven days.

Thus, this year the first full moon after the spring equinox appears on Saturday 4 April and so the Jewish Passover starts then and continues until Friday 10 April. Therefore, this year the Christian Easter falls on Sunday 12 April.

2. Why does the Catholic/Protestant Easter fall a week early on Sunday 5 April?

In the 16th century the Pope of Rome made various changes to his calendar and dropped the Biblical and Apostolic ruling that Easter must fall after the end of the Jewish Passover. Since the Protestants follow the Pope, they too dropped this ruling. Therefore, this year the Catholic/Protestant Easter is a week earlier than the Christian Easter.