Category Archives: Persecution

Half a Century in the Orthodox Church in Western Europe (2)

Fleeing the Extremes

The first Christian Emperor was called Constantine. The last Orthodox Emperor was called Nicholas. He was overthrown in the so-called 1917 Revolution, that is, in the palace coup of the aristocratic traitors to the Tsar, orchestrated by the British ruling class. As a result, all the Orthodox Churches, which the Tsar had protected when still in power lost their protector and were called either to martyrdom or else to confessordom. Once infiltrated, the Churches had to resist either the CIA, by confessordom, or else of the KGB, by martyrdom and their earlier equivalents. (Earlier they had had different names, but they were still engaged in the same intrigues). Our balancing act has meant avoiding both these extremes. In our context this has not yet meant becoming martyrs, but it has meant becoming confessors.

Combating the extremes has on the one hand meant avoiding and combating globalism, liberalism, modernism, freemasonry and Vatican-style perversions and, on the other hand, avoiding and combating sectarianism, phariseeism, hateful censoriousness, political ultra-conservatism and Old Ritualist style obscurantism. Both extremes are marked by anti-Christian ‘bishops’, who are in fact thieves, homosexuals and pedophiles. Thus, we fought against the influence of the liberal modernists in the Orthodox Churches in the 1970s and 1980s and then against the sectarian pharisees in the Orthodox Churches in the 1990s and 2000s, until Russian Church unity was achieved in 2007. This was a victory over both extremes, a miracle. But the devil does not like miracles and those who announce that God is Love.

The devil attacked the Greek Church of Constantinople through nationalist racism, called ‘phyletism’ in Greek. However, he attacked the Russian Church, replacing faith and piety with the negativity of nationalist politics, which led to State-orchestrated ritualism, rigid militarism with its blind obedience and harsh punishments, instead of integrity. Professional choirs assured that everything was provided and the people were made passive, without responsibility. From there it was only one step to anti-clericalism. As they say in Russian, ‘mnogo popov, malo batjushek’, ‘there are many fake priests, but few real ones’. And so in the Russian Church, persecution always comes from the bishops. Thus, the Russian Church isolated itself and fell out of communion and catholicity with the 15 other Local Orthodox Churches.

The USA

Thus, our 2007 victory was to give us only temporary respite, a decade of peace. The programme of Americanisation, or more precisely of Trumpisation, of the American Synod of the Russian Church, known as ROCOR, began in 2017. It sent out its US agents to the still ‘unreformed’ (= normal and traditional) parts of ROCOR in Western Europe and Australia to transform these too into ignorant and arrogant convert crazy zones, like themselves, who yearned to create a rigid and ritualistic sect. This all coincided, and not coincidentally, with President Trump’s first term of belligerent Americanism and also with the second phase of the infiltration of ROCOR by the CIA. The latter activated its sleeping agents in the American Synod and recruited new ones, sending them out worldwide to what is an ecclesiastical NGO.

The Age of Trump also coincided with the consequences of the earlier activities of the notorious Mossad agents, Maxwell and Epstein, who worked hand in hand for the greater glory of worldwide Zionism. Epstein was before his murder the model psychopath: charming, superficially brilliant, very manipulative, narcissistic, a pathological liar, with no sense of empathy, a ruthless pervert and a cynical egomaniac. His psychopathic spirit became the standard for the Age and for the CIA agents in question. So much for the psychopathic narcissists of the USA and its Epstein regime. What of the other half of the Western world, Europe and the UK? Here we have not narcissistic psychopathy, but the creeping power grab of centralising Sovietisation, the old megalomaniac temptations of power and money.

Europe and the UK

Immediately after the fall of the SU (Soviet Union) at the end of 1991, the EU (European Union) was founded. The demons behind the former Union had simply fled westwards to an easier prey, the new Gadarene swine of Western Europe. Russia was no longer attractive, as it cast off the yoke of compulsory atheism. Thus, with the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992, the EU became a geopolitical project. Instead of a trading community, it had become the political wing of militaristic NATO. The creeping centralising Sovietisation and Epsteinisation of the EU, obvious in its practices, was also clear in its vocabulary. Thus, the (European) Council is the translation of ‘Soviet’, the EU Commissioners mirror Soviet Commissars, the oligarchy mirrors the nomenklatura and the ‘narrative’ mirrors ‘the Party line’. SU = EU.

As for England, it continued on its historic cycle. In 597 it was converted to Christ from that Old Rome, which still openly condemned universal pretensions. In 1066 it was converted to barbarianism from Norman France, sponsored by the ideology of the new schismatic and ‘universal’ Rome, which stifled Christ with the Pope and England with Britain. In 1535 it was converted to anti-sacramentalism from Luther’s neo-pagan Germany. In 2004 it was converted to imperial delusions from Nazi Ukraine and its orange revolution. The cycle is repeated every 469 years. Today, the British Establishment is trying to revive its long-lost past glory, which was not glory, but shame. This imperialism is repeated all through the ex-imperialist Western European ruling class, nostalgic for its delusions of greatness.

The Collapse of Kiev Creates Regime Changes in the USA, Europe and the UK

What the ruling elites in both the EU and the UK have not understood is that all unions break up. The Soviet Union, the USSR, broke up. So did Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and now the Ukraine, so will Belgium, the EU, the UK, and quite possibly the US. The Four Nations of Britain and a reunited Ireland can work together, not in a Union or a Federation (which is a half-way house from a Union, as is the semi-Soviet Russian Federation), but in a Sovereign Confederation, the Ionan Confederation, IONA, the ‘Isles of the North Atlantic’. England must yet depose the British monarchs who have ruled it for so long, invited by the merchant-oligarchs of the City of London from Germany to become an Imperial House, but the Imperial Age is long over and so are they. A new Sovereign England must restore its own English Royal House.

As for the EU and the UK, they are entirely dependent on the black hole of the Kiev regime. They have bet everything on that loser, playing at the casino wheel of geopolitics, without knowledge and understanding, but with a fanatical and blinding, ever-expanding ideology of European unionism. But every time that Europe falls to union, and it is always a fall, whether under Napoleon, or Hitler, or the EU, it then sets about attacking Russia. ‘Europe’ always attacks European Russia, because Russia does not conform to the morally and financially bankrupt ideological narrative of the Eurocommissars. This is why they do not want peace. War is their self-justification, as only war gives them a unifying purpose. However, the Russian Federation frustrates them immensely, for it is playing the long game against the Kiev regime.

Moscow’s methodical advance by attrition, metre by metre, keeping its losses very low, is because it is awaiting the political collapse of Kiev, which will precede its military collapse. (This was why Germany, Britain and France, as Japan had tried in 1904-5, first brought about Russian political collapse in 1917, since political collapse always precedes military collapse). When political Kiev collapses, its army will have nothing left to fight for. Then, Russia will take over most of the old Soviet Ukraine at little cost, allowing Poland, Romania, Hungary and perhaps Slovakia to take back the far western fragments of Stalin’s Ukraine which used to belong to them, as they wish. And then there will be regime change, not in Moscow, but, ironically, in peace-hating Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and wherever Kiev Fascism was supported.

A Time of Folly in State and Church

Folly in the State

Western Liberalism is in fact Fascism. They proclaim to all who refuse their dominion and asset-stripping: ‘We will bomb you into liberalism’. This is what they call ‘humanitarian bombing’.

The Coalition of the Killing declares: ‘Let us create our own reality’. Here is the justification for their lies, propaganda, spin, narrative, fairy tales, virtual reality, that is, for their delusions, in which they, and a few brainwashed old people, actually believe.

Meanwhile, the dictatorship in the US is ending. Like all ending empires, it is ending in decadence, ‘conquering’ Venezuela, Iran and Greenland. Fraud, aiding genocide, kidnapping, theft, piracy, attempted murder – the charges are mounting. Like all narcissists, including Church narcissists, he is first sexually perverted, then deluded, then spectacularly rude, then sadistic, allowing his Gestapo stormtroopers to murder openly on American streets, and finally he goes mad, like Caligula of old.

Folly in the Church

Everything here is recounted objectively by a very moderate journalist who is not Orthodox and has no axe to grind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPgwY1eyT8s

Let us compare today’s Church Folly, as related above, with the events of 1963.

In 1963 Archbishop (now St) John of Shanghai was suspended from his office by the American Synod (Sanhedrin?) of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and removed from the See of San Francisco. As St John related, several bishops of the Synod almost came to physical blows about him in a ‘punch-up’, accusing him of being a Communist (!). Others accused him of being ‘preoccupied only with spiritual matters’, as though this were a major fault meriting ‘defrocking’! (Nothing has changed here). Of course, it was a major fault, as the accusers and slanderers were only preoccupied with secular matters, grasping money and power. (Nothing has changed here).

On 6 June 1963 the future saint received a summons to court and on 9 July he sat as a defendant on the court bench, supported by only three other bishops from the whole New York Synod of the Russian émigré Church. This unmercenary Archbishop, who had always lived in poverty was accused of embezzling money! Russian parishioners even spat in the face of this fragile old man, shouting hysterically against him, as one of the eyewitnesses, Hieromonk Seraphim recalled.

However, the judge, Edward O’Dey, an Irish Catholic, showed only respect for St John during the four-day trial. And like the four-day dead Lazarus of old, St John was naturally found innocent. However, in the 1990s the bishops who had accused him were still denouncing him with venom. I know, because they denounced him to me.

St John kept and renewed the living Church Tradition in the Diaspora, not introducing anything from outside the Tradition and rejecting decadent political divisions of any sort. He created churches from nothing, helped the poor and sick, and was a beacon of unity for people of all nationalities. He united not by politics, but by his example of a holy life, living in prayer and fasting, keeping liturgical and spiritual traditions. He had spiritual authority because he kept strictly to Orthodoxy, rejecting fanaticism and extremism. He showed that bishops can make a spiritual and not administrative contribution to Church life.

For eight days now, beginning on the Vigil for Old Christmas on 6 January, the feet of St John of Shanghai, depicted in the icon giving our church to St Alban the Protomartyr of Britain, as he had promised in November 1962, have been giving off a scent of roses. Today the feet of St Alban are also giving off the scent of roses.

13 January 2026

What We Left Behind: How Did a Persecuted Church Become a Persecuting Church?

History

In the course of the fourth century the Church which had been bitterly persecuted at the start of that century by Pagan Rome was adopted by the Roman Empire. And as the Roman Empire began persecuting dissidents, so individuals representing the Church, specifically bishops, allied themselves to the persecuting Roman State, which demanded obedience from all. Thus, a State Church was born and the once Persecuted Church became a Persecuting Church. To counter this enslavement and proclaim spiritual freedom, the monastic movement boomed, ’the desert became a city’, Egypt and Palestine filled with monks. The pious in the parishes followed them, not the persecuting bishops.

Such ‘State Church’ compromises have patterned the whole history of the Church, most notably in Western Europe, a former part of the empire of Pagan Rome. Here a new ideology, with its self-justifying filioque and Papist ideology, which came to be called ‘Roman Catholicism’, was based not on certain bishops of the Church allying themselves with the State, but on the Church actually becoming the State. In fact, it became a ‘Superstate’, like the modern EU, which imitates the medieval Papacy in every way. This saw the Roman Pope, the head of the new Roman Catholicism, leave the Church and in 1054 become independent from the Church and even condemn the Church as ‘schismatic’!

From that moment on, the Popes of Rome, heirs to and imitators of the pagan emperors, could lead armies, persecute and murder dissidents, bless invasions, order so-called ‘crusades’ and implement inquisitions against all who disagreed with their imperialist cult of absolute claims to power and wealth. Inevitably, from the eleventh century on that spawned many Protest movements, which further discredited them and divided the totalitarian religion that they led. And so the Church that canonised the Martyrs and Confessors, despite the worldly-minded, became the Persecuting Church, instead of love, showing hatred, and then refusing to repent in self-justification. This went down in history.

An Example in the Present

In case some think that this is simply a polemic against Roman Catholicism, let us make the truth clear. Plenty of Orthodox have followed suit, becoming ‘Philopapists’. For example, in recent times, the New York Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) did the same. And so a Church that had canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Lands in 1981, despite all the worldly-minded who criticised and mocked it, became in 2021 the Persecuting Church, instead of love, showing hatred and then refusing to repent in self-justification. This too went down in history. Like the Papacy, it preferred money and power to the Holy Spirit, to the Martyrs and Confessors.

But when did this decadence begin? This spirit was certainly absent in 1981 from the unworldly Metr Philaret, who at last canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors. The turning-point was perhaps in 2001, when his successor as leader of ROCOR, Metr Vitaly (Ustinov), by then very elderly and quite ill, was usurped. The Metropolitan who had opposed the CIA Grabbe faction was replaced by those sympathetic to that faction. Those who seized power replaced him with a series of pious, but very weak, metropolitans, and so continued to exercise power from behind their thrones. Their first act was to begin to fill the episcopate with their candidates in order to consolidate their power.

Therefore, in 2003, despite a threefold opposition from one Archbishop, they proposed one of that group’s episcopal candidates, a well-known homosexual (I had been shown his compromising photo as long ago as 1995). During the ceremony, one in the crowd, an acquaintance of mine, shouted out ‘anaxios’, ‘unworthy’, meaning that he opposed the consecration of that candidate. My acquaintance was taken aside by the wealthy brothers of the bishop and duly beaten up. And they call themselves Christians, and even call themselves ‘Orthodox’ Christians! The inevitable alcohol-fuelled scandals duly followed, ending up with the notorious property grab in Missouri. As had been foretold.

One of the techniques that has always been used by such groups is slander, that which was done in the Old Testament against St Job. It was in use already before the Revolution with regard to Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, their Family and all those who supported them. Murder started then. As the media have developed, we have seen it in the Greek Church with ‘the slandered saint’, St Nectarios of Aegina (+ 1920), in ROCOR with St John of Shanghai (+ 1966), who was suspended and faced ‘defrocking’ by the CIA faction in the American Synod, which he defeated, and in the Romanian Church with the great saint, St Arsenie of Prislop (1989), who was so hated by the atheists. Such is our destiny also.

Those ‘Philopapists’ are then always opposed to the saints and slander them. In the case of St John of Shanghai, they will claim that he did not give his shoes away to the poor because he had compassion on them, but because he did not like wearing shoes! They also claim that St John was very much a bureaucrat because he had studied law! They, of course, like wearing expensive leather shoes and love issuing decrees and ‘protocols’. In other words, they slander St John in order to justify their own Anti-Gospel behaviour. They always divert attention from whatever in the saints contradicts their perversions and accuse the saints of exactly their own weaknesses by psychological transfer.

The ROCOR ’gang’ behind the 2003 consecration then continued their activities in order to consolidate their power further. The main aim for themselves and their candidates was to amass as much wealth, property and power as possible, usurping any who opposed them and replace them with their candidates. This was exactly what they had done with the bishop who had vigorously opposed their 2003 candidate. In the decades following 2003, more homosexuals and further CIA/NATO candidates took over in various places, with the Mother-Church in Moscow naively looking on, but never opposing the pro-CIA American Synod, as if paralysed, stunned by the cowboy behaviour of the Americans.

Indeed, even when ROCOR shockingly opposed the Russian campaign against the CIA/NATO takeover of the Ukraine from February 2022 on, Moscow remained paralysed, as if hypnotised. Had it too been infiltrated by the CIA and the Hitlerite spirit of Vlasov? A still unanswered question. Here we must not confuse the dogmatic with the pastoral. For example, although one of their bishops was very greedy for money, we paid him what he wanted, even though he constantly insulted us, jealously demanding ever more, tried to steal our church buildings like a common criminal, and slandered us, saying that we had stolen money from him! We stayed, as this was a pastoral, not a dogmatic, issue.

The Pastoral and the Dogmatic

Indeed, we only left him after he had publicly gone into schism with the Church by breaking communion with Her and had then begun rebaptising Orthodox. These were dogmatic issues, as he had gone against the Creed: I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. This is an attack on the Church, for which we are prepared to die and we will win because our slanderers are not prepared to die for their greed and schism. Those who confuse the pastoral and the dogmatic would have left him before. For example, there are those who create a schism around the calendar. However, the true calendar is the one which your bishop blesses you to celebrate on. Disobedience is the only error here.

The old ROCOR never had any problem with the calendar. We had many Romanian and Bulgarian new calendar refugee parishes with us, when the atheists were in power in Romania and Bulgaria and were persecuting those Local Churches. When freedom came, those parishes quite naturally returned to their Mother-Churches. Similarly, hundreds of Russian parishes in Africa use the new calendar, as do their parishes in Vienna, Sofia and elsewhere. And today the Romanian Church has received several hundred refugee parishes which use the old calendar. Our situation is similar to that of St Paisy (Velichkovsky), who before us also had to take refuge in the Romanian Church from the Russian.

However, those who deny the dogmas of the Church and change the Creed, whether in words with the filioque, or else, all the while hypocritically retaining the words of the Creed, in deeds, put themselves outside communion with the Church. They become schismatic sects of pharisees, failing to understand that communion is the visible, external sacramental sign of the internal catholicity of the Church. To be in communion means to be part of the Church, inherently and organically connected with the whole Body of Christ, members of Him. This is not about administrative bureaucracy and protocols, but about the life in Christ through the Holy Spirit. This is real Orthodoxy, the Church of the Holy Spirit.

The One True Church and the Two False Churches: The Pastors Persecuted by the Politicians

Introduction

Even though they do not wish to join the Orthodox Church, let alone actually become Orthodox, certain Non-Orthodox admirers of Orthodoxy sometimes pronounce: ‘Yes, the Orthodox Church is the Church of the Holy Spirit’. They speak with naïvety and sentimentality, which is the result of their spiritual tourism. In reality, ‘The Orthodox Church is the Church of the War for the Holy Spirit, and it is a very bitter war. We Orthodox have two great enemies, those who prefer Mammon to the Holy Spirit and those who prefer Phariseeism to the Holy Spirit. Christ suffered from both and warned about both. And both of them crucified and continue to crucify Christ and His Church.

The Church of the War for the Holy Spirit

The Head of the Orthodox Church is neither a Pope, nor a Patriarch, nor any other worldly leader, but the Risen Christ. The Church is His Body, irradiated and governed by the Holy Spirit, as the Church is the Bearer of the Holy Spirit. Our Church is not a dead body, a corpse, but it makes Saints, who are the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Any organisation that does not make Saints is not the Church, it is a mere human business, a sect or a corporation, not the Divino-human Church. For the Saints are the sign of the Holy Spirit. Where there are Saints, there is the Holy Spirit. Where there is the Holy Spirit, there are Saints. And where the Holy Spirit is not, there are no Saints.

The Church of Mammon

Ask any Orthodox from any Orthodox country why they rarely go to church and they will usually tell you that it is because of priests who demand money from them. For alongside the real Church there exists a parasitic organisation known as the ‘Church of Mammon’. This is full of those, mainly clerics, who carve out of the business careers for themselves and high salaries, exploiting the people, charging them money for all. Some are sexual perverts and the unprincipled, they swim with the tide, according to the wishes and whims of those who pay them. For them, the Head of the Church is not Christ, but States, and the Church is not governed by the Holy Spirit, but by Mammon.

The Church of the Pharisees

Ask any Orthodox from any Orthodox country why they rarely go to church and they will tell you that it is in part because of narrow-minded bigots and fanatics. For alongside the real Church there exists a second parasitic organisation known as the ‘Church of the Pharisees’. The Pharisees are clerics and laypeople who self-righteously proclaim that they are the heads of the Church, national leaders, and hypocritically devise all manner of human rules to oppress and condemn others and to cling on to power. They are deeply involved in State politics, nationalism and even militarisation. The word ‘schismatics’ for them denotes those who are of another nationality and do not worship their ethnarchs.

Conclusion

Who will win in this War for the Holy Spirit against both the Church of Mammon and the Church of the Pharisees? On the face of it, we know that these two powerful groups of enemies of the Church of the Holy Spirit work closely together. The businessmen and the pharisees love each other, as they have the same interests and so feed off one another. It would seem that it is two against one. However, paradoxically, their persecution of the Church makes us stronger. Their Persecuting Church never wins over our Persecuted Church, for we know that the last word in history belongs to Christ, Persecuted and Crucified, but also Risen from the dead. Not Death will vanquish, but Life.

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.

Bob Amsterdam: How USAID Is Helping Zelensky Destroy Christianity With Fake Churches and Violence

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=amsterdam+and+tucker+carlson+youtube&PC=PV02&ru=%2fsearch%3fq%3damsterdam%2band%2btucker%2bcarlson%2byoutube%26FORM%3dPVSBDF%26PC%3dPV02&mmscn=vwrc&mid=2544760679BBD1EB0DC62544760679BBD1EB0DC6&FORM=WRVORC&ntb=1&msockid=91992718f2a011ef86c2cbe250ad0303

Reflections on Forty Years of Service at the Altar

Quench not the Spirit.

(1 Thessalonians 5, 19-21)

When I was a child, I did not believe in God, I knew God. He was – and is – a fact. I did not seek Him, I knew Him. Fifty years ago, in 1975, the closest disciple of St Silouan confirmed my experience that God is known by the Holy Spirit and that if someone has come to know God by the Holy Spirit, his soul will burn with the love of God by day and night and his soul will not be bound by any earthly thing.

If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you (John 15, 19)

Five years later, in May 1979 in a deep and warm conversation at Philotheou Monastery on Mt Athos, the ever-memorable Fr Ephraim (now of Arizona) confirmed this to me. And so it was that forty years ago I went with fear to St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris to be ordained, believing that our purpose in life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit, as St Seraphim of Sarov declared.

Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you (Matthew 6, 33)

Now the name ‘Antichrist’ does not mean he who is against Christ, but he who is in place of Christ. In other words, Antichrist does not appear to be outwardly against Christ, he is a substitute for Christ. From the world in which we now are we can conclude that we live in the time before Antichrist, where faith, the presence of the Holy Spirit, is being substituted by falsehood, ‘a den of thieves’.

Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away (2 Timothy 3, 5)

Thus, the most obvious thing that I have noticed about the last forty years of service at the altar has been the persistent determination of satan to destroy all that is spiritual, both directly and indirectly. He has always recruited his agents to substitute for the real Church, to set up a satanic church, where the Holy Spirit cannot abide and is replaced by the pseudo-spiritual, which stems from hatred.

You pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy, and faith (Matthew 23, 23)

Forty years ago and more, I had seen how satan used such isms as ecumenism, modernism, liberalism and freemasonry to destroy and then substitute for the Church. They considered the Church had to be brought into line with the anti-spiritual ways of the world, secularism. All who challenged these movements against the Holy Spirit were slandered. Like others, I was one of them.

Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake (Matthew 5, 11)

Twenty years ago and more, I saw how the cunning and evil satan changed his tactics to destroy and substitute for the Church. He began using the opposite forces to the first, pretending to be pure, employing such isms as sectarianism, traditionalism, conservatism and the spirit of schism. All who challenged these movements were slandered. Like others, I was and am one of them.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore you are witnesses to yourselves, that you are the children of those who killed the prophets (Matthew 23, 29-31)

All the servants of satan, of both sorts, close churches and forbid missionary work on the pretext of ‘protocols’ or ‘covid’. They replace faith, which is built on real experience of the Holy Spirit, the Giver of life, Who speaks ‘by the prophets’, with mere ‘religion’, the ideology of hired servants. This substitution of ideology for any spiritual experience, which alone gives wisdom, is why faith is dying out.

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves (Matthew 7, 15)

Thus, Protestants predict that Protestantism in Western countries will die out within a generation, by 2050. Roman Catholicism in Western countries will not be far behind. Both are being replaced by the ideology of secularism, where anything goes, for they have lost their faith and follow the ways of the world. However, in the Church of God, the war against Orthodoxy is just as fierce.

Woe unto you, Pharisees! for you love the uppermost seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets (Luke 11, 43)

Satan is working against us in the Church in exactly the same ways. The temptations of power and wealth are the rewards for those who use either ecumenism, modernism, liberalism and freemasonry, or sectarianism, traditionalism, conservatism and the spirit of schism. We avoid power and wealth and all the isms, which they use in order to persecute us.

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers….My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves (Matt 21, 12-13)

We create life and community, where before there was death and darkness. We grow the culture of life, as pastors, the voice of the people, in our hearts there is no hatred. And we are victorious over the narcissistic, jealous, resentful, corrupt and effeminate, the Establishment elite who love the uppermost seats, who are of their father the devil…for he is a liar, and the father of it (John 8, 44).

The thief comes only to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly (John 10, 10)

Today, the Russian Church, just like the Church of Constantinople, has fallen under the influence of this world. We fight for Orthodox freedom from political deviations. Canon XV of the First and Second Council is clear about those worthy of honour: they have not broken the union of the Church with any schism, but on the contrary, have been diligent to rescue the Church from schisms and divisions.

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord (Romans 12, 19)

We fight for the Truth of God and the Righteousness of man from the middle ground, from the fourteen Local Churches between the extremes, but among those in the extremes there are many who agree with us. Our role is to ‘knock heads together’ to bring away from the extremes. Like Christ, Who was crucified between the extremes of the two thieves, we too are persecuted for this.

Indeed, all who desire to live godly in Jesus Christ will suffer persecution (2 Timothy 3, 12)

Rome is in crisis and has to recall its legions from the far-flung provinces to protect Rome. The governors of the provinces feel abandoned, threatened by the rebellions of the people against their untruths. But the rebels know what to do, for those who told lies about us have discredited only themselves. Rome will return to where it came from, for it is now known the world over to tell untruths.

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap (Galatians 6, 7)

Forty years ago I went to St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris to be ordained. I was mindful of the words that the pen is mightier than the sword, or as St Alexander put it far better: God is not in force, but in truth. Nearly ten years ago it was my joy to open a new church dedicated to St Alexander in my native East Anglia. I know that God is working through His saints to cleanse His Church.

That He might present Her to Himself as a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that She should be holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5, 27)

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

St John’s Orthodox Church,

City of Colchester.

27 January 1985 – 27 January 2025

From Recent Correspondence: The Secret is Out!

Dear Father Andrew,

It’s been a long time since we last spoke or saw each other. I was engrossed in my own journey that requires a face-to-face meeting to share.

In these strange and challenging times, I currently work between Moscow, X, and (to a lesser extent) London. I planned to reach out to you when I am next in the UK.

Throughout this time, the memories of our few meetings and your work in the Orthodox Church have remained cherished treasures in my heart. I often revisit your Orthodox England website, sharing the link with those I believe might be interested.

Yesterday, I intended to browse through your ‘Orthodox England’ book online. On searching for you on Google, I came across the news three years ago of your departure from the “jurisdiction.” This development didn’t come as a surprise, given the current state of affairs within the Church and the world…..

Dear Z,

We are all very well.

Our Orthodox England site is very active and still very popular. The book, The Orthodox Faith and the English Tradition, is now fully online, under Resources on the website: http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/oe4/e-books/. Our story is quite simple, though quite shocking, as it concerns corruption in high places inside the Russian Church.

In 2017, exactly ten years after the now American, but once Russian émigré, group entered into canonical communion with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007, it was infiltrated by the CIA. This was not surprising to me, as it had already been infiltrated by the CIA as far back as the 1960s, under the then Fr George (later Bp Gregory) Grabbe. However, after the fall of the USSR in 1991, the CIA abandoned it, as it had no more interest in it, and the CIA stopped giving money to it. ‘Mission accomplished’ for them, as they said at that time. However, by 2017 the time to infiltrate again had begun.

When I spoke at the émigré Church Council in San Francisco in May 2006, it was attended by the former US ambassador to Kiev, the notorious neocon John Herbst, who lost his job in Kiev on 26 May 2006. I overheard him saying to one bishop in Russian (he thought I could not understand him), that ‘they would have to do something about the ROCOR decision to rejoin Moscow’, taken at the 2006 Council. The CIA duly subsidised a crazy man who lives in Odessa and calls himself Metropolitan Agafangel (not the canonical and real Metr Agafangel). But that was only the start.

It all went much further than that. In 2017 the CIA infiltrated the now American group in the hope of destroying it and so harming the whole Russian Church. So, in 2017 they tasked someone with destroying the Church here. He did this by creating a schism with Moscow.

Now we had been working successfully for Russian Church unity for nearly 50 years, so his schism went against the work of a lifetime, so they had to persecute us and try and close all our churches. So we went to try and join the local Moscow bishop. To our astonishment, he refused to take any of us, 15 clergy, 6 parishes and 5,000 people. Now he is a nice man and he let us know that his refusal was on orders from Moscow. So we think that the Church in Moscow itself has been infiltrated by the CIA. After all, there are people there who will do anything for money. The recent scandal with that Metropolitan proves it.

Today the now American group is beset by scandals which it created, not only here, but also in the USA. Worse still, under CIA pressure, after 2022 it openly took the Western side in the US-Russia proxy war in the so deeply tragic Ukraine. In that way it lost a lot of its Russian base. Russians were understandably scandalised by the new anti-Russian, pro-American standpoint, and without attracting any Ukrainians, who go to their own churches and do not want anything to do with Russians. As the American group is dying out as a consequence of its not merging into the structures of the Russian Church, it is now desperately trying to recruit converts. However, as it is a schismatic and sectarian group, it has problems attracting normal people, but quite often extremists or fanatics with pathological problems, for instance, unstable young men who dislike women or homosexuals.

In any case, three years ago, before the SMO, we joined the Romanian Orthodox Church, who have been wonderful to us. Here we continue exactly as before, only without corruption, without schism and without the CIA. We are getting to the point here, where there are more Russian Orthodox outside the Russian Church than inside it, because of the corruption inside it.

How St John of Shanghai the Orphan-Lover Adopted Us

When we moved back to England in 1997, we did not know to which saint or saints to dedicate our then small family community. So for a time we commemorated the names of the two local saints, St Edmund and St Felix. It was only in 2004 that it was revealed to us who to dedicate our church to in our situation. By that time, with Russians, Romanians, English and other parishioners present, we would need a multinational saint. But who?

Then one Saturday evening before the vigil service we saw a monk entering the church. He was very short, quite stocky and wearing his monastic veil which was moving as if in a breeze. Before we could speak to him, the monk had disappeared. We realised from photos that this monk was St John of Shanghai and he was going to take charge of us, after seven years of being ignored, despised and indeed persecuted by bishops and others.

Since then, in 2008, we bought – miraculously and through him – our own church, without help from any bishop. We now worship in the largest church in the world dedicated to St John. He has protected us from a rapacious man who wanted to take possession of our church and, on failing, then wanted to close it. St John has worked miracles and showed us myrrh and fragrance from our icons. He has comforted us constantly to this day.

We should not forget that St John’s title was ‘of Shanghai and Western Europe’. He spent thirteen years here, in Geneva, Paris, Brussels, London and elsewhere, whereas he spent less than four years in San Francisco, which was where they crucified him. And indeed he reposed not in San Francisco, but in Seattle. It was in Western Europe that we saw his missionary identity, preaching to all nationalities and understanding different needs.

All who are interested in the life of St John of Shanghai will have seen the infamous photo of 9 July 1963. This photo shows him sitting as a defendant in a court room in San Francisco. Sitting beside him were the only three bishops who supported him, one a Serb, Bishop Sava. St John had been put on trial with the approval of other ROCOR bishops from the Synod, who had to their shame also suspended him from his see. He awaited his crucifixion.

Today we recall that St John was born in what is now the Ukraine, the country that ten years ago the US made into its sacrificial lamb. Here too St John shows us the way forward as our inspiration. In February 2022, all our parishioners left their passports at the door. Russians and Ukrainians, Romanians and Moldovans and our 21 other nationalities forget their passports and stand together in solidarity. We have only one passport: Christ, Who unites us.

This is also the passport of St John, who alone can bring unity to the whole tragically divided Diaspora. The universal saint, he lived in exile in Serbia, Macedonia, China, the Philippines, Western Europe, North Africa and North America. His parents lived in exile in Venezuela. Many of his spiritual children took refuge in Australia. He served in Slavonic, Greek, Mandarin, French, Dutch and English and venerated the saints of the Old West. And so do we.

The Art of Schism or How to Make Part of the Orthodox Church into Your Personal Sect

First find a small part of the Church with naïve and uneducated people in charge, who will not want to obstruct your highly-developed personal ambitions, as they think that you can be useful to them and they are desperate to recruit.
Tell them that you are highly educated and hoodwink, charm and impress them, exaggerating and lying about your credentials and titles, relying on their ignorance. They will not care to know the difference, as they only look at external appearances.
Engage in a full-scale PR operation among others, which with your natural acting talents, smile, gift with words, command of the internet, support from the sponsors and minders behind you and your overriding ambition, you should find very easy.
Proceed to isolate your little part of the Church by expressing contempt and hatred for every other part of the Church, calling all others ‘satanic’, ‘heretical’, ‘schismatic’ or ‘uncanonical’ and presenting yourself as ‘spiritual’, ‘holy’, ‘pure’, ‘canonical’, with exclusive and superior truths and call all others in some way ‘tainted’. (You will find something).
In order to present yourself as the infallible Pope of your domain, a Prince of the Church and Prince of the Pharisees, cultivate your appearance. Your natural preening narcissism will help you in this.
Ensure that you have total and totalitarian control over everything that the naïve entrust you with, sending out your personal network of spies and agents to find out exactly what your victims are doing and saying and to police them.
In order to implement full control, make certain that all who are much older and far more experienced than you, contradict you or challenge you, know the truth about you and know better than you because they are actually educated and saw through you from the start, abandon you by witch-hunting them and demanding their property and money. Then you can obtain your desired absolute power over the select few of the ignorant and hoodwinked who remain.
Make any who resist you feel guilty by using the techniques of exceeding your authority, falsely claiming that they owe you absolute obedience, belittling, intimidating and humiliating them, further developing your personality cult.
Eliminate and blacken any who resist you by slandering them and insulting them in front of everyone.
Claim that only your group has like the pharisees the exclusive possession of the truth and that all others are somehow inferior and defective. All members of your sect are to be exploited by you as they are naive. You will of course practise ‘corrective baptism’, that is, the rebaptism of Orthodox, which is expressly forbidden by the Creed.
Brainwash any who are young and naïve so that you can control their minds. You will find podcasts and zooms very useful here. Remember the manipulative practices (and the riches) of tele-evangelists.
Ensure that you enslave any whom you give presents to and retain well-deserved presents from them. Hang the presents over them like carrots hang over donkeys. They must feel that they are in debt to you and be dependent on you for ever.
Check the social media of all and censor and correct any opinions that are not perfectly in line with your own. Use your network of admiring slaves to malign and try and discredit those who have different views to you. This is your cult.
Prey on the single, lonely and woman-disliking, like yourself. Find psychologically and pathologically vulnerable, naïve, weak and ignorant young men through your powers of manipulation and make them feel indebted to you.
Recruit those who have money, especially naïve and conservative-minded women who have never met any other Orthodox. They will be very useful to you in your quest to obtain property and income to finance your superior lifestyle.
Always lie whenever you have to justify yourself.
Micro-manage all situations. Your control and power must be absolute in all circumstances.
Always remember the five-word golden rule: Bully, Intimidate, Manipulate, Betray, Orchestrate (BIMBO).
If you are found out through your psychological, spiritual and other abuses, have your Plan B ready.
When you need to implement Plan B, take as much money with you to feather your nest in the next country you flee to. Remember the example of your predecessor Antony Grabbe, the six-million dollar man.