Category Archives: Roman Catholicism

From Further Correspondence and Conversations

Following the questions and answers published on 23 November, we now publish further questions and answers resulting from them.

Q: Does anyone try and stop you from writing?

A: Oh yes, two or three anonymous individuals, probably from both extreme left and extreme right (interestingly, their views are identical – the extremes always meet) try censorship. The fact that, aggressively and dictatorially, they try to impose their censorship on free expression means that they are wrong. If they wish to read what they agree with, they can turn to any of the conformist, secularist media; why do they try and censor those who are Orthodox Christians and so think otherwise?

As they say of those on the extreme left: ‘There is no-one as intolerant as a liberal’. As regards those on the extreme right, they are by definition illiberal. I ignore extremists, especially anonymous ones, because they are motivated not by love but by hatred. Interestingly, earlier this month I met in London one who had not been anonymous and had tried to silence me some years ago. He has completely changed his life and apologized for what he had asked me to do six years ago. People change, people mature with experience. Give them time for repentance. We do not repeat their intolerance, but show patience.

Q: You said in the first questions and answers that some old calendarists are concerned by the possible 2016 All-Orthodox meeting. But when you compare the piety of old calendarists to new calendarists, can’t you support the former?

A: An example. Last month a Greek woman (dressed in jeans and of course without any head covering) came from London to visit our Church. The first question she asked me was: ‘Why aren’t there any pews?’ (!). Such is the result of decades of modernism in the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the diaspora. But why would I compare an unchurched person from a new calendar Church with an old calendarist convert? You cannot justify your schism by comparing yourself with someone who is unChurched and whose Church attendance consists of 20 minutes per year on Easter night.

I can remember in 1977 meeting an unChurched old calendarist from an old calendarist village in northern Greece. I was not impressed. Let us compare like with like. There are devout people who live on the new calendar (because they are forced to, definitely not new calendarists) and devout people who live on the old calendar (freely, but definitely not old calendarists). And there are non-devout people who live on both calendars too.

On the subject of that possible 2016 meeting, I should also have mentioned that, apart from the dispute between Constantinople with the Czechs and Slovaks, the dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem may also prevent it from taking place. And not only that. This week the US politician Joe Biden, whose son Hunter son has conveniently landed a very well-paid job in the energy sector in the Ukraine, was again in Istanbul, discussing the Ukraine – with a Patriarchate which has no jurisdiction whatsoever there. All the notorious CIA mouthpieces of the Phanar were present at the meeting, ready to take their orders from an organization that has a history of mass murder.

Q: What could happen as a result?

A: If Biden bribes the Phanar into setting up a pro-CIA schism in the Ukraine, as the Phanar did in Estonia, then there will be a major schism, with the elite of Constantinople falling away from the Church altogether, maybe its Patriarch becoming the irrelevant departmental head of the Uniats in an obscure bureau in the Vatican. However, if such a schism occurred, only the elite would fall away, as at the Council of Florence, a few faithful bishops, new St Marks of Ephesus, most monks, parish clergy and people would remain in the Church, perhaps going under the Church of Greece. As the proverb says; ‘A fish rots from the head’.

Q: Is bribery a realistic option?

A: Yes. Remember that the former US ambassador in Kiev, John Herbst, already set up the Agathangel schism in Odessa. Divide and rule is Washington’s motto and even if it costs a few tens of millions of dollars, they don’t care. They just print the money off in Washington and call it ‘quantitative easing’. Remember that it cost them $5 billion, as Victoria Nuland admitted, just to set up the current lame duck regime in Kiev. With $17 trillion dollars of debt (and that is how the Soviet Union was defeated – the US could go into massive debt, but the USSR could not), that is a drop in the ocean.

Q: What could happen if Constantinople fell away?

A: In such a case the remaining faithful Local Churches could hold a real and free Council in the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. This Monastery is almost ready for this. I have been there. From there the Orthodox Truth could be proclaimed in its integrity to the whole world, which would then see the essential, underlying unity of the Church, free of CIA manipulations. In such a case we could expect the Local Churches concerned to drop their compromises, such as the new calendar, and return to the fullness of Orthodoxy. Possibly the Patriarchate of Moscow could, as three-quarters of the Orthodox Church, become the first Patriarchate in the diptychs. That would be a necessary update to the reality of the Church today. Certainly, that would completely change the state of several Local Churches from CIA control and nationalist stagnation to missionary dynamism.

Q: How will Antichrist come to power?

A: There are two techniques for establishing Antichrist’s New World Order, that is, for obtaining the Global Dictatorship of the One World Government.

First of all, you can bribe naïve leaders and organize paid mobs of the unemployed and criminals to create riots in order to overthrow the legitimate government (called a ‘regime’ by the US-run Western media which duly demonize the legitimate government). This is politely known as ‘regime-change’, which is also the aim of Western sanctions. This is what has been tried unsuccessfully in Moscow and more recently in Hong Kong, but successfully in Kiev – a technique that had been well-practised in what the CIA-paid media dubbed ‘the Arab Spring’, a series of catastrophes which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives so far.

I think Washington may soon try the same technique of ‘regime-change’ in Kishinev (where it has banned all parties except pro-EU ones – the Kiev scenario again), Belgrade, Prague and Budapest – capitals of three countries whose leaders are now valiantly resisting US and EU bribery, bullying and threats for being independent. Of course, this does not happen in Tokyo, Berlin, Paris and London, because there the regimes (often elected with less than 30% of the popular vote) are only vassals, heads of US vassal states. Where the selected elite (who call us ‘plebs’) are already in your pocket, you do not have to unseat it – you already control the country

The second technique is to use the media, including the social media, to demonize a government and then to bomb its country back to the Stone Age. This is the Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya scenario. Once you have bombed the country to smithereens and unleashed interminable tribal infighting, you are then free to plunder its natural resources, so dividing and ruling, because, again, you already control the country.

Q: In the first questions and answers you mentioned the fact that there was support in the Russian Church for Kerensky after the 1917 Revolution. How do you explain that?

A: Apart from the naïve, ignorant and deluded, there were treacherous renovationists. They had been infiltrating the Russian Church since the early 1900s. Think of the twice married Fr George Gapon who led the 1905 protest and soon after hanged himself. These people wanted a socialist Orthodoxy! The 1920s renovationist schism under heretics like the renovationist Vvedensky and the Paris schism in the emigration did not come from nowhere – the highly politicized elements responsible for these schisms had long ago infiltrated the Church. Such self-deluded individuals call the Patriarch Antichrist or Judas and still dare to take communion. Such blasphemy burns them alive, as it did the Old Ritualists. Believe me, I have seen it happen. Such individuals always end up outside the Church, embittered through their self-delusion and hatred and often commit suicide.

Q: Are there still renovationists in the Russian Church?

A: There are still a few here and there, but very, very few and they are dying out. Most have left the Church, though some have joined Constantinople.

Q: You seem to overlook the role of Catholicism. Surely it, and not Orthodoxy, could save the West?

A: The West has categorically rejected Catholicism. And here I do not only mean the Protestant West, which has directly become atheist. I also mean the once Catholic countries of Europe. In Europe Catholicism is in freefall, even in a country like Poland, where the number of those practising Catholicism has halved in the last 25 years. Why?

It is because Catholicism is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Catholicism is the father of Protestantism, which is the father of the modern atheist West. No new pope, even if he is a master of PR, is thoroughly anti-Orthodox and pro-Uniat, was voted in by Washington and has the CIA-backed Western media behind him, can change anything. It is 1,000 years too late.

Q: What do you mean by Catholicism as part of the problem?

A: Historically, the West has degenerated from Christ (Orthodoxy) to Feudalism (Catholicism), then to Democracy (Protestantism) and so to Antichrist (Post-Protestantism). We can see this in many examples. For example, feudalism appeared in England very suddenly, in 1066. It simply did not exist here before. In other words, feudalism is the socio-political and economic result of Catholicism. Or, to take another example from today, the present genocide in Catholic Mexico (100,000 dead in the last twelve months, it is said) is being caused by feudal drug-traffickers, who are holed up on their castle-ranches, and pay serfs to work for them. (Of course, the drug-traffickers only exist because a section of the US population takes drugs. Otherwise they would go out of business).

As regards Russia, serfdom, that is feudalism, was only introduced in the 18th century by Western and Westernized rulers like Peter I and Catherine II. Significantly, they are praised to the skies and called ‘the Great’ by both Western and Soviet historians. Why? Because they both represented feudal empires. The West used feudalism to maintain its colonial empires and the Soviets reintroduced feudalism to maintain their empire. For what was Stalinist collectivization if not refeudalization? Take the land from the people and slaughter those who resist, that is refeudalization.

The West hates the fact that Western-introduced serfdom was abolished only after a century and a half in Russia, whereas in the West it lasted for centuries. In Russia, Orthodoxy defeated serfdom and Russian Orthodox have always opposed and destroyed slavery, freeing slaves. However, in the West the ruling Catholic ideology was inherently feudal so it could not be defeated, it could only degenerate into Protestantism, the next step to Antichrist.

Similarly, we can see the example of Western democracy in Russia, which only lasted for seven months in 1917. Why? Because for Western democracy, as it is called, to exist, you must have a Protestant mentality. This why it never worked elsewhere and cannot be imposed elsewhere, where it is always accompanied by massive corruption, as in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Latin America, South Vietnam, Japan, Thailand – or the Ukraine. From Western democracy in Russia, it was only one step to Antichrist, that is, to Bolshevism. True, this so-called Western democracy has lasted much longer in the West, where Protestantism existed, but even here we can see that today it too is degenerating, as Protestantism has been rejected. Even in the Estonian capital they are now selling off the main Lutheran church because it has gone bankrupt.

Western democracy has outlived its purpose, which was to overthrow Christian monarchs. With that done, Antichrist has been readying himself to take over from the secular presidents, prime ministers and chancellors who replaced the Christian monarchs. We saw this with Napoleon and Hitler, who replaced Christian leaders and were both prefigurations of Antichrist and both invaded Russia, just as the US is trying to invade Russia today.

We can see this today in the replacement of democracy and its degeneration in Western countries, which are quite freely introducing ever more Fascist legislation, with selective assassinations by the secret services, censorship of the media, militarization of the police, arrest without charge, deprivation of citizens of their passports, refusing them the right to live where they want, surveillance of their every movement through camera networks and State spying on e-mails and phone calls etc.

Q: Does Orthodox Russia have friends in the West?

A: Yes. Apart from the local Russian Orthodox and Orthodox allies of other nationalities, there are still minorities in the West who have a sense of national tradition, sovereignty and identity. All of them support Russia in some way. The enemy is the cosmopolitan Brussels/Berlin bureaucrat who takes his orders from Washington and has only contempt for real Europeans and our patriotism. There is in preparation an alliance between Orthodox Russia and healthy ‘sovereignist’ forces in at present enslaved Western Europe.

Q: What chance is there of the return of an Orthodox Emperor, a Tsar, who could protect all Orthodox worldwide from Western bullying and so delay the rule of Antichrist?

A: The Church can work in any political system and survive, as history proves, but our ideal is a Christian State, which incarnates the values of the Church, creating a Christian Civilization. If that exists, Antichrist cannot come. Our situation since 1917 has been abnormal; there has been no Christian Emperor, no Tsar, and so the Local Churches have been swayed this way and that way by secular political forces, whether Communist or Capitalist, Atheist or Mammonist, however the end has not yet come. The question is whether we are to return to normality, the Christian Empire, or whether we are to continue on the path towards Antichrist.

Thus, the last nearly 100 years have been quite exceptional, all should have ended in 1917, but we have been granted further time by the mercy of God. Nevertheless, it is still a stark case of the path to the Apocalypse or the path to the Restoration. But there are reasons for thinking that Restoration is still possible because of the sacrifices of the New Martyrs and Confessors during the first generation after 1917, on which the whole rebirth of the Russian Church has been founded.

Since the long and slow process of overthrowing Antichrist in Russia, which effectively began in 1941 with the first Nazi invasion (the second Nazi invasion being in the Ukraine in 2014) and the revival of the Church inside Russia, we have begun to see the three different stages in the restoration of the Church. These are: Orthodoxy; the People; Sovereignty. They come in the opposite order to what we would expect, Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People, because we are putting history into reverse.

First of all, we have seen the process of restoration of Orthodoxy, with the end of outward persecution by Communism and the end of inward persecution by renovationism. This first stage in this process is ongoing, but is almost at an end now. The outward persecution by the Communists has ended. And both the renovationists who were supported by the Phanar and the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and who were still active in the Diaspora until recently, and the neo-renovationists who came to prominence inside Russia in the 1990s and 2000s (with the support of the old Diaspora renovationists), have literally been dying out. The latter were rejected outright by Patriarch Alexei II and elders like Fr John Krestyankin and have been defeated. That is why the last ones are so aggressive. The re-establishment and reassertion of Orthodoxy inside the Russian Orthodox Church is clear. Only a few treacherous individuals inside Russia and in the Diaspora are still resisting – but they are living in the past, irrelevant.

The second stage in the process is the revival of the People as a believing force. This stage is ongoing, but has very far to go. The missionary witness of the Church to the masses has scarcely begun, but at least it has begun. Only when the Church has been allowed to go out into the whole world by Divine Providence and preach the authentic Gospel, which has been so compromised by Catholicism, Protestantism and Modernism, can we move on to the third stage. Already, however, there has been the first political emigration after 1917, which brought Orthodoxy to countries which previously knew nothing of it, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a second economic emigration, far larger than before. All this is the Providential opportunity to witness.

Only when people have been Churched, when they are ready for the new Orthodox Emperor, the Tsar, can that restoration occur. In other words, there can be no restoration of the Sovereign Christian Empire until the baptized masses want it, until they have repented in preparation for it. Only repentance can bring restoration. And we are still far from this – though I must say we are much closer than even five years ago, let alone twenty-five years ago, when all this was still only a dream.

For Russia has now begun to play the role of the country which restrains or withholds the movement towards Antichrist. That is why the forces of this world are so aggressively attacking Russia at the moment, trying through so-called sanctions to punish Her. The most ruthlessly logical and consistently anti-Christian Western elitists like Brzezinski in the US and Bildt in Sweden have publicly declared that the West must destroy the Russian Orthodox Church (in order to hasten the arrival of Antichrist – though they are so delusional that they do not even believe in Antichrist).

Q: If that repentance or process of Churching happens, who will the new Emperor be?

A: We do not and cannot know. That is in God’s hands or rather in the hands of the Mother of God, for since the forced and forged abdication of 1917 the Empire has been in the hands of the Sovereign Mother of God. Our task is to repent, not to argue about possible candidates. God will choose the right candidate for us and it will be plain to all Churched Orthodox that this is the right choice.

The All-Orthodox Council and the Second Vatican Council

I can remember in the 1970s a modernist priest of the Parisian School declaring that ‘just as the Catholics had to ‘modernise’ at the Second Vatican Council, so too the same would happen with the Orthodox’. Tragically, that priest later gave up the priesthood and committed suicide. Nevertheless, after over 50 years of talk, a Council of all the Orthodox Churches is being planned for 2016. So was that priest right?

No, he was profoundly wrong. And for the following reasons:

First of all, nobody knows whether that Council will actually take place. In the highly politicized environment of the Orthodox world, in which the USA and the EU are continually meddling, for example in Syria and the Ukraine, nothing is certain. True, the Russian Church is now free, but some of the EU Local Churches are not; in fact two Local Churches have Patriarchs appointed by the CIA. What hope is there for a free Council in such conditions? At present there are free Local Churches and those that are not free.

Secondly, at present this will not be a Council of all Orthodox (‘Pan’- Orthodox in Greek) because the Czechoslovak Church is at present not taking part. Until the Church of Constantinople frees itself from its imperialistic policies, there is little hope for a resolution of this problem.

Thirdly, a Council can be summoned, but it cannot be recognized as a Council until its decisions have been ‘received’ by the people of God. Until that time, it is only a meeting or conference.

Fourthly, it has already been agreed that no decision taken at the Council will contradict the Tradition of the Church and that all Local Churches un catholicity (in Catholicism there is no such real concept, only monolithic papist centralization) will have to be unanimous regarding any decision taken. This is perhaps the most important factor which heterodox cannot get their heads around. In the Orthodox Church there is no centralizing Pope, who can freely flaunt Church Tradition and the Church Councils, that is, who can contradict the Holy Spirit, as happened at the Second Vatican Council, where political appointees, bureaucrats and hirelings ruled the day.

Whether an All-Orthodox Council will take place or not is by no means certain. However, it may do and it may also be a very positive Council, with the affirmation of the Truths of Orthodox Christianity, of which the apostatic heterodox world is in so desperate need.

Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Available Again

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

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

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

From the Back Cover

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

Foreword to the Third Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glory to Thee, O God, Glory to Thee!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

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

A Letter from His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill to Patriarch Bartholomew on the Real Situation in the Ukraine

To write this letter to you brings me a deep sense of pain and extreme concern about the situation facing the flock of the Church in Novorossiya (the south and the east of the Ukraine), where a fratricidal civil war has been raging for the last few months. Last autumn, at the beginning of the current Ukrainian political crisis, members of the Greek Catholic (Uniat) church and schismatic ‘Orthodox’ openly preached hatred of the Orthodox Church on Maidan Square in Kiev; they urged the seizure of Orthodox shrines and called for the eradication of Orthodoxy from the Ukraine. Since the outbreak of hostilities, Uniats and schismatics have taken up arms under the guise of an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ and started direct aggression against the clergy of the canonical Church in the Ukraine. Nevertheless, the Church, unlike the Uniats and schismatics, remains alien to political bias. It continues to carry out pastoral care for its faithful, including those who find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict, trying to reconcile them, issuing constant calls for dialogue.

In recent weeks we have received reports from local bishops indicating abuse of canonical Orthodox clergy as they carry out their pastoral duties. Here are a few examples. On 17 July, during the Divine Liturgy in the Church of the Resurrection in Slavyansk, a gang of armed men led by a Uniat military chaplain threatened the rector, Archpriest Vitaly Vesyol. The Uniat ‘priest’ stated that the Church does not belong in the Ukraine and lamented that the authorities would not let the Uniats steal the Monastery of the Kiev Caves. On 19 July junta ‘soldiers’ issued death threats to Archpriest Andrei Chicherinda, Dean of the Nikolaevsk District of the Dioceses of Gorlovka and Slavyansk and harassed and interrogated him, keeping him handcuffed. On 20 July, near Slavyansk, thugs armed with sub-machine guns made Archpriest Vadim Yablonovsky dig his own grave and on the same day they arrested Archpriest Viktor Stratovich, handcuffed him, and took him away with a bag over his head into the woods, where they forced him to grovel on his knees as they interrogated him.

On July 30 in Krasnoarmeiskoe a group of armed men illegally searched the home of Archpriest Igor Sergienko, rector of St Alexander Nevsky parish. They insulted Fr Igor, accusing him of taking part in clandestine organisations, threatened him with torture, demanded that he leave the Ukraine and that he hand over the deeds of the parish property. On the same day, in the Amvrosievska District, Ukrainian troops seized Archpriest Yevgeni Podgorny, showering him with abusive curses, bound him and threw him to the ground. They kicked him, hit him with a rifle butt and fired over his head, to force him to admit that he supported the Home Guard. They tried to force him to take off his priestly cross, but he refused, so they tore if off by force, put a bag over his head and threw him into a pit. Then they threatened to kill his son and robbed his house. Only his parishioners’ intervention saved Fr Igor.

We cannot ignore the fact that the conflict in the Ukraine has unambiguous religious overtones. The Uniats and schismatics are trying to overpower the canonical Orthodox Church, which continues to minister with patience and courage to its suffering faithful in a harsh environment. Priests are serving in places that have become battlegrounds; the majority remain with their flocks, sharing with them all the horrors of the civil war. Their families suffer from attacks, lack of water and food and shelling. On 31 July Archpriest Vladimir Kreslyansky died of his wounds after the shelling of civilian areas in Lugansk, leaving a wife and five children.

Novorossiya was a fruitful land inhabited by millions of hardworking Orthodox Christians… now, it is being burned down and destroyed. Bombing has destroyed the home of Metropolitan Hilarion (Shukalo) (he heads the Diocese of Donetsk and Mariupol). Artillery shelling damaged the Diocesan Administration building in Gorlovka. The Convent of the Iviron Icon in the Diocese of Donetsk lies in ruins, it was burned down during the fighting. However, the canonical Church is a Martyr Church; it remains with the believers in spite of these difficult conditions, it does everything possible to help people who are experiencing the worst times in modern Ukrainian history. The fire of civil conflict has caused hundreds of thousands to lose their homes and become refugees. Many of them try to escape the horrors of war by finding shelter in churches and monasteries, in particular, in the Monastery of the Dormition in Svyatogorsk, which is full of refugees. In Donetsk, Gorlovka, and Lugansk, civilians try to escape the bombardments by staying in the churches at night; once there, they get free food and shelter. All the canonical Orthodox monasteries, parishes, and dioceses provide all kinds of assistance to refugees and ordinary civilians.

Our Church as a whole is using every opportunity to provide humanitarian assistance to the civilian population in areas where fighting is taking place. Daily, all our churches offer up special prayers for peace and the end of internecine warfare in the Ukraine. The Church is taking care of many thousands of refugees from Novorossiya in camps and in specially prepared facilities located all over Russia. We are providing assistance to all without distinction as to nationality or religion. Amongst those who have sought refuge in Russia are many Ukrainian soldiers who did not want to shoot their own people.

These are perilous days for our Russian Orthodox Church, especially for the faithful in the Ukraine, I ask the prayers of Your Holiness, archpastors, pastors, monastics, and all the believers of the Holy Church of Constantinople for peace in the Ukrainian land, to stop the bloodshed and to end the suffering of our brethren in the Lord, especially of our archpastors and pastors, who in the most difficult conditions of civil strife continue to do their duty courageously, serve the Church and defend Holy Orthodoxy. I ask Your Holiness to use every opportunity to raise your voice to defend Orthodox Christians in Novorossiya, who live in daily fear due to the worsening violence by Greek Catholics and schismatics, who fear that if the persecutors take power they and their loved ones will face severe persecution if they do not renounce their faith.

15 August 2014

+ Kyrill, Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias

http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/3704024.html

The Tortuous Path of Western Religion in the Global World

This April’s canonization of two twentieth-century Popes of Rome has only served to underline the gulf between the Church and Roman Catholicism as regards the criteria for sainthood. The first pope to be canonized, a jocular Italian peasant, and the second, a highly politicised Polish nationalist philosopher, were both enemies of the Orthodox Church. The first took part in anti-Orthodox activities in Bulgaria, the second in Yugoslavia and the Ukraine. This is no surprise, since both have been canonized by a Jesuit pope, who is a form backer of Galician Uniats and last weekend received the self-appointed Premier of the Ukraine, the scientologist and promoter of anti-Ukrainian terrorism Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

The present Pope’s support for the disintegration of the Ukraine probably comes under US orders, following President Obama’s recent visit to Rome, just as John Paul II made himself available to the US to help bring down the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. It was under the latter’s pontificate in particular that Catholicism was penetrated by pedophile priests, whose activities were camouflaged by Rome. Naturally, the double canonization in Rome was attended by a bishop from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, who sat with the other Uniats, not with the Protestants (Lutherans and Anglicans). In this way that Patriarchate can see what its fate will be if it does entirely join Rome – it will become just another Roman Catholic colonial subculture.

These papal canonizations, like that to follow later this year, illustrate the confusion of the Vatican of the last fifty years. It is not exact to say that Catholicism has lost the way; rather it has found a multitude of false ways. As they say: when you stop believing in something, you will believe in anything. The gap between official Vatican proclamations and what ordinary Catholics actually believe has grown and grown. However, the overall trend of the last fifty years has been towards a Catholicism that is ever more secularized, protestantized, politicized, turned away from God, symbolized by their priests who now turn their backs to God during their services and face the world instead. The Catholic merger with the world is also symbolized by the ‘modern’ ‘design’ of its church buildings, furnishings and vestments. And the modern designs of the 60s and 70s look very old-fashioned in today’s post-modern world.

Overall, Catholicism has shown a loss of the sense of the sacred, of Divinity, of holiness, a movement towards protestantization and so secularization. In the face of that, many of the most devout Catholics – as well as many ordinary Catholics – have abandoned Catholicism, since they have felt abandoned by their own hierarchy. Catholicism has lost the Western world. Its reality today is in Latin America, Africa and Asia, though here too there are losses, for example Brazil, where 40% of the population is said to have joined Protestant sects. Of the future it is hard to speak. The sectarian Muslim world and Hindu India remain mysteries, though it is said that by 2030 China will be the largest Christian nation on earth. And there, as everywhere else, the spiritually sensitive and the historically-minded will see through Western mythology and find their way to the Orthodox Church.

As a result of the collapse of Catholicism in the Western world, over the last two generations right-wing Catholics have joined the Catholic traditionalists; as for the moderate and the younger generation, faced with the spiritual desert of the West, they have been drawn into any number of sects and cults. There they seek a sense of belonging. The degeneration of modern Catholic worship, characterised by infantilism, the entertainment mentality, and the lack of spiritual understanding are reflections. They are reflections of the modern consumer mentality. This has conditioned and shaped modern Catholicism, like modern Protestantism, making it into a ‘cafeteria religion’, a ‘pick and mix’ consumerist supermarket. Today Western religion faces a civilizational dead end; the thread of its manmade life has been unwound. If the West wants to continue as a spiritually-based entity, and so a morally-based entity, it will have to look outside its apostatic self for sustenance.

May: A Turning-Point?

The European elections of 22 May are fast approaching, falling just three days before elections in the governmentless and rudderless Ukraine, where a separatist, US-installed junta has seized power by violence. This time the European elections may present a real choice to their electorate. Do Europeans want to continue with the Fourth Reich project, a United States of Europe, a museum and graveyard of dead culture, a Europe without Christ, or do they want to stop the project now and even reverse the catastrophe before it is too late?

The true face of the European Union, a despised colony of the bullying, meddling US elite, who are now using Ukrainians as pawns in their giant geopolitical game, has been recognized by ever more Europeans. The former Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, has indicated how mistaken the EU elite is in meddling in the Ukraine. In Hungary the Jobbik National Party is openly supporting Russia against the USA; its leader, Gabor Vona, said in Moscow in 2013 that ‘Russia is defending European values, whereas the EU is betraying them’, and may join the Eurasian Union. In France Marine Le Pen of the National Front, with between 20% and 30% of support, is saying much the same. Even Nigel Farage, the leader of the Independence Party in the UK, says that he admires President Putin, and in the USA such paleocon (definitely not neocon) leaders as Patrick Buchanan and Ron Paul support the new Russia against the Western Sodom.

The European elites are worried. Despite the propaganda daily pumped out by their European Establishment media, ordinary Europeans are resisting. President Putin’s appeal is to the long hoodwinked, native peoples in the depths of Europe, who have for so long been oppressed by their know-it-all, ‘liberal’, Establishment elites. His appeal is to European roots, to those who wish to live in the Christian, Mediterranean civilisation of Europe, at whose roots lies Orthodox Christianity, which is also the only living belief-system in contemporary Russia.

The peoples of Europe do not want to be taken over by sects, either the Protestant variety – and all Protestantism, a splinter of Catholicism, is sectarian because it is humanist and individualist, based on a humanistic ‘Jesus’ cult, not on the God-man. Neither do they want to be taken over by the Muslim sect – and make no mistake Islam, a splinter of Arianism, is also a sect. This is against a sombre background. In just a few days’ time the Vatican machine is intending to canonize two recent popes, John XXIII and John-Paul II. Both of them represent the protestantising current of modern Catholicism and therefore the canonization of that current. This is the current that denies the Divine, the presence of the sacred. Characteristically, they are being canonized by a Jesuit Pope who venerates the awful mass-murdering Uniat Kuntsevich as a saint and is encouraging Uniat aggression in the Ukraine.

It is now for the Orthodox Churches to reject the personality cults surrounding contemporary and recent philosophers of Orthodox academic ‘theology’ and their associated freemasonry, simony and decadence. It is for the Russian Orthodox Church in particular to show Europe what Church Christianity, and not Christian sects, actually is. For decades Europe has been riding a bicycle in the wrong direction. It is time to stop, turn round and go back to recivilization. If it does not, it will suicidally leap, like a mass of lemmings, into the abyss of its own making.

The Euro-American Revenge against International Orthodoxy

We must create a Slavic State in Central Europe on a strictly Catholic basis so that it can become a bulwark against Orthodox Russia.

Adolf Hitler

The present violent disturbances in Kiev and certain formerly Polish, Galician towns in the Ukrainian wild west come after the refusal of the Ukrainian government to cede to the wishes of the violent pro-Western minority and so make the Ukraine into the next bankrupt EU colony. It is crystal clear that the present carefully-orchestrated riots are the ethnocentric, Western revenge for the choice of freedom of the democratically-elected Ukrainian government and people.

After several carefully-timed ‘visits’ in support of the terrorists (many of them known violent criminals) since last November of various high-ranking EU commissars and US Republican politicians, like so many pagan Roman generals and senators 2,000 years ago, after threats from the US administration and from their puppet EU (the EU was ever a post-1945 US creation) to impose sanctions against the Ukrainian government and in support of the few thousand terrorists (many of them said to be Polish nationals and rumoured to be paid a small fortune (for them) of 30 euros a day by the US administration), after invasion threats to the territorial integrity of the admittedly artificial state of the Ukraine by forces in EU Poland, Hungary and Romania, it is clear that the Ukraine may not survive.

The Ukrainian government itself is desperate to keep the territorial integrity of the mere generation-old Ukraine. It has a softly-softly approach with the terrorists in Kiev and elsewhere, even though their tactics are carefully orchestrated and many of them have been professionally trained and equipped, as can be seen in their techniques of kidnapping women and children. If this were Belfast, Washington or Paris, clearly the riot police and soldiers would by now have shot dozens of them. But even with this approach, it may not be possible for the government to preserve the unity of the fledgling State. Just as other colonial states, like Iraq, Syria and virtually all of Africa, have not been able to survive civil wars ultimately caused by bureaucrats in London or Paris who drew up their straight-lined borders on backs of envelopes decades ago, so too the Ukraine, a Stalinist and Khrushchevite colonial formation, may not survive the present civil strife.

Notably, it now seems almost certain that the Russian centre, the Russian south (called ‘New Russia’), including the already autonomous Russian Crimea, and almost all the purely Russian east will no longer tolerate the activities of eastern Catholics and other schismatics from Galicia. It is quite notable that Catholic priests have been prominent in encouraging the riots in Kiev, and even the Cardinal of New York, Timothy Dolan, has been encouraging them. Many already say that ‘it is all Stalin’s fault’. He should, they say, have left the three pro-Nazi provinces in the far west, known as Galicia, to Poland, as before 1939. These people, Galicians, form the backbone of the ‘Ukrainian’ (actually Polish) emigration in the Western world and many of their descendants now advise the ethnocentric and utterly prejudiced US government. Their departure would leave the other 21 provinces of the Ukraine to freedom outside the pro-German EU – for the jealousy of freedom-loving Greeks, Cypriots, Bulgarians, Romanians, Latvians, Italians, Frenchmen, Irishmen, Britons and many others.

If the six million or so Galicians wish to leave the Ukraine for the bankrupt US-sponsored EU, then this would be much better for the rest. Then the rest of the Ukraine, 85% of it, by far the richest part, would be free to enjoy the benefits of multinational Orthodoxy and the Eurasian Union. As for the small Orthodox minority, they could simply become part of the Russian Orthodox Diaspora, either under the care of the Polish Orthodox Church or else directly under the care of Moscow. The only question would be what to do with Orthodox Transcarpathia, the south-westernmost province of the Ukraine, which has been so persecuted by Ukrainian nationalism since it was detached from Czechoslovakia in 1945, when it was still called Subcarpathian Rus.

It might wish to become an independent country, to be called Ruthenia or Carpatho-Russia, and join the Eurasian Union. It certainly needs protection from present EU and Hungarian imperialism, from which latter it suffered so bitterly before 1919. Its Church, with 600 parishes and a multitude of monasteries, quite big enough to be independent, could easily become a new Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Certainly, this would be in the Trinitarian unity in diversity model of Russian Orthodoxy which founds new Local Churches (unlike the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which has never freely allowed any Church to receive autocephaly and does not share this vision of unity in diversity, but only crushing centralism, like the EU or its predecessor the SU).

It is no coincidence that at the same time as these carefully organised events have been unfolding in limited parts of the Ukraine, persecution has been unfolding against Tartar Orthodox in Tartarstan. Churches have been burned down and the 250,000 Tartar Orthodox are being threatened by organised Islamists, trained and financed abroad, mainly financed from the Western allies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. (How well we all remember how President George Bush protected the Saudi Bin Laden family after the Saudi terrorist attacks of 9/11). Thus, both in East and West, the enemies of Christ are attempting to destroy multinational Orthodoxy (the Church of Russia has 62 different nationalities). What the enemies of Christ want to create – and have in many places already created – by their old technique of dividing and ruling, is a disunited, nationalistic Orthodox world, a series of little, balkanised, mononational churches, which would become mere toothless departments of assorted toothless EU states, for consumers of individualistic pietism and folklore, on the disincarnate, Western Protestant model.

It is clear that in 2014 we are facing a turning point on the road of world history. On the one hand, we have the four nations of the newly-formed Eurasian Union (The Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia) with its originally Orthodox Christian unity in diversity basis and ideal of symphony of Church and State, which is in the forefront of the Spiritual Resistance Movement; on the other hand, we have the anti-Christian US/EU, much imitated by the rest of the world, largely made up of former EU and present-day US colonies, although several decades behind their colonial masters. Therefore, there are today only two choices. What is uncertain is whether this is the end or just the last shock before restoration of the Orthosphere and Orthodox government which is the only thing that now stands between Christ and Antichrist, between the Orthodox Church and her faithful and the militantly atheist Western world. Time will show which way we are going to go.

See: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/01/24/347411/west-targets-russia-by-ukraine-unrest/

A Council?

How well we recall the letter of Fr (now St) Justin (Popovich) of 7 May 1977, ‘On the Summoning of a ‘Great Council’ of the Orthodox Church’. In fact, we still have translations of it in Russian, French and English. In it he stated that there could be no Council of the Orthodox Church because most of the Orthodox Churches were not free and those that were, (he cited the Russian Church Outside Russia, the Church in America and the Japanese Orthodox Church), were not being invited. Instead, the seats were to be filled by a host of titular bishops from the Patriarch of Constantinople and KGB-vetted bishops from, as it was then called, the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’. The Saint’s plea was heard, perhaps not in the courts of men, but by the angels above, and the Council never took place. Now again, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is pushing forward for yet another ‘Pre-Conciliar Meeting’ in March this year and for the Council to take place next year.

It seems to us that although the situation of the Local Churches in Eastern Europe has radically changed since the fall of atheistic Communism, since when freedom has come to them, in other respects little has changed. The Patriarchate of Constantinople has, if anything, even more become a colony of the US Department of State. The latter has misused it ever since they installed their own US Patriarch in 1948 and exiled the legitimate Patriarch Maximos to Switzerland (who said on his ejection ‘The City is lost’) in order to undermine the Russian Orthodox Church by setting up schisms, for example, in France, Finland, Estonia, England and the Ukraine. In no way can there be a formal meeting of the Orthodox Churches, while the Patriarch of Constantinople and its allies are enslaved by the CIA (and also the Turkish government).

The US Administration appears to think that it can deal with the Orthodox Churches as it dealt with the Vatican, which accepted US Protestantisation in its Second Council fifty years ago and then saw imposed on it an anti-Communist Polish Pope for the 1980s Reaganite Crusade against Communism. Significantly, Roman Catholic sources, like the papist AsiaNews, are pushing Constantinople to arrange this so-called Council so that it will become a modernist Orthodox (therefore pseudo-Orthodox) Second Vatican Council. This would make the Orthodox Church into a mere Uniat department of the Vatican and, in that way, of the US Department of State. This is not going to happen. (In any case a meeting of bishops is not a Council; to become a Council the meeting must first be ‘received’ by clergy, monks and people; paradoxically, Church Orthodox Christians are a lot more democratic than the Non-Church Protestants and Roman Catholics, and always have been).

Thus, the attempts by Constantinople to make the recently set up Regional Inter-Orthodox (called ‘Pan-Orthodox’ by enemies of the Tradition) Assemblies of Bishops in the Diaspora into bridgeheads for their conquest of the Diaspora have failed miserably. Thus, for North and Central America, Archbishop Kyrill of San Francisco has eloquently voiced the opposition of all free Orthodox to such attempts (http://www.synod.com/synod/eng2014/ 20140115_ensynodletterarchbpdemetrios.html). Indeed, in some places the Assemblies have virtually closed ‘for lack of things to talk about’. Much more than this, the agenda proposed for a future Inter-Orthodox Meeting (illogically called a ‘Council’) is looking increasingly tired, a leftover washed up from 1960s liberalism, denounced at the time, even more so now. Let us remind ourselves what the ten items on the agenda are – or were: The Orthodox diaspora; The granting of autocephaly; The granting of autonomy; The diptychs; The Church calendar; Marriage; Fasting; Relations with Heterodox; Ecumenism; Peace, Brotherhood and Freedom. (See our article of several years ago: http://orthodoxengland. org.uk/panorth.htm).

The last six questions are absurd, because the canons are clear and of course unchangeable; the tenth is in particular a piece of masonic nonsense from the 1960s. As regards the fourth issue, the diptychs, if people want to argue about what place they should have on an irrelevant, artificial and anachronistic list, then we say they should first read Mark 10, 37-45. In fact, only the first three issues are discussable – and there will be no agreement on them because they have already been discussed, and with Constantinople in the pocket of the US State Department, a former senior representative of which (Brzezinski) has already declared that the Russian Orthodox Church is its greatest enemy, what point is there in discussing them?

Thirty-three years ago a saint prophetically wrote: ‘Should this Council, God forbid, actually come to pass, only one sort of result can be expected from it: schisms, heresies and the loss of many souls. Considering the question from the point of view of the apostolic, patristic and historical experience of the Church, such a Council will, instead of healing, open only up new wounds in the body of the Church and inflict on Her new difficulties and new misfortunes’. We will not contradict the voice of a Saint.

Words not Actions

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/smi/66203.htm

Today’s announcement of the opinion of Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokalamsk that the Orthodox Church and Roman Catholicism are not rivals but allies is to be welcomed. Certainly, embattled Roman Catholicism in the Western world desperately needs the support of the Russian Orthodox Church in the fight against Westernisation and so DeChristianisation. It does indeed therefore need to become an ally of the Orthodox Church instead of trying to destroy us, as it does throughout Eastern Europe and in the Middle East.

It is clear that as long as there exists a single Uniat (Greek Catholic), Roman Catholicism views the Orthodox Church as a rival, not as an ally, even to the point of supporting virulent atheism against the Russian Orthodox Church, as in the 1920s Soviet Union. We look forward to the day when the present Pope Francis announces the ending of the disastrous Uniat experiment and proselytisation which has poisoned relations between Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Church for centuries. If you wish to become Roman Catholic, so joining a secularised and compromised form of the Orthodox Church, that is up to you. But Uniatism, the pretence of Orthodoxy, is simply dishonest and against all Christian sense of morality. After this has happened, we will welcome him as a penitent pilgrim to Holy Russia.

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/news/66232.htm

Today’s announcement from Constantinople that Patriarch Bartholomew has nothing to do with freemasons is also to be welcomed. This is the first denial of the rumours that have been so widespread about him for decades.

Unfortunately, it does not explain why there are so many clergy and laity freemasons in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, who unrepentently persecute us non-masons, and why yesterday Patriarch Bartholomew asked that Orthodox who wish to see the Church freed from the heresy of ecumenism change their minds.