Category Archives: Rome

Q and A Spring 2026

We do not want to go to Rome, Constantinople or Moscow, we want to go to Heaven! We want Archpastors, not Archpoliticians!

The Nature of the Church and its Governance

Q: With the schism between Greeks and Russians, some say that the Orthodox Church does not exist. What would you say?

A: Of course, it does not exist and never has done. But this is nothing to do with the current political dispute, created by the CIA. The words ‘the Orthodox Church’ are abstract, but the principle of the Church is concrete, it is the Incarnation. The Church it is not an abstract idea, as in the minds of Protestants, it is real in places. Concretely, we think of the real Local Orthodox Churches, of Orthodox Christianity, of the Orthodox Faith. Such was the situation in the New Testament, with the Local Churches in Corinth, Ephesus, Colossae, Philippi, Galatia, Thessaloniki, Rome. Today there are sixteen Local Churches, double the number 150 years ago. In 150 years’ time, that number may well double again to 32 Local Churches, in any case reaching at least 24. What is One and creates Unity is the Orthodox Faith, shared by all the Local Churches.

Q: Can the Church be corrupt?

A: If you see ‘The Church’ as a group of upper middle-class Anglican bishops appointed by an atheist or Hindu Prime Minister, as I think you do, then it is corrupt. However, that is not the Church, that is a mere human organisation, founded by a corrupt and evil King out of lust and some of whose properties were ‘privatised’ and handed out to his cronies, and which is run by accountants. In reality, the Church is the Body of Christ (in the words of the Apostle Paul), and it is run by the Holy Spirit. This can be seen clearly in the case of the Church in heaven.

As for the Church on earth, I think it can be likened to a huge Ship, carrying to Paradise those who sail in it, the captain, the navigator, the senior officers, mechanics, cooks, waiters, cleaners, plumbers, doctors, as well as the very many passengers, who are baptised. Some of these help the crew greatly, some do not, in fact they hinder. Sometimes some passengers decide to leave the Ship on lifeboats, which get lost or sink, others follow in the wake for a time and some from them get back on. Some passengers jump off, others come in new boats and climb on board. If the latest captain is bad, so what? Sooner or later the Owner of the Ship will come and change course, appointing a new captain. In the end, all are only passengers, who follow the Owner.

Q: Is the Church hierarchical or congregational?

A: If you are Roman Catholic, especially a traditionalist, then it is hierarchical. If you are Protestant, then it is congregational. If you are a normal Orthodox Christian, it is both. However, if you are some sort of old calendarist / ROCOR convert and you dream of dressing in clerical or monastic garments and hats and having a long beard or, if a woman, of dressing as a nun, then it is hierarchical. And if you are a liberal modernist, then it is congregational and you ignore and despise bishops.

Q: What happens in a Church if there is a shortage of suitable candidates for the episcopate?

A: We recently had the visit of a Romanian bishop. He told us how he and the Metropolitan are the only bishops in the Metropolia of Iasi of over 1,200 parishes. The Metropolia is in fact run by 15 deans, married priests. This system of delegation works very well. And that is in a Local Church which has a lot of active monasteries.

I remember in Moscow in 2007 being told that the Russian Church had 2,000 candidates to be bishops. This was quite untrue. They had in reality 2,000 single men who had an interest in a career in the Church. In fact, over 300 of the 2,000 became bishops. The results have been catastrophic and many have already had to be defrocked; many others will be. Single men with an interest in the Church do not make bishops! When will this common sense fact be understood in Moscow and Constantinople?

If there is a shortage of good bishops, then delegate! Thus, in the Russian Church exhausted bishops rush around at the end of Lent and in Holy Week doing long unction services, whereas in the Romanian Church priests can do unction services every month, if they wish. Such things are delegated. Only ordinations are not delegated.

Q: What sorts of bishop are there in your experience?

A: There are the real bishops, who are shepherds and love their flock, who loves them: St Spyridon, St Nicholas, St Nectarios, St John of Shanghai. The rest are lovers of themselves – administrators, narcissists, intellectuals, careerists, thieves, sadists, bullies, sexually disturbed homosexuals, pedophiles and psychopaths.

Q: What is more important, frequent confession or frequent communion?

A: Both. There should be frequent communion and confession, together with frequent prayer, the prayer of the heart and prayer from the prayerbook. This is different from the heterodox world, which has only frequent communion.

Q: Ever since the incidents in Amsterdam in 2022, the Russian Church has been known as ‘the Persecuting Church’ and lost most of its credit. How did a Persecuted Church become a Persecuting Church?

A: Persecution certainly was not present until 2008, when Patriarch Alexis was there. Then tens of millions of newly baptised and sometimes very zealous people and clergy worked enthusiastically hand in hand to rebuild the Church. The change came afterwards, with the spirit of centralisation (an old Soviet hangover), Papalisation (all those visits to the Vatican were a sign of this), bureaucratisation (the paperwork which was suddenly demanded by the Centre and detested by the priests), the military-style clericalisation (literal uniformity in dress, but also in political opinions), the closeness to the State and the Armed Forces, ‘blessing’ tanks, bombs and guns, and the insistence on rigid discipline, ritualisation and the use of archaic and little understood Slavonic.

All I can say is that the Persecuting Church developed in a process between 2008 and 2022. Let us take the mid-point of 2015 as a symbolic date for its appearance. And the essential reason for all this is that by then State politics, raison d’etat, had been put above pastoral love and above the support for Orthodox teaching. Schism followed. Schism always follows politics, that is why we speak of party (part) politics.

Q: Has your parish ever produced a monk?

A: Yes, we had one. However, he went to a monastery in the USA, where he was ‘touched up’ by a monk. He fled and came to complain to the bishop here, who had already turned down the offer of a free monastery, which had involved me in a lot of hard, but wasted, work. That bishop in turn made homosexual advances to the monk. The result was that the monk fled from him too. Later, others fled.

Q: Where do you think ROCOR is heading today?

A: In 2007 it had the opportunity of bringing its liturgical and ascetic heritage to help in renewing the life of the ex-Soviet Russian Church and the Local Churches in the Diaspora, as the late Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) insightfully urged. Instead of making a positive contribution, however, ROCOR gradually began developing into a negative exclusive sect and cult, especially after 2017.

Having only a very small ethnic flock, it began recruiting crazies. The rest, as they say, is history. Therefore, today its American Synod is already in schism from most Local Churches, for which it has expressed hatred, not love. After its recent meeting at its former US church in Munich, donated to it by the CIA, I fear it may turn altogether into a Californian homosexual and pedophile sect. See: https://www.bing.com/search?q=pokrovtruth+fr+seraphim&FORM=PVSBDF&PC=PV02

The Undivided World and the Zionist World

Q: How did the Western world come to dominate the rest of the world until quite recently?

A: This is the question raised, but only vaguely answered, by the great Roman Catholic cultural historian and philosopher, Christopher Dawson (+ 1970), the English Berdyayev, in such books as Religion and the Rise of Western Culture. Here he writes that Western supremacy comes from a restless spirit, a spiritual energy, ‘a spirit that strives to change the world’. In Orthodoxy, we know what that spirit is; as a Catholic, he did not.

Before the eleventh century there was a multipolar world, as the Pentarchy of five Patriarchates was, which was not dominated by any one centre. We can see this in the life of the saintly English King Alfred the Great, who visited Europe, sent alms to Jerusalem, which he never, quite unthinkably, tried to seize from the Muslims. He also sent alms to India and despatched a mission to explore the countries around the White Sea.

Multipolarity is a sign of diversity and of unity in diversity, the sign of the Holy Trinity. The late historian Robert Moore describes in detail how from the early eleventh century on, any diversity was persecuted, in his The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250.

Multipolarity was gradually destroyed by what we can call Zionism or Universalism. The First West, the West of the first millennium, was pre-Zionist, that is, diverse. The symbol and reality of this Zionism is the filioque. That heresy, adopted in the late eighth century as an imperial ideology in what is now western Germany and spread slowly until it was promulgated in Rome in 1014, is anti-Trinitarian. It dePersonalises the Trinity, making the Father and the Son into One and the Holy Spirit the mere link between them (as portrayed in many a heretical icon). This is why the Church insists on the Holy Trinity.

To the Vatican it was rather irrelevant, as the Unitarian Head of their ‘Church’ is the Pope of Rome, whom all must obey. Protestant Unitarians are like freemasons, who believe in One Architect-God. Thus, Western Europe moved away from the ascetic and grace-filled towards the legal and the moral, as seen, for instance, in Roman Catholic ‘days of obligation’ and Protestant puritanism.

Q: What is Zionism, in theological terms?

A: Zionism means universalism that is, globalism, the movement towards One World Dictatorship, homogeneity, unity without diversity, overseen by oligarchs. These think they are infallible, superior to those whom they consider to be lesser human-beings. Trotskyism is a classic example. Today’s extraterrestrial (or is that demonic?) ‘Muskism’ is another. Zionism can only exist outside the Holy Trinity, which is the principle of unity in diversity.

Here it is important to state that Zionism is by no means necessarily Jewish. By far the majority of Zionists are not Jews. Indeed, a great many Jews are anti-Zionists. For example, the last Non-Zionist US presidents were Eisenhower and Kennedy, that is, over sixty years ago. Since then, all US presidents have been Zionists, whether Democrat or Republican, but none has been a Jew. One of the greatest British Zionists was the psychopathic Churchill – he had no Jewish blood, despite what absurd conspiracy theories claim. His ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, was also a Zionist. Other British Zionists include Cromwell, Rhodes, Thatcher and Blair, among many others.

Moreover, even among Jewish Zionists, there is huge variety of individuals, of left and right and nothing at all, for example, Rothschild and Marx, Trotsky and Zuckerberg, Freud and Spielberg, Sarkozy and Zelensky, in the UK Maxwell, Mandelson, Starmer (by his wife), Straw, the Milibands and Polanski, Milei in Argentina, or in the USA, Epstein, Witkoff, Kushner and Cohen (Trump’s mentor and friends).

Some homosexual politicians are also Zionists, for example, Mandelson (and many other Blairites such as N. Brown and Streeting), Lord Ali, the Dutch Rutte, several in the US-run Baltic States, and the US Bessent, Graham and many others.

Some pedophiles are also Zionists and are very active in the media, for example in the gagging-ordered, heavily censored (‘editorially controlled’) BBC. This perhaps should be called the ABCC (the Anti-British Broadcasting Corporation), as it appears to be controlled by Zionist journalists and pedophiles too numerous to name here, for Savile, Harris and Edwards are only the tip of the iceberg.

Today parts of the USA appear to be ruled by Zionist oligarchs and perverts, the so-called Epstein class, the majority of whom are not Jewish, but who are globalists. They run the banks, the oil corporations, Silicon Valley, the nuclear-armed military, Wall Street, Hollywood, the PR industry, the legacy media, the social media and pseudo-academia. They operate by sanctions and tariffs, instead of by encouragement and development. To drain the US swamp and not to be sucked into it must be very difficult.

Contemporary Wars

Q: Would you say that the wars in the Ukraine and Iran form one single World War?

A: Yes, but it must be understood that this World War is not only a military War and that it began decades ago. Indeed, for 35 years, since 1991, the West has been embarked on a war against the world, which has been composed of a series of campaigns to promote a ‘forever’ war in several phases, both military and social. This began in Iraq and Serbia, spread to Afghanistan, created the chaos in Libya and Syria, included the campaign against the anti-globalist Brexit, the social engineering attempts to enforce the manmade climate change and net zero myths and to poison the weak and elderly with manmade covid, and then the new phases of this one single war, in the Ukraine and Iran.

Is Today’s Rome Washington or Moscow?

Q: The US Secretary for War, Hegseth, has on his chest a tattoo in the form of a red cross, surrounded by four smaller crosses. It looks Orthodox. Is it?

A: No. This US Secretary for War wears the crusader cross. He has, after all, like the crusaders, tried to destroyed to invade West Asia and Eastern Europe. These crusades have since 1096 become worldwide. Thus, President Bush also launched a ‘crusade’ against Iraq, as he publicly declared, and that is why the current US Secretary of War wears a crusader cross tattoo. He follows a very long history.

It is all logical. Just as the Papacy used excommunications and indulgences, so his successors, the US President in his Capitol and the EU Commissars, use sanctions and tariffs. However, those ‘infallible’ and ‘exceptional’ Fascist crusaders, who are above the law, not only cannot win in the Ukraine against a Superpower like Russia, they cannot even win against a regional power like Iran. Washington is not Rome.

Q: Is Moscow the Third Rome?

A: When Archbishop Nikitas was at last appointed Archbishop of the Greek Thyateira Archdiocese in Great Britain in 2019, in order to save a Greek ethnic group from rapidly dying out, he gave a radio interview to the Spectator. In this he stated that the Moscow the Third Rome idea is absurd, that there is no Third Rome, only a First and Second Rome! In other words, he was only a mouthpiece for Phanariot ideology. As one very senior and outspoken (in private) Greek cleric from the Patriarchate of Constantinople said to me of his own Patriarch last year: ‘We are waiting for the toilet to flush’. His words, not mine.

Rome, First, Second or Third, are all an absurd and fatal distraction, worse still, a delusion and those who believe in it are delusional, whether in Washington or Moscow. We want Jerusalem, not Rome. Romes are the downfall of the Church. We do not want to go to some Rome, we want to go to Heaven. We want Archpastors, not Archpoliticians. The so-called First, Second and Third Romes are irrelevant in Church life, as they all fell, in 1054, 1453 and 1917 respectively. Why keep harping on about the fallen and disappeared past? Neither Moscow, nor Constantinople, nor Rome are of any importance or help now, as we face, potentially, the end of the world.

Hatred of Russia

Q: Why do so many politicians hate Russia, but not other Orthodox countries like Romania, Greece, Bulgaria? King Charles, for example, loves Romania, and owns properties there, tourists love Greece, yet many hate Russia.

A: The elite of the Western world hates Russia and not other Orthodox countries, because the latter are small, poor and weak, unlike Russia, which is vast, rich and powerful. In other words, it is all about jealousy and greed for resources.

The British elite especially hates Russia, because in October 1917 Russian-language, Marxist ideologues overthrew the masonic MI6 regime imposed on Russia by the British between December 1916 and October 1917. This is why they made up the Litvinenko, Salisbury and now El Money cases as cheap propaganda. In the same way, the American elite hates Cuba and Iran, because they are the only ones who successfully overthrew CIA-imposed regimes.

As regards British Russophobia, see in greater detail: The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain from 1815 to 1841: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion by John Howes Gleason, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, London Oxford University Press 1950.

President Putin

Q: President Putin seems to be very cold. Do you think he is?

A: I have only been able to observe him one in real life, in 2007, but I think his apparent coldness is because he is probably autistic, that is, he is someone who is brilliant at systems, but perhaps lacks people skills. He is an ultra-cautious diplomat and lawyer, who does everything by the book. He has an excellent memory and is brilliant at chess and German, but he presents a very blurred image of Russia.

Nobody quite knows where he stands. He used to be a devout Westerner, a protégé of Yeltsin, who wanted to join NATO. He has acknowledged publicly his many mistakes of naivety after 2014. Many blame him for the Ukrainian situation and not acting then, which would have been far less destructive of life and property. His present indecisive diplomacy is frustrating to some and makes him seem weak and naïve. As a result, he has led Russia into full-blown nationalism. Neither his previous Westernism, nor his present nationalism are Orthodox. We are still obliged to wait for Russia to move out of both these deviations, Westernism and nationalism, towards Christ.

Q: Who could replace Putin in this year’s Russian elections?

A: The elections in Russia next September are Parliamentary elections, not Presidential. President Putin will stay. But the influence of the former Westerner and now strong Russian nationalist Medvedev may become a lot stronger. Rightly or wrongly, he is seen as strong and decisive. Others have unflattering views about him. We shall see.

Personal

Q: Do you hope to live a long life?

A: I hope so, as there is still so much to do, or so it seems to me, but what I hope is completely irrelevant. God decides. Perhaps tomorrow I will be gone! As Chaucer wrote: The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

 

 

How Will the Greco-Russian Church Civil War End?

All wars end in peace. Sometimes peace comes through compromises and ceasefires (the Korean War), sometimes through the total victory of one side and the unconditional surrender of the other (the Vietnam War). The present Civil War between Constantinople and Moscow, the rivalry between the ‘Second Rome’ and the ‘Third Rome’ for control of the Church, began long ago. This rivalry is purely political, as no part of the Church controls the whole. The Church consists of diverse parts and has never been controlled by one local part.

True, the First Rome, in what is now called Italy and which inherited from the pagan Roman Empire the obsessive desire to dominate all others, tried to control all. This only ended up in the self-justifying filioque heresy, which claimed that the Pope of Rome, and not Christ, is the Head of the Church and he has total control of the Holy Spirit. This heresy came to be called Roman Catholicism. Originally it affected only a small and backward part of Christendom, mainly newly-converted, post-Roman peoples and Germanic and Celtic tribes.

The First Rome, with its militarily conquered subject peoples, from Sicily to England, finally separated itself from the Church in the eleventh century. The First Rome was already notorious for carrying out bloody wars, conquests, persecutions, indulgences, tortures and inquisitions in its attempts to impose itself. Later, however, in the sixteenth century, it itself split into many parts, with most of the Germanic peoples revolting against its Latin Yoke. The Latin Roman Catholics became far more numerous only through the crimes of the Western colonisation of Latin America, Black Africa and parts of Asia like the Philippines much later.

It was this same will to dominate that had already tormented the Second Rome and in part led to the fifth-century nationalistic splits from it of Nestorians and Miaphysites, the latter group existing to this day in Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Armenia and parts of Syria. As for the Third Rome, its will to dominate resulted in the disastrous, seventeenth-century ‘Old Ritualist’ schism, created by the enforcement of new rituals by the Russian State. As a result, the Russian word for schism (‘raskol’) came to have the purely political connotations of treason to the State.

Both those in the Second and the Third Rome who want to dominate the rest of the Church today have been much influenced by the millennial example of the First Rome, which they often visit. The temptations to obtain more power and more wealth are very great among some. This will for centralisation, whether of the First, Second or Third Romes, is purely secular. What is the Church perspective? The Church view is made clear from the New Testament. This is of independent Local Churches in different places, which share the same Faith.

Thus, at that time none of the seven Local Churches of Corinth, Ephesus, Colossae, Philippi, Galatia, Thessaloniki and Rome ever tried to dominate any other or even tried to impose something on another. This continues to be the overall situation in the (Orthodox) Church, where 16 Local Churches, now not covering cities, but countries or peoples, continue to exist. They are tied together by the same Faith; the current separation of a few of the sixteen is only because of political rivalry. This unity of Faith, in all places and at all times, is known as ‘Catholicity’.

Catholicity is quite different from ‘Catholicism’. The latter, by definition an ‘ism’ or ideology, denotes the attempt by one to dominate all others. Once Constantinople and Moscow are depoliticised and they rid themselves of their Imperialist pretensions (= the will to dominate and impose), that is, once they have been ‘dePapalised’, then Catholicity will return through the gathering of all at an inclusive, politically free Church Council, which will be free to set its own agenda. For Church Councils are where Catholicity, the Unity of the Faith in Diversity, is expressed.

In concrete terms, this means that Constantinople must give up its claims to traditional Russian Church territory (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, the Ukraine etc) and that in turn Moscow must give up its claim to traditional Greek Church territory (Africa). In order to avoid humiliation for both, the clear way forward is to grant these territories Autocephaly, tcreating new and neutral Autocephalous Churches. Only then can serious discussions begin on joint Autocephaly being granted to areas where mixed Orthodox have lived in numbers for generations.

This means new Autocephalous Churches in Western Europe, Northern America (95% English-speaking), Latin America and the Caribbean, and Oceania. These Churches can only be formed by all the Autocephalous Churches which have populations there, not simply the Greek and Russian, whose populations in those Continents are often only a small minority. In Western Europe, the majority belongs to the Romanian Church, in Northern America and Oceania perhaps to Constantinople, in Latin America and the Caribbean probably to Antioch.

 

The End of the Second Western Empire and the Road from Damascus: The Just Shall Live by His Faith and the Prophecies of Habbakuk

The First Western Empire lasted just over 500 years, from 27 BC in Rome to 476 AD in Rome (there was no year zero). Its successor, the Second Western Empire, lasted twice as long, 1,000 years, from 1014 with the proclamation of the filioque in Rome to 2014 with, in effect, the proclamation of the filioque in Kiev. This Second and Last Empire was much weakened by tribal rivalries between the nine phases of the Western Empire in Europe. These were between the ‘Holy Roman’, Northern Italian (Venice, Genoa, Florence), Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British, German and Soviet phases. Their rival jostling for leadership of the Empire led to two suicidal European (World) Wars and to the final and tenth phase of the Western Empire, its American phase.

The First Western Empire fell and now the Second is falling. The parallels are obvious. The First Empire fell to ‘barbarians’, but who were less barbarian than Rome. The First Western Empire fell because the Romans who lived on its periphery sided with the converted ‘barbarians’, realising that Rome was the barbarian. Today the Second Western Empire is falling to Non-Westerners, not least of whom are the Russians, who today are converted, more European than the Europeans. The Non-Westerners, ‘the Rest’, form the Sovereign World, whose struggle for multipolarity is the struggle for justice and prosperity. The Western Empire can only respond by convincing countries to commit suicide, as in the Ukraine, Georgia and all of the EU, starting with Nordstream Germany.

The upshot of the First European War was the British-operated regime change in the Russian empire at the end of 1916, which backfired disastrously into the Soviet quagmire. The result of the Second European War was American intervention (it had already taken place in the First European War, as soon as the British had overthrown their Russian rivals) and American leadership of the Western Empire from 1945 on. Now the Americans always promoted gangsters and terrorists to head their imperial client-states. Thus, after reaching an apogee at the turn of the millennium, they declined rapidly. This always happens, as the method used contains the seeds of its own destruction (1). ‘Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind’. So now all is backfiring into the Syrian quagmire of beheadings.

The artificial, post-Ottoman countries of West Asia, designed by the divide and rule British (and French) after the First World War and held together by brutal dictators (only such could hold artificial countries together), are crumbling. Iraq, Libya and Syria. Who is next? The Jordan? Lebanon? Egypt? Syria is a trap for the Western Empire. It was only a pawn between the West and the Rest. Far more important pieces on the Western side of the chessboard can now be taken by the Rest. The Western Empire is today like a cornered, wounded and snarling beast. Cornered because it has painted itself into a corner; wounded because it has lost all its wars, from Korea to the Ukraine; snarling because it has humiliated itself in defeats and because liberation from the West for all Afro-Eurasia is here.

Thus, the Second Western Empire started collapsing immediately after reaching its apogee, the criminal ascent to which contained the seeds of its own destruction. This destruction is the result of unscrupulous imperial overreach, just like that in the First Western Empire 1600 years before. This most recent stage in the collapse began with the fall of the Soviet phase of the Empire at the end of 1991, exactly three generations after the end of the Russian Imperial phase in 1916. That Soviet phase was only the short-lived, dissident last European phase of the Western Empire, patterned by successive phases. Everything is now in motion, the outposts of the Western Empire are falling one by one. We are now on the Road from Damascus – the Road towards Jerusalem.

Despite its dissidence which came from its Western Marxist ideology, the Soviet phase of the Western Empire still shared in the same basic immoral materialistic ideology as all the others. This explains why the fall of the Soviet empire was not the end of a process, as some deluded people like Fukuyama thought, but the beginning of a process, that of the final phase and fall of the Western Empire. The fall of the Soviet empire merely presaged the fall of the American empire a generation later. (Both the Soviet Union and America were former European colonies which overtook the eight heartland phases of the Western Empire). Now we are at ‘the end of history’, that is, at the end of Western history, the result of the imperial overreach in the regime change operation in Kiev in 2014.

And so world history is beginning again after its millennial Western Imperial interruption. Each country of the world, big or small, is now reclaiming and returning to its roots, restoring its sovereignty, identity, nationhood and traditions. The future is not Imperial, but Multipolar, which means it is composed of the co-operation of many centres and of the collaboration of the Nations. From Russia to China, from India to Iran, from Africa to Latin America, from Vietnam to Polynesia, we no longer see the attempt by one Nation to subjugate others to its imperial supremacy and domination, so forming an Empire, instead we see anti-imperial Sovereignties. We have come to the time of the prophecies of Habbakuk (Avvakum), beginning in Chapter 1, Verse 5:

Chapter 1, 2 O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!

3 Why dost thou show me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance? for spoiling and violence are before me: and there are that raise up strife and contention.

4 Therefore the law is slacked, and judgement never goes forth: for the wicked compasses about the righteous; therefore wrong judgment proceeds.

5 Behold among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvellously: for I will work a work in your days, which you will not believe, though it be told to you.

6 For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, which shall march through the breadth of the land, to possess the dwelling places that are not theirs.

7 They are terrible and dreadful: their judgment and their dignity shall proceed of themselves.

8 Their horses also are swifter than the leopards, and are fiercer than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as the eagle that hastens to eat.

9 They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand.

10 And they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them: they shall deride every stronghold; for they shall heap dust, and take it.

12 Art thou not from everlasting, O LORD my God, mine Holy One? We shall not die. O LORD, thou hast ordained them for judgment; and, O mighty God, thou hast established them for correction.

Chapter 2, 2 And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he that reads it may run.

3 For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.

4 Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith.

8 Because thou hast spoiled many nations, all the remnant of the people shall spoil thee; because of men’s blood, and for the violence of the land, of the city, and of all that dwell therein.

10 Thou hast consulted shame to thy house by cutting off many people, and hast sinned against thy soul.

12 Woe to him that builds a town with blood, and establishes a city by iniquity!

14 For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

17 For the violence of Lebanon shall cover thee, and the spoil of beasts, which made them afraid, because of men’s blood, and for the violence of the land, of the city, and of all that dwell therein.

Chapter 3, 2 O LORD, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy.

4 And his brightness was as the light; he had horns coming out of his hand: and there was the hiding of his power.

5 Before him went the pestilence, and burning coals went forth at his feet.

6 He stood, and measured the earth: he beheld, and drove asunder the nations; and the everlasting mountains were scattered, the perpetual hills did bow: his ways are everlasting.

12 Thou didst march through the land in indignation, thou didst thresh the heathen in anger.

13 Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, even for salvation with thine anointed; thou woundedst the head out of the house of the wicked, by discovering the foundation unto the neck.

15 Thou didst walk through the sea with thine horses, through the heap of great waters.

16 When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice: rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble: when he comes up unto the people, he will invade them with his troops.

 

Note:

  1. This ‘bully, sanction and bomb’ policy is the case even of an American bishop sent abroad to assemble all the worst elements in his tiny church, fanatics and careerists, in order to seize power, ‘bullying, sanctioning and bombing’ and so expelling all the honest when challenged. This is exactly the same American technique containing exactly the same seeds of destruction.

What Does it Need to Found a Local Church in the Diaspora?

The Orthodox Diasporas in the Western world have so far given birth to only one new, albeit compromised, Local Church. This is the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), founded over 50 years ago. Much disputed by others, it has unfortunately been a failure – the vast majority of Orthodox who live in Northern America have not joined it and do not wish to. It has not united Orthodox. However, it must be said, it has been a bold failure and its failure is hardly a matter for rejoicing. It was bold because elsewhere founding a new Local Church has not even been tried. We should learn from the OCA’s strengths as well as from its weaknesses.

True, in England, there was in the 1970s an attempt not to build a multinational Local Church, but a multinational or, at that time, trinational, chapel. This was in Oxford and involved émigré Russian (and English) academics, Greeks and Serbs. It was never going to work. The Serbs never took part, apart from a certain rather effeminate bishop who was then ‘disappeared’. It was set up in a tiny, octagonal, Methodist-looking chapel, not at all traditional on the outside. Then the ‘Russians’ left it through ejection and miraculously managed to set up their own English-language chapel elsewhere.

It left Greeks and a tiny number of ex-Anglican, pseudo-Russian Bloomite elitists in their Methodist-looking chapel. Now that large numbers of new Romanian immigrants have set up their own church in Oxford, the whole experiment is best forgotten. The Oxford chapel represents not even 10% of local Orthodox, rather like the OCA representation in Northern America. Why these failures? It is always ideologies that destroy the unity required for a Local Church, because ideologies are always by definition exclusive.

For example, new calendarism (one of the great failings of the OCA) and old calendarism (one of the great failings of the new 2020s ROCOR sect) are ideological enemies, as are political and nationalist ideologies, like those of the Greek nationalist Second Rome and the Russian nationalist Third Rome. Neither of them ever learned from the failure of the First Rome with its equally nationalist ‘Roman Catholicism’ (a contradiction in terms). All of these isms operate against and are destructive of any multinational Church, for any Diaspora Church must by definition be multinational, not nationalist. Only the concept of a Second Jerusalem can be successful. This, for example, was where the Russian Church failed, and three times over. Thus:

In Russian émigré Paris, French liberal intellectualism, imported back from Saint Petersburg, did nothing for the Paris Russians and as a result their jurisdiction became very small because exclusive. But at least, small, they were not corrupted by money, like the other two.

In the émigré ‘Russian Orthodox’ Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the substitution of the subtle moderation of Russian émigré Orthodoxy for the very unsubtle extremism of US convert Orthodoxy. Well-financed Lutheran fanaticism was substituted for real Christianity. That is spiritual suicide, for no-one apart from crazy and uncharitable converts is interested.

The Moscow Patriarchate itself has been badly served both by Soviet nationalism and the corrupting riches of the post-Soviet episcopate together with their sexual perversions, as we can see at this very moment. But what has been rumoured for years in Moscow and elsewhere, is only the tip of the iceberg. The MP and ROCOR have to be cleansed. An antique-filled seaside cottage (cottage, not the antique-filled Victorian house, that is another story) on the south coast of England (in the nineteenth century gay Anglican bishops would also ‘resort’ to south-coast Brighton) is not the solution.

In England, we Orthodox will be neither pro-Soviet, nor pro-American, but faithful to local realities. You can only build a Local Church, if you want it and believe in it.

 

What Went Wrong with the Russian Church?

After fifty years of faithfulness to the Russian Church, that Church literally abandoned us, just as in the last three years it has abandoned so many tens of millions of other Orthodox, who were also once part of its jurisdiction. Thus, today we live in the very kind, generous and homely Romanian Church, awaiting the day of the restoration of freedom in the Russian Church. Then it can come out of its self-imposed isolation and take part in the fullness of catholic life and the concert of all the Local Orthodox Churches once more. Why did it abandon us?

The short answer is that in the thirty years after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 the Russian Church turned from a persecuted Church into a persecuting Church. It is the same old sordid story from Church history (read for example the life of St John Chrysostom or of St Martin of Tours, who lived at the same time), the story of how persecution and poverty were supplanted by power and money. This meant the same old inevitable financial and moral corruption, that is, the theft of the people’s assets and homosexualisation. And all this is displayed in a sheer lack of love, which is a scandal in the Church. It means that millions of Russian Orthodox are now boycotting their Church administration, whom they rightly see as politicians and not pastors, wolves in shepherds’ clothing.

Although, I had been well aware of many stories from the Church inside Russia from the early 2000s onwards, I first saw it there with my own eyes quite obviously in 2012. (Several times over the following years I was to see exactly the same thing in the Ukraine and again in Russia in 2018). For example, as one of many experiences I could quote, as part of an official delegation we visited a bishop’s palace (yes, palace) in provincial Russia. It was like a five-star hotel and the tables were groaning with luxurious food. There were about 20 of us. There was enough food for 200. What sort of monasticism was this? Why was the food not given to the poor? In general, the whole trip, including a flight on a private jet from Moscow to Saint Petersburg and gifts of an expensive Swiss watch to everyone, was an experience of luxury that you only usually see in films.

I was astonished and also very disappointed. Holy Rus? There had been far more Holy Rus in the poverty and persecution of the very modest émigré Church. I have always belonged to the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, where he spent 13 years before being sent to the USA for the last three years of his life, where his fellow-bishops suspended him, put him on trial and basically martyred him. St John’s is the only Russian Church we will ever know. We are Non-Possessors, not effeminate and wealthy semi-Catholics who make of the Church just another State bureaucracy and lord it over clergy and people alike.

But there was far worse than that. The delegation I was part of was composed, except for me, of American-Russians and the Americanised who were impressed (!) by the decadence of bishops, who were in fact mini-oligarchs. I did not at first realise to what extent they were impressed. I could not have believed that they would actually want to imitate their decadence! But gradually between 2012 and 2020 I saw it with my own eyes, as this decadence spread to the Church outside Russia. However, those outside Russia were not corrupted by Moscow, instead they corrupted themselves, quite freely and voluntarily.

Instead of siding with the faithful poor of Russia, clergy and people alike, who sided with the Martyrs and Confessors and those who followed in the footsteps of St John of Shanghai, they freely chose to side with the corrupted and homosexualised in Moscow and their imperialist cruelty. We remained the same; they did not, and from the Church of St John, whom they had crucified, they turned into the Nasty Church. This is composed of those who hate everyone else outside their sad and ever smaller nationalist and schismatic ghetto. How sorrowful. They betrayed St John and all the Saints.

But there was far worse even than that. With this decadence in the leadership of the Church inside Russia, with power and money gone to the heads of certain leaders, inevitably an explosion took place: a terrible civil war which divided the Church and the people of Rus’. For when there is no repentance, there always follows a crisis, the Greek word for judgement. God is not mocked. 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers are dead, 60,000 dead among Russians and allies, militias from the Donbass, Chechens, Uzbeks and others. Millions have been wounded, either physically or else mentally. The majority are nominally Orthodox. This dreadful war is the chastisement and retribution for a nominal Church. It has been judged and it has been found wanting.

The reform of the governance of the Russian Church is now inevitable, as that governance, fallen into politics and militaristic nationalism, has shown itself incapable of being multinational. It is inadequate for the multinational Russian Federation, which is also the leading nation in the multinational BRICS. Regardless of the imminent Russian victory against the USA and its NATO vassals and their decadent and corrupted Constantinople thugs in the Ukraine, the cleansing of the Russian Church from corruption is to follow. Just as President Putin, strengthened by a new and highly popular mandate, is cleansing the Russian Army with the arrest of four generals for corruption, attention will turn to the corruption in the Church.

From there the decentralisation of the Russian Church for Russian Orthodox who live in fully independent countries (just as previously those in Poland and the USA had received decentralisation) is now also inevitable. This will lead to the birth of many new Autocephalous and Autonomous Churches, in the Ukraine and elsewhere. Moreover, this movement is largely supported by other Local Churches, who have sided neither with the imperialist corruption of Russian leaders, nor with the imperialist corruption of Greek leaders. The latter belonged to WEF-style anti-nation and anti-family globalist religious sect of modernism, syncretism, sexual perversion, covid propaganda and the green agenda, just like that of the Vatican and that of Soros and Schwab.

However, the Churches of Romania, Albania, Poland, Serbia, Macedonia, America, Jerusalem and now the Church of Bulgaria too are on our side, following the golden mean, ignoring the imperialist, Roman Catholic style, thisworldly pretensions of the Second and Third Romes. Freedom is in the air, as the Holy Spirit wafts over the Church of God.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, 2 July 2024

 

New Jerusalem and All Rus?

Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown. Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God….and I will write upon him….the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem…

Revelation 3, 11-12

And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God…

Revelation 21, 2

Shine, shine, O New Jerusalem! The Glory of the Lord has shone on Thee!

From Easter Matins

The term ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ was to some extent discredited in the Soviet period. For some even now it suggests political compromise with an atheist State, as well as ritualism, bureaucracy and centralization. Indeed, for extremists, the very words are literally anathema. For example, the present Ukrainian crisis is coloured by so-called ‘Christian’ (whether nominally Catholic or nominally Orthodox and actually atheists), now sponsored by the Phanar, chant, ‘Death to the Muscovites!’ It seems to us that their extremist nationalism must be countered by Russian Orthodox Church internationalism. What does this mean? Let me explain.

We can see both from the history books and contemporary newspapers with their Roman Catholic clerical scandals how the First Rome ended up. And now in the last few weeks, after centuries of extraordinary decadence culminating in the Ukraine, we have seen how the Second Rome (‘New Rome’) has ended up. Therefore, the alternative rallying call of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ seems to us less attractive. There is an alternative: This is ‘Moscow the Second Jerusalem’. And outside the secular and post-Soviet Russian Federation government and secular metropolis that is today’s Moscow, this is possible in a place that has now been restored.

After the historic events of the reunion of the Russian Church on Ascension Day in Moscow, soon after, on 18 May 2007 I gave a talk at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy entitled ‘Orthodox Russia and a World Council of Orthodoxy’. This was of the possible future importance of the New Jerusalem Monastery complex outside Moscow, where restoration after the ravages of both Soviet Russian and Nazi German atheism was then about to start. Founded by Patriarch Nikon in the 17th century, the whole complex had been intended to recreate the Holy Land in the area of Moscow by the River Istra, which takes the role of the Holy River Jordan.

In the main church there is indeed a place for the Patriarch of each Local Church to stand. It was conceived as  the Church of International Orthodoxy. I said then that this might one day become the centre of World Orthodoxy, a place of Church Councils. I said: ‘Indeed, we would dare to suggest an actual location for this World Council – at the New Jerusalem complex, west of Moscow. Built in the seventeenth century as a counterbalance to Imperial ideas of the State, this complex, centred around the Monastery of the Resurrection, was chosen to embody parts of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, with the River Istra representing the River Jordan.

It was meant to be open to all peoples and there monks of different nationalities, including those converted from the West, strove together in true catholic unity. Although still to be restored, this site is surely most appropriate, since it is centred around a Monastery, dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ. It stands in stark contrast to Chambesy in Calvinist Switzerland. There, Protestantism financed a basically secular conference centre for the Patriarchate of Constantinople, with its pseudo-Orthodox ‘cinema’ chapel’. Those were my words then, printed in a bilingual booklet in Russian and English. They were spoken with prayer and hope.

As Ukrainian Fascists cry with hatred their slogan ‘Death to the Muscovites’, perhaps the time has come. As the Russian Orthodox Church at the end of December set up two new missionary Exarchates, ‘of Paris and Western Europe’ and ‘of Singapore and South-East Asia’, uniting East and West beneath the double-headed eagle, perhaps the time has come. To do what? In these eschatological times, to rename the Patriarchate of Moscow, ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’. It seems to us that  nationalism must be countered by internationalism. For, ‘The Lord doth build up Jerusalem: He gathereth together the outcast of Israel’. (Ps. 146, 2).

123: Rome, Istanbul, Moscow

According to Canon III of the Second Universal Council and Canon XXVIII of the Fourth Council, the Metropolitan primacy of honour goes not to Jerusalem, but to the City where the Emperor lives. Thus, in the first centuries the Imperial Capital of Rome took the primacy and second place was taken by the Second Rome, New Rome, which the first Christian Emperor had founded and where he soon went to live. However, in the eleventh century Rome fell away from the Church and Holy Orthodoxy and lapsed into a paganised, barbarianized, so-called ‘Christianity’. This new pseudo-Christianity is what lay behind Papal corruption, violence and heresy in the first half of the eleventh century.

Thus, in the second half of that century it fell into the Invasion of England in 1066 and ensuing genocide throughout the Isles, pagan Aristotelian Scholasticism, the Crusades in the Holy Land and Eastern Europe, the human sacrifices made to Satan by the Inquisition, indulgences and mass genocides in ‘religious wars’ in Western Europe and the world’s greatest genocide (75 million dead?) in what became Latin America. Thus, New Rome, the City of the Emperor, took the place of Old Rome. Then in its turn, four hundred years later, this Second or New Rome fell away by betraying the faith to Old Rome and was duly occupied by the Ottomans. Thus, primacy passed to the Third Rome in Moscow, become in its turn the City of the Emperor.

The Emperor is the Defender of the Faith and the real, and not fictitious, Capital of the Church, of Holy Orthodoxy, is the City which extends its protection to all Christians and whose ruler is not ashamed to confess the Orthodox Faith. Since the fifteenth century this has meant Moscow, despite, or in a sense because of, all the Western attacks on it. These attacks were especially ferocious during the twentieth century and paralyzed it for three generations after the Western-organized ‘regime-change’ coup in 1917 and the ensuing genocide by the materialist Bolshevik regime. Today, with revival and restoration at last beginning in an increasingly sovereign Russia, the protection of Christians is exactly what the ruler in Moscow is doing in Syria.

This action has been very successful, with the result that the disastrous Obama regime is now pleading with Russia to allow a truce there; the end-game is approaching. The neocons have failed to effect regime change in Syria, just as the regime-change in the Ukraine, which they effected by toppling its democratic government, has proved to be the catastrophe that we all knew it would be. The defence of Christians in the Ukraine and Syria: this is why Russia is today the object of vicious propaganda attacks from the Western Powers and their demonic masters. The miracle of restoration of the Church inside Russia, however partial, hesitant, fragile and merely beginning, is abhorrent to the demons, for all their hopes of destroying the Church on earth and enthroning Antichrist are having to be postponed.

As regards the meeting of the Patriarch of the Third Rome and of the Pope of the First Rome, all is becoming clear. Both old Romes are now reluctantly ceding their places to the Third Rome, if only by force of circumstance. For it is not the Patriarchs of the First or Second Romes who lead the Church, it is the Patriarch of the Third Rome. He is free of submission to the Pope of Old Rome and to the USA. Thus several Western news agencies have presented the meeting at Havana Airport as the ‘first between the leaders of the two confessions since 1054’ (ABC News). Fox News says much the same. In France ‘Le Journal du Dimanche rightly asserts that the leaders of ‘the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches have not met since the age of the Schism’.

Thus, in reality even for the secular media the regular meetings between the Popes of Rome and the Patriarchs of the Second Rome, today Istanbul, do not count. The Patriarch in Istanbul, a Turkish citizen whose policies are dictated by Joe Biden and the US State Department, is not taken seriously even by the secular media. A compromised faith does not count: the Pope of Rome wants to talk to the real thing. In Italy the newspaper Corriere della Sera quotes the Pope: ‘Russia has imperial blood and so it can give the world a great deal’. The Pope is in fact calling on help from Russia, just as over 200 years ago his predecessor called on help from the Russian Emperor Paul to fight against the atheist Napoleon.

Not least Pope Francis now has to find a way of controlling the devilish hatred for the Church of the Uniats, whom the Vatican has so foolishly again unleashed in the Ukraine. Indeed, the first price for any help that Old Rome needs from the Third Rome in its battle to survive against Secularism, the illegitimate child of its illegitimate Protestant child, will be justice in the Ukraine. There Uniats have stolen churches, maimed and killed – all in the name of the Vatican: a story familiar elsewhere, for example in Serbia. This is why all the Uniat journalists are running scared today: could the South American Pope sabotage their xenophobia, which is justified by their Uniat ideology and their absurd pretence of being Orthodox, and tell them to convert to proper Catholicism or else abandon them?

Catholicism is all but finished in the West: if it is to survive, it has now to look to a restored Russia, the protector of the Church. It has to repent for its millennial and contemporary crimes, not least its co-operation with the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, for which in 1945 it had to pay very dearly after its collaboration with Hitler, pleading for and receiving Orthodox protection. Catholicism is at the crossroads, it can continue on the path of modern secularization, on which it has been for over fifty years, or it can return to the Church of God, incarnate in the first millennium of Western history. Having seen that in Istanbul there is only a minor ethnic cult, multinational Old Rome is now looking to multinational Third Rome for survival.

Our Man in Havana: From the Catacombs to the World Stage

Some Orthodox are, understandably, worried by next week’s meeting between the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Pope of Rome. However, perhaps they listen too much to the CIA-paid hacks of the Western media who are already presenting the meeting as a kind of Russian Orthodox prostration before the Pope of Rome, on the orders of President Putin who is, apparently, desperate for any kind of contact with the West! Having recalled that at the Victory Day parade in Moscow on the 9 May the Russian President stood side by side with the leaders of China, India and many other lands, representing virtually the whole Non-Western world, the vast majority of humanity, we shall laugh our fill at the Western media. It is the G7 Western world that is isolated, bunkered up in Hitler’s Villa outside Munich as in June 2015. The meeting at Havana Airport between the Russian Orthodox Patriarch and the Pope of Rome, between the past and the future, between Old Rome and the Third Rome, will be successful, but only if the Pope of Rome comes with repentance. Why?

First of all this is the first meeting in history between a Russian Orthodox Patriarch and a Pope of Rome (though not with a Pope of Alexandria). Ignorant Western media point to the fifteenth-century meeting between the then Pope of Rome and Metropolitan Isidore at the so-called ‘Council’ of Florence. However that Metropolitan was not a Patriarch, he was not Russian and, above all, he was not Orthodox. The truth is that this meeting could be a turning-point for discredited Catholicism. It now has a chance to repent before the Russian Orthodox Church for the crime of Uniatism. Just as the Polish Pope, himself a quarter Uniat by descent, did apologize for the Crusaders’ barbaric sacking of New Rome in 1204 (800 years late!), so now this Latin American Pope of Rome has the opportunity to ask forgiveness (420 years late) of the Russian Orthodox world. It knows that as long as there exists a single Uniat, it is stabbing the Church in the back. The Vatican now has to start behaving as though it were Christian.

The Russian Orthodox world has never been against a meeting with the Pope of Old Rome, but it has always had to be on our terms, not from a position of humiliation, but from a position of authority. It could never have happened with the aggressive Polish Pope; with the penitent Pope Benedict it could have happened, only he was removed for being too close to Orthodoxy; now with this Pope there has come a chance. Both leaders are making pastoral visits to Latin America and Catholicism is facing the ‘battle of the millennia’ and needs the Church. Catholicism, heir to 2,000 years of history, now has a vital choice to make, to choose between the first millennium, which was Orthodox, and the second millennium which was Catholic-Protestant. In this third millennium, either it will choose to protestantize itself completely, or else at least a small part of it can choose the path of repentance and return to the Orthodox Church, supporting the Russian Orthodox defence of the Christian Middle East or siding with the anti-Christian post-Protestant West.

A generation ago, until 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church was for the main part viciously hounded by politicians and mockingly despised by Non-Orthodox. We well remember the 70s and 80s when we were forced to live in an almost ghetto-like situation; we were indeed the last of the Mohicans. Whether inside or outside Russia, we lived in the catacombs. At that time there were only 40 bishops in Russia and 5,000 clergy; today there are 361 bishops and some 40,000 clergy. There is no reason to think that those figures will not double over the next generation. The miracle happened with us. Through the prayers of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Lands, at that time the atheist regime of the countries of the Soviet Union collapsed by self-chosen dissolution, but also the Western world chose to descend into the pit of hell by self-chosen dissolution. Exactly a generation after these events, in 2016 we are now entering a new age, the generation where we come out of the catacombs and the ghetto and move onto the world stage.

Some may find it difficult to adapt to this; others who were never comfortable in the ghetto find it easier. But the fact is that for the first time in history a Pope of Rome is meeting a Russian Orthodox Patriarch. The Church moves centre stage. It may be that the Russian Orthodox Church can save at least parts of Roman Catholicism from Protestantization. Certainly, with last week’s canonization of the ROCOR hierarch and wonderworker, St Seraphim of Sofia, who first exposed the heresy of Bulgakov and then the heresy of Ecumenism, there is no doubt that the Russian Church has moved far on from the provincial Orthodoxy of the fringes who are still stuck in old-fashioned modernism. The Russian Orthodox Church now takes the lead in the Orthodox world and has turned the leadership of Orthodoxy from a US-run masonic affair into the voice of the Church. Not only that, but it also reclaims the Ukraine from the Nazi Uniat junta in Kiev, which may have only a few months to live.

Sunday of the New Martyrs and Confessors

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (September 2015)

Q: Are you surprised by the election of the new leader of the Labour Party?

A: Frankly, no. For 35 years neocons have in effect been in power in the UK, ever since the old Tories lost power to Thatcherite monetarists, the ancestors of the neocons, and the Labour Party has essentially been run by neocon Tories. The election of a primitive, old-fashioned socialist as leader of the Labour Party is a reaction to all this. The Labour Party leadership has now returned to its grassroots membership, whom it had betrayed by becoming Washington’s poodles. The Labour Party now has a leader who actually believes in something, other than himself and his own bank account, unlike its previous leaders. The only surprise is that the reaction has taken so long. Extremes breed extremes – the neocons have produced old-fashioned, atheist socialism – that was quite predictable.

This is all part of the process of the election of socialists elsewhere in the EU, for example in Greece and Spain. However, it is difficult to see what will come of it. The new Labour leader seems to have very little understanding of reality and it is difficult to see him lasting very long. Others, nationalists and sovereignists, have also been elected throughout the EU, for example, UKIP in the UK and the National Front in France. All these movements, whether of left or of right, are reactions to the rule over the EU of the neocons in Washington. That is why in the UK the Establishment-run BBC and Press character-assassinate them all. Whether they are the UKIP leader or the new Labour leader, they are both anti-Establishment, driven by sincerely-held beliefs rather than by their own careers and bank accounts. Mammon that rules the modern world dislikes such people because they put their values, whatever we may think of them, right or wrong, above money.

Q: How do you see the consequences of the present chaos caused by mass Muslim immigration into Western Europe?

A: First of all, mass immigration has been rejected by Central and Eastern Europe, not just by Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Lands, but also by the Baltics, Slovenia and Poland, which has had to face mass emigration from Ukrainians fleeing the US and EU-instigated war in the Ukraine. EU-Croatia does not want the refugees either, it is simply allowing them to pass through, not to stay. As for Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, none of the refugees wants to settle in these countries that are poverty-stricken by the EU, let alone in Non-EU Macedonia, which is already being torn apart by the Muslim invasion from Albania, and NATO-bombed Serbia with all its Serbian refugees from Croatia and Kosovo.

All these former Communist-bloc countries are quite right to hand on the refugees – their countries have not been responsible for this new Muslim invasion – Western Europe has been responsible. Who is paying for the billions of dollars of arms with which the war in Syria is being fought? Who is paying for this murderous conflict that is being played out on the borders of Armageddon? Who is making and supplying the arms for these fanatics to murder with? Who bombed Yugoslavia? Who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq? Who bombed Libya? It is not Eastern and Central Europe, it is the Western world that is responsible. At this moment US aircraft and British bombs are slaughtering the people of Yemen. The West always has money for bombs to destroy, but not to feed poor refugees from Western-instigated wars.

Now Germany has to pay the price for its co-destruction of Yugoslavia and the foundation of Muslim states there. If Yugoslavia still existed, the refugees would not be able to pass through its former territory and head for Germany. War in Yugoslavia happened twenty years ago – but the consequences are now. Sooner or later you have to pay for your errors – the chickens always come home to roost. It is called responsibility, responsibility for the injustices that you have committed in the past.

Mass immigration is causing division in the EU – already the Schengen agreement is in tatters. This could be the moment when parts of Eastern Europe, especially Hungary and Slovakia, finally turn their backs on the disastrous EU and join the EEU, the Eurasian Economic Union, together with Serbia, Montenegro and Moldova – if those countries can find the courage to overturn their home-grown traitors who are willing to hand over their countries to NATO tyranny. Thanks to Communism, ironically, these countries had kept their national identity and sovereignty; under EU tyranny they have to lose them. The time for them to choose is coming – to surrender your national identity to so-called ‘multiculturalism’, as have Western European countries, or to keep it by turning to the protection of Sovereign Russia.

The Western part of the EU now has a choice: to accept mass Islamization and so complete the renunciation of its Christian history, as its atheists have already mentally done, or to bring back peace to Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and resettle the Muslim millions back in their homes, which is what they want. But this would be to admit that the West caused the problems in those countries in the first place. This would be a noble act of repentance, but the Western elite is too proud to carry it out. The Western elite is always capable of making war – but quite unable to make peace. This is because of its essentially anti-Christian, aggressive and destructive nature. Only a rising of ordinary Western people, crushed for so long by its elite, and aided from outside, can make a difference now.

Q: After the September Local Synod in Istanbul, Patriarch Bartholomew denounced the co-operation of Church and State in Russia, though without mentioning the word ‘Russia’ by name. What do you make of this?

A: Patriarch Bartholomew is merely a US-installed mouthpiece of the State Department, so he is irrelevant to the real Orthodox world, just as KGB-installed Russian bishops were irrelevant to the real Orthodox world in their time. For example he has just granted the highest award of his Patriarchate to the abortionist Joe Biden. In other words, nobody is listening to him because his words of propaganda are dictated to him by neocon politicians, not by the Holy Spirit.

What is the reality of the situation in Russia, beyond such neocon propaganda? It is that the Russian Church is trying to reChristianize the Russian State. The attempt to Christianize the State is very frightening for the neocons. This is the Incarnational role of the Church, they hate that because for them religion must only be a private matter, which should have no practical consequences and social ramifications. To renounce this role is to renounce Orthodoxy – which is what the anti-Christian US State Department does every single day of its existence. It is interesting for me to see in the words of Patriarch Bartholomew exactly the same editorial policy as that of the BBC, where I took part in two radio programmes a couple of years ago. It was clear then and it is clear now that the powers that be long ago sent out a message to all their vassal Western media – to try and discredit the Russian Orthodox Church by making out that it is a puppet of the Russian State.

In transmitting this message in the UK they are utterly hypocritical – it is the Church of England that is a puppet of the British State – all the C of E bishops are nominated by an agnostic/atheist Prime Minister, most are freemasons. This is quite different from the situation in Russia where the Church is separated from the State and independent of it. Whenever the Russian State agrees with the Church, it is a triumph of reChristianization for the Church, it is not that the State has conquered the Church, but just the opposite. Soviet times are over. The Western elite and its arms merchants want them to return – by creating another Cold War.

Q: If, as you say, Constantinople is a puppet of US neocons, what hope is there for the Orthodox ‘Council’, to be held in the Phanar next year?

A: That Conference, which is what it is at the moment, may well turn out to be a mere meeting with a final statement couched in meaningless ‘Chancellery-speak’. If so, it will be forgotten very quickly, as were many politically-organized ‘councils’ under heretical emperors of Constantinople. However, a destiny much more interesting than the dustbin of history is possible.

If the Phanar is tempted to take the thirty pieces of silver offered it by Washington and the Vatican and so completely discredit itself in the eyes of the Orthodox world and openly fall away from it, the Conference will become a Council, for it will at last be free to speak the Orthodox Truth. Then will follow the official transfer of the Centre of the Orthodox Church to Moscow, where in reality it has already been for centuries. This will be the end of the 562-year old myth of the Phanar (and the other fallen fragments of the Greek Empire) as the centre of Orthodoxy, a myth that US propagandists have assiduously used since 1948 to flatter Constantinople’s inherent ethnophyletist vanity.

Q: But would you not agree that there are still many problems within the Russian Orthodox Church?

A: Yes, of course there are indeed many problems. These are the result of the Soviet-period ‘legacy’. Only when the Church has been purified from this legacy will complete unity and so full strength come. Beware of the word ‘legacy’, when it is used by pseudo-Russian Orthodox, what they mean by it is apostasy.

Q: What in concrete terms do the words ‘Soviet-period legacy’ mean?

A: I mean all the political and spiritual compromises that ‘representatives’ of the Russian Church made through human weakness during the Soviet period, both inside Russia and outside Russia – ritualism, phariseeism, careerism, corruption, lying, renovationism. We were victims of that awful corruption outside Russia, so we know clearly and exactly what we are talking about.

Q: What can be done to destroy that legacy?

A: Re-Churching. And today Russia is being re-Churched. True, the Soviet diseases of alcoholism, abortion and corruption are still rife in the Russian Federation, but they are nonetheless declining because of this re-Churching. It is a privilege to take part in this process of re-Churching, even outside Russia, alongside tens of thousands of others who work in this field, but the process is only just beginning. We have very far to go. The ‘legacy’ must be destroyed, so that it can be replaced by the Tradition, so that human failings can be transfigured by the Holy Spirit, so that multinational Russian Orthodoxy can be rebuilt.

Q: If the ‘Conference’, as you call it, does turn into a Council and the Church is at last cleansed of the spiritually compromised representatives of the Patriarchate of Constantinople who have lapsed from Orthodoxy, where would they go?

A: They could go wherever they want, to whomever would take them. I think, for example, that its lapsed representatives would be welcome in the Vatican or in the post-Protestant US, whose mouthpieces they are; as for all those in the Patriarchate of Constantinople who are faithful Orthodox, the many on Mt Athos and in the parishes, they could join the Church of Greece, whose Archbishop could take the title of Patriarch of Constantinople. At the same time Orthodox-leaning Catholics in today’s Muslim and atheist-dominated Europe, who have been rejected by the present Patriarchate of Constantinople because of its apostasy and ecumenist agreement with the Vatican not to accept them, could freely join the Russian Orthodox Church. Turkey would then become a missionary territory for the Russian Church; there are tens of thousands of Russians living there already. There will be much to do; the Greek prophecies say that a third of Turks will be baptized as Orthodox.

This process of Russian missionary work is already happening outside Europe. Just recently hundreds of Filipinos have chosen to join the Russian Orthodox Church. They chose true Christianity, that is, Russian Orthodoxy, to the alternatives to IS or Maoist terrorism on the one hand and to Western secularist atheism (economic terrorism) on the other hand. This is the same situation as before the Revolution, when Tsar Nicholas II provided the sole alternative to rival secularist and imperialist Western ideologies, the Anglo-French and the Austro-German. He alone provided uncompromised Orthodoxy, the Christian Empire, Christian values. That of course is why the West crucified him and his family, like St Job.

Q: What is the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in this missionary light?

A: Rather than role I would say responsibility. As the heir to the Christian Empire, of St Constantine, the responsibility of what remains of Holy Russia and the Russian Empire is to be the last bastion of Christianity in the world. Today, after the failed imposition of the destructive Western ideology of Communism by the Western Powers against the will of the people through financing the 1905 and 1917 revolutions and through it the slaughter of the last Christian Emperor, Nicholas II (the order for whose martyrdom went out from New York, as the historian Petr V. Multatuli has made clear in recent years), the Christian Empire is beginning to revive and the Russian Church is playing the essential role in this process. Some prophesy the full restoration of the Empire and an Emperor Nicholas III, the final rampart of Christianity against Eurosodom and Gommorhica, which is what the Western elite wants to create against the will of the Western peoples (See what we have said above about the need for the people to rise against this imposition). This is why the West hates Russia – Russia is the only rival to its decadence. Only Russia contradicts it. Only anti-Christians can be against the restoration of the Christian Empire, whatever they may call themselves and however pharisaically they may conduct themselves. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, friends of the pagan Romans, of both yesterday’s and today’s enemies of Christ.

Very sadly, the September communication of Patriarch Bartholomew seems to show that he has accepted the anti-Incarnational secularist ideology of the Vatican and of Washington, the rejection of the role of the Incarnation in the life of the State. Why? Because only the restoration of the Orthodox State, the Christian Empire, can restrain the growth of so-called ‘globalization’, which the US masters of the Phanar are entirely in charge of. Even the remnants of the Third Rome, the Christian Empire, stand as a living witness to the fall, decadence and perjury of both the First Rome and of the Second Rome – that is why their masters deny it, envy it, fear it and fight against it. Their greatest enemy is the Russian Orthodox Church, the last bastion of Christ, which is why they work together against us.

Q: But is there not a danger of Russian nationalism in trying to Christianize the Russian State?

A: Yes, of course there is. In history the word ‘nationalism’ was not used because it is simply a modern word for ‘worldliness’. Nationalism destroyed the first two Romes: Pagan Roman nationalism destroyed the First Rome when it was adopted and made into an ideology by the Germanic peoples; Greek nationalism destroyed New Rome and the Third Rome was for three generations brought down by the nationalism of the anti-Russian aristocracy who wanted power for themselves against the Tsar and against the people.

Thus the first two Romes fell hundreds of years ago on account of worldliness and there is no chance that they will ever be restored. However, this is not the case with the Third and last Rome, Moscow. True, it was brought down in 1917 and suffered immensely for many years, but since the Western invasion of the former Russian Empire in 1941 restoration by the blood and tears of the New Martyrs and Confessors has been under way. This has happened amidst the hatred and envy of the Western world, which is why it is ringing Russia with NATO bases, trying to take over the Ukraine and developing plans for the dismemberment of the Russian Federation and of the Russian Orthodox Church, primarily through US-encouraged schisms in the Ukraine and Moldova.

Q: If the Western world is successful in dismembering the Russian Federation and the Russian Orthodox Church, is that the end?

A: Yes, that is the end – of the world, since salvation will become impossible so the world will no longer have any reason to exist.

Q: Do you think that nationalist temptations can be overcome so that the Christian Empire will be restored in Russia and in the rest of the Orthodox world together with it?

A: Yes, they can, though ‘can’ does not mean ‘will be’. Nevertheless, today there is reason for hope because there is a difference with the past. Before the Russian Revolution nationalism was alive, as was witnessed to by the worldly nationalism in the Russian emigration which stopped Church life from being as missionary as it should have been, persecuted missionaries like St John of Shanghai and rejected its messianic mission to preach Orthodoxy to the world, to make the world part of Holy Russia and so save it. Many emigres, especially among the intellectuals and aristocrats, were selfish and inward-looking, turning away the people whom God sent them. That was to be expected because they had already betrayed the Tsar.

The difference with the past is that Russia is now an international country. Today’s real International Community, led by Russia, includes much of Eastern Europe, Asia (including China and India, the Middle East and Iran), Africa and Latin America. The Western world is a small minority, fewer than a billion people, including only North America (except for Mexico), Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, and perhaps South Korea and Taiwan. Six-sevenths of the world stands against Western exploitation. As such the West is isolated.

Look at the great military victory parade in Beijing that took place two weeks ago in front of the Chinese and Russian leaders in celebration of the liberation of China from the Japanese by the Soviet Army. That parade was totally ignored and despised by the Western media, as China and Russia sealed their bonds. A new bloc has been formed. The West did not want to know because it is in denial that it has once again created its own enemies. Today there is a consciousness of Russia’s spiritual importance internationally. Before the Revolution only Tsar Nicholas and a very few in the elite had that consciousness; today many share in it.

Q: What practically does this consciousness mean to you?

A: For instance, every year I travel 17,000 miles around Eastern England visiting Orthodox. As I travel, I am conscious that I am perhaps the first Russian Orthodox priest to be on a given road and in a given place, the first to bless a place with icons, the first to bless a particular house. In doing this, I am therefore in fact travelling around a new province of Holy Russia.

However, I need help. We are together in the Church. The Church is not about individuals. I need at least one Russian-speaking priest here to help. We must encourage young people to take up the priesthood. When I was young, I was strongly discouraged from becoming a priest, not by this world, but by so-called ‘Orthodox’ priests and bishops – those of ‘the legacy’. I was incredibly badly advised and indeed deliberately. This was scandalously sad. Zeal was crushed quite ruthlessly and cruelly by the unworthy then in power. This must not happen to the young generation now, they must not be discouraged as I was.

We are building a new Holy Rus. The Church urgently needs a new generation of priests who are not afraid to use the Word of Christ to fight against aggressive Western secularism (including when so-called Orthodox confess it) on the one hand and Islamic terrorism on the other. We are Christ’s Army. For that we have the example of St Alexander Nevsky who resisted the traitors and the extremes of east and west, soaring above them on the wings of the double-headed Orthodox eagle.

To young people, I say: Do not be afraid! The reviving Christian Empire needs you to restore and rebuild! Join and be active in the Russian Orthodox Church! Belong to Christ, not to Antichrist!