Category Archives: Russia

The Atheist War Against the Multinational Orthodox Church Continues

The seizure of power in Kiev by a tiny minority of extremist Galician Catholics (Uniat Ukrainians from the far west, formerly eastern Poland) had been carefully planned. Through the violent overthrow of the democratically-elected Ukrainian government with generous US financial backing ($5 billion) and EU support last February, it opened a Pandora’s Box. Now the three parts of the Ukraine, the small Polonised and Neo-Fascist Galicia, central Malorossiya (Little Russia) and purely Russian southern and eastern Novorossiya (New Russia) are divided. The vast majority of the inhabitants of the Ukraine do not recognise the unrepresentative Kievan junta.

The nature of the modern Ukraine as an artificial construct, a nationalist divide and rule Western project, has been revealed. This is despite the empty and pathetic sabre-rattling by the head of NATO, which is still licking its wounds from its defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Ukraine is a puppet made in Austria just over a century ago and founded on xenophobic pride and hatred. Its puppet leaders, whose ancestors fought with Hitler and have been handpicked by the US politician Victoria Nuland, are incompetent and cannot control their peoples. Russia now waits while what remains of the ‘Ukraine’ goes bankrupt, its gold reserves yesterday transferred to Switzerland and the USA in the final act of twenty-three years of asset-stripping by corrupt oligarchs.

The events in the Ukraine must be seen as part of the whole, Western-orchestrated, geopolitical war against the Church of Christ. That began in North Africa, spread to the Middle East, especially Syria, the only place on earth where the language of Christ, Aramaic, is still spoken, and has now been spread to Little Russia, the south-western corner of the Russian Lands, Rus. This attempt to divide historic Rus by the Western atheists uses Ukrainian nationalism, so recently founded on a provincial identity and a regional language from the Polish borderlands (‘Ukraine’ in Russian). All this is in order to cut off this potentially rich area, where natural gas has just been discovered, from its kindred Russian Lands and their peoples.

Western atheism is outraged that the Russian Lands are united, their unity founded not on ethnicity, but on over a thousand years of Christianity, the common and multinational Russian Orthodox Faith, thus making those lands into Holy Rus. It has not forgiven its peoples for throwing off Western atheism in its Soviet form. This is why Western atheism has now set out to use its puppet Patriarchate of Constantinople to undermine the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, the majority of whose members are Carpatho-Russians – another part of Holy Rus. However, in failing to recognise the Czechoslovak episcopate and even absurdly daring to call itself its ‘Mother-Church’ (!), that sorry Patriarchate has indicated that no Inter-Orthodox Council will be held in 2016. Such a Council could only take place if all the Local Churches are represented there, and not just the ones that the CIA allows.

Holy Rus is by definition multinational and not nationalist, the heritage of the Roman Christian Empire, and not some provincial localism. It unites 62 different nationalities. Unlike Ukrainianism (or for that matter Hellenism, Montenegrinism and Macedonianism etc – other artificial Western constructs from the 19th century on), Holy Rus does not put a regional national identity and language above the Universal Church of Christ. In the Second World War Hitler instructed his occupying administrators to set up a separate church in each village of the Ukraine. This is still the Western project, so coloured by Protestant separatism, today. It will not succeed.

Some are concerned that the Russian Orthodox Church and those with it, the Georgian Orthodox Church, the Polish Orthodox Church, the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and supporters in Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, will be isolated by Western meddling. They should not be concerned by this. We recall how the ‘democratic’ majority shouted out ‘Crucify him, Crucify him’; we are happy to be ‘isolated’ from that majority. Today the Russian Lands are rising from the ashes of the past. A generation has passed since the dissolution of Soviet atheism. Now that the Church is being reborn, its values are beginning to be embodied in social, political and economic life and so the Russian State is also being reborn, returning to Orthodox roots and traditional values.

The Second Generation of our Revolution Begins: 1989-2014

A new survey by the independent Levada Centre in Russia shows that the proportion of the population of the Russian Federation identifying themselves as Orthodox Christians has risen by 400% in the past 24 years. The poll of 1,603 people found that 68% said that they were Orthodox Christians, up from 17% in 1989. The proportion of Muslims has also risen from about 1% in 1991 to 7% today. The number of Russian Catholics and Protestants remained roughly the same, at about 1%. 19%, stated that they were not religious, compared to 75% in 1989, when atheism was still the official State ideology. However, only 4% say that they attended services once a week and only 8% said that they took communion a few times a year.

Levada ran the poll on 15-18 November 2013 in 130 cities, towns, and villages across the Russian Federation and does not include the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the 58 other countries in the world which spiritually belong to Rus. The poll shows how far Russia has come in one generation, but also how very far there is still to go: The spiritual revolution has only just begun.

24 December 2013

RIA-Novosti

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131224/185903098/Orthodox-Christian-Belief-Rises-among-Russians–Poll.html

Cromwell and Stalin

I have always detested the statue of Cromwell erected in 1899 outside the Houses of Parliament in London. I have always said that if it were legal to destroy it, I would take great pleasure in doing so.

Let us recall that this regicide Cromwell was the monster responsible for the deaths of roughly 190,000 English people out of a total population of about five million, some 60,000 Scottish people from a population of about one million and some 616,000 Irish people from a population of about one and a half million. These estimates indicate that England suffered a 3.7% loss of population, Scotland a loss of 6%, while Ireland suffered a loss of 41% of its population.

Thus, today’s statement by President Putin that Cromwell and Stalin are indistinguishable as ‘bloody dictators’ makes sense. (I have always considered that Lenin was a parallel to the mass murderer and destroyer of monasteries Henry VIII, also for some strange reason widely ‘celebrated’ by the heritage industry in England). Indeed, statistically Cromwell was far worse than Stalin.

Thus, it does indeed make Western leaders and media representatives look utterly hypocritical when they, with their statues, ‘relics’ and tourist souvenirs of Henry VIII and Cromwell, Napoleon and Disraeli, Leopold of the Belgians and Churchill, complain that in Russia there are still statues of Lenin and Stalin. However, the hypocritical celebration of evil in the West still does not excuse the celebration of evil in today’s still impure, post-Soviet Russian Federation.

Refugees to Russia?

There is nothing new in European religious refugees. From the eleventh century on, all who opposed the iron grip of Papism and the blood-soaked Inquisition, fled to remote places. Then, after the Reformation, French Protestants, Huguenots, were forced to flee from Catholic intolerance to many countries, both inside and outside Europe. In the 17th century religious refugees from England, known as Puritans, fled from the local State Religion to America. After 1789 French Catholic refugees made for Russia and other countries, fleeing atheist persecution. After the export into Russia of Western materialism, known as Marxism, in 1917, Russian refugees in turn fled from atheist persecution, settling all over the world, creating a global diaspora. And in the near future, within the next few decades, it seems as though EU citizens and others may yet flee from the dictats of their unelected Eurocommissars, also for religious reasons.

Although the present struggle for the freedom of the Ukraine from these Eurocommissars, whose bribed imported supporters, it is said, were paid 30 euros a day by the CIA to parade in favour of the EU, is looking victorious, the situation elsewhere looks grim. Thus, the peoples ruled by the EU dictatorship and their bankrupt and corrupt puppet governments in Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and elsewhere, are becoming economic refugees all over the world. Elsewhere in the EU, intolerance of Christian values is now such that many faithful Christians in Western Europe are beginning to look with hope elsewhere. But where?

To look to the USA, Latin America or Australia would be senseless, for the wave of intolerance of Christianity, Christian family life and Christian patriotism is just as strong there, as we saw in the recent attacks by 500 abortionists on a Catholic church in Argentina, or the almost daily attacks on Christianity by the secularist authorities and mocking, atheist media in other Western countries. Other parts of the world, either Non-Christian or else poisoned by the history of Western colonialism and all its abuses, are not places where Western people are welcome. The tolerance of sin and evil is in fact intolerance of good, of the spiritual and the traditional. Already the EU has refused to mention Christianity in its Constitution and it continues to attack those who hold dear national identity and national sovereignty all over Europe.

Where then will traditional Christians from Western Europe, even if they are not yet all members of the multinational Russian Orthodox Church, head? The situation may within the next generation reach a point that those last freedom-loving Europeans who still profess spiritual values may feel that the only solution is emigration to the Russian Federation. It is true that there is still much to do here to enlighten Western peoples and relieve them of their prejudices, as they have been zombified for generations by implicit Establishment theories of Western racial superiority and therefore anti-Russian propaganda, for many years cleverly masked as anti-Soviet propaganda. Even recently there was the statement by the warmongering Hillary Clinton that Vladimir Putin did not have a soul; though, true, this only made her look even more ridiculous than she already did.

The struggle against dehumanisation is on. Those who believe that the human-being is made in the image and likeness of God, who believe that each nation has the right to its own identity and sovereign existence, and stand against the forces of globalisation which wish to liquidate the diversity of civilisations, are starting to look to Russia as the source of support and freedom. It has been said that we should live in a multipolar world; it seems that rather we may be heading for a bipolar world; the West and the Westernised (that is secularised) world versus the renewed and free Christian Orthodox Empire centred on the Russian Federation and its free Eurasian Union allies, who, unlike the Western consumerists, affirm that man does not live by bread alone.

Those with traditional moral and spiritual values, family people, farmers who refuse to grow genetically modified crops, teachers who believe that there is a difference between right and wrong, doctors and nurses who refuse to administer abortion and euthanasia, artists who believe that art has a spiritual and moral aesthetic mission, aristocrats who seek to conserve traditional forms of life, architects who want to build structures fit for human-beings and not ants and robots, workers who seek social justice, would all be interested. However, it is also true that although the post-Soviet world has come a long way, it still has far to go to reform itself and restore what Western materialism destroyed after 1917.

Only when it has itself gone further down that path, not only showing resistance to the greedsters and banksters of the New World Order, but also reversing the damage that that Order has done there, especially in the last 25 years, will the Russian Federation attract numbers of religious refugees from the now militantly secularist Western world. We seek freedom for traditional spiritual and moral values and ways of life, incarnate in just, honest, unbureaucratic and uncorrupt economic structures, where family life can then freely prosper. The formation of such structures is only hesitantly beginning in the Eurasian Union. We will have to wait and see if the present tiny trickle of Western religious refugees to the Russian Federation and her allies will yet become the mighty stream, the Moses-led exodus, as has been prophesied.

The World That Was Lost in 1917

Tell them that the evil that is in the world will grow, but it is not evil that will triumph, but only love.

Holy Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II

The Emperor and Empress thought that they were dying for their Homeland. In fact, they died for all mankind.

Pierre Gilliard

Introduction: 1917 the Turning Point

It is often said that the world was lost with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This is not accurate. In fact, the world was lost in 1917 and since then has been plunged into suffering and continual warfare. For the real aim of the First World War, the aim of the Satanic Manipulator behind all the petty aims of his human puppets, was not to find a solution to the tribal, territorial disputes of kindred but rival peoples at the tiny, western end of Eurasian Continent, but to destroy the vast Eurasian Russian Orthodox Empire and its Tsar. This Heartland-Empire stood for the averting of wars, spiritual life, unity and balance; therefore it had to be slandered so that it could be destroyed. It alone stood in the way of what the technologically advanced but spiritually dwarfed Western peoples chose to describe as ‘universal progress’. This ‘universal progress’, since 1917 unchecked by the Russian Empire and its Tsar, is the history of all the wars and catastrophes of the last 100 years.

Above East and West

The symbol of the vast Russian Orthodox Empire, the double-headed eagle, combined East and West. This was and is the symbol of Christ worldwide. Thus, with its western borders peaceful and stabilised for many years, the Tsar and the Empire embarked on the Great Asian Plan to secure the Pacific coasts of Siberia, ensuring the security of Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea and fragile China against rapacious Japan with its British and American financed military machine and British-built Navy. It was this Japan that stabbed the Empire in the back, as, ironically, it later did America and Britain. Elsewhere in Asia the Empire supported the sovereignty of Afghanistan, Tibet and Siam (Thailand), and in Africa, Ethiopia and South Africa. And, most importantly, it supported the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and especially the Holy Land. The Empire stood above and united East and West; it was universal, which is why our own salvation is in her salvation.

Above Left and Right

The Sovereign Monarch towered above the petty combats of self-interested political parties and the vainglorious personality politics of corrupt parliamentarianism. Only the Anointed Sovereign had a vision beyond left and right and saw the whole. Only he was strong-willed and independent enough to reign and responsible to God for the well-being of the Empire. He had to fight both against leftist terrorists and decadent and hugely wealthy aristocrats, including members of his own extended family. These latter, because they already had immense riches which their hard hearts would not give to the poor, wanted the power of the Sovereign for their own futile and vainglorious ends, and so overthrew the whole Empire, whose destiny was also that of the betrayed Tsar. Thus, they handed all to the ruthless and terroristic atheists, who thought that they could create a paradise on earth if only they could seize power by violence, however many millions they might have to kill in the process.

Above Provincialism and Degeneration

The best of the Church of the Russian Orthodox Empire was international, stretching around the world into the Americas and Western Europe. It stood above petty Balkan nationalism and its provincial Greek phyletism, not to mention the warring tribalism of Western Europe, which the Empire had tried to overcome with peace-making at the Hague. The Orthodox Rus’ of the Empire was international. The aims of the First World War that had been imposed on the Empire became to free others, Germans, Poles, Czechoslovaks and Serbs, from centralised tyranny, and to gather all the Orthodox Christian lands, including Constantinople and Carpatho-Russia, together. The Royal Family, European and Orthodox, stood above such provincialism and the spiritual and so moral degeneration linked to it. The family life of the Sovereign was exemplary and showed elegance, purity and beauty, a model for family life today; they prayed together, they became saints together, an icon of the family.

An Unbalanced World led to the ‘Balance of Terror’ of Left and Right

In 1917 the traitors took Russia out of the First World War and so the world became unbalanced. The old hope of Nicholas II of allying Russia, Germany and France in peace was for ever lost. And the immediate results were the USA entering the war, taking over decadent Europe, and Zionism triumphing with the support of the bankrupt British government. This has since ensured permanent warfare between the West and the Muslim world. The result was then the disaster of Versailles, which directed its vengeance against the misled German peoples, who had lost their homelands, instead of the centralising Prussian elite. Europe did not learn the lesson of its attempted suicide and so the Second World War was made inevitable. The world became divided between Left and Right, East and West, Communist and Fascist, and even after the Second War, it went on to live for almost another fifty years in terror of being obliterated by nuclear warfare, the costs of which were bankrupting.

Provincialisation and Degeneration

Two sayings state that ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ and ‘divide and rule’. The ‘Balkanisation’ of division has been exactly the policy of today’s anti-Orthodox Powers. Thus, Constantinople, like other ancient but tiny Patriarchates, has since 1917 become a Western-controlled puppet and the once Orthodox or partly Orthodox Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria, Baltic States, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland have now lost their sovereignty and enslaved themselves to EU colonialism and economic, spiritual and so moral degeneration. Today the heavily Polonised, heavily Uniatised, Galician-centred westernmost borderlands, the western 20% of the ‘Ukraine’, for the moment belonging to the real Europe of Orthodoxy, seek slavery to the same, false, anti-Orthodox ‘Europe’ of the US-founded ‘European Union’. The broken family life of the provincial and degenerate EU is anti-exemplary and shows vulgarity, impurity and ugliness; it is an anti-icon of the family.

Conclusion: Treason and Cowardice and Deceit

The Tsar-Martyr, from whom the elite and then the people abdicated, said: ‘All around – treason and cowardice and deceit’. These are the anti-Trinity that destroyed the Russian Empire and led to his triumphal martyrdom and that of millions of Russian Orthodox Christians. Tsar Nicholas faced the treason and cowardice of unprincipled, anti-Orthodox aristocrats, who had lost their faith, and of left-wing terrorists, and the deceit of the Western Powers who, Allies on paper, rejoiced at his downfall. However, all have been punished: the left-wing terrorists betrayed and killed each other; the faithless, anti-Orthodox aristocrats were shot, exiled and chose schism; and the Western Powers, colonised by their colonies, deceived themselves and are now dying powerless. None of the above three groups has so far been able to recognise the Tsar as a saint, for to do so would mean repenting for all their errors and lies of the last 100 years and more – and they are too proud to do that.

50,000 Antiochian Orthodox to Become Russian Orthodox?

The Russian government is considering granting citizenship to some 50,000 Syrian Orthodox from the Qalamoun region, after they issued a joint request to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In statements issued in the past few days, spokesmen for President Putin and the Ministry have confirmed that the highest Russian authorities are examining the request.

The Syrian Christians wrote: ‘This is the first time since Christ’s birth that we, the Christians of Saidnaya and Maara Saidnaya, Ma’loula and Maarun have been threatened with expulsion from our land’. The letter was full of praise for Russia which it described as a ‘powerful factor for global peace and stability’. However, its remarks about Western countries were less flattering: ‘The aim of the Western-backed terrorists is to eliminate our presence in our homeland. They use the most abhorrent methods to achieve this, for example, murdering ordinary people’.

Archpriest Nikolai Balashov of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Department for External Affairs, commented that Middle Eastern Christians ‘had known for centuries that no other country would look after their interests in the same way that Russia would’. To reaffirm the ties between Russia and the Churches in Syria, on 14 October the Russian authorities decided to erect a statue of Christ on a mountain in Syria which is home to the Orthodox shrine of the Mother of God of Saidnaya. Arab Orthodox pilgrims come to this shrine from all over the Middle East.

To express his concern for the Christians ahead of the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Patriarch Kyrill had already sent President Obama a letter, asking him to listen to the cries of religious leaders who unanimously opposed proposals for military intervention against President Assad. In his message, the Patriarch talked about ‘the threat of mass extermination or exile’ faced by Christians in the Middle East. He urged others to join Russia’s diplomatic efforts and make the most of the opportunities that opened up for a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

With atheist Communism dead and atheist Europe a poodle to the USA, Russia is reinstating itself as the protector of Middle Eastern Christians, as in the 19th century. The Russian Orthodox Church has strengthened its relations with the Middle East’s battered Orthodox Churches by giving significant financial help. Last August, it donated $300,000 to the Patriarchate of Antioch to help those in need as a result of the Saudi and Qatari-financed anti-Syrian war. In July, First Hierarchs and representatives of Middle Eastern Churches met President Putin in person during their visits to Moscow for the 1025th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus. Patriarch Kyrill was the last great foreign Christian leader to be received by Bashar al-Assad in Damascus back in November 2011.

See also:
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/world-news/detail/articolo/russia-rusia-medio-oriente-28944/

The Struggle for Holy Orthodoxy: Secularism, Nationalism and Nominalism

Introduction

‘The struggle for Holy Orthodoxy’ was a phrase of the ever-memorable Metr Laurus. No doubt the many who knew this saintly hierarch much better than us could speak more about how he used it. The phrase, however, is very apt to describe those who seem to be crashing onto the rocks around the Church, without ever attaining Her. Today Holy Orthodoxy is threatened by two external threats, but above all by one internal threat. Only by struggling against all three of them can we win the struggle. What are these threats?

Secularism

The first threat is symbolised by the recent announcement that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a pan-European group, has passed a resolution condemning circumci-sion of children as a violation of human rights. The resolution was passed a few days ago with 78 votes in favour to just 13 against. 15 abstained from the vote. This wave of anti-Semitism against all Semites, Jews as well as Arab Muslims, may seem to some Orthodox Christians not to be our concern. However, it is.

Now, as we have seen with the furore around the practice of homosexuality, all faith is under threat from Western secularism, which is being spearheaded by the EU. This ‘secularism’, in fact just another name for atheism, threatens the catholicity, integrity and freedom of the Orthodox Church. Today it is against Jew and Muslim, tomorrow it will be the banning of Orthodox baptism, which will mean that the prophecy of St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1949), that Europeans will be forced to go to Russia for baptism, will come true.

Without the sense of catholicity, integrity and freedom the Local Orthodox Churches are threatened by the development of personality cults, which we saw developing when the Russian Church was not free under the Soviet yoke; then those who did not want the Russian Church to be reduced to a personality cult, left for freedom. But when the personality in question died, those who had created the cult also left, for their only attachment to the Church had been the dead personality whom they had culted.

Without the sense of catholicity, integrity and freedom, the Orthodox Churches are also threatened by homosexualisation, the result of the lack of monastic life. We saw this with the notorious Archbishop German Aav in Finland in the 1920s and the ensuing ‘Finlandisation’ of many parishes there, which have still not recovered. We have seen similar problems in the recent past in the USA and today the horrible problems created by homosexual plotters in the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, who slandered and ejected their Metropolitan.

Nationalism

Nationalism anywhere is a spiritual danger. Nationalism in the Church leads to the ethnic religion of the narrow and self-centred cultural ghetto, the petty religion of the pharisee and the sectarian. It belongs to a primitive world of isolation, for it says that one’s tribal group is above Christ. Soviet nationalism, still infecting Russia, is a good example of this. However, this is also a generational phenomenon which does not last, because it is incapable of bearing fruit in the next generation, which rejects it, unable to bear its constricting narrowness.

We well remember at the end of the 1970s studying at St Serge in Paris and the views of the late rector, Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, on the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the very Patriarchate to which he belonged. Having suffered in the 1960s from that Patriarchate’s three-year long abandonment of his diocese, he had been to the Phanar and asked for proof that the Patriarch there really did have universal authority among the Local Orthodox Churches as he claimed and was not simply, as he put it, ‘a petty Balkan bishop’.

He did not receive any proof and so in the 1970s tried to bring his jurisdiction back to the Russian Orthodox Church. Today’s paranoid misreport in the ‘EU Greek Reporter’ (http://eu.greekreporter.com/2013/10/21/conflicts-in-the-orthodox-ecumenical-council/) says indeed that the Patriarchate of Constantinople missed its unitive vocation during the Cold War through its nationalism. The article confirms that petty nationalistic jealousy on the part of the US-run Greek Patriarchate is delaying the convening of an Inter-Orthodox Conference.

The political jealousy of the Phanar with regard to Russian Orthodox Ukraine, which it recently tried to take over with US and EU backing, with regard to Russian Orthodox missionary work carried out for well over a century in Japan, China and the USA (as also in Poland and Czechoslovakia) and with regard to Russia’s present vital role in the Middle East in supporting the now Arab-run Patriarchate of Antioch against American interventionism, is not conducive to inter-Orthodox co-operation.

Nominalism

Despite the external irritants of Secularism and petty Nationalism – and not only Greek – the real enemy of the Church is internal. It is called Nominalism. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as three visits to church per lifetime, for baptism, marriage and funeral. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as a fifteen-minute visit on Easter Night. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as a thirty-minute visit once a month to ‘listen to the choir’.

This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as belonging to the 80% who sometimes attend but do not contribute, and not the 20% who take an active part in Church life and without whom the Church would not exist. This is also the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as living the consumerist lifestyle of this world; the Church is a supermarket, from which the consumer is free to choose whatever they like, that is, only ‘the nice, comfortable parts’.

Such a consumerist distortion of Church life in particular affects the demographics of any country that has fallen to nominalism, including once Orthodox countries. There, a large family is considered to be a burden, even a curse, by the consumerist. They say: How can you ‘enjoy’ life when you have a large family? Thus the world has fallen to the greatest holocaust in human history, greater than that of Hitler, Stalin and Mao; this is the holocaust of abortion, the greatest genocide and suicide in history.

All the once Orthodox countries have been infected by this holocaust. Thus, Russia cannot populate its expanses; China will do it instead. It has been calculated that if the atheist Revolution had never taken place, Russia would today have a population of over 600 million. How then can it be that in such a country the prophecies of rebirth will come right? Those who ask this question forget that prophecies are always conditional on repentance. Even so, it is true that Russia may not have quantity, but it may at least have quality.

Conclusion

Today Europe has finished its history. By its own choice it has nothing more to say; so it is no longer a civilisational choice. As for the USA, it has, like its films, only technology, the ‘shock and awe’ of special effects. As for other lands, they have people and productivity, but their cultures, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Animist, have lost the original impetus that came from faith and have only nationalism or violence. Only the multinational Church of Rus still bears a creative civilisation. The world will choose that – or die.

On Recovering the Lost Provinces of Western Europe

In the fifth century the westernmost provinces of Europe were lost by the Christian Empire to barbarian Germanic invaders. However, in the sixth century St Justinian the Great was Emperor in the Christian capital in New Rome from 527 to 565. The last Roman Emperor to speak Latin as a first language, Justinian sought ‘renovatio imperii’ or the restoration of the Empire by recovering the lost western provinces. This ambition was expressed by reconquering the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa as well as the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and restoring Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy and Rome to the Empire after more than half a century of barbarian control. His forces then reclaimed most of southern Iberia, establishing the province of Spania. Unfortunately, this recovery was to be all too short-lived

At the end of the sixth century, seeing that physical recovery was impossible, in Old Rome, itself provincialised, Pope Gregory the Great set about the spiritual recovery of the provinces, starting with Britain. This recovery succeeded and spread, but was fragile. Already towards the end of the eighth century the Germanic leader Charlemagne had changed the Creed and fallen into iconoclasm. Although he soon died, in the mid-eleventh century the Germanic iconoclasts not only returned to power, but took over the Roman see, creating the definitive Schism of 1054. No help could come from those who had remained faithful in New Rome, so oppressed were they, and indeed in 1204 the Christian capital was sacked by the barbarians, finally falling in 1453, its leaders having compromised themselves with the barbarians.

At this, the task of the spiritual recovery of the lost Western provinces fell to small and oppressed Russia as the only free country in the still Christian world. It, however, was faced with the hostility of the rulers of Western Europe and it was not until the nineteenth century that Russia was able to begin to preach the Christian Faith to the captive peoples of the Western provinces. However, the leaders of Western Europe became even more aggressive and invaded Russia in 1812, 1854 and again in 1914. This last invasion led to the fall of Christianity there in 1917, which came about through the treachery of the westernised upper classes, who betrayed their own ruler. In 1941 Western countries again invaded now fallen Russia, but with the sobering result that it began a fifty-year process of return to Christianity.

It is since 1991 then that Russia has been undergoing a long period of regeneration, painfully striving to re-establish at least something of Christianity. Although this process is far from complete, it provides hope that the spiritually sensitive in the lost Western provinces can return to the Church of Christ, especially if Russia is regenerated in full. This return can neither be on the basis of an uninteresting nationalistic form of Russian Christianity, nor on the basis of a minimal and opportunistically compromised form of Russian Christianity, as among some in North America, Paris, Finland and Estonia. It can only be on the basis of the maximal Christianity, the fullness of Orthodoxy. In this way, the lost provinces of Western Europe, including our own East of England province, can reintegrate the Church of God.