Category Archives: Russia

The End-Game for the Ukrainian State and Church?

https://savetheuoc.com/press-release-ukraines-passage-of-8371-is-a-grotesque-violation-of-religious-freedom/

Militarily, the Ukraine is collapsing. In the east Russian forces are advancing some miles almost every day, as former Kiev strongholds, undermanned and underequipped, fall. In the north, the NATO-planned operation to ‘invade’ Russia through the southern tip of the province of Kursk with up to 15,000 elite troops (2,000 of whom are Polish, American, British and French, but wearing Ukrainian uniforms) is turning into a bloodbath. Over 4,000 of those troops are already dead or seriously wounded. Many others have surrendered. That was a last act of desperation, a last chance to do something big. It too has failed, as the NATO-led Ukrainians are outmatched and outgunned in every was.

Two and a half years ago, all that Russia wanted was a neutral Ukraine and human rights for its Russian inhabitants. The USA forbade that. And slowly the USA escalated this war, arming and training Kiev troops. Even only a few weeks ago, Russia was still prepared to open peace negotiations with Kiev. Other BRICS countries were encouraging this. That is over. Now NATO, not the Ukraine, has invaded Russia. The Kursk Operation was NATO-planned, NATO-trained, NATO-equipped and NATO-financed. Here there are echoes of Napoleon’s multinational Western invasion of Russia in 1812 and Hitler’s equally multinational invasion of Russia in 1941. When will the West stop invading Russia? After each previous invasion from Western Europe, Western Europe was entirely reshaped. Here is the future for it. As for the Ukraine, it no longer has any future as such.

Meanwhile, there is also chaos in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Seeing these words, some will say: ‘No news here, it always is in chaos’. The confusion comes from the existence of so many pseudo-Orthodox Churches – here, clearly, I am not referring to the many US-founded Baptist/Pentecostalist sects in the country, which have no pretence of being Orthodox. Apart from the very few actual Roman Catholics, who are very traditional and more or less condemn the Second Vatican Council as heretical (and who have in the past contacted me), there are the not very many ‘Greek Catholics’. Neither Greek, nor Catholic (!), they are better known as Uniats, as they vaguely pretend to be Orthodox, but think like very old-fashioned, very right-wing and very anti-semitic Polish Catholics.

Then come those who call themselves ‘Ukrainian Orthodox’. There is the tiny group around the long since defrocked ‘Metropolitan’ (or is it Patriarch?) Filaret of Kiev. Nobody, not even Constantinople or his own children (both with Metr Onufry), takes this money-greedy (ex-?) Communist criminal seriously. Then comes the ‘OCU’, (‘the Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’), a group of clerically-dressed thugs and defrocked clergy who have stolen many churches from the actual Ukrainian Orthodox Church and whose favourite instruments are not liturgical, but angle-grinders and bolt-cutters. Their ideology appears to be Neo-Nazi, though they do convince a few patriotic but unchurched Ukrainians that they are actually Orthodox. After all, they were founded by the Patriarchate of Constantinople under American orders and greased with millions of US dollars, now nearly six years ago. Now using the Catholic calendar for their services, no serious Orthodox takes them seriously.

There is in reality only one real, internationally recognised and canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. 95% + of Ukrainian Orthodox belong to it, despite vicious persecution by the Neo-Nazi Ukrainian State. Its ruling hierarch is Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev and All the Ukraine. It is this Church which has today been banned by the Rada, or Parliament, in Kiev (269 votes for, 29 votes against). So much for American-sponsored freedom and democracy in the Ukraine. America is the new atheist Soviet Union, it seems. However, the law must be signed by the President, after which it can only be enacted after thirty days. Now things are moving quickly to stop this.

Constantinople warned the Ukrainians not to pass this law. Constantinople now knows that the OCU is fake and that the only real Church is the one Kiev wants to ban. Kiev has just disobeyed. Of course, Constantinople in itself has no power. But behind it stands the USA. The local Greek Archbishop there, Elpidiforos, who four years ago had his photograph taken with Biden, whom then he praised and told everyone to vote for, is now seen with Trump. Trump is much less keen on the Ukraine. His Catholic Vice-Presidential running-mate, Senator Vance, is a supporter of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Everybody knows that probably the next US President, if still unassassinated, will be Trump, and that he is fed up with giving money to subsidise everything in the Ukraine, which without US dollars would have gone bankrupt years ago.

Moreover, everybody knows that Patriarch Bartholomew is now aged 84. Archbishop Elpidiforos is very keen to succeed him. As also is Metropolitan Emmanuel (Adamakis). The former has taken against the Ukrainian OCU, the latter very much did the dirty work to found it. Now a delegation from there is going to Kiev, as they wanted to before. (Let us hope that the dreaded SBU Kiev Secret Police, will not assassinate them). Constantinople is very keen for it not to be seen as the instigator of a law to ban the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Given the failure of its OCU fantasy, it may at last be ready to repeal its statute (‘tomos’ in Greek) which founded the OCU and re-establish relations with Metropolitan Onufry’s canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the rest of the Orthodox world, from which it has isolated itself.

Having implemented its OCU gaffe six years ago, this would be a convenient let-out (in American English ‘off-ramp’) for Constantinople. If Constantinople states that it was lied to by the OCU, it can unrecognise it. If it were sensible it could even offer Metr Onufry autocephaly for his Church. That would put the Moscow Church, of which the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is de jure, but not de facto, a part, and to which for over thirty years it refused to grant autocephaly, in a tight corner. Of course, it may will not do this. Instead, some say that Constantinople wants to open up yet a new ecclesiastical structure in the Ukraine, an Exarchate, under the notorious and hated Archbishop Job (Getcha). That would be a great pity, because it now has an opportunity to improve relations with Moscow and embarrass it for Moscow’s uncanonical incursion into Greek-claimed Africa.

Our former friend, the former press secretary of the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II and journalist, Sergei Chapnin, who once came to our house, is heading for Constantinople now. We may hear more in the coming days. As the old Russian saying goes: ‘The circus left town, but the clowns stayed behind’.

 

 

Western Aggression + Russian Naivety = Ukrainian Tragedy + Millennial Transfiguration

Introduction: The End of an Old History

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 should have been a Godsend to the whole world. It should have led to the demilitarisation of the West since, with the fall of its Communist ideological rival, military aggression should have had no more meaning for the Western Capitalist world, if it ever had. Although, at the time, some spoke of ‘the peace dividend’, it became apparent that power had gone to the heads of the Western elite and they actually wanted to implement their ultimate fantasy. This consisted of totalitarian globalist control by the Western elite under the pretence of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ to the rest of the world through ‘humanitarian intervention’.

To do this, they would as usual use the organised violence of their ever more bankruptingly expensive military to impose it. They wanted ‘the end of history’ with ‘the global victory of the West’ and its messianic Zionism of ‘freedom and democracy’ (= slavery and tyranny), over all other and much older and far more sophisticated Civilisations. Already, even before the formal fall of the USSR in 1991, the Western elite had decided to invade the oil-rich and gas-rich Muslim world through Iraq. There followed decades of Western massacres of millions in various Muslim countries, which continue today, notably in the genocide in Gaza, with nearly 200,000 civilian dead so far.

Russian Naivety

Meanwhile, however, the pro-Western Russian government was dreaming about a common European home ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok’, made richer by demilitarisation. ‘We are Europeans’, claimed the now anti-Communist Russian governing elite. Even after 1999 the ultra-cautious and legalistic lawyer-leader of Russia, the pro-Russian President Putin, continued to want this common European home and even asked to join NATO. Indeed, for nearly three decades after 1991 Russian leaders continued to speak naively of ‘our Western partners’. With Communism removed, why was such idealistic friendship not possible?

However, naïve Russian leaders did not understand the true and envious nature of ambitious Western aggression. From 2008 on, after the West had aggressively declared that the Ukraine and Georgia would also have to join NATO, after already breaking all its promises to Russia not to expand to the whole of ex-Soviet Eastern Europe, Russia at last began to be alarmed. It had lost its post-1945 buffer zone set up to protect it from continual Western invasions. For the first time it resisted and defeated the aggression of the Western puppet government in nationalist Georgia. Relations between the West and Russia sharply deteriorated, requiring an utterly failed ‘reset’.

The situation came to a head in 2014 with the anti-democratic CIA regime-change coup on Russia’s doorstep, in Kiev. Manipulating Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, this Western-financed (it had cost ‘only’ $5 billion, as the US politician Nuland publicly boasted) coup was directed at destroying Russia. The aim was to start a proxy war and invade Russia from a highly militarised and NATO-ised Ukraine, then overthrow the Russian government, break this millennial country up, colonise it and seize its huge mineral wealth, thus surrounding China from the north. This was the dream of the Western elite, as openly expressed by the Pentagon’s think tank, the US Rand Corporation.

Such exploitation had already been tried in the 1990s, disastrous for the impoverished and humiliated Russian people, creating the corrupt class of Russian and Ukrainian (in fact, mainly Israeli) oligarchs. Thus, for eight long years between 2014 and 2022, the CIA-controlled Kiev regime and its US and British PR advisors and arms merchants massacred, persecuted and repressed the large Russian minority (about 40% of the population) in the east and south of the Ukraine, arming the Kiev regime to the teeth. During this time naïve Russia still constantly tried to create peace and negotiate, mainly through the Minsk Accords.

Naivety Rewarded by Western Aggression

In these ‘Accords’ the naïve Russian elite was systematically betrayed and deceived by the West, especially by the German and French leaders, behind whom stood Washington. Slowly, the extremely naïve Russian governing elite began to realise what had been obvious to others all along, that the US would not allow peace and that the Western European vassals were entirely in US pockets and no longer had any policy of their own. When at the end of 2021 it became obvious that the Kiev regime was about to invade and genocide Russian majority areas, in February 2022 a small Russian task force was forced to pre-empt Kiev and enter the east of the Ukraine, formerly Russia.

Numbering some 90,000, but facing the largest and perhaps best-trained, best-equipped and best-fortified army in Europe, that of the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime, this force had as its aim not to occupy, but to withdraw, having forced Kiev into realistic peace talks. However, again Russia was betrayed and lied to. In early April 2022 the US, through its UK subsidiary, forbade peace, even forcing Kiev to pass a law to forbid any negotiations with Moscow. In return, it promised to arm the Kiev regime with all the stocks of Western-held weapons, obsolete or not, it could give it, and to train its troops, if necessary, to ‘die to the last Ukrainian’, so killing as many Russians as possible and weakening Russia.

Thus, the Western elite forced Russia to make its small token operation into an operation against the whole of NATO. This meant the huge growth by voluntary conscription and reprofessionalisation and re-equipping of the Russian armed forces. It also meant the end of reliance on the typically post-Soviet private military Wagner mercenary company, run by the crooked Russian oligarch, Prigozhin, which was the equivalent of the US Blackwater. Much more than this, seeing Western hypocrisy, double standards and intense, Western media Russophobia with its Cancel Russia culture, the pro-Western Russian elite was shocked and even traumatised to its core.

At the height of the Nazis, no-one had ever thought of cancelling Goethe, Hegel, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Heine, Wagner or any other giants of German culture. Russia’s dreamed-of friends have turned into nightmarish enemies, who will not even speak to Russians any more. And the diplomat-free Western elite invented 20,000 illegal anti-Russian sanctions and, as true racists, called its patriotic President ‘Hitler’ (who was a Westerner as was his Fascism also Western) and its people ‘Asiatic barbarians’! Russia was forced to turn away from the hostile and uncivilised West to friendly and civilised China and India, becoming the champion of the anti-Western Global Majority.

From the Ukrainian Tragedy

Gradually, the pre-empting, token Russian Special Military Operation sent in to force negotiations on 24 February 2022, had to turn into another Operation, This had not just to liberate the eastern corner of the Ukraine, with its long-suffering Russian people, and demilitarise and denazify the rest of the Ukraine, but to demilitarise and denazify, that is, disarm and defeat, the whole of NATO. This defeat could well lead to its collapse and the eventual withdrawal of the bankrupt US from Western Europe. However, this in turn will mean the collapse of US world hegemony through the dedollarising, Russian-led BRICS Alliance, liberating Africa, Asia and Latin America from Western tyranny.

These will no longer fear a defeated West with its continual regime-changes of colour revolutions (currently involving Serbia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Armenia, Georgia, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru etc). Some Global Majority countries, especially in French colonial West Africa, have already seen the victory of Russian arms over the West in the Ukraine and liberated themselves in turn from French and US troops. In the end, BRICS may well take with it still relatively free European countries, like Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, perhaps the rest of the Central Europe and the Balkans, and perhaps ultimately Italy and others, thus in time collapsing the US Neo-Nazi EU puppet.

In the last few days, at least 12,000 fanatical Kiev regime troops and many NATO mercenaries, still believing in the recently invented myths of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, have been sent on a fool’s errand by the US/NATO, ostensibly in a terrorist operation which threatens the Kursk nuclear power station, in reality an operation which is guaranteed to fail so that Zelensky can be discredited and replaced. They have been sent as cannon fodder to die in a crazy and suicidal incursion across the Russian border to occupy 40 (not 1,000) square kilometres and a few villages in the south of the province of Kursk. Thus, the last of NATO arms sent in this US-promoted PR stunt to ‘invade Russia’ will be destroyed.

However, these last elite troops, the few trained left, supposed to defend the east of the Ukraine and Kiev itself, have been thrown away together with their German (and British) tanks fighting near Kursk again. All they have achieved is to occupy some fields, forests, hamlets and tiny villages in the vastness of Russia. Now they are running out of logistics, air cover, supplies, ammunition, fuel, food and water. Some 2,600 are already dead or wounded and over 300 of their NATO tanks and armoured cars destroyed. Many Ukrainian soldiers, trapped inside Russia, have surrendered. But Russian public opinion is outraged. ‘Go for Kiev’ is the message they are giving the once moderate Russian government.

To Millennial Transfiguration

Some have even suggested that the whole operation was a Russian trap, set to destroy this last gasp of the collapsing Kiev regime. Some compare the operation to the suicidal Nazi operation in the Ardennes, ‘the Battle of the Bulge’, in December 1944. This may be the end for those currently cowering in their bunker in Kiev. Russia never wanted any of this. But the treacherous trauma of Western aggression since 2014 in Kiev, which has led directly to today’s tragic bloodshed, has also made Russia into the linchpin of BRICS. Thus, it has allied itself with the Global Majority, that is, 90% of the world, the Non-Western world. The Orwellian-censored Western elite has been left sulking.

It has set about trying to assassinate any leader it can, apparently in Slovakia, Hungary, Iran and even regime-changing the USA itself, replacing the senile Biden in a palace coup with the unelected Harris, and trying to assassinate Trump. Its State propaganda mouthpieces call ‘war’ ‘peace’, ‘tyranny’ ‘freedom’, oligarchy’ ‘democracy’, and ‘lies’ ‘truth’. (Orwell was forty years too early, 1984 = 2024). Many have commented that this is a transformation which takes place only every 500 years. The period of exploitation and colonisation of the New Worlds, that is, everywhere outside Western Europe, between 1514 and 2014, from Latin America to Asia, from Africa to the Ukraine, is over.

It is the Ukraine that has been the bridge too far, the fat morsel which the greedy West has bitten off and choked on. However, in reality, this is a millennial transformation. For the West began its ascendancy in Rome when on 14 February 1014, the newly-installed Pope Benedict VIII crowned the centralising and imperialistic Holy Roman Emperor Henry in Rome. This was to the reading of the newly-formed dogma of Western ideology, expressed in the new Roman Catholic Creed, at variance with the age-old Creed of the Church. For Henry II had forced Pope Benedict VIII to include the word filioque in the Nicene Creed agreed on by the whole Church in the fourth century.

This is the proclamation that all authority and infallibility, the Spirit of God, proceeds uniquely from Western leaders, who are the replacements (‘vicars’) of God on earth. This is an ersatz humanist religion, replacing God by men, Faith by religion. Moreover, this authority and infallibility has been passed down to all Western leaders, whoever they may be, whether they have been Popes of Rome (up until the sixteenth century) and Western Kings (up until the revolutions of 1688 in England and 1789 in France), and then Western European Emperors (Napoleon), Presidents, Prime Ministers, Chancellors or, since 1917, US Presidents.

Conclusion: The Beginning of a New History

However, what will happen after the Russian Special Operation in the Ukraine is over? How will Russia, which has no intention of occupying the whole of this Communist construct of the Ukraine, win the peace there? Will there be a new Russia-friendly government in the New Ukraine (will it even be called that?), its capital still in Kiev, but perhaps shorn of between five and nine southern and western provinces, gone back to Russia, and of between three and five provinces in the far west, gone back to Poland, Romania and Hungary? And how will the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church cease after the fall of the now illegal, atheist Jewish dictatorship of Zelensky?

What will the new status of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church then be? Will the naïve Russian Church free itself of its corrupt or CIA bishops? Will the New Ukraine join BRICS, as part of the Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus? So many questions remain, for this conflict is only the beginning, not the end, of a new history. What is certain is that this new history will be led and created not by the West, but by the Global Majority, led by Russia and China. The US will be left isolated and the US-appointed EU Commissars, German and UK ministers will, with their Fascist ‘liberal’ globalist ideology, be as discredited as their Nazi grandfathers, and run away into US exile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Eve of Destruction? Prayer or Despair

Introduction

Whether among the secular elite or among the Church elite, corruption, perversion and faithlessness are everywhere, in almost apocalyptic fashion. The Western elite seems to be obsessed with its virtual world delusions which come from its wishful thinking lies, that it calls ‘narratives’, which are psy-ops and propaganda. For example, most Roman Catholics are still stunned by the anti-Christian opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in ex-Catholic and Prime Minister-less France, which is now ‘run’ by perverts. Perhaps they were stunned even more by the silence and eventual half-hearted condemnation of that blasphemy by the Pope of Rome. Some Catholics have even asked if he is not one of them. No comment. It is for Catholics to comment on their own elite.

International

Meanwhile, the US-funded provocations of the Western crusader state of Israel against Iran, with Mossad assassinations of Iranian leaders and friends, now look as though they could lead to a regional war in the powderkeg of West Asia, perhaps in the Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of Jews have already fled Israel, whose army with its many deserters, has been mauled by the genocided Palestinians, many hundreds of whose civilians are massacred every single day by Israel’s US bombs. If the leaderless and rudderless US, where the senile Biden has been replaced in a coup d’etat, obsessed with an election next November, directly takes part in this war, it will be on the orders of Washington fanatics, blinded by their ideology.

If so, expect US Navy ships to be sunk. This could be in the eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, where 30% of the world’s oil passes, or in the Red Sea. US ships already had to run away from the Red Sea once, frightened of Houthi missiles. Iran is being armed with air-defence systems and missiles by Russia. The Muslim world, Russia and China are united in support of Iran. Little wonder that stock exchanges amid the political chaos of the Western world have been crashing, not least because they have seen that US debt is unpayable. Printing more trillions of dollars is not an option.

Meanwhile, almost unreported in the Pagan Games-obsessed and media-manipulated Western world of bread and circuses, 2,000 ageing Ukrainian troops are being killed or wounded every day. Despite the  six obsolete US fighter aircraft hiding in Romania, whose futile presence is merely a PR stunt, surely the tragedy there can only last another two months at most?  Moreover, Ukrainians are themselves rebelling against their authorities and the Fascist military pressgangs, who are trying to recruit the over-60s, so desperate is the manpower situation. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are surrendering or deserting every year. The conflict in the Ukraine, with its untrained and surrendering troops, can only end in one way, the unconditional capitulation of Kiev, which for ten years refused to negotiate. In the meantime, Russian forces are heading for the Polish border.

National

In the UK, some minor riots against mass and uncontrolled illegal immigration, wretched refugees from the West’s futile wars in the Middle East, have been taking place in a few of the poorest working-class areas in the north and midlands of England. The anti-working-class British Prime Minister, the Zionist millionaire Starmer, elected by 20% of the population, but with a massive parliamentary majority, can only bluster. His prisons are so full anyway that he has to release thousands of prisoners before term. But then the last two British Prime Ministers were not even elected – such is the inbred elite of British democracy, which is in fact like the EU, a US-appointed globalist autocracy.

Starmer’s utter incompetence is not going to solve any problems, let alone draw up a strategy to deal with decades of accumulated discontent in the oligarch-controlled UK. The future looks grim. Decades of British incompetence and exploitation have produced the destruction of public services and utilities (which now resemble more public disservices), tens of thousands of homeless people sleep rough on the streets, hundreds of thousands of children have to eat from food banks run by charities, amid dangerous potholed roads and polluted rivers. Decay is all around.

Indeed, on top of the failure of the hopelessly underfunded police, defence and education services, there is the utterly failed National Health ‘Disservice’, with nearly 8 million waiting for urgent medical attention. The number goes down only if those waiting for treatment die before they get treatment, as so often happens. Why such social injustice? Partly, because of the tens of billions wasted in futile wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Ukraine, each time without any consultation, and at the British Akrotiri base (run under US orders) in Cyprus, which is used to supply bombs for the ongoing genocide of 200,000 Palestinian civilians and children in Gaza.

Church

In the meantime, on 25th July, the Synod of the Russian Church in Moscow at last began the long, long overdue campaign to cleanse the immoral and amoral members of the episcopate and senior clergy of that Church. First, it suspended the notorious liberal intellectual, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev). At best he can only be retired, like so many other hypocritical metropolitans who ‘let the side down’, like the alcoholic and married Metr Ioan, who once sat in Paris or, much worse, the pedophile metropolitans, two of whom it has already ‘retired’ in Moscow, or those ‘retired’ from Kazan in that disgusting affair.

The suspension of Metr Hilarion followed the long overdue suspension of the Rector of St John the Theologian’s University in Moscow, the notorious Abbot Petr Yeremeev. Now also Archbishop Ephraim of Birobidjan has been ‘retired’. As for Bishop Ignaty (Punin), once very close to the Patriarch, this notorious homosexual thief has at last been defrocked. And in the Crimea Bishop Callinicus, aged 47, has also been ‘retired’. Meanwhile, in London, the defrocked drug dealer ‘Bishop Maxim’, notorious for his sexual orgies even when he was an unpunished priest in London, roams free from the Russian police.

Many will complain and ask when this drop of punishment in the ocean of corruption and perversion will extend to take in all the corrupt and perverted (most of them are the same people). When will it spread to all those hundreds of corrupted and perverted bishops and senior clergy both inside and outside Russia and their gay mafia gangs, whose antics have been known for years or even decades? These gangs are the ones who persecute the honest parish pastors and ignore the people and their basic needs. Yet no action has ever been taken against them and these evil men are still shielded and protected.

Conclusion

The people have been left unprotected for decades, both by secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Both have been and are equally corrupt. May the Church cleansing, which has at last begun, spread to the hundreds who need to be cleansed. And may it spread outside the Russian Church to the utterly corrupt episcopate in Constantinople and elsewhere. And may it finally spread to the political authorities too. Now is the time for prayer. The alternative is despair.

 

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

 

The Russian Federation Offers Peace for the Last Time

On 14 June President Putin gave a very generous and face-saving last opportunity to the US elite and their vassals to make peace in the Ukraine, where they are fighting against the Russian Federation. This last chance peace offer is a repetition of and development of all those made continuously from 2014 on. This last offer consisted once more of the condition of the neutrality, demilitarisation and denazification of the Ukraine and its recognition of the five Russian provinces in the east and south whose Russian inhabitants have by referendum already chosen to join the Russian Federation.

This peace offer was at once dismissed by the Western elite in favour of their plan to escalate the anti-Russian war further. ‘Make war, not peace’, said Washington’s messenger-boy Boris Johnson in Kiev in early April 2022, using as his pretext the amateurishly British-staged ‘massacre’ in Bucha, selected only as its name is similar to the English word ‘butcher’. So they put paid to the already initialled Istanbul peace agreement between the Ukraine and Russia. Peace was never on the Washington agenda. In 2019 Washington had already published its plan to destroy and dismantle Russia completely, though this had been its scheming ever since 1991.

In reality, this intention of destroying Russian unity actually goes back to the British-orchestrated overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. That tragic overthrow, which led directly to the massacres of Lenin and Stalin, was greeted by the then Prime Minister Lloyd George in the London Parliament at the time as ‘the achievement of one of our aims’. However, it had in fact been the intention of the Victorian Imperialists as early as the 1840s, which had led to the British invasion of Russia in 1854.

After all, the American Empire only inherited and continued the British Empire, the turning point and transatlantic handover of power going back to Milner’s Round Table Movement agreement of 1916. That provided US backing for the British overthrow of the Tsar and at once the US entry into World War I, thus the US replacing Russia. Of course, the present Western ‘narrative’ (a new word for fairy-tale or parallel world) is that Russia wants to recreate the Soviet Union and invade all of Europe. This is nonsense. The failed Marxist experiment in the USSR with its buffer zone in Eastern Europe to protect it from continual Western invasions is dead. Sadly, the equally failed US Empire experiment is not quite over.

When will the tragedy in the Ukraine end? The end must be close, but no politician can say when; only a psychiatrist can do that. With the US rejection of the peace plan, a rejection swiftly followed by the rejection of the same by US NATO client-states, the US will soon lose its war against the Federation. The latter has now been obliged by Western stubbornness to reject the Russian ultimatum and Russia will now take control of the whole of the Ukraine. And as a result, the US elite and Co will lose face. And the whole of Western Europe will never be the same again. This transformation will affect the Church. See the next commentary.

 

Towards the Civilisation of the Resurrection

Introduction: The Obvious Russian Victory in the Ukraine

It was from the outset clear that there could only be one winner in the conflict in the Ukraine – the Russian Federation. This is because it is fighting on its doorstep – so there are no logistic issues – in a country where nearly half the population is pro-Russian anyway. Russia, by far the largest country in the world, certainly does not need more territory. Indeed, it is not fighting for territory, but for security by demilitarising and denazifying the very threatening Russophobic Kiev puppet regime, which exists only because of the support, finance and arms of the US elite. And Russia is ideally placed to conduct a war of attrition, which is what it is doing, as Kiev suicidally throws its few arms and few troops into the direct lines of Russian fire.

Russia also has seven times the present Ukrainian population and is completely independent in terms of natural and human resources. It also has one of the best educational systems, very advanced technology and one of the largest militaries in the world. It has most of the world’s most advanced and cheapest arms, such as hypersonic missiles, outmatching NATO’s absurdly expensive and obsolete arms. Russia can provide these arms to others who wish to protect themselves from US threats, it has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world and is supported diplomatically by China and indeed the Non-Western 90% of the world. The deindustrialised West stands no chance against it. However, it is one thing for Russia to win a war, quite another, as all should know from the recent US invasions of West Asia, for Russia to win the peace.

Why the Ukraine?

Essentially the conflict in the Ukraine is a civilisational war. Who does the Ukraine belong to? Does it belong to Western Civilisation, first Catholic, then Protestant, and now Secularist? Or does it belong to (Orthodox) Christian Civilisation, which stretches up from Gaza and Jerusalem northwards to the White Sea and eastwards from the Montenegrin shores of the Adriatic, from eastern Slovakia and eastern Poland to Vladivostok? History tells us that the Ukraine is a strange amalgam, an artificial country, invented at the end of the 19th century by the Austro-Hungarians in order to divide and rule, justifying their domination. In reality, over 80% of the Ukraine is part of Christian Civilisation, for the south and the east of what is now called the Ukraine was part of Russia until 1922 and all the Ukraine is an invention of Communist dictators since then. It is the decisions of these Communist dictators which are being so keenly supported by the US and NATO governments today.

These dictators were Lenin (in 1922), Stalin (in 1945) and Khruschev, who at a drunken party in 1954 gave the Russian Crimea to the Ukraine. Obviously, none of these evil and brutal dictators ever consulted the Russian population whether they wanted to belong to the Ukraine, let alone if they wanted to abandon their own language and be forced to speak Ukrainian. Perhaps the greatest error was that of the atheist Stalin, who in 1945 stole a small area of the far west of what is now called the Ukraine, called Western Galicia. It was this Western Galicia which Tsar Nicholas II had intended to give to the newly independent Poland after the Russian victory in the First World War. This Western Galicia had for centuries been part of the Habsburg Empire and then, after 1918, of Poland. At the same time, he stole smaller areas that had long belonged to Romania and another part called Carpatho-Rus, also miscalled ‘Ruthenia’, which had belonged to Hungary, before that to Czechoslovakia, and before that to the Habsburgs who had oppressed it.

The West Galician Tragedy

The West Galicians alone spoke authentic Ukrainian (a language different from Russian and Polish) as their first language. Like nearly all Catholics in Europe at the time, from de Valera’s Ireland to the Catholic priest Hlinka’s Slovakia, the murderous Pavelic’s Croatia, Salazar’s Portugal, Franco’s Spain, Petain’s France and to Mussolini’s Italy) these Galicians, some of them joining the SS, had been ardent Nazis under the German Occupation from 1941 to 1944, as they were also ardent anti-Communists. With Nazi encouragement they ethnically cleansed, massacring Jews, Poles (over 100,000) and Russians alike, in huge numbers. The Galicians gradually rose to power, armed by parachute drops of arms from the CIA and MI6 after 1945 right up till the late 1950s, oppressing others and their languages, Hungarian, Romanian and Carpatho-Rusyn. The Galicians were nearly all Uniats (also known as Greek Catholics), which is a fanatically nationalist religion, different from the rest of the Ukrainians who are Orthodox and from the Poles who are Catholics.

The rise of the pro-Nazi West Galician Uniats became a steep and victorious ascent under the Americans from 1991 on. So that they could Americanise the population, the Americans sent a host of Protestant missionaries. When this failed, in 2018 the Americans set up a fake Orthodox Church, staffed by gangsters and other dollar-paid thugs, and then imposed the Western calendar on it. Of course, virtually nobody has joined it, everyone knows it is an American fake. In other words, after Western European countries had been forced to give up their settler colonial empires around the world after 1945 (the Dutch, the British, the French, the Belgian, the Portuguese and the South Africans), the US set up an apartheid colonial empire in the Ukraine, using the fanatical pro-Nazi Galicians as their enforcers, a battering ram against Russia, just as the British had used the Sikhs in India and the French the Harkis in Algeria against the rest. However, this was not the first case in the late 20th century, for the US has already done the same thing with Israel.

The Western Civilisation of Suicide

However, the period of the domination and exploitation of the world’s peoples by the Western elite, essentially the elite of the USA and of the very narrow strip of land north of it where 90% of Canadians live, and Western Europe, is largely over. The spirit of Cruel Britannia and Cruel America and their forever wars is ending. However, the Western elite resists the death of its domination and refuses to accept constructive change and co-operation, seeking confrontation instead. Its resistance to inevitable change on account of its denial that it is inevitable is leading to suicidal actions in its death agony. And it has exported that agony. Thus, the Western strategy in the Ukraine which has never been to help that wretched country, but to try and weaken US rivals, Russia and, through it, China.

So the Ukraine shares in the same demographically suicidal trap. Since the bloody Western coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in Kiev in 2014, the Ukraine has already lost half its population, down from 40 million to 20 million, also losing one and a half million dead or wounded troops in two years. It is no longer a viable State and cannot even pay the salaries of its civil servants, which are paid by the US and the EU. Who wants to live there or have children there? There is no future. However, the owner of the Ukrainian State, Biden, also lives in a country of suicide in a mixture of bankruptcy and fentanyl. Biden’s US cannot even defeat the Houthis of Yemen. Biden’s term that began with the humiliating US rout in Kabul is ending with the humiliating US rout in Kiev.

European Suicide

However, the same suicide is also taking place in the US colony in Israel, which commits genocidal blunder after genocidal blunder and loses all sympathy worldwide. This suicide is also happening in Europe. Self-imposed sanctions against Russia have meant an 84% increase in European energy costs, equivalent to a loss of one trillion euros. Meanwhile, Russia simply sells its energy to many other willing buyers outside the Western world. Poland and the Baltic statelets have bankrupted themselves helping Ukrainian ‘refugees’, who have run away from the suicidal danger of having to serve in the Ukrainian Army. The German elite has committed economic and social suicide by allowing the US and its allies to destroy its source of cheap energy, the Nordstream pipelines. Germany, once the locomotive of the EU, is now losing its strength, its manufacturing industry. Russia has overtaken the German economy. The French elite, led by the banker Macron, has committed suicide with its racist ideology of superiority towards its colonial empire in West Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, where in nickel-rich Kanaky (New Caledonia) revolt against France is again on the streets.

In the UK, with its collapsing infrastructure, reducing parts of its town and city administrations, water supplies, railways, roads, hospitals and schools to Third World levels, as in the USA, the unelected and extremely unpopular Sunak has given up. First, there was his self-humiliation, while standing in the pouring rain, of declaring that he will hold an election on 4 July, US Independence Day, for the UK has outsourced its Independence to the US. Now Sunak the bank teller has declared that he does not want any young people or people with children and grandchildren to vote for him by absurdly decreeing that he will reintroduce National Service for young people. (Something that Germany had rejected just before him). He and his Party are dead. But then the anti-Left wing Labour ‘Opposition’ which also supports the anti-Ukrainian genocide in the Ukraine and the anti-Palestinian genocide in Gaza is just as dead.

The Ukrainian Myth and Western Self-Esteem

Western politicians declare: ‘We cannot let Russia win in the Ukraine’. Why? Russians, keenly supported by long-oppressed Eastern and Southern Ukrainians, consider that they are fighting to liberate Russians who live on ancient Russian territory, that is, in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The sacked and disgraced British Prime Minister Johnson has explained: ‘We are at risk of losing Western hegemony’. Admitting Western hegemony, he believes in what can only be called the ‘Western ideology’, that is, the myth that the West is superior to the Rest. This is the ideology of hubris, rejected by the seven billion people of the Global Majority and also by many in the West itself (see below). And that ideology, like all ideologies which apply narrow human imaginings to ever-changing reality, makes those who believe in it stupid.

Western politicians have replaced the old ideological opposition between Capitalism and Communism with a new and mythical opposition between ‘Democracy and Autocracy’. And yet the Ukraine is not a democracy. Its President is a martial law dictator, whose term in office ended on 20 May, who has banned other political parties, the free media, and has had murdered those who disagree with him or else sent them to the torture-chambers of his secret police. His Neo-Nazi military pressgang ordinary Ukrainians into the Army, which is why some ten million of them have either fled abroad (ironically, above all, to Russia), or else are in hiding in their apartments, leaving the streets empty of men. No Ukrainian man wants to face almost certain death by being pressganged into serving in the Ukrainian Army.

Western Fascist Ideology

However, which Western leader has been elected by over 50% of his citizens, let alone represents their views? Not a single one. They are all minority leaders. In fact, so-called Western ‘Democracy’ is a unipolar hegemony, a Uniparty, supported and run by wealthy oligarchs. For in so-called ‘Democracy’ there is no value higher than profit. There is no-one to vote for, both parties are run by the ‘Deep State’, that is, by the Establishment. The West is living in Communist times. There you could vote for anyone, as long as they belonged to the Communist Party. So in the modern West you can vote for anyone as long as they belong to the Establishment/Deep State. Not the Soviet Union, but the Western Union. As for ‘Autocracy’, ‘authoritarian government’, it forms a multipolar world of sovereign patriotisms, supported by the people. (This is why ‘democrats’ deride them as ‘populists’). For ‘Autocracy’ there is no value higher than patriotism. Thus, the actual division in the modern world is not between Democracy and Autocracy, but between Transnational Oligarchy and National Sovereignty, or, put more simply, between Globalism and Patriotism.

In the former French colonies they know this, they at least have no illusions. That is why they are kicking French (and American) troops out. They know it in Armenia, where, led by a patriotic archbishop, they are trying to kick out EU meddlers and their anti-patriotic, EU puppet-leader. None of this is described in the delusional Western media, since globalist oligarchs own them. The Western ideology is supremacism, of which Nazism is only the best-known form. This ideology is espoused by Western supremacist EU officials, many of them grandchildren of actual German Nazis, and the disgraced liar, the British Prime Minister Johnson. He openly praised Ukrainian Nazis as ‘heroes’ and had his photograph taken with them and their Nazi Azov flag. This is the disease of exceptionalism, ‘we are above the law’, as seen in the Western decision to ignore the findings of the International Criminal Court against the genocidal Mileikowsky (who hides behind the alias of Netanyahu). This is satanic pride.

The World on the Nuclear Brink

As a result, we face a situation potentially worse than in 1962, when the world was threatened by nuclear war on account of US missiles positioned near the Soviet border in Turkey. Once the US President Kennedy had removed those missiles, the USSR removed its threat to position its missiles in Cuba. Today some in NATO are threatening to bomb Russia through their Kiev proxies and Russia is therefore threatening to reply in kind. A simultaneous triple war is threatened, in the Ukraine, in the Middle East and in Taiwan, plus the probability that the West will lose Slovakia (where it has tried to assassinate the Prime Minister), Hungary, Georgia (ruled by a Frenchwoman and CIA-run NGOs and whose patriots are threatened by EU assassination), Central Asia, Kosovo, Armenia, Syria, all of Africa (in uranium-rich Niger, Burkina Faso and the Congo in particular), most of Latin America and even the rest of the now bankrupt EU. This includes the US-run Baltics, Poland, Bulgaria and Moldova, which are in fact for the moment run by their US ambassador-governors.

To describe all this, they use the absurd term ‘Cold War’ or ‘Cold War II’. This never existed. Wars were and are always hot, whether in Korea, Africa, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq or today in the Ukraine and Gaza. Western politicians declare that there is a Russian threat to ‘Western Civilisation’, i.e., if defiant Russia does not agree to be bombed by NATO without reply and back the direct and indirect Western massacres which have taken place in Korea, Vietnam, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and Gaza, and Western colour revolutions, which use small numbers of dollar-paid protestors in Belarus, Kazakhstan, today in Georgia, and tomorrow perhaps in Slovakia and Hungary, then, indeed, that particular exploitative and corrupt form of ‘Western Civilisation’ will collapse. Thank God.

Christian Civilisation

However, that does not mean that Civilisation in the Western world will collapse. On the contrary, it will become civilised, renewed, recovered and restart its long-ago interrupted existence. Clearly, we who are Western and were born in the West do not belong to that ‘Western Civilisation’ of Fascist superiority and impunity, of Nazi hubris and arrogance. That can be called ‘Zionism’ (this is nothing to do with Jews), which proclaims that anything it does is justified because it is ‘superior’, ‘indispensable’ and, just like its ancestor the Roman Papacy, ‘infallible’. For example, the leader of the British Labour Party, an Establishment multi-millionaire, proudly states that he is a ‘Zionist’. So do the Catholic Biden and the atheist Johnson.

We are not Zionists, for we belong to another Western Civilisation, whose sign is not pride, but humility. This Civilisation is called Christian Civilisation. Here we are not speaking of ‘Western Christian Civilisation’, which does not exist as such, but of Christian Civilisation in the West. This Civilisation is part of that same worldwide Orthodox Christian Civilisation which was founded in Jerusalem in AD 33 and existed almost all through the Mediterranean world in the first millennium and still exists in parts of the Middle East and large parts of Eastern Europe. And we too still belong it, this Civilisation of the Resurrection. It does not matter whether we are in the East or the West, we are Orthodox Christians.

The Renewal of Orthodox Christian Civilisation

The definition of Orthodox Christian Civilisation is that it produces saints, for saints are the product of the Holy Spirit, Who makes the Church live. Some say that this Orthodox Christian Civilisation is corrupted, that is, that it no longer produces saints. This is not true. Within the last 100 years, we have seen many new saints on Mt Athos, in Greece, Serbia, Romania, in Carpatho-Russia and everywhere in the former Communist lands. True, there are parts of the Church where we do not see any saints for the moment, but we do see persecuted Confessors of the Faith, bishops, monks, nuns, priests and laypeople and Martyrs for the Faith – clergy and laity. Critics will point to individuals, especially in the heights of Constantinople or Moscow, who have been corrupted and created scandals, either financial or moral, through being tempted by money or power.

However, it is notable that after his landslide election victory and new mandate, President Putin is now strong enough to begin resolving the problems caused by post-Soviet corruption in Russia. Within two weeks, he has had four generals arrested for stealing large amounts of money and equipment. He has now appointed a new Minister of Defence, an Orthodox Christian economist, who is said to be incorruptible. After purging the military, perhaps next the President will purge the post-Soviet Church administration, with its top-heavy centralism, corrupt individuals and scandals, including those infiltrated by the CIA. All these ‘princes of the Church’, with their love of clerical luxury, ignore the grassroots and have made the Church in Russia very unpopular. Their only use for priests is as an army of moneymakers for themselves. We the monastics, the parish clergy and the people have no time for this disgusting froth. If the new Christian Civilisation is to take shape and take root once more in the West and in the East, it must not be corrupt.

Conclusion: A Way Forward

We have spoken about winning the peace. This will be essential for the Church in the Ukraine after the military conflict is over. ‘For the peace of the whole world, the peace of all Rus and victory over the forces of evil, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all, let us pray to the Lord’. Here in bold are the words that we thought should have been added to the great litany of the Russian Church for the duration of the conflict. And the Communist-period named Patriarchate of Moscow should have been renamed ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’, its administrative headquarters being removed to the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. As Russia is now a national State, albeit multi-ethnic, the Russian Orthodox Church should at once have granted autocephaly to Churches outside its national borders, thus forming the Ukrainian Church, the Moldovan Church and the Baltic Church (covering Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland).

Thus, it would have established three new Autocephalous Churches, outplaying US-orchestrated Constantinople schisms in Lithuania, the Ukraine and Estonia, just as the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches were created for newly-independent countries in the last century and so avoided schisms. And if Belarus and the five countries of Central Asia also desired autocephaly, they too should receive it, creating two more Autocephalous Churches, the Belarussian and the Central Asian. And schism should never have been encouraged by Moscow in ROCOR or in Africa. And senior hierarchs could have adopted the attitude of St Nicholas of Japan during the Japanese War against Russia in 1904-5, who locked himself away and prayed. This is the Civilisation of the Resurrection. Here was a way of winning the peace. None of this has been done. And that is why all is now so delicate.

Afterword: Russia’s Lost Time and the Magic Mountain of Europe

In 1913 the famous French economist Edmond Thierry (1854-1925) predicted that by 1950 Russia would dominate Europe politically, economically and financially. In other words, if Russia had not undergone the 1917 ‘revolution’, 33 years later, in 1950, Russia would have dominated Europe. What happened? Quite simply, Russia lost 74 years (1917-1991) under the Soviet regime. Only now, in 2024, has it overtaken Germany and become the largest economy in a Europe which it also dominates politically and soon will dominate financially.

Exactly 100 years ago the German author Thomas Mann wrote his novel ‘The Magic Mountain’. It is about a group of Europeans in a sanatorium. It is about all the problems of a Europe in disarray. The novel was perhaps written prematurely. Perhaps it should have been written today, for Europe is now in an even greater disarray than after the slaughter of the Great War. There is only one hope for the present Europe which is now in its self-made sanatorium of civilisational collapse: that hope is to head for the Civilisation of the Resurrection.

 

 

 

 

A Russian Tragedy of Errors

 

Introduction: Three Fragments of the Church

After the overthrow of the Tsar by traitors in the so-called ‘Revolution’ of 1917, and the ensuing substitution of the Russian Empire for the Soviet Union, parts of the Russian Orthodox Church broke away from it. Although divisions of tiny, temporary ‘catacomb’ church communities formed inside the USSR, divisions were nowhere so obvious as outside the USSR, where there was the political freedom to choose which part of the Church to belong to.

The anti-Soviet Russian emigration split into two warring groups, one quite independent of the rest of the Orthodox Church, the other under the British-controlled and, after British bankruptcy from 1948 on the US-controlled, Patriarchate of Constantinople (1). In any case, both groups were independent of the vast majority of the Russian Church, which was under the enslaved and enhostaged administration of the 99% of the Church inside the Soviet Union. Why did these divisions develop?

  1. The Moscow Patriarchate: Bride of Christ or Concubine of the State?

Like all other Churches the Russian Orthodox Church has had a long history of both dependence on and independence from the State. In this respect, people may think of the independence from the State of St Nil of Sora (1508) and the Transvolgan Non-Possessors (1), of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow (murdered in 1569 on the orders of the centralising Tsar Ivan IV) and of the Old Ritualist schism of the 1660s, which was largely created by reaction to the persecution of the centralising State, which demanded absurd ritual conformity. By 1917 some 10% of the Russian population were declaring that they were Old Ritualists, thus showing the strength of opposition to the centralist State. All the above showed independence from the nationalist State, and many showed faithfulness to Orthodox Tradition, placing the Holy Spirit above corruption.

Under the imperialist Emperor Peter I (‘the Great’) (+ 1725), the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate was abolished and replaced by a Protestant-style Minister of Religion. Soon after this there began the persecution of monastic life, when some two-thirds of monasteries were closed by the German Empress Catherine I (‘the Great’) (+ 1796). Nevertheless, the Church continued to live, under the great St Paisius (Velichkovsky), forced into exile in Romania, and in the Russian Lands, in Sarov and Optina, where new saints appeared, and in Kronstadt, where there began the eucharistic revival, and elsewhere. The grace of the Holy Spirit was active and the deadly bureaucrats of the State apparatus did not manage to quench it, despite their best efforts. They were opposed by Tsar Nicholas II, who, despised and mocked by the bureaucrats in cassocks, had such great saints as Seraphim of Sarov canonised.

However, during this Imperial period most Russian Orthodox omitted to take communion more than once a year and lead an active life of prayer and fasting. Church life became largely an empty ritual, an exercise in ritualism. Here is why the Soviet atheists (most of them, like Stalin, were also ritually Orthodox) came to power: there was no Orthodox conscience and so spiritual resistance to the myths and practices of atheism. Under the Soviet regime, which unsurprisingly admired the imperialist Peter I as their centralising model, the Church was run by the Secret Police. Therefore, the enslaved Church hierarchy of the time adopted a subservient pro-State policy called ‘Sergianism’, in order to ensure its survival. Sergianism was massively rejected by the politically free emigration: hence the divisions. Meanwhile, inside the Soviet Union, ordinary bishops, priests, monastics and faithful people were martyred in their hundreds of thousands.

The remnants of these State-subservient attitudes are still very present in the Russian Church today. For instance, churches in towns and cities usually have professional choirs (if parishioners want to sing, they are forbidden, as in the Russian church in Chiswick, a suburb of London, for example), which reduces the church to a ritualist theatre with a choir to listen to. For example, many ordinary Orthodox in Russia today reproach the Church which appears to be run like a business, the main interest seeming to be profit. Also the centralised hierarchy in Moscow actively opposes clergy who have dissident political opinions from the State about the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. This only creates more scandals.

This centralisation has led to those parts of the Church in independent countries outside the Russian Federation wanting to break away from the centralised control of Moscow. This is for national reasons, for example, there is resistance to the Moscow centralisation on the part of Non-Russians in the Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere. They all seek Church independence and devolution. However, there are also cases of sectarian and schismatic groups which break away from central authority for purely political, right-wing reasons, both inside the Russian Federation, but also outside it, above all in the highly Americanised ROCOR (see below).

  1. ROCOR: Orthodox or Right-Wing?

In 2007 we all at last managed to get the New York-based ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) to rejoin the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate. Otherwise, it would have become a schismatic sect, out of communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. When it reunited with Moscow, it lost some 5% of its 300 parishes. These 5% were extremists who really wanted to be in schism, out of communion with everyone, claiming like pharisees to be ‘True Russian Orthodox Churches’. There were then, and perhaps still are, about four of these tiny squabbling sects, formed in 2007, all cursing each other.

After the wonderful God-sent opportunity of reunion with the bulk of the reviving Russian Orthodox Church and life-giving canonical communion with it for a decade between 2007 and 2017, very sadly, the ROCOR authorities gradually lapsed back into their sectarian temptations from before 2007. Step by step these sectarians took control of ROCOR’s New York Synod in an internal coup d’etat, effectively isolating its ill but charismatic Metropolitan, rejecting all his decisions and using his electronic signature to justify their very strange and deeply uncanonical decisions.

Very sadly, the extremists had learned nothing from being in communion with the Mother-Church for ten years. They had simply camouflaged and justified their pharisaical, schismatic and sectarian tendencies behind their alleged unity with the Moscow Patriarchate. Today ROCOR is out of full communion with Moscow, and so its second state is worse than its first. Instead of Orthodoxy, it has espoused the sectarian American right-wingery of woman-despising ‘Orthobros’ and Trumpism, totally confusing Divine Orthodoxy with mere human conservatism and its lust for money and power.

This pharisaical state of schism and fanatical sectarianism was encouraged by deluded Non-Russian neophytes, who want to be more royalist than the King, more Russian Orthodox than real Russian Orthodox. In reality, these Lutheran and Calvinist sectarians have ended up outside full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, the King they betrayed. They have painted themselves into their own corner, apparently feeling very comfortable in their isolation. Thus, they have renounced their own saints, who were internationally-minded, not isolated, and concelebrated with and gathered together all Orthodox. These include St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, whom the US right-wingers so cruelly suspended and persecuted, leading to his premature death in 1966.

Some suspect that the new ROCOR division has been encouraged by the CIA, of whose largesse ROCOR was a well-known recipient for a generation between 1966 and 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. As participants in the San Francisco ROCOR Council in 2006 we all know that the CIA virulently opposed the ROCOR reunion with Moscow in 2007 and from 2017 on tried to censor and then close this anti-CIA (and anti-FSB and anti-MI5) Orthodox England site through an amateur agent. For a few months he succeeded, causing an international scandal and making ROCOR a laughing-stock among the other Local Churches. Perhaps money exchanged hands here too.

  1. Paris: Orthodox or Left-Wing?

The second part of the Russian emigration which split away from the enslaved Church authorities in Soviet Moscow was the group founded by Saint Petersburg aristocrats and intellectuals and centred in Paris. (Some of them spoke better French than Russian; all spoke fluent French). Originally less than a third of the size of the now US-centred ROCOR, today it is called the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Russian Tradition. In reality it is very small outside France, as it is practically forbidden to expand elsewhere, and now has only some sixty parishes.

In 2019 it too at last rejoined the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, leaving behind in Constantinople, to our open relief, its masonic and modernist wing with its uncanonical practices, losing not 5% of its parishes, clergy and people, as with ROCOR, but over 40% of its parishes, clergy and people. If ROCOR had lost 40% of its body, then it would have remained in full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate after 2017. Too much of the pharisaical, ‘onetruechurchist’, sectarian and schismatic had remained in ROCOR, thus poisoning its potential. Conversely, the much smaller Paris Archdiocese not only remained in communion, but also, to its credit and unlike ROCOR, remained politically free of Moscow centralisation.

Conclusion: Disloyalty to the Testament of the Tsar

In the history of the last generation of pre-Revolutionary Russia under the last Emperor, it is clear that right-wing extremists played as negative a role as left-wing extremists. For example, plotting together, they murdered the Tsar’s adviser, Gregory Rasputin, who was helping him bring the Old Ritualists back into the Church. But this treacherous extremism can above all be seen in the ensuing history of the tragic Civil War between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. Then both sides committed awful atrocities, as described in any history of that dreadful war, where brother killed brother.

Sadly, just like the Reds, most of the Whites did not support the Tsar: it is reckoned that only 10% of them did so. They were the only real Whites. Most simply wanted their land, property and wealth back from the Marxists. Many ‘Whites’ were quite as openly atheistic as the Reds. As a Russian patriot and real Orthodox, the Sovereign Tsar stood above both Reds and Whites, above and outside the vulgar extremes of both left and right, above and outside their centralisation and nationalism. This is his Testament. This is our heritage. Under him there would have been no tragic war between Russian and American-proxy Ukrainians today.

Notes:

  1. https://orthodoxwiki.org/Maximus_V_of_Constantinople
  2. It is interesting that the enemies of the Non-Possessors accused them of stealing money! Nothing has changed. We know of a very greedy bishop in England today who accused a Non-Possessor priest, who subsidised his parish from his own money, of exactly the same thing! Of course, the bishop never apologised.

 

The Tsar is Alive! Eternal Rus

 In this (the defence of defenceless civilians by President Putin after the illegal NATO bombing of Libya in 2011) we see continuity with the foreign policy of Emperor Nicholas II. Today, in our fearful and unpredictable century, when Russia stands on the threshold of menacing trials, let us hope that, according to the testament of Nicholas II, ‘with deep faith in the rightness of our cause and humble hope in All-Powerful Providence’ we will be able to overcome and once more find our country strong in God and Truth.

Petr V. Multatuli, The Foreign Policy of Emperor Nicholas II, p.786, (Moscow 2012)

 

In the 1970s and 1980s I was able to meet many White Russian emigres who had been adults before the Russian Revolution. They knew exactly what the real old Russia had been like, both the good and the bad – unlike the second generation who often nostalgically idealised what they had not known. Their version was a fairy tale, a Disneyland Old Russia. It was a fantasy born from their politically hostile attitude to the Soviet regime, which was the reality then, and from the defensive inferiority complex of the children of immigrants. In reality, when we look at and compare Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, one thing clearly stands out: Continuity.

Today President Putin is undeniably very popular, to an extent that Western politicians can only dream of. At least 80% of the Russian population approve of him and those who disagree with him will still tell you that there is no alternative – all the others are worse. In this way he is quite unlike those Soviet and post-Soviet leaders who were disliked or even detested. It can be said that the present Russian President is a Tsar without the title – indeed, even the Russian emblem is the double-headed eagle and the flag is that of the Tsars.

It is a Western propaganda narrative, invented for self-justification and to raise money for its aggressive forever wars, that President Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union. The President has more than once made it crystal clear that: ‘He who does not regret the Soviet Union has no heart, but he who wants to restore it has no brain’. What is his aim then? He knows with all rational Russians that both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Empire are lost to the history books and will not be restored. Nevertheless, the threefold East Slav lands – the Russian Federation, the Ukraine (whatever its future borders and name) and Belarus, which are being united as a ’Union State’, will still form by far the largest country on earth, with nearly 12% of the world’s land area. President Putin’s aim in other words is national, to unite Eastern Slavdom.

The Russian Federation by itself has the largest economy in Europe and is set to become the fourth largest economy in the world, although with less than 2.5% of the world population. This is neither the Russian Empire, nor the Soviet Empire, but it is the ‘Empire of Rus’. Rus is what would probably have been formed under Tsar Nicholas, who, if he had not been murdered in 1918, would perhaps have died naturally in the 1940s, when he would have been in his 70s. (Without his murder in 1918, there would not have been a Second World War). With Poland, Finland, Bessarabia, the Baltics, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and the five Central Asian stans given independence if they wished, probably the Russian Empire of 1917 would have turned into the Empire of Rus by 1945, as it has done now.

Just as Russia was ruled by Tsar Nicholas, but with an advisory ‘Council of Ministers’, so today Russia is ruled by one man, but with a ‘Security Council’. Just as Tsar Nicholas was a great reformer, promoting eleven reforms – the sale of alcohol, monetary affairs, education, the peasantry, the legal system, the government, religious tolerance, civil freedom, agrarian affairs, the military and healthcare, promoting free medicine and social justice, so beloved by Tsarevich Alexei, President Putin has also been a great reformer. Tsar Nicholas successfully fought off the Western invasion until 1917, when he was betrayed to the West by unpatriotic and disloyal generals, politicians and aristocrats.

Here President Putin learned from history. Tsar Nicholas was brought down by the parasitic class, called aristocrats, who under their Western sponsors meddled and betrayed the Tsar. President Putin has been able to stop the parasitic class, now called oligarchs, from meddling in Western-sponsored politics and treachery. As a result, Russia is today successfully fighting off the current Western invasion. With the disloyal and unpatriotic in exile, President Putin no longer needs aggressive but degenerate Western Europe. Today Russia does not need the decadent West with its LGBT, for Russia is itself the repository of traditional Western values, as the new Orthodox Minister of Defence, Andrei Belousov, has declared.

Just as over four generations ago Tsar Nicholas tried to help the former Ottoman Balkans unite, forming a ‘Balkan Union’ against local chauvinism, and help the Austro-Hungarian Empire decentralise, there is now hope that Russia through BRICS can help South-Eastern Europe, the now independent lands of the former Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. However, perhaps the greatest resemblance between Tsar Nicholas and President Putin is in the Window to Asia, the ‘Great Asian Programme’, which Tsar Nicholas opened. The Tsar began with the Trans-Siberian Railway and the President has successfully begun again, building the Russian alliance with the new Imperial China of ‘Emperor’ Xi.

The first Window was closed by the British, which armed and financed the Western vassal Japan to the teeth, so that it would treacherously attack Russia without warning in 1904. Now the Window is open once more. For the painstaking construction of BRICS, to a great extent the work of Russia, resurrects the whole foreign policy of Tsar Nicholas, whose aim was co-operation, not confrontation. It was the ‘White Tsar’, anti-colonialist to the core, who opposed the British in their horrifying genocide in the Boer War in South Africa, who defended Ethiopia, Egypt, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Armenia, Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet (forcing the British invaders to leave), Thailand, and above all China, and would have helped India, had it been possible, to resist Western colonialism.

And now many of those countries have joined or wish to join BRICS. From the martyred Tsar Nicholas II to President Putin, this is Eternal Rus. It fights not only for its own re-creation, but also for the freedom of the whole world from the West, the ideology that the West calls ‘Globalism’. It fights for peace, stability and balance against Western conquest, occupation, plunder, pillaging and dismemberment for the purposes of divide and rule. Today Russia fights for this through the New World Order of Sovereignty and Patriotism. Tsar Nicholas is alive and President Putin is completing the work which he began, but which was interrupted by internal treachery, sponsored by external enemies.

From Westphalia to West Failure

1648 Westphalia

The Peace of Westphalia is the name for two peace treaties signed in October 1648 in Osnabrueck and Muenster in German Westphalia. These treaties ended the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which had murdered some eight million Europeans for pseudo-religious, in fact political and economic, reasons. The treaties were made between the Habsburgs rulers of Austria and Spain, with their Roman Catholic allies, and the Protestant powers such as Sweden and certain German principalities, allied with France, which, though Roman Catholic, was anti-Habsburg.

Most consider that the Peace of Westphalia is at the origin of principles crucial to international relations, known as Westphalian Sovereignty the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. These principles were clearly disobeyed in the imperialist wars in 1914 and 1939 and are also contradicted by the modern anti-Sovereignty and anti-Nation-State ideology of Globalism, with its invented theory of ‘humanitarian interventionism’ (= imperialist meddling), which evolved rapidly after the fall of the USSR in 1991. It is this Globalism which has destroyed the sovereignty of many countries and led to today’s failed Western world ideology, now overtaken by the BRICS Alliance.

1956 Suez

Just over three centuries after Westphalia came the anti-Westphalian Suez Crisis. This is the name for the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in November 1956. Soon after the invasion began, the three aggressor countries came under heavy pressure from the USA, the USSR and the UN, prompting their withdrawal from Egypt. The Suez Crisis led to international humiliation for the British and the French and confirmed the USA and the USSR as the only Superpowers.

Western Europe was over. It meant full Western European dependence on the US and its vassalisation. For example, the US President Eisenhower issued a strong warning to the British that if they invaded Egypt, he would bankrupt the British financial system by selling US pound sterling bonds. They did and he did. In other words, Suez signified that the sun had once and for all set on the British Empire. Britain was now a US satellite, like the rest of Western Europe.

2024 West Failure

All empires end in violence. The German Empire (Reich) ended in the deaths of tens of millions, especially in Eastern Europe, in 1945. British Empire ended a little after in the deaths of millions in the Indian Subcontinent, Kenya, Egypt, Malaysia, Northern Ireland and the Falklands. The French Empire ended at the same time in the deaths of millions in Indo-China, Algeria and Africa. Now, in 2024, we are facing the sunset of the American Empire, for the US has long not been a Republic, but an Empire. Its only ‘victory’ since 1945 has been in tiny Grenada. In Korea its war ended in stalemate, and then came its defeats, or rather routs, with the deaths of millions in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and now in the Ukraine and Gaza. These last routs are the sunset of the US Empire and in general the whole West’s Suez.

People speak of the Western system in politics, media and academia, which filters out the spiritual, the moral, the intelligent and the adult, leaving only the materialist, the immoral, the stupid and the infantile, who will obey the devil himself. Others quote the words of Voltaire: ‘I have only ever made one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous’. And God granted it’. People wonder if this is not also the prayer of President Putin. In the UK people speak of the unelected Prime Minister and his unelected Foreign Secretary, whose family made its riches from slave-trading, and of 10 Drowning (sic) Street. There are those who have already left the Titanic of the Western world, for they have spotted the iceberg of retribution for violence and hubris that is rapidly approaching. But all this also brings new opportunities.

2025 Destiny Time for Western Europe

Europe is divided into two halves: Peninsular Europe, the western half of Europe; and Continental Europe, the eastern half of Europe, the European part of the Russian Federation, Belarus and the future Free Ukraine, together making the Russian Lands. The western half, 42 countries, makes up 54% of Europe’s land surface; the eastern half, 3 countries, makes up 46% of Europe’s land surface. Today, these Russian Lands have finally taken control of their destiny after over 300 years of confusion. After its eight-generation experiment with Western Imperialism, its three-generation experiment with Western Marxism and finally its one-generation experiment with oligarchic Western Capitalism, the Russian Lands have been forced by constant Western aggression to turn their back on the West. Forming the eastern half of Europe, Continental Europe together with Northern Asia, these Lands have turned to Southern Asia, Africa and Latin America, making alliances with China, Iran and many others.

What of the western half of Europe? The western half, Peninsula Europe, has likewise to take control of its own destiny. The bankrupt US, with its dying imperial NATO and EU projects in the western half of Europe, is abandoning it. The old and absurd rivalries between what are now political and military pygmies, Germany, the UK and France, will not fill the vacuum. All three have tried to fill the vacuum left by the US, making themselves the leaders of Europe and made themselves look even more ridiculous: Germany with its arrogant and imperialist conduct in ex-Yugoslavia and by bankrupting the former Warsaw Pact countries; the British by proposing an absurd military alliance with Kiev-regime Ukraine, its enemy in Poland and the tiny Baltic States, for which alliance it has no money; the French under the delusional President Macron with his project to send 2,000 French troops to ‘destroy’ the million-strong Army of Russia. It is time for all 42 countries to turn away from West Failure Globalism to Westphalia Sovereignty, which is, significantly, at the basis of the ever more thriving BRICS Alliance.

 

 

Ideology Versus Faith and the Post-Ukrainian Russian Church

Introduction: Ideology versus Faith

Ideology and Faith are opposed to one another. As an example, I will describe the exact church situation in a small provincial town in eastern Russia today, where there are two churches and which I know well. This situation is very symbolic of my fifty-one years of experience of the Russian Church in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia and of the Russian Diaspora in Western Europe, the USA and Australia and how that situation has radically degenerated in recent years.

Those who knew and lived in the Russian Church before the last few years of decadence and who for generations had venerated the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia are shocked and disappointed by the unthinkable events that have happened since. The Church was purified by the blood and suffering of those new saints. Now there are those who are trying to sully the Church once more. This is the result of a Church administration which has, purely voluntarily, applied the dead hand of the State with its ever-corrupting ideology of power, money and careerism, to itself, under no obligation whatsoever from the State.

A Church of Ideology

The first church in this small provincial town in eastern Russia is a large, beautifully restored church with frescoes and golden domes. It looks like a picture postcard, a Russian church as it should be and as is portrayed in countless coffee-table books and tourist brochures. It attracts rather well-off people who want to be in such a church; it makes them feel that they are in a ’proper church’ and that they are doing everything ‘correctly’. Thirty years ago, the church was still a ruin, abandoned there by the atheists who had wrecked it and desecrated it before World War Two. Now the church is prosperous, there is an emphasis on donating money, it is frescoed and led by Fr Gennady, a priest who hands over a lot of money to his bishop, seems rather like a businessman, has many awards, is well-off, lives in a nice house and has a smart car.  At the end of every Sunday service he preaches about politics in a way which he believes to be patriotic, but which in fact is nationalistic. He repels the few Non-Russian Orthodox (mainly Ukrainians) who live in the town. It is also rather depressing, certainly for anyone who wants to get away from the oppressive spirit of this world and expects some uplifting words from the Church.

There is no parish life, in the sense that there is no unity among the ‘parishioners’, even the priest’s wife does not attend church because of her depression. The wife of the second priest, aged 33, left him for another man. These are just groups of people who attend the church, fewer in number than in the heady and idealistic days of Patriarch Alexij II and restoration twenty-five years ago. These people do not work together, for there is no sense of community. This church is the fruit of the ideology of ‘The Russian World’. Although the basic ‘Russian World’ ideology had evolved by the Year 2000 and then found favour with the State, it was only in 2009 that it was officially adopted by certain politically-minded Church hierarchs. Since then it has been promoted, has filtered down and some have adopted it, like the priest in this town. It is essentially an aggressive, even militaristic, self-righteous, Stalinistic Russian nationalism, as symbolised by the controversial Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, recently opened outside Moscow.

This ‘Russian World’ nationalism is an exact parallel to the equally self-righteous, political and aggressive Greek nationalism, or ‘Hellenism’, promoted by some in the US-backed Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople and other Greek Church institutions. Ultimately, the Russian World ideology goes back to the nationalistic ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ ideology, which gradually developed after the fall of Constantinople, ‘the Second Rome’, in 1453. Now, Hellenism was rejected by the Apostle Paul in the first century who described how the Cross is foolishness for the Hellenes (1 Cor 1, 23), that is, a form of paganism. As for ‘The Russian World’ ideology, it too has been rejected by the very eminent confessor of the Faith, Metr Onufry of Kiev and all the Ukraine. He has quite rightly said that we should not be aiming at creating a ‘Russian world’, but ‘God’s world’. https://spzh.media/en/news/79477-decr-uoc-comments-on-decree-of-the-25th-world-russian-peoples-assembly

A Church of Faith

The other church in this place is much older, on the edge of town, looks poorish and is really rather plain. There are no golden domes. Inside there is a great number of icons painted on wood and relics. Fr Leonty, the priest, is an older pastor and spiritual father and is ignored by his bishop. He does not have a car and never asks people to donate money. He is not interested in money. His sermons concern the Gospel and he never mentions politics in church, but speaks of repentance and a change of life for the better. He is very traditional in his faith, but is kind and open to everyone. Parish life is strong and people feel united. They love their pastor, as he loves them. The emphasis is on the spiritual, on confession and communion.

The second church is the fruit of the Faith of ‘The Orthodox Christian World’. This Faith goes back to the Resurrection of Christ in Jerusalem in the Year 33 and its Incarnation in the world as a way of life, and not some nationalist ideology or political philosophy, for it is not nationally exclusive. Indeed, on the Day of Pentecost in the Year 33, the apostles spoke in different languages, so that all could understand. No national or racial exclusivity here, for the Orthodox World is multinational and international, the expression of Catholicity.

This Faith has always been expressed by the Church and is lived by all who are devoted to the Church, as seen most obviously in the communion of the saints. In today’s world we could give this Faith the name of ‘The New Jerusalem’. This is simply another word for Orthodox Christianity, which is outside all petty nationalism and concerned with the spiritual and ascetic. It opposes ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ with what has in Russia since the seventeenth century been called ‘Moscow the Second Jerusalem’.

Faith Always Wins

The essential problem with the Third Rome ideology is that the ideal of Rome always degenerates into nationalism. For example, the ideal of the First Rome degenerated into what was at first a Germanic or Frankish-led Western ideology and superiority complex of infallibility in the eleventh century. Passing through Spanish, Dutch, French and then British nationalist leadership, a millennium on, this ideology is now US-led. The ideal of the Second Rome (Constantinople) also clearly degenerated – into a Greek nationalist ideology. The multinational ideal of Moscow the Third Rome has equally been degenerating into Russian nationalist ideology for a long time. This is why in the seventeenth century the then persecuted Russian Patriarch counterbalanced the ideal of the Third Rome with the ideal of the Second Jerusalem. This is the only way.

For the moment some in the Russian Church have rejected Non-Russians, thus rejecting centuries of missionaries and missionary activity outside itself and have degenerated the Christian Commonwealth ideal of the Third Rome into a mere nationalist ideology. Whether in the Ukraine, Latvia, England or elsewhere, all too many in the Russian Church have turned their backs on Non-Russians. Those who love the Church of God are at present often forced to look outside the Russian Church for spiritual life.

However, there is the same situation for those inside Russia who seek the spiritual. In the provincial town I know, they go to the second church, not to the first one. That is why we too have had to go elsewhere, still hopeful that certain Russian Church clergy can cast off the nationalistic and militaristic ‘Russian World’ ideology. Although it is clear that the Russian State is the great winner in the Ukraine, it is the Russian Church that is the great loser and although it is clear that the Ukrainian State is the great loser in the Ukraine, it is the Ukrainian Church that is the great winner. The need is to return to ‘God’s world’, as Metr Onufry of the Ukraine has said.

Conclusion: Towards the Future

This New Jerusalem Faith, the Faith of ‘God’s World’, is also that of the free Metr Hilarion of Budapest and Hungary. He stands out as an exception among the episcopate of the Russian Church. Principled, speaking Western languages and with connections all over the world, he occupies the high moral ground and has not compromised himself in ‘Russian World’ politics. He is surely to become the next, non-political and pastoral, Patriarch and Archpastor of the cleansed Russian Church. Indeed, his first act may have to be to reverse the appalling injustices and persecution committed inside the Russian Church against its faithful pastors in the last three years for their rejection of sectarian schism, greed and politicisation, which have so utterly discredited the Russian Church.

He will also have to stand up to the absurd and novel demands of sectarians and schismatics, who claim to be ‘Russian Orthodox’ and claim that Non-Orthodox Christians, including Catholics, must be rebaptised to be received into the Orthodox Church. Then he can include more Western Orthodox saints into the Russian Church calendar. He will have to decentralise the Russian Church, granting autocephaly or autonomy to the Churches in republics outside the Russian Federation. Above all he will have to re-establish good relations with all the other Local Churches in the spirit of Catholicity and so move towards settling the century-old canonical irregularities within the Orthodox Diasporas through a politically free Council of the whole Church.