Category Archives: Russian Church

Church and State: Lessons from History for the Present Day

This is the Ukrainian Orthodox Viewpoint ( from the Society of Orthodox Journalists), which most Russian Orthodox also probably agree with. It begs the question as to why the once multinational Orthodox Church of All Rus, including the once free ROCOR Synod in New York which used to resist Sergianism (erastianism), has become dominated by Russian nationalist politicians, instead of Orthodox Christians, theologians and pastors. Nationalism is not the Church, but schismatic!

https://spzh.eu/en/zashhita-very/87544-church-and-state-lessons-from-history-for-the-present-day

05 August 11:06

Author: Nazar Golovko

In the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Church often co-operated too closely with the State.

From Peter’s reforms to the Revolution of 1917: how state dependence affected the Russian Church – and what lessons the UOC should draw from this today.

Many today wonder: how could it happen that the devout Orthodox people, the “God-bearing nation” as Dostoevsky called them, suddenly rose up against their Church after the 1917 revolution? How could those who once went to their deaths “for Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland” destroy the faith, kill the Tsar, and tear down that very Fatherland?

Indeed, what happened after 1917 defies human logic. Tens of thousands of churches were closed or wiped off the face of the earth, thousands of monasteries and sketes were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of believers were executed, thousands of priests and hundreds of bishops were murdered, and millions were buried alive behind the barbed wire of the Gulag.

How could this happen? And, more importantly – why?

To answer this question – which remains deeply relevant today – we must turn to history.

When the Church ceases to be the Body of Christ

As early as the era of Peter I, the religious life of the Russian Church was subjected to harsh and merciless criticism. On one hand, the Church was attacked for excessive attention to outward ritual forms; on the other, it had fallen under overwhelming state control. Ivan Aksakov, a Slavophile and patriot well-versed in Church affairs, once wrote:

“Thus, in terms of administration, the Church now appears as a kind of colossal bureaucracy, applying – with the inevitable, alas, official bureaucratic falsehood – the methods of German bureaucracy to the salvation of Christ’s flock… Apparently, all the Church has been granted is outward order – a semblance of proper organization…

But one trifling thing is missing: the soul is gone. The ideal has been replaced – the Church’s ideal has been supplanted by a state ideal, inner truth replaced by formal, external correctness. A new measure has been substituted for the old – a governmental measure instead of a spiritual and moral one. Everything is now weighed and measured on the State’s official scale…

The worldview of the state has, like a subtle vapor, imperceptibly seeped into the mind and soul of nearly the entire ecclesiastical environment, with few exceptions, narrowing its understanding to the point where the living sense of the Church’s true mission has become barely accessible. Nowhere is truth so feared as in our Church administration; nowhere is there such flattery as among our hierarchy; nowhere is the spirit of Pharisaism so strong as among those who ought to hate falsehood the most.”

The Church and the Authorities: harm or benefit?

Indeed, it’s hard to deny that the Church of that era had surrendered itself to imperial will. For example, Peter I’s decree of April 22, 1722, required every cleric (including bishops) upon entering holy office to swear an oath “to be a faithful, good, and obedient servant and subject to the emperor and his lawful heirs,” to defend the emperor’s rights and dignity, “not sparing even their own life if necessary,” and to report any damage or threat to imperial interests – including “theft, treason, or rebellion revealed in confession,” as well as “any evil designs against the Tsar’s honour, health, or family.”

In other words, the secular authorities demanded that Orthodox clergy violate a foundational canonical rule: the inviolability of the sacramental confession. In effect, the Church became a mere “Department of Spiritual Affairs,” heavily influenced by the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod – a layman appointed by the Tsar.

As a result:

The Church in Russia was perceived as an extension of the state. And if the people’s hatred was directed at the state, the Church was inevitably caught in that hatred too – a sentiment that had been simmering long before 1917.

Prince Ivan Gagarin, who converted to Catholicism, wrote: “The Russian Church needs independence; it senses this itself.”

Understanding that the Church in Russia was inextricably tied to autocracy, Gagarin believed that an attack on the Tsar would inevitably strike the Church as well. Moreover, he saw the deepening schism with the Old Believers as another wellspring of discontent with autocratic rule. In his eyes, Catholicism could save Russia – because it had the spiritual freedom the Russian Church lacked. He famously wrote:

“Let us repeat: it is one or the other – Catholicism or revolution. The Russian Church is powerless; the Tsarist regime may only delay the explosion. The union of the schismatics with revolutionary movements becomes more and more inevitable. There is no time to lose. I see no other way to avert this threat than a national Russian-Catholic clergy.”

Thus, Gagarin understood that the Russian Church – having bound itself so tightly to the state – lacked the strength to confront the revolutionary currents rising among the Old Believers and even within the lower clergy.

Church and Revolution

Here is just a short list of well-known revolutionaries who came from clergy families:

  • Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), a major theorist of Russian revolution, son of a priest in the Saratov Eparchy; educated in a religious school and seminary.
  • Sergei Nechaev (1847–1882), organizer of the underground group “People’s Retribution” and a symbol of fanatical revolution; son of a deacon from Nizhny Novgorod province.
  • Nikolai Kibalchich (1853–1881), member of “Narodnaya Volya” and chief designer of the bomb that killed Alexander II; son of a priest in the Chernihiv Diocese.
  • Mikhail Novomirsky (Tikhomirov) (1850–1884), activist of “Narodnaya Volya”; son of a priest.
  • Alexander Mikhailov (1855–1884), one of the leaders of “Narodnaya Volya” and its Executive Committee; son of a rural priest.
  • Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) – came from a clerical estate.

Besides, let us not forget the failed seminarian Stalin.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of names of priest’s children who became revolutionaries. And many of them did not merely sympathize with revolutionary causes – they actively took part in terror and assassinations.

Why?

Because they saw the hypocrisy and servility that had become entrenched in the lives of their fathers.

Because they understood: the Church, subordinated to the state, had ceased to be a spiritual mother and had become a cog in the bureaucratic machine. And if that machine needed to be destroyed – so did its parts.

A Fatal Union

Thus, the revolution in Russia was not just a popular uprising. It was, in many ways, the outcome of an unhappy marriage between Church and state. A Church bound hand and foot by the government was unable to serve as the voice of conscience. In the end, it remained silent – or even offered its blessing – as the old order was dismantled.

For example, on March 5, 1917, just two days after Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication, the Holy Synod declared:

“The Holy Church of Christ greets the recent events as a mercy of God upon our people… May the Lord bless the Provisional Government and grant it strength to perform the work of serving the people.”

As a result, those forces that destroyed the Tsar turned their wrath on the Church as well. And the reason is clear: when the Church becomes part of the state, people see it as a target – not as the Body of Christ.

What about today?

Yes, the current situation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church seems unbearably difficult to many of us. We are forbidden to pray as our ancestors did for centuries. Our churches are being taken away. The authorities are doing everything in their power to erase the UOC from Ukraine’s religious landscape.

But—

Perhaps this is, in fact, a blessing from God. A blessing that the Church should be free from all state dependence, so that it may possess the inner liberty necessary to fulfill its true mission – the preaching of the Gospel.

It may seem that without the “roof” of state protection or official patronage, the Church is weak and exposed. But maybe this is precisely the path Christianity calls us to walk – not to please power, but to serve the people.

And perhaps, painful as it is, a Church free from State dependence is walking a blessed path.

 

Questions and Answers July 2025

The True Faith. The state of the various Orthodox jurisdictions in England today and fifty years ago. The moment when the Russian Church turned its back on Europe. The Oxford and London Russian parishes fifty years ago. Tsar Nicholas in England. The coming end of the war in the Ukraine. The consequent fall of the European elite and of its ideology versus Orthodoxy.

Q: What for you is the True Faith?

A: In my late childhood and early teenage years, I came to three conclusions about what must be the True Faith:

Firstly, the True Faith must be about Christ, as only Christ is God and man, combining East and West, North and South. The True Faith must therefore represent the spiritual reality of Him and not State manipulations of Religion and the Bible, based on nationalism, racism, imperialism, colonialism and all cultures of apostasy, like the White Supremacy Western world.

Secondly, the True Faith must be historical and not some recent invention, neither of the nineteenth century, nor of the sixteenth century, nor even of the eleventh century, for it must go back a thousand years before, to the Scriptures, to the Word of God Himself.

Thirdly, the True Faith must be universal, as is Christ. In other words, the True Faith must be for all races who seek it, accessible to all, that is, to all who are repentant and so seek Christ, and so is not some esoteric or obscurantist religion for one nationality, or for the select few or elite.

Q: Why did you not become members of the Antiochian Diocese when you left ROCOR in 2021, unlike the three Western riters who were purged by ROCOR and went to Antioch?

A: The short answer is that none of us twelve clergy, or any of our thousands of people, had ever been Anglicans, let alone Anglican vicars. You have to understand the Antiochian Diocese exists in this country for them. We have all always been Orthodox and have never known any other religion, so something for ex-Anglicans, however worthy and sincere they may be, has no interest for us. It is irrelevant to us.

Also, Antioch is not European, as we are, and cannot members of one of the four Arab families who operate it. The Church of Antioch here is tiny, consisting perhaps of only a thousand people, mainly ex-Anglicans or ex-Protestants, especially rather puritanical conservative evangelicals. (This puritanism is rather ironic given the behaviour of the former Antiochian Archbishop in the USA and also drives away normal Orthodox, who, like Arab Orthodox, are not puritans).

Another problem of Antioch being so small is that it is desperate to recruit clergy and people, with one recent disaster when they accepted a reject from the mainstream Churches, based in his front room in Liverpool, and another disaster, some years ago, in Belfast. I believe in the latter case that vicar-priest ended up in prison for fraud. Other Non-ex-Anglican clergy under Antioch eventually transfer back to the Local Churches they come from. They cannot take the Anglican mentality, however hard they try to deny their origins.

The long answer is that our first act after we learned, directly, (it was actually boasted of by the culprit!) of the ROCOR schism in April 2021 was to warn the ROCOR Synod of what was going on. As soon as we realised that the whole Synod in New York had been perverted into the new ROCOR, not leaving a shred of tradition and the old ROCOR, and misinformed, our second act was to report to Moscow. When they replied that, although they perfectly understood the insanity of the situation, for purely political reasons they could not receive us, our third act was to join the Paris Archdiocese under Moscow. This had largely been cleansed of liberal French intellectuals and we have many friends and family there.

After Paris was told by Moscow, which could not make up its mind at first, that it would not be allowed to keep us, as the Moscow aim was not to expand Paris but to close it down, our fourth act was to look at our other options. Although three different jurisdictions wanted us, the obvious and only correct option, which we adopted very quickly, was to go with our old friends in the Church of Romania. (Romania had been the original choice of the Paris Jurisdiction when they had quit Constantinople there years before, but occult forces had rejected that choice and it had joined Moscow. So we made the choice for them). The Romanian Church had been suggesting to us for years in case ROCOR turned schismatic and it was supported by Moscow for purely political reasons, we could transfer to them.

So we joined the Romanian Church with the tacit blessing of Moscow, and any other refugees who want to leave the schismatic ROCOR for the Romanian Church have been invited to do so too. We have simply paved the way for the others, who will follow us. The strangest thing about this was that there appeared a lie on the internet that the Romanian Church had not received us! There were actually people who believed this, though not in Moscow. But the lie only discredited him who invented it and those who believed it. Today the culprit for the lie is isolated, shunned and shamed as a liar.

Q: So Moscow is abandoning ROCOR behind their backs? Why did you not opt for the Russian or Greek Churches?

A: As I said, Moscow was not allowed to receive us for political reasons, even though it knew that ROCOR was engaged in its insane schism. As Moscow was not politically free (a very serious fault), it had to go along with the ROCOR schism. This was a turning point and next year, in 2026, all will see the significance of this. Later, Moscow was punished for this lack of principle and has since had to tolerate the recent horrible Russophobic attacks on the Moscow Patriarchate by both ROCOR bishops in Germany.

This is what happens when you compromise yourself with the positions of enemies of Church teaching, even if only once. It is a downward spiral, as you have to accept everything else they do later on. Moscow already regrets it, indeed it is the great loser in all of this, but that was its choice. It was clearly told what was going on, but Metr Antony Sevryuk suicidally rejected the warning and told us to join the Romanian Church. Thus, the Russian Church turned its back on Europe – I don’t think that even now he realises the scale and significance of his error. In one act he had handed over Western Europe, including the local Russians, to Romanian Orthodox jurisdiction.

As a result, the Moscow Diocese in this country is now programmed to become a small embassy ghetto, a dependency, with just its church in London and the small church in Oxford surviving, exactly as it was fifty years ago, the rest has literally been left to die out. Since the British Establishment, like the other Establishments in Europe, has blacklisted Moscow, Moscow has no hope of expansion or incarnation into Western society. Therefore, Moscow is for the time being closed down in Western Europe. There is no future for the Russian Church here. It has had to close its window on Europe, given European political hostility to it, and is looking towards Asia and Africa. It will take a generation for Moscow to turn back to Europe, if ever it does. 2022 will go down in Western European Church history as the moment when the Russian Church lost it.

As for the Greek Archdiocese, it has recently been renewed, as it was dying out. It now has several younger bishops, including one excellent one (if only he could be the next Patriarch!), still has excellent infrastructure and several big parishes in London and some outstanding priests, but it has huge problems. It is profoundly ethnically and politically Greek, compromised by its CIA Patriarch, and, like Antioch and the Moscow Church here, most of its priests are elderly and dying out.

As Archbishop Nikitas told us recently, he has 100 elderly priests to replace in the next ten years and only 3 candidates. It is now not possible to get lots of poorly-educated young archimandrites from Greece, like they did in the 60s and 70s. That source has dried up. Moreover, only one church, the newly-frescoed Thyateira chapel, actually belongs to the Greek Archdiocese. The others are all privately owned by Greek and Cypriot businessmen and restauranteurs, who do as they want.

Q: What then is the future of ROCOR?

A: In rejecting the mission of the Diaspora Church to gather all Orthodox together through its schism and racism towards Greeks, Romanians, Moldovans and rooted English Orthodox in particular, it refused to concelebrate with the mainstream and cut itself off from communion. It has instead concentrated on attracting extremists, the naïve, the vulnerable and the pathologically ill. This is the path of the sect and the cult. And that is what it has become.

Q: Did you know Fr Mark Meyrick and Metr Kallistos Ware?

A: Of course. I first met the then Fr Kallistos in September 1974. He was an old-style, upper middle-class High Church Anglican, with an incisive public school-trained intellect. I loved his lectures and learned a lot from him. But above all, he was a very kind and sincere man. I remember him and pray for him with gratitude, although I was on a quite different wavelength from him.

I first met Fr Mark in July 1976. The problem with Fr Mark, who came from a long line of Anglican vicars, is that he had chosen to live among Anglicans, cut off from the Orthodox mainstream. As a result, he had a tiny community in a Norfolk village, isolated from Orthodoxy. He mainly seemed to be interested in converting young Anglican men and encouraging them to grow extremely long beards! As I had no interest in either Anglicanism or long beards, that was not for me.

Fr Mark (later Archimandrite David), transferred from ROCOR to Moscow, I think, in 1981. This was because of the attempted Americanisation and sectarian fanaticisation of ROCOR, which began at that time and which ended in 2021 with the triumph of American convert ROCOR in Europe and its abolition as part of the mainstream. It is now an American crazy convert colony and has no future. Crazy convert Orthodoxy does not export, as it is culturally alien to Europeans.

Q: Are Orthodox bishops worse today than fifty years ago?

A: Absolutely not. Fifty years ago, I knew three of them. One was a homosexual bureaucrat who ordained his boyfriends. One of those he ordained became an alcoholic, another gave up the priesthood within two weeks. A second bishop was a lady’s man who spent time with his main mistress in a cottage on the south coast, or so I was told. I knew her. A third was an anthroposophist. So we decided to return to Paris, to people who knew the Tradition. Today’s crop of homosexuals and sociopathic narcissists created by being spoiled as children are no better, but also no worse.

Q: What do you remember of the University of Oxford in the 1970s and the Russian chapel, then inside the house in Canterbury Road in Oxford?

A: In those days (and I am told that it has not changed very much since then), there were three ways of getting into the University of Oxford as an undergraduate. In order of importance, these were: aristocratic privilege, wealth, and academic achievement. I was therefore automatically and distinctly third class from the outset. The first two types were there to complete their Norman education, so they could enter the Norman (British) Establishment.

Moreover, those aristocratic or wealthy types who had nearly always attended public schools were shockingly, to me an innocent aged 18, often suffered from Norman homosexuality, like William Rufus. Oxford was riddled with it. Another reason to keep well away. In any case, I was not there to enter the Norman Establishment, though many who had not been to public schools allowed it to happen to them, as they were venal careerists. I was there for exactly the opposite reason, to understand how to de-Normanise. By Divine Providence I studied in the Alfredian College, by tradition (even if not in reality), the only pre-Norman College in Oxford. All was right.

I attended the Russian chapel in Canterbury Road in October 1972 and again in February 1973, when I was sixteen, just before the modernistic, octagonal chapel was built in the garden. The old chapel inside the House is now the library, based on Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, which I helped put in there. That old chapel was charming.

On the other hand, the rather effete University chapel later built in the garden of 1, Canterbury Road was definitely not for the ordinary people of Oxford. The Serbs, who were ordinary people, kept well away, as did most of the Greeks. The few by then elderly Russian academics who were still alive went when they could to one or other of the two Russian churches in London.

Apart from the majority of normal people who went there, there were also wealthy Anglo-Catholic homosexuals, or else those who mistakenly thought that Church Tradition means the same as right-wing political conservatism.

Q: What was the London Russian Church in Ennismore Gardens like at the time fifty years ago in the mid-seventies? And the ROCOR Church?

A: The London Patriarchal church had been taken over by upper middle-class people from wealthy west London, owners of Cotswold cottages, villas in Tuscany or on Greek islands. These were intellectuals, Liberal Democrats, BBC directors, well-to-do academics, lawyers, journalists etc, so rich that they had the leisure time to be enthralled by ‘spirituality’, Orthodox or Buddhist, as spiritual tourists. In 2006 they left en masse for Constantinople, as their hero, Metr Antony Bloom, had died. He was the reason for them joining, so once he had gone, in 2004, it was all over. Their cliquish snobbery continues. Only five years ago I overheard one of these now elderly people saying about a very pious and simple Romanian man, who dared (once) to frequent his clubby (rented) church: ‘I hope he does not come back, but at least he has a degree’. Is that Christianity?

Fifty years ago the Emperor’s Gate ROCOR Church had twice as many people as the Bloomite church, but it was an old people’s home. Apart from two or three Anglican homosexuals, the average age of the parishioners, who were very nice, must have been about 80. The writing was on the wall. It was an ethnic club that had no future, as they had failed to pass on the Faith to their descendants.

Q: Is there anywhere you would go on to a pilgrimage to the Royal Martyrs in England?

A: There are two places: Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Sandringham in Norfolk. Of the two I much prefer Sandringham, which is connected with the Tsar. He is still present there and he dreamed of becoming a Norfolk gentleman-farmer, if ever he had to leave Russia. Things will happen here.

For your interest, here is a full list of the five visits of the Tsar to England, with places and dates:

In 1873 the future Tsar first visited Queen Victoria as a five-year old child. He arrived on the Imperial Yacht at Woolwich on 16 June, stayed at Marlborough House on the Mall, visited Chiswick House on 28 June and on 28 July left for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, staying at Albert Cottage. On 8 August he went to Cowes Regatta, leaving England on 13 August, having spent nearly two months in England.

He visited London at the end of June 1893, having been met at Charing Cross Station, and staying at Marlborough House again. He went to Windsor on 1 July, visited Hurlingham on 4 July and Buckingham Palace on 5 July, attending the wedding of the future King George V on 6 July. He left the next day, having spent just over a week in England.

He arrived on 20 June 1894 to meet the future Tsarina. He arrived at Gravesend in Kent and travelled to Walton-on-Thames via Waterloo Station. He also visited Frogmore, Bagshot, Sandringham, Kings Lynn, London, Eton, Slough, Farnborough, Aldershot and Richmond-on-Thames. On 19 July he left for Portsmouth to cross to Osborne House and Albert Cottage, visiting Newport. He left on 23 July, after over a month in England.

1896 was his first visit as Tsar, with the Tsarina and the Grand Duchess Olga. They arrived at Leith on 22 September and went to Balmoral by train via Ballater. Here he visited Braemar Castle. He then travelled by train via Preston and Oxford, taking the Imperial Yacht at Portsmouth on 3 October.

On Monday 2 August 1909 the Tsar and his family visited Cowes on the Isle of Wight for the Regatta. He stayed at Osborne House, visiting Barton Manor and leaving on 5 August, having given £1,000 to be distributed among the island’s poor.

Q: When will the war in the Ukraine end?

A: This US proxy war against Russia (as Marco Rubio has openly described it) is a war of attrition. First, the Russians ground down first the first Ukrainian Army, then the second Ukrainian Army with old Soviet equipment from Eastern Europe, and now it is finishing off the third Ukrainian Army, with its NATO equipment. Wars of attrition, like the American Civil War and the First and Second World Wars, can go on for years, but they always end very suddenly, as the Second War ended suddenly in Berlin.

We are now reaching that point in the Ukraine, as the Americans are getting rid of their actor-puppet Zelensky. He has got too big for his boots and is too corrupt, resists the puppet-master and has refused peace, which is want Trump wants. The end will come suddenly and, I think, fairly soon. This is why Trump gave him (not Putin) 50 days so Zelensky could be finished off. Either he will get out on a CIA plane or else he will finish with a bullet in his head. When will Kiev collapse? The German-led, Pan-European invasion of the USSR in the Second World War lasted three years and eleven months. So maybe the end to this war will come within the same time span. At present it has lasted three years and five months.

The only danger is that NATO may invade Russia, as it has threatened, then that will be full war. That is possible, if the crazies in NATO have their way. If so, they will be crushed, as NATO has already been demilitarised by Russia. Russia has defeated all the Western Coalitions that invaded it, that of Napoleon, that in the Crimea, that of Hitler, and now this American-led NATO one.

Q: What will happen to Western Europe, once it has been defeated in the Ukraine?

A: The consequences of the defeat of the Western puppet government in Kiev, created and used as a proxy battering ram against Russia, and so the defeat of the whole of NATO, will be tremendous. The West will never get its money back. Worse still, it will never get its prestige back. The West has gone, replaced by the multipolar BRICS world. This will feed through and the old governing elites in Europe will have to be replaced.

This is because all empires decline in depravity and perversion (from Roman emperors to the debauched King Edward VII and now the Mossad-Epstein orgies) or buffoonery (the leaders of Western Europe and Kiev today, if they are not also pedophiles and cocaine addicts). Decadence comes at the end and with it a total lack of sense of reality, as buffoons live in virtual reality, fantasy, just as Hitler did at the end. We can see this clearly in the last 35 years of US leaders, from Clinton-Lewinsky to Obama, ending with the demented Biden and the world’s greatest narcissist, the result of a materially spoilt childhood, Trump.

Q: Do you think that Europe could return to Orthodoxy?

A: Europe, no, but a small portion of Europeans, yes. In the Romanian Church we are preparing for this literally, as you will see next year. We already have ten bishops in the twenty-one countries of Western Europe and a flock of nearly five million. One of those bishops is French, all speak at least one Western European language, if not two or three.

Moreover, our bishops also have a conscience of the importance of the veneration of the local saints of Western Europe. This is unique. I remember the fierce and insulting opposition of the ROCOR bishops to their veneration until 2017, when they finally realised that the tide was too strong for them to swim against any longer and then they stopped persecuting me on that score at least.

It is clear that we are moving towards a post-American Europe, the post-1945 part of the history of Western Europe is over. The American invasion and occupation will soon end. Its old puppet governments, in the UK, Germany, France and elsewhere, will fall. And Eurasia, Russian, India, China, India and Iran, north, south, east and west, the centres of the Heartland, are now co-operating in BRICS. Thus, the Western world, which was formed in the eleventh century has after a thousand years made itself spiritually irrelevant.

Q: Are the media censored in the UK?

A: Yes. The name of the official censor is Ofcom, but censorship relies above all on editorial control. Here news editors are appointed to carry out the censorship duties imposed by the State/Establishment and journalists who are completely mercenary, ‘presstitutes’ as they say. The BBC is a classic case of such censorship, of deliberate non-reporting, deliberate misreporting, and diversion (reporting irrelevant local stories of no interest instead of reporting the actual news).

 

 

 

 

When the Church is Taken Over by the State and Faith Becomes Religion

Introduction: The Roman Catholic-Protestant Model of Church Administration

What exactly happens when the Church becomes part of the State? This has happened many times in Western history and shaped that history. There is not only the case of the Church-State, known as Roman Catholicism, whose head started wars, commanded armies and ordered mass campaigns of inquisition, repression and torture. There have also been the cases in Protestant North-Western Europe and wherever that model has been imitated. This is the State-Church, where Churches hand themselves over to State control.

Thus, the Protestants founded National (and nationalist, ‘flag-driven’) Churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, the Church of Denmark, the Church of Sweden, the Church of Finland etc. In the first and well-known case, the new Church was founded by a Welsh genocidal tyrant and wife-murderer, who stole huge numbers of monastic houses and their lands and handed out their immense riches to his cronies. As for the national riches he seized for himself, he wasted them on pointless wars against France, which he lost.

The Adoption of the Model by the Russian State

This Protestant model was imitated by Tsar Peter I in Russia. Between 1682 and 1725 he forced the Russian Church into the same Lutheran mould, abolishing the Patriarchate in 1700, appointing Lutheran-educated Ukrainian bishops, and an ‘Oberprokuror’ to rule over the episcopate, effectively creating a Ministry of Religion. Some of the ‘Oberprokurors’ were not Orthodox Christians, indeed, at least one was an atheist and worked to destroy the Church. This control, resisted by Tsar Nicholas who wanted to abolish it, was copied by the atheist Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks controlled the Church in a similar reformist (in fact ‘deformist’), way, appointing a Secret Police Commissar to control the bishops, working to destroy the Church, murdering hundreds of thousands of clergy and people and literally dynamiting churches or confiscating them for secular uses. It was in this way that over some 300 years since Peter I, a special ‘religiosity’ appeared among nominal Russian Orthodox, which has lasted to this day. What are the three characteristics of this particular form of religiosity?

  1. Nationalisation

A State takeover of a Church means confusing Caesar’s and God’s, despite Christ’s words in the Gospel which command us to separate them and not to confuse them. Since the Church does not by nature belong to the State, therefore when such a takeover occurs, it means that the Church unnaturally begins to resemble the State. This means the adoption of State attributes – a persecuting, nationalistic, militaristic and bureaucratic mentality. In this way, the Church begins to resemble the State, rather like Roman Catholicism.

Nationalism means an emphasis on a narrow, exclusive, racial identity and language. In the Russian context, this means Russification and the loss of loyalty of other nationalities to the once multinational Russian Church. Militarism means an emphasis on a literal uniformity, obedience and rigidity, which cancels freedom of thought, and also integration with the armed forces. Bureaucratisation means an emphasis on protocols, paperwork and administration against the sacramental and spiritual view of the world.

  1. Clericalisation

A State takeover of a Church means that the clergy become agents of the State, that is, State employees, who develop the careerist mentality of civil servants and their ranks of promotion, awards and pensions. This in turn means that the people are alienated from the clergy, who become a separate caste ‘behind the iconostasis’ and the people begin to consider that the clergy are ‘the Church’. This creates a passive, disengaged and irresponsible mentality among the people – ‘it is not for us to do this, let ‘the Church’, i.e. the clergy, do it for us’.

This passive attitude of non-participation means that professional choirs sing in churches and services increasingly become abstract concerts and spectacles. Even prayer is delegated to the clergy, as people stop praying for themselves and ask the clergy to pray for them, an attitude that can be called ‘pious consumerism’. This view of the clergy as State bureaucrats, civil servants, means that the people begin to look at the clergy as unable to resolve their real problems and so they turn to elders, ‘startsy’, who in turn are often charlatans.

  1. Ritualisation

This mentality leads inevitably to ritualisation, the understanding of worship as ‘ustav’ or rubrics, a series of outward rites, in which participation is passive, but which just have to be tolerated. Thus, communion becomes the privilege of the clergy who may control access to laypeople’s communion by weaponising confession. As a result, communion may take place perfunctorily only once a year (the obligation for all civil servants until 1917) and sacraments are replaced by semi-private services, which have nothing to do with the liturgical cycles.

These made-up services, contractions of historic ones, include molebens, panikhidas and akathists. The latter of these are popular because they are comprehensible, since they have been composed recently in a language closer to Russian than the less accessible Church Slavonic, which is seen as the private language of the clergy (‘the Church’). The primacy of private rites means weak parish life, little sense of community, churches are patterned by outward formalities. In turn, non-churchgoers then revert to superstition as their belief.

A Nominal Church and Real Church Life

Reading the above, some may be in despair. However, we have made it clear that all these trends are the norm for nominal Russian Orthodox. Practising Russian Orthodox resist these outward trends and are critical of them. We follow the lives of the saints, who emphasise prayer and the ascetic, inward struggle. The above three trends are not those of St Seraphim of Sarov and St John of Kronstadt, even less are they those of the New Martyrs and Confessors, of the Imperial Martyrs, St Tikhon and St Matrona. They are ours.

Firstly, Orthodox oppose Nationalism through cultivating the sense of the catholicity of the Church, meaning cultivating good relations with the other Local Churches, which work in other countries, where the Russian State has no control. Secondly, Orthodox oppose Clericalism through developing the solidarity between clergy and people, which is what Orthodoxy is, and this means the clergy no longer living as State functionaries. And finally Orthodox oppose Ritualism through inner life, the life of the spirit, as in real monasteries.

Conclusion: The Last Tsar and the Coming Restoration

The last Tsar opposed all three deformations of Church life, Nationalism, Clericalism and Ritualism. Thus, his intention, not fully implemented, was to open a Russian Orthodox church in every capital of Western Europe. This opposed Nationalism. As for Clericalism, he was always shocked by the spiritual emptiness of ‘educated’ bishops and priests and their careerist rivalries, for example that of Protopresbyter George Shavelsky. To them he opposed St Seraphim of Sarov, whom he had had canonised, and the Martyr Gregory.

Tsar Nicholas II also ardently opposed Ritualism and wanted to restore the architecture, iconography and Church music from before Peter I, as can be seen in his design of the Tsarskoe Selo Cathedral. Already in 1905 he had proposed the restoration of the Patriarchate. Careerist bishops, all wanting to be Patriarch, opposed him and the Tsar understood that they were not ready for restoration. Indeed, after his overthrow in 1917, this became very clear. Soon another Tsar will come and carry out the unfinished restoration.

Winner Takes All: The Self-Destruction of the Church of the Russian Emigration

In the years following the so-called Russian Revolution in 1917, the Church of the resulting Russian Emigration split into three parts. A few, very few, remained under the Church centred in Moscow, which eventually became known as the Moscow Patriarchate. Most of the emigres considered that that was a ‘Soviet Church’, a Communist-controlled organisation and, since members of their families had died fighting against Communism and they had been exiled by it, they would have nothing to do with its Church. This vast majority of emigres themselves split into two, a smaller group and a larger group.

The smaller group, centred at its Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and existing mainly in France, was founded and led by Saint Petersburg aristocrats who had overthrown the Tsar in order to introduce a pro-Western regime, either a Constitutional Monarchy or else a masonic Republic. The larger group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), centred at first in Germany and then in New York, and with parishes above all in Germany, the Americas and Australia, was founded and led by emigres who, whatever their politics, were united by a profound hatred of Communists, who had stolen their land and wealth.

Obviously, now 108 years on after 1917, both groups are dying out, even though the New York group was much reinforced by the anti-Communist Russian emigration of 1945. As a result, the last pre-Revolutionary Archbishop of the Paris group died in 1981, and the last pre-Revolutionary Metropolitan of the reinforced New York group was deposed by his fellow-bishops in 2001 and died in 2006. Since then both groups have staggered on, declining in every way.

Both groups have since then much contracted, largely having failed to pass on the Faith to the descendants of the emigres, who are now in their fifth generation. Those born in the Diaspora have overwhelmingly been assimilated and lost all their Russian heritage. All that has survived is the political liberalism of the Paris group and the political conservatism (sometimes extreme conservatism) of the New York group. In other words, despite their radical contraction and the radical changes in their composition, their political identities have survived. However, their spiritual identity has been greatly weakened.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, these political identities have largely become irrelevant, mere history. Moreover, both the ageing and ever-smaller groups were dwarfed by the post-1991 emigration of young people from the former Soviet Union, who automatically became part of the much-expanded Moscow Patriarchate. These young people found the two old émigré groups to be museum pieces and so irrelevant. As a result, both émigré groups had to join the Moscow Patriarchate, though keeping a measure of internal independence.

Today, both groups are being dismantled, or rather, are dismantling themselves, as both suffer from the same suicidal disease: a lack of bishops who know the canonical Russian Tradition and, as a result of this total lack of leadership and Christian example, a lack of money. The flock will not follow wolves. For example, after 1917 both groups built some churches, or much more often, converted buildings for Orthodox use, the majority of them very small, built for fewer than a hundred parishioners. However, they also inherited some splendid pre-Revolutionary church buildings, such as:

In Italy the two churches in Florence and San Remo, currently under ROCOR, but formerly under the Paris Archdiocese.

In Paris the Cathedral of the Paris Archdiocese.

In France the ruinous churches in Cannes, Biarritz and Pau. Although it is forbidden to enter the Cannes church, as it is too dangerous, the increasingly aggressive and increasingly small and impoverished ROCOR is paradoxically engaged in a court action against its own Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, in order to obtain property rights over this ruin.

In Switzerland the ROCOR churches in Geneva, Lausanne and Vevey.

In Germany, several ROCOR churches, such as those in Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Baden-Baden.

The two ROCOR convents in Jerusalem.

Most of these churches suffer from dwindling congregations and so dwindling income. Some are going to fall down, if they do not soon receive tens of millions of euros for repair and restoration. Clearly, in order to avoid this, only direct transfers of the buildings to the cash-rich Moscow Patriarchate can, as happened to the two former Paris Archdiocese churches in Nice and the former ROCOR church in Bari in Italy, solve the problem. In the matter of restoring historic buildings, the Moscow Patriarchate will be much aided by the Russian State, which is keen to recover pre-Revolutionary Russian historic monuments, even if they are in a ruinous state.

In this long game of chess between the 99%, the very large Mother-Church, and the 1%, the two tiny émigré fragments, there can only be one winner, the Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate. It will take it all. As we said, this has already taken place in Nice and Bari, but also in Indonesia, where in 2016 ROCOR voluntarily handed over all its sixteen mission parishes to the Moscow Patriarchate, admitting that it could not cope with them. Once one of the last old, Russian-speaking ROCOR bishops has left the stage, many of the churches in Germany will certainly transfer to the Moscow Patriarchate, as their clergy and people come almost all from the ex-Soviet Union.

As one Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan told me recently: ‘Their churches are like ripe fruit hanging from a tree which will fall into our hands’. In other words, the Patriarchate does not have to do anything, except to wait patiently for the Church of the Emigration to dismantle itself, as the Emigration self-destructs after the deaths of educated, Russian-speaking bishops, who are faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and not to weird old calendarist or new calendarist pseudo-theologies, or rather fantasies.

We have descended a long, long way from the hopes expressed by the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexei II in 2003 (yes, already nearly a generation ago!) that the Western European Metropolia of the Moscow Patriarchate would become the foundation of a future Western European Local Church. That is now a mere daydream to be forgotten in the cold light of reality, the incompetence, corruption and immorality of various bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate, the liberalism of a large minority in the Paris Archdiocese, who then left it, and the schismatic and sectarian isolation of the ROCOR bishops, who still have not left it and officially founded some weird pseudo-Russian old calendarist sect, which is what they are.

Anyone has the right to leave a Church which has broken communion with another Church. That is what was done when ROCOR broke communion with part of the Moscow Patriarchate. For anyone and everyone can leave a group which enters into schism. The floodgates are opened. Moscow went to the casino, bet all its money on the wrong number and the wheel has spun and chosen another. Russia has always been betrayed by the traitors of the fifth column. In the early 17th century, boyars betrayed it to the Poles, 1917 aristocrat-traitors destroyed the Russian Empire, in 1991 oligarch-traitors destroyed the Soviet Union, and today wealthy traitors have been allowed to undermine the Russian Church.

The results are the anti-Ukrainian, anti-Moldovan and anti-English actions of Moscow and its increasing centralisation, ritualisation, nationalisation and militarisation, as it has cut itself off from communion with other Local Churches. To return to even the situation of hope of 2003 will take decades. Just like the Patriarchate of Constantinople before it, Moscow has hit the ball into the court of others, who are busy constructing what Moscow failed to do. God gave Moscow an opportunity on a silver plate; it rejected it. Now it will have to deal with the suicidal consequences, exactly as we have been warning ever since 2003. The opportunity has been presented to others.

For the Orthodox Diaspora, does this matter? Probably not, because the policy of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Diaspora has increasingly become that of a nationalist ghetto. It lives in isolation from, and so is irrelevant to, the vast majority of Diaspora Orthodox, who are not Russian. The only hope is that the Moscow Patriarchate will cast off its present nationalist and racist isolationism, returning to communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church.

Only then will Moscow return to the glorious heritage of the two great Russian saints of the Diaspora, in the USA St Tikhon of New York and Moscow, and in Europe, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, the latter the greatest man of the Russian emigration. They did not listen to St John, they persecuted him, suspended him, put him on trial and have done exactly the same to his disciples. The price they are having to pay for that is already very heavy indeed. God is not mocked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Human Remains Found near Ekaterinburg and the Last Tsar

Introduction

On the night of 4/17 July 2018 I was fortunate enough to be able to take part in the centennial pilgrimage of 120,000 Orthodox in the Urals. For hours after the Divine liturgy, led by Patriarch Kyrill, which had ended at midnight, we marched swiftly from Ekaterinburg to Ganina Yama in honour of the martyrdom of the martyred Tsar Nicholas, His Family and their four retainers (the pilgrims also prayed to the martyred layman, Gregory Rasputin). As we arrived, day broke. But where are the relics of the Imperial Martyrs and their four retainers?

The Past

In May 1979 two amateur enthusiasts found human remains at Ganina Yama (‘Gabriel’s Pit’) near Ekaterinburg, the reputed burial place of Tsar Nicholas II, His Family and their four retainers. As the Soviet tyranny fell, in July 1991 the alleged remains of five family members (the Tsar, Tsarina and three daughters) and four retainers were exhumed. After forensic examination and positive DNA identification, the nine sets of remains were laid to rest with State honours in St Catherine’s Chapel of Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. In February 1998 the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church opposed the government’s decision to bury the remains, preferring a symbolic grave until their authenticity had been confirmed. Thus, when they were interred in July 1998, they were referred to by the priest conducting the service as ‘Christian victims of the Revolution’ rather than as the Imperial Family.

In 2007 the alleged remains of Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters, reckoned to be Maria by Russian anthropologists, were discovered at Porosjonkov Log (‘Piglets’ Ravine’), just a few hundred metres from Ganina Yama. These were positively DNA tested. In late 2015, at the insistence of the Church, Russian investigators took samples from the alleged remains of Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra for additional DNA testing, which appeared to reconfirm that the remains were those of the couple. However, very many serious Orthodox, Elder Nicholas (Guryanov), the historian Piotr Valentinovich Multatuli (the great-grandson of one of the martyrs) and many other medical specialists believed that the remains of the Romanovs had been destroyed at Ganina Yama during a ritual murder. Therefore, the alleged remains of the martyrs, as well as the place of one of the burials at Porosyonkov Log, are ignored by the faithful.

The Present

Why is there such opposition to the sets of DNA results, which clearly suggest that these are indeed the remains of the eleven victims of that dread night 107 years ago? Why has Patriarch Kyrill ‘kicked any official decision into the long grass’, as they say, by declaring that a Council of Bishops must be summoned in order to come to a decision? This is all the more a postponed decision, as no Council of Bishops could meet during the covid crisis or can meet now during the tragic conflict in the Ukraine, as the Ukrainian bishops, almost a quarter of the whole Russian Orthodox episcopate, cannot attend? The answer is because there is no unanimity within the Church or among the bishops. For the issue of ‘the Ekaterinburg Remains’ has been completely politicised, manipulated by politicians. This all began with the Western-installed Yeltsin State of the 1990s, which clearly wanted to dispose of the matter as soon as possible.

The Yeltsin regime, like its Western sponsors, wanted the DNA tests to be positive, so they could, literally, bury this painful subject. This was especially so given the Communist drunkard Yeltsin’s direct role in demolishing the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, where the slaying of the Imperial Family had taken place. Furthermore, in the 1990s, DNA testing was relatively very primitive. Moreover, it took place in the UK and the USA, so many Russians believe this allowed a further manipulation for the Western-backed Yeltsin regime. As for today, President Putin, a political strongman whose character was forged by the Soviet State, he rather despises Tsar Nicholas II as a weak ruler. As to the Church’s bishops, there is another problem. Much of the Church hierarchy is despised by many people (and many clergy). They are seen as ‘mini-oligarchs’ (to quote Russians inside Russia), who have no love for popular piety.

The Division

Thus, a gulf of distrust exists between the centralised, bureaucratised and tightly-controlled episcopate on the one hand and, on the other hand, the people, the parish clergy and the monastics. Sadly, today’s Russian Church has returned to exactly the same clericalist problems as in the pre-Revolutionary Church, by which Tsar Nicholas II was himself embarrassed and tried so despairingly to overcome. Furthermore, problems also arise from the sharp political divide within the episcopate itself. This is again just as there were before the Revolution, say between the arch-liberal Metr Anony (Vadkovsky) of Saint Petersburg and the arch-conservative Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev. Today, this political divide is again between what in secular language is called ‘left and right’, between liberals and conservatives, or in historic Church language, between Arians and Monophysites.

Thus, the Arians emphasise the human side of Church life, sometimes in a lax and modernist way, almost to the exclusion of Christ-God, whereas the Monophysites emphasise the clerical and the ascetic, sometimes harshly and mercilessly, almost to the exclusion of the human. Thus, today, of two very well-known bishops who support the DNA results, one severely compromised himself by supporting the State persecution of the Church in Russia during the covid restrictions and the other was involved in ecumenism, liberalism and a homosexual scandal, totally discrediting himself. However, some of those who oppose the recognition of the remains as those of the martyred Imperial Family and their retainers are marked by ultra-nationalism and anti-semitism. Usually, these people appear to be Non-Churchgoers, for whom Orthodoxy is a political and racist ideology, not the living Faith. What of the Orthodox?

Conclusion

In the Tradition, saints are revealed to us not by archaeologists or DNA, but by miracles. It is our belief that only when Russians have repented for the crimes of their ancestors and for their present practical atheism and changed their way of life, will the truth be revealed. However, this repentance concerns us all, for all Orthodox need to begin to live an Orthodox way of life for the truth to be revealed. For the truth of the past is only revealed when there is righteousness in the present. Only then shall we be worthy to know the Truth of God.

 

 

Come, Holy Spirit! Over 5,000 Words on over Fifty Years of Faithfulness to the Orthodox Church

Fifty Years of History; 2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia; The Ukraine; The Suicide of ROCOR; Eastern Papism; A New Local Church

Fifty Years of History

Q: Why is 2025 a significant year for you personally?

A: 2025 marks fifty years of faithfulness to the Orthodox Church and Faith, forty-seven of them in the Russian Church, three in the Romanian Church, and forty years as an Orthodox clergyman.

Q: When did you begin this journey?

A:  My conscious journey began in 1968, when I was twelve years old. I realised then that my destiny was in the Orthodox Church and set about studying Russian, though there had been contacts with two local White Russian families before that. However, as I was under age, I was not able to join the Church until I was eighteen. Six years of waiting. In 1973 I at last managed to visit an Orthodox church. This was the Russian émigré chapel inside the house on the corner of Canterbury Road in Oxford. Soon after, the chapel became a library with the late Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, as the new octagonal University chapel, now Greek, had been opened in the garden outside.

Q: Why did you join the Russian Church?

A: Hobson’s choice, as they say in Cambridge! The only other Local Churches present in this country then, the Greek and the Serbian, would just tell you to go away. ‘You are not one of us’. They were ethnic clubs. Therefore, you had no choice. Only the two Russian jurisdictions would accept you. Not that they were very gracious about it either. They gave you the impression that they would accept you, but they would have preferred not to. Only because the elderly Russian emigres had no political power or money and were dying out, did some of them accept you. Many told us they would sooner die out than accept ‘foreigners’. They also entertained bitter political divisions and polemics, which you just had to put up with and make sense of.

2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia

Q: In 2022 three-quarters of the ROCOR Diocese in England, the so-called ‘Colchester Diocese’, though it stretches to Coventry and Manchester, that is, many ROCOR parishes, 5,000 people and 15 clergy, including three Western rite clergy, left ROCOR and 12 of you (all except for the Western riters) joined the Romanian Church. So do you regret that you had worked for forty-seven years for the unity of the divided three parts of the Russian Church?

A: No, not at all! To work for unity is always good. Without unity Churches fall out of communion and eventually become sects. This is my real experience, I have seen this and lived this. This is what began to happen to the two Russian émigré Churches, the smaller one based in Paris and the larger one based in New York, after the last emigres who had been adults and known the realities of Russia before 1917 had died out and direct contact with reality was lost.

After them, by the early 2000s, the sectarian fantasies, to the left and to the right, in both of them became ever stronger. The Paris group began falling away definitively towards liberal secularism under masonic sponsorship and the New York group began falling away definitively into old calendarist sectarianism under CIA sponsorship, like that of the elderly CIA Colonel Magerovsky. We were eyewitnesses to both and knew all the personalities involved, writing vigorously against both extremist tendencies. There was only one way out for them, to rejoin the broad Centre, which could hold everyone together.

Indeed, we finally got both parts into communion with the Centre in Moscow and so with each other, just in time, with many of the extremists falling away, 47% of the Paris group and 5% of the New York group. However, ironically, our triumph lasted only a little more than one year, for they fell out of communion with each other again. The fault here was entirely that of the very aggressive, old calendarist pharisee-bishops of New York, who had remained in ROCOR or infiltrated it after unity and were wreaking havoc. This took place after set in the dementia of the ever-memorable Metr Hilarion, who had no idea what they were doing in his name. The schism came in December 2020. Only one bishop resisted, the anti-sectarian and anti-rebaptiser Archbishop Peter of Chicago, who had been an altar boy to St John, but who has since died. His see is now without a permanent bishop and many there are now out of control.

Q: Why did the Centre in Moscow not try and hold the two émigré parts together?

A: As the Russians say of themselves, ‘We are slow to harness, but quick to ride’. In other words, Moscow is very passive, it does nothing for, say, twenty years despite all the warnings of the coming explosion from the grassroots, and then, too late, after the explosion, it overreacts to the extreme. This is the result of not working incrementally and being pastorally interested, only politically interested. Firstly, Moscow had, and refused to have, little or any understanding of the provincial Russian emigration and its petty political arguments. Secondly, Moscow was distracted from pastoral care by international politics, for by that time Moscow had itself fallen out of communion with the Greeks, after the grossly uncanonical actions of the Greeks in the Ukraine, breaking the first canons of the Apostles. Again, here too, Moscow overreacted.

Here we see how the fall from communion with the Greeks by the Centre affected the rest. Lack of communion is like an infection, a virus. So all our work for unity was undone by the Moscow error of overreaction to the Greek error, splitting off from the Church. Then, not having turned the other cheek, Moscow ‘did a Constantinople’, by interfering in the jurisdiction of Alexandria in Africa. Little wonder that people then began to say that ‘Moscow is as bad as Constantinople’.

Q: What do you do, if even the Centre is infected by the spirit of disunity and without principles tolerates sectarianism, and ignores schism and even the heresy of rebaptising Orthodox?

A: In such a case, you must transfer to a canonical Local Church which is not infected with the disease of schism and has a Diaspora structure. Today, that means neither the Russians, nor the Greeks. As I had been to seminary in the 1970s and a couple of the seminarians had become bishops, namely in the Serbian and Romanian Churches, and since I had been around for a long time and had met lots of other bishops since then and many had read the translations of my writings into Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, German and Czech, we had a choice of where to go. After the Russian betrayal of us in the Non-schismatic Diaspora, all the others offered to protect us from the new, brutal, sectarian, uncanonical and anti-pastoral ROCOR. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

The Ukraine

Q: What was the connection between your departure for the Romanian Patriarchate and the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: None, directly. We were received by our old friend, the very experienced Metr Joseph (Pop) of the four-million strong Autonomous Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe of the Romanian Orthodox Church on 16 February 2022, as proved by the documents issued on that day (despite the blatant lies of others on the internet who said that those documents were forged (!), much to the shock of Metr Joseph – he did not know that bishops can lie). Now that was eight days before the new phase of the Ukrainian conflict began on 24 February.

It was providential that we had left before that conflict, because then we did not have to face the deep and bitter divisions among the flock which the commemoration of Patriarch Kyrill has brought to all Russian parishes, especially in ROCOR, though it happens even inside Russia. There anti-war Orthodox are also boycotting the Church in very large numbers, not least after the ‘defrocking’ and exiling of liberal but popular priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky.

The reason why we left was the schism which occurred with the official introduction of the heresy of rebaptism of Orthodox under old calendarist pressure, not the problem of the Ukraine. Our departure was clearly not directly connected with the intensified conflict in the Ukraine eight days later, on 24 February, but there was still an indirect connection. This is because both the heresy of rebaptism and the scandalous support for a war against other Orthodox were caused by exactly the same lack of pastoral leadership. The chasm between the bishops on the one hand and the suffering priests and people on the other hand, whom the bishops have been persecuting, opened up for exactly the same reason.

Q: But you seem to support the Russian side in the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: Not at all, that is not true. No clergyman can support war and violence. However, as a political observer and cultural historian, who knows very well both Russia and the Ukraine, both officially and unofficially, and has met both recent Patriarchs and President Putin, and who also perfectly well knows the aggression and hypocrisy of the West, several things were obvious.

Firstly, it was obvious from the very outset that, as a Great Power, Russia would win that deeply tragic and catastrophic conflict. That is not support, it is just a recognition of an obvious fact. It was also clear that the Kiev regime was Fascist and atheist and was acting simply as a proxy of the highly aggressive USA and the EU. It was obvious that the anti-Ukrainian regime in Kiev existed only because NATO was using it to try and destroy Russia and grab its wealth, for the Ukraine is the last chance of the West to dominate the world and pay off its colossal debts. It was also plain for all to see that the Kiev regime had been persecuting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and all the minorities there (and the Russians in the Ukraine are a minority of 40%!) for years. Blood is on their hands – the Russians did not start this.

Moreover, the CIA and Constantinople support for the fake Church, the OCU, under Dumenko, is an abuse of the canons, on the same level as the abuse of the canons by others, as is the present ‘defrocking’ of bishops of Cyprus for their faithfulness to Christ in refusing to recognise the fake Church. The latter has totally discredited the Church of Cyprus, which kowtows to discredited Constantinople and the local US ambassador. Frankly, there is something quite satanic in the Kiev regime, as it closes hundreds of churches, threatens to turn them into casinos and propagandises LGBT.

It was also obvious that the Ukrainian people, especially the real Orthodox there, were the victims of that war. And finally, it was manifest that the ignorant and arrogant Western mainstream media, financed by the CIA and MI6, which are themselves financed by the Military Financial Complex of the USA and the UK, supported the Kiev Nazis because they could make a lot of money out of such a conflict. They told plain lies. It was the same in Britain in the First World War, where the newspapers which were owned by millionaire arms merchants told the same type of lies.

The Suicide of ROCOR

Q: How did ROCOR come to discredit and destroy itself?

A: All too many in the Russian episcopate now appear to want to suck money out of the parishes in order to finance their ‘superior’, oligarchic lifestyle and then in return sadistically punish the selfsame priests and parishes for telling the truth and living as Christians, also trying to destroy their families. Such bishops, whether inside or outside Russia, claim that they are acting according to the canons and that any who refuse to accept their vicious persecutions and slanders are committing the ultimate sin of refusing to participate in their evil. That apparently is ‘uncanonical’!

Clearly, these people are not Christians. It would be laughable if it were not so sad. We are obedient to Christ, not to those who are de facto filioquists, that is, who claim to have replaced Christ and so put their clearly twisted interpretations of the canons above the Holy Spirit. Their lust for power and money is what has temporarily corrupted the Russian Church, just as it has Constantinople. The Russian émigré Churches had never suffered from that disease, as they had neither power, nor money, which was precisely their glory, but they had died out by the early 2000s. We saw their last generation between 1975 and 2000.

The local example of a recent convert was of one who suffered from narcissistic rages and tantrums, throwing his toys out of his pram and acting as a typical unprincipled bully. Uneducated and ignorant, humiliating those who had been in the Church before he was even born, he threatened all with a metaphorical baseball bat. He was a kind of ecclesiastical Trump, wanting only to ‘grab property’ (the words of our outraged solicitor who examined his shameless claims in astonishment – she had never seen anything like it, even in the secular world) and dominate, without any understanding of local languages, history, geography, customs etc. Moscow now knows all about him, since the scandal he caused in the altar of a church in Paris last year, when he had to be restrained by another bishop from his aggressive rage and threat of violence.

Q: Was ROCOR’s entry into schism and even heresy inevitable?

A: No, not at all. As far back as 1997, a friend of mine, the late Fr Roman Lukianov in Boston USA, warned that ROCOR risked becoming a sect, as the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, successor of St John, had reposed in 1993. For decades Vladyka Antony had been the great moderating influence inside ROCOR against the American crazies. He was rightly concerned, as were others of us.

I remember one old aristocratic émigré in London, who had worked for MI6 (so many of them did) in Iran in the 1950s (himself he just said that he had worked for ‘The Foreign Office’, which was well-understood code). He said that no unity between ROCOR and the MP was possible because ROCOR was like a glass of pure water and the MP was like a glass of dirty water. I asked him then why St Matrona of Moscow and St Luke of the Crimea had been in the MP? Then I asked him why were there so many scandals in ROCOR, with the Grabbe affair, his ‘six million dollar’ son, and the defrocking for good canonical reasons of immoral priests and why there were so many ROCOR parishes that did not have priests? He simply answered that he had never heard of any of that! In other words, it was all ignorance and bigotry. It was the usual phariseeism of those who see the speck in others, but not the log in their own eye.

In fact, despite such people, ROCOR did not become a sect and ten years later it even entered back into communion with Moscow, then presided over by a former émigré, the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II. That was a miracle. I witnessed it. ROCOR through the ever-memorable Metr Laurus had received the most generous canonical agreement from the Patriarch, becoming a self-governing part of the Russian Church. ROCOR had basically become an Autonomous Church of the Diaspora. This had been exactly our hope all along. My only regret was that it had taken so long. Patriarch Alexis, whom I knew, had already made the same offer in about 1995! Seven years had been wasted after the revolutionary 2000 Jubilee Council in Moscow when all our just demands had been met.

With such an agreement to autonomy, ROCOR could therefore have avoided all the controversy of the later Russian schism with the Greeks and the conflict in the Ukraine and not broken communion with but co-operated with the other Local Churches. (By other Local Churches, I do not include the leadership of the Greek Churches, whose policies were purely political, dictated to them and paid for by the CIA).

But instead of using its autonomy and working with the concert of the politically free Local Churches, self-governing ROCOR showed no independence from Moscow at all, except to express CIA views of the Kiev regime! It not only entered into schism from the Greeks, but also took several priests from the Greek Church without letters of release, and accepted in silence the persecution of priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky. All this was because it did not want to recognise the Catholicity of the Church, but to be a schismatic ghetto-group, actually denying the sacraments of other local Churches, against its own people.

Q: But you must admit that ROCOR had long been a breeding ground for schism?

A: Yes, there had been the Bostonite old calendarist schism in, I think, 1986, when about 2,000 left, the tiny old calendarist schisms in France in 1987 and 2001, then the four schisms in the USA and England of 2007. But each time the numbers who left for all these various warring ‘True Orthodox’ sects were minute, often fewer than 500, sometimes as few as 50. The ROCOR Centre had remained firm.

And all those schisms proved just how necessary it was for ROCOR to enter into canonical communion with Moscow and to eliminate the sectarian spirit of hatred and division for ever. Those schisms also proved how ROCOR had for years been attracting the wrong sort of people, pathological extremists and the dissatisfied, sometimes second-generation immigrant Russians with their inferiority complexes and fantasies about pre-Revolutionary Russia, sometimes weird converts from Protestant sects, very often with sexual problems.

These are the sort of people who call normal Orthodox ‘World Orthodox’ and themselves, in their narcissistic and pharisaical pride, ‘True Orthodox’. There is no such thing as ‘World Orthodox’. True, there can be worldly or lapsed Orthodox, but they do not go to church and therefore, they are not Orthodox. An Orthodox is one who goes to church, unlike so many of the internet Orthodox who dare to call themselves ‘True Orthodox’. The only ‘True Orthodox’ are the saints of God, to whose state all Orthodox aspire.

Today, there are all of us who left ROCOR from 2021 on, in the USA, in England and elsewhere. Only this time we left not for weird and schismatic sectarian groups, but for the mainstream Local Churches, anti-Bartholomew Constantinople (those who joined Constantinople in the USA and Paris refuse to have anything to do with his fake Ukrainian Church) and then Bucharest, which welcomed us all with open arms and great sympathy, as heroic witnesses and refugees from ROCOR schism and heresy.

This time it was the scandal-ridden ROCOR itself which had become a weird and schismatic sectarian group. True, there were others in ROCOR who were too weak and fearful, including one bishop and several clergy, who did not leave for other Local Churches, but simply gave up and resigned in disgust at the lack of canonicity and corruption they had seen inside the new ROCOR. This is the end of ROCOR, its suicide. It has outlived its sell-by date.

Q: But what do you think about the anti-Moscow Patriarchate ROCOR Synod statement of 5 June?

https://www.synod.com/synod/eng2025/20250605_ensynodstatement.html

A: This was a clearly provoked by the very recent Sister Vassa debacle and the numbers of Russians leaving ROCOR in the USA and withdrawing their donations, since the documents contains nothing new and could have been written years ago. (Why wasn’t it written then? Well, as American say, ‘Follow the money’). It was clearly written by the German Metr Mark and his entourage, who have been running the Synod ever since they removed Metr Vitaly in 2001.

It is a document that deals only with the past of 70-90 years ago and fails utterly to address the present, the elephant in the room, the war in the Ukraine. The liberals will rightly mock the document as too little, too late. However, there is even worse.

From the Moscow viewpoint, the ROCOR document is scandalous. It is well known that the German Diocese of Metr Mark still has many children and grandchildren of Vlasovites (Russians who fought with Hitler) in it. For Russians in Russia Stalin was the victor of 1945, just as for British people Churchill (who was just as racist as Hitler) was the victor in 1945. And Vlasov was a traitor. Any attack of this manner on Stalin is seen as Nazi and therefore as support for the Nazis in Kiev, who are have been killing Russian civilians and children ever since 2014, with the support of the grandchildren of Nazis in Berlin and Brussels.

This statement has quite rightly outraged Moscow, especially since it has Vlasovite and CIA connections. It was 27 million Soviet citizens who were massacred by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945. Victory came when Stalin was the Soviet leader. Why is ROCOR, with its close Vlasov and CIA connections meddling in internal affairs in Russia? If Moscow ditches ROCOR, then it will lose its last shreds of a claim to canonicity and become officially the schismatic sect that it already is. For the quite correct Russian reaction, see:

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2025/06/06/sinod_rpcz_nastupaet_na_te_zhe_grabli

Q: Today ROCOR is attracting many young men. So ROCOR is not finished?

A: All Orthodox dioceses in the Diaspora are receiving many young people today. This is due to the internet effect of various influencers. But we have to be very careful and receive only the serious, not the beardy-weirdy. With such people the lapse rate is extremely high. I am now receiving at least one young person a month, though as many young women as men, including refugees from ROCOR sectarianism, now that they have understood their mistake. ROCOR is once more attracting the wrong sort of young men, the terminally online, the exclusivists, incels, woman-haters, closet homosexuals, bisexuals, extremists, narcissists, internet Orthodox. You cannot build a Church on their exclusivist pathology and hatred, and yet ROCOR usually ordains such young men, preferring them to the normal!

Thus, they claim that Orthodoxy is ’manly’ and ‘masculine’. But what about women? Are they not allowed? Why are they against family life and children? Clearly, all this is internet fantasy. Russian churches especially have always been filled with women, 80% or 90%. But you will not learn about that reality from the internet. Those remaining in ROCOR just never learn. They are just making it worse for themselves. All we can do is to pray for their repentance despite their schism and heresy.

Eastern Papism

Q: Why did some Russian hierarchs fall into exactly the same error as the Greek (Constantinople) Church before it, by proclaiming themselves to be some sort of Eastern Papacy?

A: Only about 2% of Orthodox belong to the Greek jurisdiction of Constantinople, whereas 70% (140 million) belong to that of Moscow. Moscow therefore thinks that it is No 1. However, Constantinople maintains that as the Church of the former Imperial Capital (which fell nearly 600 years ago!), it is the ‘first without equals’, that is, No 1.

Now promoting yourself as ‘No 1’ is precisely the heresy of Papism, which directly contradicts the Gospel, where Christ calls on us to serve others, not to lord it over others. The First Rome fell because it wanted to dominate. Those who call themselves the Second Rome and the Third Rome have learned nothing from its fall and have instead chosen to imitate that exact same ‘Roman’ fall. It is the sin of Rome-ism, even though you may call it worldliness, secularism, erastianism or Sergianism.

Fortunately, the Church works through Catholicity, not through becoming a State (the First Rome), ancient prestige (the Second Rome) or through size (the Third Rome). A Council of the whole Church, all sixteen Local Churches, is the solution to this childish division. In any case, as a result, both Moscow and Constantinople have punished themselves. Today Moscow is being reduced in size, losing a third of its territories and parishes, and as for Constantinople, it is losing the last shreds of its prestige, making itself into a laughing-stock, as one bishop after another in the Church of Cyprus is ‘defrocked’ for the ‘heresy’ of disagreeing with Constantinople!

Both Moscow and Constantinople are punished by the sin that they sinned with, as the Book of Proverbs says. God is not mocked. Meanwhile the real Church, the other fourteen Local Churches, goes on together with the many healthy elements within both Moscow and Constantinople are in accord. This is not a sickness unto death, for repentance is possible.

A New Local Church

Q: What after fifty years of struggle do you think of the chances of a new Local Church being established?

A: I have always believed that I would not live to see it, but I have always fought for it, for the sake of our children and grandchildren. It is still for the future and despite the present Greek and Russian squabble we are far closer to it than fifty years ago, when it was an impossible dream and even services in local languages hardly existed. The present schism does not fill me with pessimism because people in their eighties die. What is frightening is that people of that age appear to feel no repentance.

The point is that over the last fifty years I have seen both the Russian Church in the Diaspora and the Greek (Constantinople) Church dying out. Why? Because they stuck to what for the new Western-born generations of Russians and Greeks were foreign languages, Slavonic and Greek. They do not understand a word of them. The decision not to use local languages was suicide, the ethnic funeral of the Church.

On top of that, what possible missionary witness do you give to Non-Orthodox, if you do not even speak the local language and understand the local culture? Did the Apostles go around speaking in a foreign language to preach the Gospel? No, they spoke in the local language. This is one of the meanings of Pentecost. To speak in tongues does not mean to speak in gibberish in a wave of hysterical self-exaltation, like crazy Evangelicals and Pentecostalists. It means to work in order to learn another language, its culture and customs, in order to inculturate the Orthodox Christian Faith and so bring people to Christ.

St Nicholas of Japan, St Tikhon of Moscow and St John of Shanghai are recent examples, for they did exactly this. They did not impose, they set examples. All we have to do is follow them. For instance, when Japan started its proxy war against Russia with its undeclared surprise attack on Russia, St Nicholas told his Japanese clergy to pray for their armed forces and locked himself away to pray for the duration. Here is our example.

Q: And what about the chances of achieving an Autocephalous Local Church today?

A: Firstly, most Local Churches do not even have a Diaspora jurisdiction, so they are not concerned by the question.

Secondly, many of the Churches that do have a Diaspora jurisdiction would never give autocephaly to their Diaspora jurisdiction for ethnic reasons, especially if that jurisdiction is small. So there is no hope that in Western Europe, for example, the Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian or Antiochian Churches will ever grant autocephaly. This means that only the big three, the Greek, Russian or Romanian Churches could ever give autocephaly in Western Europe. True, the Romanian Church gave autonomy several years ago, but not autocephaly for very good canonical reasons, for which see below.

Thirdly, there is the question of local people who have joined that Church. This is all about missionary work. Ghetto-churches will never give autocephaly. Why should they? They are precisely not local and do not want to be local! But if there were large numbers of local people in a Church, then it would have to receive autocephaly. This so far is not the case anywhere, the numbers of native people accepting Orthodoxy have been very small.

Fourthly, there is the question of size. For example, the Greek Church is by far the largest in North America and Australia, the Antiochian the largest in South America, whereas the Romanian Church has in the last 15 years become by far the largest in Western Europe. In those regions, we must hope that the largest group would take responsibility and draw towards autocephaly. However, more of this in the final point below.

Finally, there is the issue of ability to get on with others, i.e, the absence of nationalism and narrow jurisdictionalism and even worse, of sectarianism. This disqualifies the Greek and now the Russian Churches, one of whose bishops told our Romanians and Moldovans that, ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. This is racism, chauvinism on the same level as Constantinople’s.

The fact is that the Greek Church of Constantinople has never voluntarily given or recognised genuine autocephaly to anyone because of its centralising tendencies, neither to the Serbs, nor to the Russians, nor to the Romanians and, most obviously, nor to the Bulgarians, nor to the Poles, nor to the Czechs and Slovaks, nor to the Macedonians today. Even the ‘autocephaly’ the Greeks recently gave to the Ukrainian schismatics is completely fake. Their fake Church of gangsters and thugs has no independence and depends entirely on CIA cash. Even in history, when the Copts and the Armenians broke away from Orthodoxy, the main reason was their nationalist reaction to Greek racism.

With the suicide of ROCOR and its schism from the Paris Archdiocese of the Russian Church, in Western Europe the Russians have now done exactly the same thing as the Greeks, excluding most Ukrainians, Moldovans and normal local Western Europeans from the Russian Church, that is, becoming like the Greeks a nationalistic ghetto-Church. There is only one option left – the Romanians.

Are the Romanians up to the job? I can affirm that many are, the publishing efforts in English and French of the Romanian Dioceses are formidable. But is that enough? Only time will tell. What is certain that no one Local Church can give autocephaly. It must be done in concert, which is why Bucharest did not give us autocephaly, only autonomy. Thus, there is no room either for nationalism, nor sectarianism.

Q: What might a new Local Church look like?

A: I see it as a group of bishops, with their flocks of different nationalities, presiding in turn for a fixed term over the new Local Church, its autocephaly granted collectively by all the Local Churches concerned. Each bishop would have his own diocese, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Georgian, Romanian, Russian and Antiochian. We must avoid the error of the Greeks who set up episcopal assemblies. These failed and no longer operate because the Greeks wanted to dominate them and sat in permanent control over them, heavy-handedly trying to impose their views. That is not the way to go. There must be complete respect and freedom for different languages, calendars and customs, not to mention different attitudes towards ecumenism. There must be no interference from the Mother-Churches. Autocephaly must mean autocephaly. There is no other way.

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Pentecost 2025

 

 

 

 

The Consequences of the Russian Victory in the Ukraine

The Origin of the Western Delusion

The elites of Western European countries have always tried to invade and then colonise and exploit the lands nearest to them. This means the invasions, mainly from the lands between the Rhine and the Loire or else from Northern Italy, of Sardinia in 1015-17, then of Greek Sicily and Southern Italy, the Frankish-led 1064 Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula, the Norman-led invasion of England in 1066 and from there the invasions of the Celtic lands, the Frankish ‘Crusades’ in the Holy Land and the Teutonic Knight invasions of the Baltic States and Russia. These aggressions against Russia were later repeated in every century, by the Poles in 1609-18, by the Swedes in the Great Northern War, by Napoleon in 1812 and then by Hitler in 1941, both with Collective European invasions, which became routs of Western Europe. Now history is repeated in the Ukraine.

Originally, such imperialism came about because Western Europe began to consider that it possessed a superior religion under its leader, the infallible Pope, who had by dogma replaced Christ and from whom alone the Holy Spirit comes into the world. Then it laid claim to a superior civilisation, because it had superior military and industrial technology. Next it claimed to be a superior race (most visibly among the ‘Aryan’ Nazis), and today it considers that it is superior because it has ‘liberal’ values. In fact, like all its other ‘European values’, its liberalism is Fascist, as it denigrates others. Among them, even the word ‘liberal’ has come to mean intolerant. Indeed, unsurprisingly, the grandfathers of many of the unelected, but ‘infallible’, ‘Papist’ and Neo-Carolingian EU leaders were Nazis, for example those of von der Leyen, Kallas, Merz, Baerbok etc.

The End-Game in the Ukraine

The ill-advised Trump has lost the US proxy war against Russia, whatever the PR drone stunts of Kiev. Ignorant of the geography, history and politics of all countries outside the USA, he believed the propaganda lies which were fed to him, that Russia was losing the war with huge losses and sacrificing ‘human waves’ of its soldiers, its leader was dying, its ‘tiny economy’ (‘the same size as Spain’s’) was ‘in meltdown’, its forces had no arms, no fuel, no weapons, no soldiers, that it ‘was a gas station masquerading as a country’. Trump may be a poker player, but he has ‘no cards’, so he cannot win. He has and never had any ‘leverage’ and the latest EU threats of piracy are laughable. Russia’s economy is in fact the fourth largest in the world, at least four to five times larger than Spain’s, indeed, the largest in Europe. Perhaps slowly, but reality is dawning.

Russia is not a poker player, but a chess player. Thus, in the Ukraine there will be no frozen conflict, no stalemate, no ceasefire, no DMZ, as there was in Korea, in that war which the Western world also lost. No, the Ukraine will be another Vietnam or Afghanistan, a humiliating capitulation, as in Saigon or Kabul. Millions of Ukrainians who had to flee to Russia from the genocidal Fascist regime in Kiev will return to the New Ukraine, once peace has come there, as well as many of the more than six million Ukrainians who took the politically-motivated bribes of the West and emigrated there after 2022. When peace comes, there will be a New Ukraine and it will be remade as a neutral State, with very deep suspicion of the West which wanted to genocide the Ukraine ‘to the last Ukrainian’, for clearly Ukrainian lives do not matter to the racist and anti-Slav Western world.

The conflict in the Ukraine has been a civil war and also a war of attrition. The Russian aim from the outset was to wipe out the NATO-trained, -armed and -financed Ukrainian armed forces. This is what Russia meant by ‘Demilitarisation’. Russia, by far the largest country in the world, needs no new territories, but the ‘Ukrainian’ territories inhabited by persecuted Russians will become part of Russia. Trump is no mediator in this conflict, the USA has always supported Kiev in every way and is still doing so, so his PR peace efforts to try and win a Nobel prize, funded by the CIA, are all in vain. The war will end on the battlefield. All wars of attrition end suddenly. This one will end suddenly too and that end may come in the next few months. In that case the conflict will have lasted about as long as the Second World War in Russia (June 1941-May 1945).

Consequences: A World of Spheres of Influence

Given NATO aggression, which caused the war in the Ukraine through its sponsorship of the puppet Fascist regime that it set up in Kiev, and the imminent NATO defeat, there will be great bitterness and a spirit of revanchism against Russia in defeated and humiliated Western Europe. We can imagine a barbed wire fence being laid out along the border between the New Ukraine and the Uniat Galician far west of Stalin’s old Ukraine, which will be separated from the Russian world by that fence. This will prevent invasions and terrorist attacks, perhaps planned, as so often happens, by the British MI6 and SAS, from Galicia or Poland. This situation will last until such time as there is a new pragmatic and realistic elite in Western Europe, the old ideological one swept away by its long-suffering peoples, who want good relations with their neighbours.

The post-Ukrainian world will be a multipolar world of spheres of influence, dominated by the three Great Powers and perhaps later by a fourth, India, if it can overcome its narrow Hindu nationalism. Thus, the USA will dominate or control Greenland (to be invaded by it), Canada (seceded Alberta may well become the 51st State of the USA), Mexico, Central America as far as Panama, the ‘Gulf of America’ and the Caribbean. China will dominate East Asia and its influence will become ever greater in Japan, Korea, South-East Asia, the Western outpost of Australia, South America (which the US is about to lose to China) and, together with Russian arms and diplomacy, Africa. Russia will help all Northern Asia, from Europe to the Sea of Japan, including the Caucasus and Central Asia and any in Western Europe (see below) who wish for co-operation.

Consequences: An Isolated Western Europe

Now Europe has for a millennium been divided into two halves. The Western half (‘Western Europe’ – see above) consists of the former Catholic and Protestant countries. The Eastern half belongs to Eurasia and consists of Russia, Belarus and the future New Ukraine, whose precise borders are yet to be set. Western Europe is sociologically and ideologically divided between the tiny bankster- and oligarch-controlled ruling elite, supported by and consisting of some 20% of the population who benefit from the elite, 20% who oppose the feudal, oligarchic and exploitative nature of the West and then the 60% inbetween. This 60% swims with the tide, looking only for its own survival and benefit. Nobody can rely on the support of this unprincipled mass. However, we do not condemn them, they too have to eat and feed their children.

The tragedy of Western Europe is that its elite has actually believed in its own lies, known variously as ‘propaganda, spin, narrative, fantasy, fairy tales, wishful thinking, virtual reality, a parallel universe’. All of these such fantasies are delusion, more precisely self-delusion. The result is that Western Europe will be defeated and then will separate from its artificial ‘Union’ into its various constituent parts, north, west, east and south. For example, the sixteen countries of south-eastern Europe, from Austria to Cyprus, could leave for the sphere of influence of Russia, with all Northern Eurasia, linking them with the New Silk Road of China. Many in Hungary, Slovakia and Non-EU Serbia are already thinking of doing this. This will leave the twenty-five countries of the rest of Western Europe even more abandoned and isolated.

They will have to define themselves afresh, retrieving their roots. It will then be quite possible that the six countries of south-western Europe, Italy, Malta, San Marino and then Spain, Portugal and Andorra will leave the EU, in that order, to join south-western Europe and the BRICS world led by the Russian Federation. This will leave the nineteen countries of north-western Europe, from Iceland to Estonia, even more isolated. Only through such isolation and self-examination can come repentance and the decolonisation and devassalisation of the Western European peoples, the French, Bavarians, English, Poles, Dutch, Swiss, Scandinavians, Finns, Balts and all the others, from their corrupted and barbarian Neo-Carolingian elite, which today is centred in Brussels. For some, like the long-oppressed Irish, this repentance will be easier than for others.

The Consequences for the Russian Orthodox Church

By allying itself with the State of the Russian Federation, the Sovietised and nationalistic Moscow Patriarchate (and its New York ROCOR satellite) have lost their influence outside the Federation, in the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic States, just as it lost the Orthodox in Finland, Poland and Slovakia after the 1917 Revolution, when those countries were recreated. In other words, a bureaucratised, clericalised, nationalised and militarised ideology replaced pastorship in the Russian Church. In bitterness Western countries may yet ban any Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe. This is already happening in the Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia and its Patriarch has already been officially banned from the Ukraine, Lithuania, Canada and the UK. It is becoming a ghetto-Church, both voluntarily and involuntarily.

The problems of the Patriarchate of Moscow and its ROCOR subsidiary all came about through the desire of certain of its leading bishops to create an Orthodox Vatican. They have long admired the Statist ideology of the Vatican, espoused by Patriarch Sergius. This meant competing against Constantinople, which had already advanced much further along that same Statist path, that of replacing pastors with political ideologues, replacing Churchmanship with politics. The Vatican is a Church-Business, a Church-State, a Church of the filioque, according to which the Pope is the Head of the Church, replacing Christ, from Whom ‘proceeds the Holy Spirit’ and who has the right to persecute real Christians. But the real Church of God, Orthodoxy, is not a State, not a Business, not the filioque. The elitist Vatican model is alien and rejected by all sincere Orthodox.

 

 

Questions and Answers (January-May 2025): On Pastoral Work, the Church and other Christians, Miaphysites, Homosexuality, the Russian Church, Sister Vassa, the Suicide of ROCOR, English and England

Pastoral Work

Q: On the internet you have been called ‘popular but controversial’. Do you think that is fair?

A: That question again! My answer is that I don’t know if it is fair. It is not for me to judge. Popular? Our church is always packed with hundreds, but many other Romanian and Greek churches in this country are also packed in the same way, so that does not mean anything. Controversial is a more interesting comment. Let me explain why.

My priority over 40 years as a clergyman of the Church has always been pastoral work. Therefore, I have always been ideology-free and nationality-free. All are welcome. And for some that may be controversial. For instance, I have always said that if tomorrow 1,000 Chinese people turn up wanting to be baptised, then I will set about that and learn some Chinese on the way. This is exactly what we did when 1,000 Romanians and Moldovans turned up some 12 years ago. I learned some Romanian and found a pious Romanian who was able to become a deacon and then a priest. Since then he has completed seminary and is now completing his masters.

Another example. During the covid scandal (for that is what it was), all the bishops closed down their churches. Not a single one resisted the fraud or went to prison for remaining open. I kept our churches open. True, we hid as in the catacombs, we forbade parking in front, entrance was by the side door, we did not turn the lights on and did not ring the bells and people came in and went out in twos and threes. People of all nationalities came from all over the eastern side of England, from up to 150 miles away. I also went to give people communion in their houses in that area, including all over London, which had turned into a church desert. The others were hiding, ‘for fear of the Jews’. Western and Westernised secularist and atheist governments had achieved what Stalin had not achieved. I suppose my actions were perhaps ‘popular but controversial’.

Some will say that that was irresponsible, I could have spread covid. I did not. I told those, and nearly all of our people are under 40, who felt ill or had weak health to stay at home. But that was only common sense, I am sure they were doing that anyway. Just like ‘social distancing’, which in fact was anti-social distancing, which was also common sense. When we are ill or risk falling ill, we stay at home, we avoid others, especially the vulnerable. We don’t need governments to tell us that! We are not zombies.

Throughout history the Church authorities have had to make up their minds whether they are with Christ or with the State. So it is today. I am with Christ. So were the fools in Christ in Moscow and Saint Petersburg (the capitals where the State authorities did not allow other saints), like St Basil the Fool and St Xenia. St John of Kronstadt worked in a port with its bars and brothels. The snooty aristocrats did not want him, a dirty peasant, in Saint Petersburg.

Likewise, St Seraphim of Sarov lived in the middle of nowhere with bears – the authorities did not want ‘a dirty peasant’ among them and when the pious Tsar had him canonised, the atheist aristocrats, who later overthrew the Tsar, mocked the Tsar’s ‘obscurantism’. Bears liked him more than aristocrats. As for the very recent Elder Nikolai (Guryanov), the Soviet and also post-Soviet Church authorities not only kept him away from towns, but exiled him to a tiny island on a lake, as far away as possible from where large numbers lived. Contempt and persecution by furious bishops who love money and power over Christ have always been our lot, they have never wanted us in a large city. Popular but controversial?

The Church and Other Christians

Q: Where is the True Church?

A: The True Church is where there is Love. Wherever there is hatred, there is no True Church and so no Orthodoxy.

Q: Which Christian group is closest to the Orthodox Church, the Catholics or the Protestants?

A: Neither! Let me explain.

There is an absurd black and white belief, usually adopted by self-justifying converts who know very little and understand even less, that outside the (Orthodox) Church there is nothing. If, on the contrary, we are to make a very broad generalisation, perhaps we could say the following in answer to your question:

The Miaphysites, who are made up of the six groups known as Ethiopians, Eritreans, Copts, Armenians, Syriacs and Malankara Syriacs, totalling some 50 million people, are by far the closest to us. Very crudely speaking, we could say that they have three-quarters of Orthodoxy, whereas the Roman Catholics (who do have the concepts of bishops, priests, saints and sacraments) have only half, and the Protestants (who have only the misinterpreted Scriptures) have only a quarter of Orthodoxy.

The Miaphysites (Non-Chalcedonians) believe what St Cyril of Alexandria also expressed, that Christ has One Nature (‘mia physia’), which is both Divine and human. This was refined by him and all Orthodoxy into the Dogma of the Universal Council of Chalcedon in 451 that Christ is One Person in two natures, Divine and human. For some Orthodox, that seems like the same thing as Miaphysitism, the difference is only semantic.

For many others, however, this is much too vague and unrefined. Apart from the central questions of the Miaphysite attitude to the Council of Chalcedon itself, to the following three Universal Councils and the issue as to whether for them Christ is fully Divine and fully human, with Divine and human souls, minds, wills and energies, there are questions of the Canon of Scripture, the recognition of saints, circumcision etc. These issues divide the Miaphysites from Orthodoxy.

Thus, Miaphysitism disagrees with Orthodoxy about the Person of Christ. Official Roman Catholicism disagrees with Orthodoxy about the Holy Spirit, through Whom the Head of the Church, Christ, is present, replacing both Christ and the Holy Spirit with the Pope of Rome, then the ‘leader of the West’. And Protestantism has no Church, it does not know the Body of Christ, which is why it says strange humanist things like, ‘the Church is wrong’, ‘the Church made a mistake’, ‘the Church has to change’, ‘we must reform the Church’ etc

Q: The new Pope has taken the name Leo XIV, apparently since he wanted to balance conservative and liberal forces in his Church. What do you think of him, and if you were elected Pope, what name would you take? And what would you change, if you could?

A: Your second question greatly amused me, as there must be several billion people who could become Pope before me!

I had obviously never thought about it, but maybe on reflection I would take the name Zacharias II, as Pope Zacharias (741-752) was the last Greek Pope of Rome. Above all, he is an Orthodox saint. I would certainly start by reverting to the Creed, that is, abandoning the filioque, and allowing married men to become priests, stamping out the perversions caused by compulsory celibacy.

As regards your first question and what I think of the new Pope, I don’t know. He may wear a Russian priest’s cross and have an appreciation of liturgies other than the new Roman mass, but that does not mean anything. Actions speak louder than words. Give him a year.

Q: What went wrong with Catholicism in the 1960s? Why did it abandon so much from before?

A: I was not there, but I have understood the following from eyewitnesses.

In the 1960s, rationalist intellectuals seized hold of Catholicism and decided that it needed ‘updating’, as though it were some sort of corporate secular organisation that needed rebranding. They forgot, or probably never even knew, that the Church services are made to inspire prayer, contact with the other world, and so must have the sense of the sacred, the mystical, the otherworldly, the numinous. Instead, they made their Church resemble the world, destroying any sense of the sacred. And so they discouraged prayer and people stopped going to their churches. Why go there? It resembled the world around them. It was no longer different, ‘special’.

But let us not get it out of proportion. There was much that was wrong with it centuries before the 1960s.

Q: Who do you hope will become the next Archbishop of Canterbury after the pedophile scandal with Welby?

A: I have no idea. I just hope the next one actually believes in God, unlike the last one

Q: Why is there so much homosexuality among the Orthodox episcopate today?

A: Homosexuality always come in times of decadence. That is your reply.

As Fr John, the rector of the very large Mayfield parish (3,000 Orthodox) in the USA, explained to me in 2007, the worst thing is when bishops form a gay mafia (in the US, this is called a ‘lavender mafia’) and then gang up against married priests and their solid families. Closet homosexual bishops are jealous of their common touch, experience and knowledge.

In those days, this concerned the OCA, today it concerns the Russian/ROCOR and Constantinople Churches. Thus, in the Russian Church inside Russia, another three bishops have just been deposed, though it is not clear whether this was for embezzlement of money or again for perversion, as in the Grindr scandals previously.

Q: Why did the Orthodox Easter coincide with the Catholic Easter this year?

A: What you mean is that in 2025 the Roman Catholic Easter coincided with the Orthodox Easter. This happens every five years, when Catholicism observes the Paschalia and the canons.

Q: What do you think of the icons that have been displayed in recent years in a great many Non-Orthodox Churches?

A: Sadly, they are used only as superficial decoration and you cannot venerate them. The Non-Orthodox would not venerate them, do not even know how to venerate them or actively prevent Orthodox from venerating them in horror at our veneration. Icons there are only a fashion from the 1970s, but it has gone no further than a fashion.

Q: What for you is religion?

A: Religion is State manipulation, as Marx said in his definition that ‘Religion is the opium of the masses’. (What he did not mention is that mass murder is the opium of the Marxists).

As a priest, I am not a man of religion, but a man of faith, for faith is defined as the perception of spiritual reality.

Q: Do Orthodox accept conspiracy theories?

A: Some surely do. But the problem with such theories is that they always identify a human enemy – the Jews, the Freemasons, the Catholics, the Trilateral, the City of London, the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese etc. Therefore, they are all wrong, because they have partial or temporary truths. There is only one enemy; the devil, and he can and does work through all and any of us or them, not just through one group.

The Russian Church

Q: Should we pray for Patriarch Kyrill, inasmuch as he has stated that the Russian war against the Ukraine is a ’holy war’?

A: Your question contains so many misunderstandings that I hardly know where to begin!

Firstly, we should all pray for each other and especially for our enemies, if you consider that you have any. Secondly the Ukraine and Russia have been at war with each other for years, since 2014, when the Kiev regime began its genocide of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. It is above all a Kiev regime war against Russia. It is catastrophic, for it is a civil war.

However, this war was only possible because the mass of both Russians and Ukrainians have lost their faith. Real Orthodox Christians do not kill one another. To present the war as a war between an Orthodox side and a Non-Orthodox side is absurd. Neither is Orthodox, the masses are atheists, with abortion rates twice that of ‘decadent’ Western countries, divorce rates at the same level and social decomposition and an ultra-low birthrate current. This is in reality a proxy war, a geopolitical struggle which pits US-based atheist Globalism against Russian-based Nationalism, which nobody except Russian nationalists can support.

The conflict is only a religious question inasmuch as the Kiev regime, strongly supported by the Globalists, persecutes the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and, on the other hand, inasmuch as certain priests inside Russia have been persecuted and exiled for having different political opinions to the warlike Russian nationalist views promulgated among others by certain Russian bishops. The grounds for the persecution in the Ukraine could have been avoided, had there been a canonical, autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its autocephaly granted by Moscow. For thirty years nationalist Moscow refused to grant this autocephaly, thus creating the Kiev nationalist accusation that the Ukrainian Church is a slave of Moscow and to some making it appear true.

Our sympathies naturally go to the persecuted, not to the persecutors, wherever those persecutors are. However, that does not mean that our prayers do not go to the persecutors too. Indeed, quite the contrary. For example, we pray publicly at every liturgy ‘for this land, all the Royal House, all those in seats of authority and the armed forces’, with whom we may not at all agree. Prayer for others does not mean that we agree with them! That is a purely secular, not to say atheistic, understanding. We pray especially for those who disagree with us so that their hearts may be softened. That is why the first Orthodox prayed for the pagan Roman emperors, such as Nero. Such prayer is good for us too, as it protects us from ill feeling. All the more do we pray for those who persecute us. We do that all the time.

There is no such thing as ‘a holy war’. In that Sister Vassa Larina and all the other liberals right. Why do they have to persecute so cruelly such an innocent and harmless, if misled, head in the clouds idealist as Sister Vassa? The ‘defrocking’ of her and experienced pastors, outside Russia, where ROCOR is systematically purging itself of all the old traditional ROCOR and replacing them with crazy lickspittle converts, fobbing the experienced off with meaningless medallions and then retiring them, however young they are. This is the same as inside Russia, where experienced pastors are ‘defrocked’ for holding different opinions to narcissistic bishops is sacrilegious. In Russia and in the Netherlands they even threatened pacifist clergy with criminal courts. However, whether inside and outside Russia, it is exactly the same Stalinism.

For the bishops who defrocked Sister Vassa were not forced into persecuting her by Moscow – it was worse than that, they did it voluntarily. With their greed for money and power, they too are merely Sergianists, like those in the USSR who persecuted the New Martyrs and Confessors. That is spiritual suicide. ROCOR bishops pressed the self-destruct button some years ago, in about 2017, when they cast aside Metr Hilarion in an internal coup d’etat and the crazies took over.

However, Sister Vassa, who has quite rightly called the attitude of the new ROCOR ‘Neo-Sergianism’, has now made the mistake of joining those who, financed by the CIA, want to invade Russia and also openly persecute the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Since Sister Vassa is American, does this mean that she too supports the CIA and is anti-Russian, like the ROCOR bishops? Some ROCOR bishops and priests are CIA – is she also CIA? That too is Sergianism – putting pro-Ukrainian political beliefs above the Church. Sergianism is not only Russian. Its origins are after all in Protestant Holland, whose Erastian attitudes were taken to Russia by Peter I. We must pray for Sister Vassa that she will come to understand. To be anti-Russian is the same as being anti-Ukrainian. We must be pro-Christ.

Q: What did the Church of the Russian Emigration have to teach the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: Very simply, that we must always put Christ above the State. This includes the pre-Revolutionary Russian State (all too many in the Emigration suffered from cultural nostalgia for that uncanonical and unjust system, but it too was also in part run by practical atheists – 90% of the emigres simply wanted the old, corrupt system, and their money and land, back), as well as the Soviet atheist State or the post-Soviet atheist State. We render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

That is what we teach them, that is what St John of Shanghai, the greatest saint of the Emigration taught and still teaches today through his life. Even less universal and even somewhat controversial figures from the Parisian Emigration, like the locally-venerated Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), who had nothing to do with Essex (I know, I was born in Essex!), Mother Maria (Skobtsova), and Metropolitan Antony (Bloom) taught this, the first as a rather inaccessible art nouveau period philosopher, the second as one who like so many others sacrificed her life for someone younger, the third as a conscious convert presented the logic of Orthodoxy to other converts.

Instead of teaching that Christ is above the State, after 2007 many of the remnants of the Russian Emigration and their naïve converts did the opposite. They copied the Sergianist vices of the Moscow Patriarchate (which had their roots entirely in the uncanonical, Protestant-style, Erastian administration of the pre-Revolutionary State), falling prey to the love of power and especially of money. It is very, very sad. The ‘Church-Business’ inside Russia is why even in the last six years Church attendance there has halved from 2.6% to 1.3%. They have restored the pre-Revolutionary Church – yes, the worst of it!

The reconciliation of ROCOR with the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) in 2007 was absolutely vital as ROCOR was on the verge of becoming a sect, already many in ROCOR were saying that they would join the MP in any case, if there was no reconciliation. Some had begun leaving in the 1990s. The new ROCOR shows utter disloyalty to St John, about whom one new, very effeminate, luxuriously dressed, ill-educated ROCOR bishop, who does not know even the basics, told us that he walked without shoes only because his shoes were uncomfortable!! It is interesting to see how such bishops today persecute the legacy of love of St John even today, trying to close churches dedicated to St John, persecuting and bullying his spiritual descendants, threatening them with incredible violence and rage (‘Cut their heads off’) and only paying lip service to St John, as his relics are a source of income. ‘By their fruit ye shall know them’. And these people call themselves Christians…

Today we see resistance to the State above all only in the Ukraine through the heroism of the much-persecuted Metr Onufry of Kiev. But Tsar Michael will come and sweep the old post-Soviet vestiges in both the Russian Federation and the Ukraine away.

Q: Why does the Russian Church have relatively strict practices?

A: We must recall that Russia was converted by Byzantine monks, so it lacks the parish tradition, which is so much alive in Greece and Cyprus and is much freer and easier than the monastic tradition and its practices. Today, the Russian Church is often obsessed by rules and a certain militarisation, for nearly all there today are converts. This is also a sociological phenomenon.

Q: Why in Russian churches in Russia are there women who come around and clean the icons with cloths every few minutes?

A: This comes from Soviet accusations about hygiene, that Orthodox are dirty. So the Church in the USSR reacted to it with this over the top hygiene obsession.

Q: Who do you prefer of the two sister-saints, the Tsarina Alexandra or the Grand Duchess Elizabeth?

A: Both were converts, but the Tsarina went further into Orthodoxy than her sister, who got stuck in the convert politics of trying to mix Orthodoxy with a Western mentality, hence her ‘reforms’, specially designed nuns’ uniform, deaconesses, and her support for murder. However, Elizabeth was finally purified by her sacrifices for the poor and, above all, by the blood of her martyrdom.

Q: What exactly is a mass baptism?

A: For me, it means the baptism of hundreds or thousands. When it is just a matter of a ten or twenty, or fewer than a hundred, that is a group baptism.

English and England

Q: What version of the Bible do you recommend for home reading?

A: The Revised Standard Version, or RSV, as blessed by some Orthodox bishops back in the 1960s.

Q: In English do you write matins or mattins?

A: The English word comes from the Latin ‘matutina’, which does have two ts, but I think that matins with one t is the most common spelling.

Q: As you appear to dislike the House of Windsor, do you consider that you are a Jacobite?

A: I support only one Royal House, the House of Wessex. All the others came after the Schism and the near-millennial Norman Occupation.

 

 

The Liberation, Demilitarisation and DeNazification of the Ukraine, the Russian Federation and the Émigré Church

Introduction: National Demons

Just like every person, so every country also has its demons. France has its absurd narcissistic vanity (Louis XIV, Napoleon, Mitterrand, Macron), Britain has its overweening delusional arrogance (Churchill, Thatcher), surrounded Germany has its crazed bouts of bipolarity (Kaiser Wilhem, Hitler), the USA has its freakish urge for global domination (Clinton and Biden), and Russia has its fits of suicide, heightened by the host of totalitarian demons of its great suicide from 1917 on, when even the name ‘Russia’ disappeared until Hitler restored it.

On the other hand, the Ukraine has its ever-grasping and outrageous sense of entitlement, heightened by the injustices of Soviet persecutions, especially of the territory Stalin stole from Poland, directed from Moscow from 1939 on. Tragically, these old demons of the post-Soviet and atheised Ukraine and of the post-Soviet and atheised Russian Federation brought the two countries to war with each other in 2014. That war worsened in February 2022, after the Western sponsors of the Kiev regime had refused peace talks for eight years.

The Atheist Tragedy in the Ukraine

The demons love and laugh at human bloodshed and suffering, which they create, and have especially been mocking fallen Orthodox since 1917, toying with the Church of God through the passions of certain bishops of various nationalities. The demons gloat at human misery and the despairing souls they capture as a result. And the demons continue to mock today. The conflict in the Ukraine is a geopolitical struggle which pits US-led Globalism, parasitically feeding off Ukrainian nationalism, against Russian-led Nationalism.

The latter treats all Non-Russians as second-class citizens. The conflict in the Ukraine is catastrophic, for it is a civil war, a war between former brothers. It was made possible because the mass of both Russians and Ukrainians have lost their faith, the result of the demons that entered the Russian Empire in 1917 and which have still not been exorcised. Real Orthodox Christians do not kill one another. Now the tragic conflict in the Ukraine is in its fourth, probably final, year. Over 1.2 million Ukrainian soldiers and 100,000 Russian soldiers are dead.

Communists and Nationalists

The three Russian aims were stated very clearly from the very outset, as the Liberation from Neo-Nazi Kiev of the purely Russian Donbass in eastern Ukraine (still not achieved after over three years, though this aim has had to be extended to other provinces), and the Demilitarisation and DeNazification of the Ukraine. After all, the war was caused by the categorical refusal of the Nazi Kiev puppet regime, installed by frightening violence in 2014 against the democratically-elected government, to allow the Federalisation of the multiethnic Ukraine.

Instead, the regime imposed a centralised NATO system, just like that of the Communists before it. They no longer call themselves Communists, but instead Nationalists, but spiritually those are still Communists. Clearly, as a result of that refusal to decentralise, the Ukraine would fragment and fall apart, as is always the result of Stalinist centralisation, whether in the Ukraine or in the Russian Federation. There the new militaristic and clericalist trend of erecting statues of Stalin is growing, a clear sign of its reviving nationalist centralisation.

The Atheist Tragedy in ROCOR

The situation in the Ukraine is mirrored in other Stalinist-style centralising organisations all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and even outside it, in, for example, in the Russian Church and even in its New-York based émigré fragment, the so-called Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). It is known as the American Synod, for today it is Russian only in history and name. In reality, its main language is American English, and its ideology is right-wing Protestant Americanism, a Disneyfied Russian Orthodox fairy-tale.

With large chunks of hellfire Lutheranism of the convert type thrown in, this ideology is appropriate for ‘the Republican Party at prayer’, but not for the Orthodox Church. The old ROCOR of Russian emigres has been substituted by the new ROCOR, a process which can be dated back to its internal coup d’etat, which took place approximately in 2017. In the case of the new ROCOR too, Orthodox aims should be Liberation, Demilitarisation and DeNazification. For like the Kiev regime, it too has replaced Faith with a political ideology.

Liberation in the USA and England

First of all, there must be liberation from the ‘Persecuting ROCOR’, the mentality of pharisaic sectarianisation, which led directly to its schism from the fullness of the Russian Church as well as from the rest of the Orthodox Church, and its rejection of the Local Orthodox Churches, which ended in a ghetto of self-isolation and the Donatist heresy of rebaptism. This we have seen in the USA, with the escape from ROCOR of Fr Alexander Belya, who is now in charge of a Vicariate of over twenty Slav clergy and parishes in the Greek Archdiocese.

That situation was mirrored in England with the planned escape of over 90% of the ROCOR diocese to the Romanian/Moldovan Orthodox Church, since well over three-quarters of its 5,000 parishioners were Romanians and Moldovans. It was there received without hesitation on 16 February 2022. The fake Russian nationalism of the new ROCOR (fake because it is in fact American!), its insatiable greed for money, its heresy of rebaptism, its hatred for all Orthodox of the Tradition and outright, shameless lies, define the new American ROCOR.

Liberation Elsewhere

There are also the many clergy and people who have left ROCOR in France and Germany, profoundly unhappy with the anti-Russian, American mentality of the new ROCOR. That unhappiness is almost certain to spread throughout the remaining ROCOR parishes in Western Europe over the next few years, as the clergy and people refuse to become Americans. Now there is also the sad case of Sister Vassa Larina, herself an American-Russian, but in Europe, who rejected the new arch-Republican American Synod, which she calls ‘disgraceful’.

However, rather than returning to the Tradition of the old ROCOR of her father (whom I knew well), she made the strange choice of a liberal ideology, leaving ROCOR for the schismatic Ukrainian nationalist sect, known as ‘The Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’ (OCU). Instead of simply letting her go to such liberals, whom she has always so admired as a liberal feminist academic, the American Synod punished her. In all these cases, it is freedom and respect for other opinions that are missing in the new ROCOR – just as it is in the former USSR.

Demilitarisation and Denazification

The best of the old ROCOR was always politically neutral, not partisan. Now we have ROCOR bishops who are openly anti-Russian, pro-NATO, or belong to the CIA or work for its anti-Orthodox front organisations. True, this process began in the 1960s with the then Fr George Grabbe, but he was a one-off. The new ROCOR explains the decision of the American Synod to get rid of all those of the Tradition, who knew the old Russian clergy and laity born before the Revolution or in the two first generations of the emigration between 1917 and 1967.

They are being replaced with new and idealistic converts, who do not know the Tradition, do not speak Russian, and have little to do with the realities, both positive and negative, of the Church inside Russia today. They can therefore be easily manipulated with fairy-tales and myths of ‘Holy Rus’. As for Nazification in ROCOR, that began in Germany in the 1930s and continued with its support of the Russian Nazis under Vlasov. The survivors of Stalin’s barbarism emigrated to the USA and South America, especially to Argentina, after 1945.

In the New ROCOR

However, they were opposed by the old pre-Revolutionary Western European ROCOR and the Chinese-Australian ROCOR, as well as the minority who had kept the authentic Orthodox Tradition in North America. After the Second World War Nazification was tempered to some extent, but from time to time its authoritarianism came to the fore again. Since the takeover of the old ROCOR by the American Synod in 2017, it has deliberately sent out its new convert-bishops to Australia and Western Europe to entirely dismantle the old ROCOR.

Thus, they tried to retire or force out faithful clergy and people. This substitution is now all but complete. Implementing schism from the Russian Orthodox Church, it has now begun rebaptising other Orthodox, denigrating other Local Churches and telling public and private lies about them, for ‘ROCOR is the only True Church’. This OneTrueChurch Protestantisation has made the American Synod into a sect, which refuses to concelebrate with other Orthodox, except in rare cases where it has self-interest to do so, to try and show that it is not a sect.

Conclusion: Waiting for Repentance

We will continue to pray for them and wait for their repentance, in the hope that they will return to the legacy of the old ROCOR of St John of Shanghai. Their ancestors suspended him and put him on trial, but like the Righteous Job he was in the end justified and glorified by God. Perhaps once this nightmare of the Ukraine is over, there will be great changes and reforms in the Russian Church, based on decentralisation, that is, deSovietisation. A Church which is opposed to LGBT, but which is filled with homosexual bishops is only hypocritical.

Moreover, the Russian Church operates inside a society undermined by abortion and divorce and, as a result, suffers from a demographic crisis. This cannot go on. Perhaps when it has at last dealt with its own deep problems, the Russian Church can draw back the oppressed half of ROCOR which still wants to be part of the wider Orthodox Church and world, and not be part of a hate-filled sect, which condemns all others. Then they will say with other Orthodox ‘Our Father’ and mean it, participating positively in the construction of new Local Churches.

 

Striving for Russian Church Unity: A Historical Note

For 47 years, from 1975 to 2022, I strived to help create unity inside the severely divided Russian Church, which then consisted of three aggressively warring ‘jurisdictions’. From 1975 to 2000 I fought against the Saducees with their ‘anything goes’, swim with the tide secularists, ‘all religions are the same’, ‘we all have the same god’ syncretism. From 2000 to 2022, I fought against the Pharisees, the scribes and the hypocrites, the old words for narcissists, who love only themselves are therefore Anti-Christians.

The division was purely political and went back to 1917. Only once we had achieved unity inside the Russian Church through the non-political, those of goodwill, in each group, could we hope to achieve unity with representatives of the other Local Churches in the Diaspora and so work towards a Local Western European Orthodox Church. To our great joy, we saw intra-Russian Church fully achieved in 2019.

However, the devil also has ears. Three years later, just like Constantinople with its control freak and isolating mentality decades earlier, the Russian Church then suicidally destroyed that unity through more nationalist politics. As a result, in 2022, all of us multinational clergy, parishes and people, some 5,000 in all, crossed, with the approval of Moscow (rather like Fr/St Sophrony (Sakharov) in 1965) to what will be the largest part of the future Local Church, the Romanian. The Russian Church in the Diaspora is now isolated and very small, as it has lost Ukrainians and now many Moldovans, not to mention local people.

In the last three years, the Moscow Church in Moldova has lost nearly half its parishes. According to updated information, Moscow now has 1,200 parishes and the Romanian Bessarabian Metropolia no longer has 200, but 1,100 parishes, with many monasteries. The movement from Moscow to Bucharest is in one direction only, at the rate of 4, 6 and even 10 parishes and mainly young people per week. As Metr Vladimir famously wrote in October 2023, Moscow treats Moldovans like second-class citizens, just as it treats other Non-Russians, including English people. See:

https://gordonua.com/news/worldnews/rossija-otnositsja-k-nam-kak-k-beskhrebetnomu-narodu-mitropolit-moldavskoj-pravoslavnoj-tserkvi-napisal-pismo-hlave-rpts-1685283.html

Although Metr Vladimir wonders about contacting Constantinople and asking it for autocephaly, that will not happen. Patriarch Bartholomew does not want to interfere in Moldova (he already made his huge mistake in the Ukraine) and get on the wrong side of Bucharest. He will be going here next October to take part in the consecration of the new Patriarchal Cathedral, the largest Orthodox church in the world. It is too late for Constantinople, just as it is too late for Moscow. Far more likely, given Moscow’s stubborn refusal 30 years ago to grant Moldova autonomy or autocephaly, is that the elderly Moscow jurisdiction in Moldova will disappear, except for the ultra-Russian nationalist Bishop Markel, and Bucharest will grant Moldova autonomy.

This will also mean the end of most of the Russian Diaspora in Western Europe, as it largely consists of Ukrainians and Moldovans, especially in Italy, Spain and Portugal. The nationalist attitude of Moscow is suicidal. God gave Moscow so much, the largest country in the world, and yet it destroyed it twice, in 1917 and then again very recently. The  Soviet-style ideology of nationalism has destroyed a once multinational Church.