Category Archives: Russian Church

Senator J D Vance: A Question to the Russian Orthodox Church

A member of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), between 1974 and 1977 I studied in Oxford under the ever-memorable Metr Kallistos (Ware), then taught in Greece and went on to study at the St Sergius Institute of Theology in Paris. In January 1981 I was tonsured reader by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Antony of Sourozh (ROC) at the Dormition Cathedral in London. In December 1991, after a decade in which I discovered bishops with mistresses and bishop-freemasons, I was ordained priest by a bishop of integrity. This was the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the successor of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. This ordination followed seven years of service as a deacon in the Russian Orthodox Church. I served faithfully and without recompense as a priest for thirty years, in France, in Portugal, setting up the first ever Russian parish there, and in England.

In May 2012 I was awarded my first jewelled cross in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow by His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill. This was for my efforts in helping to bring the very small, New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) back into communion with the ROC Mother Church and fighting against the American sectarianism which had infected it in the USA. I believe that this was very much in accord with what would have been the wishes of St John and Archbishop Antony. In July 2018 I had the privilege of being in Ekaterinburg on the night of the 100th anniversary of the martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, his August Family and faithful servants, together with the Russian Patriarch and a host of other clergy. Then at midnight I walked the 13 miles together with 120,000 other Russian Orthodox faithful to Ganina Yama, the place where the atheists had first tried to bury the Imperial Martyrs and their servants.

On 10 April 2021, a new and highly controversial ROCOR bishop in London, a young American neophyte who had not long been a clergyman of ROCOR, was not educated in a seminary and was pastorally very inexperienced, publicly declared his intention to break communion with other Orthodox Churches. This included with the Western European Archdiocese of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) – the ROC is over 130 times larger than ROCOR. His unilateral decision came because he no longer accepted the age-old practice of the ROC of not receiving Catholic priests and people into the Church by rebaptism, but by confession and communion. He also told his laypeople that they could no longer take communion in that part of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), where we have had close family members and friends since the 1970s, because they had followed the traditional ROC practice. Thus, ROCOR created a schism with the Mother-Church.

For us this was the imposition of Lutheran-style sectarianism and an attack on canonicity, experience and practice. Excommunication, dividing faithful Russian Orthodox into two separate groups, was unacceptable to us who had strived so long for unity. We are Orthodox Christians, not Donatist schismatics. As we had no desire to belong to a right-wing American sect which is what ROCOR had become, we carefully discussed what our canonical path would be and made discreet enquiries. Finally, after disappointment with the response of the ROC, on 16 February 2022, after four hours of negotiations with the Romanian Orthodox Church involving the chief canonical adviser of His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel, our deanery of twelve clergy, six parishes and church buildings, some 5,000 people, 99.5% of those who had sought canonical refuge, were received into the local Romanian Metropolia, which is three times larger than the whole of ROCOR.

Our theological conscience was unable to agree to being part of a schism. Thus, we entered with joy into the four-million strong Synod of eight bishops under Metropolitan Joseph (Pop) of Western and Southern Europe of the Patriarchate of Romania. It seems then that the ROC wishes to abandon its centuries-old practice of receiving Non-Orthodox by chrismation, or confession and communion, that is, by economy. This was the case of the future martyrs, Tsarina Alexandra and Grand Duchess Elizabeth, received by the future St John of Kronstadt by chrismation. More recently, in the 1970s both Metr Antony of Sourozh (ROC) and the now St Sophrony the Athonite (Patriarchate of Constantinople), both of whom I knew well, publicly rejected the reception of Non-Orthodox into the Orthodox Church by rebaptism. It seems to us that the denial of this issue of principle preceded the catastrophe of the ROC that befell it eight days later.

For within eight days of our transfer to the Romanian Orthodox Church, the ROC fell into the pastoral disaster of multiple divisions in countries outside the Russian Federation, as the conflict in the Ukraine began. At a time when the probably future President of the USA has chosen a conscious Catholic, Senator J D Vance, a man close to the Orthodox Faith, as his running mate, therefore the probable future Vice-President and possibly the succeeding President of the USA in 2028, this is serious. Senator Vance is a friend of the ROC and has openly stated that the Ukraine must make peace with Russia, returning Russian territory to the Russian Federation. This Catholic Senator has denounced the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufry by the Kiev regime and also appears to support the dissolution of NATO. Does the Russian Orthodox Church want Senator Vance to believe that it considers that Catholics are unbaptised?

 

 

Global or Globalist and the Russian State or the Russian Church

Global or Globalist

It is a cliché to state that we live in a Global world. It is nothing new. The concept was inherent in the term ‘World Wars’, the first of which began 110 years ago. On the other hand, the vision of an interconnected world where all the different nations live together and co-operate in peace, respecting each other’s differences, is profoundly Christian, as in the Seven ‘Universal’ (that is, Global) Councils. ‘For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all, let us pray to the Lord’. However, being Global is not at all the same as being Globalist.

Unlike Global, Globalism means forcing everyone to be the same, preparing the planet for a One World Government under a Dictator, known as Antichrist. The Globalist mafia, with its alphabet soup of US, EU, UK, NATO, UN, IMF, AUKUS, WEF etc, with its Davos serfs of banksters, arms-dealers, police states, spies, Soros, Schwab, Biden, Macron, Starmer (or Sunak), Scholz etc, is a curse, as it is preparing the way for Antichrist. We resist that mafia. We chase out the Globalist elites, for otherwise we shall see our countries and our families die.

Yet, Globalism is here. Who owns the Western half of Europe, that is, Peninsular Europe? The US Globalist elite, a giant with feet of clay, supported by its Globalist client elite in the Western half of Europe, owns those countries. This is why the fall of that half of Europe, of the European Union and the rest, will be like that of the Soviet Union, overnight, like a ripe, red apple that hangs from a tree and then, without any prompting, suddenly falls. Why? Because, eaten by worms, it has rotted from inside. It is ready to fall.

The fall of the West has come through the Ukraine. We speak of the small-scale, with fewer than 100,000 troops, highly-provoked (Russian-speaking Ukrainians had for eight years been genocided by the US-installed, Neo-Nazi Kiev regime and were about to be massacred by Kiev troops) invasion, or rather liberation, of the Eastern Ukraine by Russian forces. To the astonishment of the Russians, the West forbade the Kiev regime to make peace and armed the Kiev regime to the teeth with NATO arms, declaring that it wanted all Ukrainians to die. So Russia turned to Plan B, to wage a war of attrition until the apple falls.

Thus, the West has chosen to commit suicide, defeated militarily by superior Russian arms and politically and economically by Russian-inspired BRICS. Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and perhaps other peoples in the Carpathians and the Balkans of South-Eastern Europe, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and others, if they can free themselves of the US elite’s puppets, will also join BRICS. This will be their salvation. Little wonder that Victor Orban of Hungary has recently hosted the Chinese leader in Budapest and been hosted by him in Beijing. The rest of Western Europe, in the North-East, the North-West and the South-West, will be left aside, until it repents for arming Kiev regime troops and mercenaries and also joins BRICS.

The Russian State and the Russian Church

The conflict in the Ukraine, also as a new country, soon to join BRICS, will be a victory for the Russian State, although not for the Russian Church. The latter has compromised itself everywhere outside the Russian Federation. There senior figures in its administration have persecuted and betrayed lifelong Russian Orthodox faithful, starting in England and then in the Ukraine, then in the Baltics and Moldova, and not least inside the Russian Federation itself.

The recent events in Hungary witness to the tragic decadence that has penetrated the episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church over the last 30 years. It is not a question of one very disreputable and apparently criminal witness and his mother (why was a pervert befriended?), it is the witnesses of audio and video recordings. Nobody who knows anything about the fatal love of luxury of the episcopate of the Russian Church over the last 30 years is in the least surprised. It all just confirms a multitude of witness reports over the last 20 years in particular.

The activities of many senior figures are anti-Russian, shaming the patriotic President Putin and our good friend, Sergei, among his ministers. The recent revelations typify many others. This leaves the episcopate of the Russian Church, both inside and outside the former USSR, to be cleansed by the Russian State. Make no mistake, this will happen. However, the schismatic, money-corrupted, liberal and homosexual (usually the same ones) among the episcopate are not only anti-patriotic, but also, and above all, they are anti-Orthodox.

For Orthodox Christianity does not accept the word ‘exceptional’ or ‘indispensable’. All Local Churches act together in conciliarity and catholicity. No single Local Church, however old, however big, however powerful or however rich, has the right to lord it over the others because it is ‘exceptional’. That error is precisely Globalism, the error of ‘Roman Catholicism’.

Some may admire that; we faithful Orthodox clergy and people do not, for we are not Globalists, since that is a sin against the Catholicity of the Church. Yes, the Great Cleansing of the Orthodox episcopate, Russian Orthodox and other, is coming. The guilty bishops must be trembling. If not, they have a shock coming.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What Went Wrong with the Russian Church?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, 2 July 2024

 

An Interview with a Russian Countess

Countess Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, has kindly agreed to be interviewed about the contemporary situation in Russia. We have recorded her answers, slightly edited, below.

 

Q: Can you tell us something about the Benckendorff family? I presume it is a German name.

A: The Benckendorffs were Saxons, not Germans. The Germans persecuted us. We were first recorded in 1240 in the village of Benckendorff in Saxony in eastern Germany, from where we became known as von Benckendorff. 300 years later some of our family settled further east in the Baltics, at first in Riga, then near Tallinn. After the Baltics had been absorbed into the Russian Empire, many of the family settled in the Morshansk area of the Tambov province, where in 1775 we were awarded the Sosnovka estate of 8,000 acres. In the early 19th century we were made counts in gratitude for service to the Tsar.

After 1917, part of the family, including a cousin Konstantin, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain, emigrated. He passed away in 1917, but belonged to the Germanised Lutheran-Catholic side of the family and did not even speak Russian very well. He was allowed to write his reports as ambassador in French, which everyone in Saint Petersburg spoke fluently at that time. However, his family, who were Orthodox, came to live in Suffolk because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Suffolk farm machinery was used in Sosnovka.

Thus, our branch of the family had been Russianised in the late eighteenth century and became Orthodox. After 1917 we remained in Russia, still living in Morshansk in the Tambov province. Obviously, we lost everything and we had to hide our identity, changing our surname in the 1920s, but we always remained faithful to the Orthodox Faith, the Tsar and Rus, to all our traditions. We were always different from others and members of our branch of the family never became members of the Party. We did not want to be Sovietised.

Q: What happened to your family inside the Soviet Union?

A: Our family suffered. In 1937 one of our family, who had been sent to the camps, was shot for being an Orthodox priest and is venerated as a New Martyr.  We have his icon. He is our family saint.

We lived all over the European part of the USSR and there are still Benckendorffs in the Ukraine (including a famous film-maker), Belarus and the Baltics, as well as Russia. Since the fall of the USSR, as you say in English, we have been scattered to the four winds. Some of us now live in England, Denmark and the USA. In England we attend the Romanian church, in the USA the OCA. We are the new White emigration, though we still use our 1920s name. It is just too complicated to change our name back for the moment. But that will come. I and my husband are talking about doing this at this very moment.

Q: You mention the Ukraine. What is your view of the conflict there today?

A: The Ukraine? First of all, people must understand that the war there is nothing to do with the Ukraine. It is between Western imperialism with its wealthy oligarchs who control the USA, and the rest of humanity with its poor people who are represented by Russia. The war is between the globalist rich like Soros and Schwab against humanity, between the elite minority with its media dictatorship, arms merchants, global warming, artificial covid and transgenderism, and the vast majority of the world with its ordinary people who just love their homelands and their families. The naïve Ukrainians are being used as paid mercenaries by the rich West as cannon fodder. As the Western elite said, they will fight till the last Ukrainian. They will not die themselves because they do not believe in anything, except in themselves. They are all narcissists, so others die in their name.

The origin of the Ukrainian tragedy is in the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. He was the one person who linked us all together, the central point. After he was overthrown, what could you expect? There was no unity left, nothing to fight for. Through weakness and lack of principle, willingness to sell themselves for money, first the western Ukrainians allowed themselves to be conquered by the Nazis and then by the Americans. They always go wherever they imagine they have an advantage. Nazis and Americans are the same thing, those so-called Ukrainians are Nazis.

Until all the peoples of the former USSR have truly repented for their ancestors’ sin in 1917, there will be conflict among its former peoples. I just hope that the conflict in the Ukraine is the last post-Soviet conflict, with the other conflicts of the traitors in the Caucasus, in Georgia and Armenia, and elsewhere. Then there can at last be the restoration of the real Rus and all the other countries will be free.

Q: What do you think of the old White Russian emigration?

A: They had to emigrate. It was that or be killed by the Bolsheviks. But most of them were also against the Tsar, they overthrew him, they were just right-wing atheists like the Bolsheviks, who were left-wing atheists. Many of the so-called Whites entirely lacked patriotism. Some of them supported Hitler invade Russia during the war and today their descendants support the Americans, which is the same thing. Nazism is an inherently Western colonial ideology, German or American, French or British, Belgian or Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, Austrian or Dutch. It was all about killing and exploiting others who are considered to be inferior subhumans, Untermenschen, as the Germans called them. What is this forced imposition of transgenderism, if not Nazism? The name NATO, which was staffed by German Nazis from the outset, even sounds like the word Nazi.

Q: Should all Russian Orthodox be under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: How is that possible? That is absurd! The Moscow Patriarchate is a house divided because it still has to be cleansed of Sovietism and post-Sovietism. It is very, very corrupt and many of the bishops are just capitalist oligarchs, interested only in money and luxury and they defrock good priests for disagreeing with their Sovietism and denouncing them for their corruption and immorality. The fools-for-Christ tell the truth, not the bishops. If the bishops told the truth, we would not need fools-for-Christ. Some of the bishops are atheists or moral perverts, just as they were in the Soviet period. Look at Filaret with his palace in Kiev. It is shameful.

Most of the Russian bishops should be sent to monasteries to repent for the rest of their lives. Only, if they were sent there, you would see that most of them would run away and defrock themselves. Anything except repent! Like that awful Bishop Maxim in London, who ran away because he was running a drugs factory in Saint Petersburg with his boyfriend. That is the level of so many Russian bishops today, here or in Russia. They are on the same level as the Greeks from Istanbul. There is no difference between them.

True, after 1991 the Patriarchate made the first leap – from the theory of Soviet ideology. But it failed to make the second leap – from the practice of Soviet corruption. Nowadays you can be an atheist in the Church, all you need to do is decide which Church group you as an atheist want to join.

Here in England, for example, I have been horrified by ROCOR. It is full of American agents, it is an anti-Russian organisation, just a Fascistic branch of the CIA, right-wing atheists. Little wonder so many in ROCOR sided with the Nazis against Russia then. Now they are doing it again. ROCOR refuses to be nice or negotiate and thinks that by being nasty and punishing, it wins. In fact, it punishes itself and loses, just like the US government in its dealings with other countries. Treachery is everywhere. As someone said, the persecuted Church has become the persecuting Church. The greatness of the Russian Church is when it is persecuted. It is not in its bishops, with rare exceptions. And certainly not in today’s bishops.

Q: How do you see Western Europe?

A: It is so sad. Old Europe is dying. I think present Europe, which has already become very decadent, will have to hit rock bottom before it can be reformed. Only then will the various nations of Europe be able to negotiate with Russia and return individually to having normal relations with Russia, the wider world and with each other. Probably Europe is not far off rock-bottom now. My husband fears the situation in France especially. He says there could be a revolution there, if a military coup does not take place first.

Q: You have lived in England for 14 years and speak English fluently now. How do you see England?

A: When we first came here, we knew nothing. I had studied German at school and my husband French. We just came to work, to survive, like everyone else. But now we have come to appreciate and love Old England, the countryside, the thatched cottages, the traditions. For example, we go regularly to Ely to venerate St Audrey, whose hand is still venerated there, still making the sign of the cross over the city through all these centuries. Her presence is there. But we also see how Americanised modern England has become, like the rest of Western Europe in general, even the Catholic countries in the south.

For example, a few days ago when I had a day off, we were sitting in the lovely Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, another city of a saint. Two schoolgirls, aged perhaps 9 or 10, walked by in their lovely uniforms. So sweet and innocent. And we thought this is the real England. And then a very badly-dressed young man, his face covered in tattoos and pieces of metal, walked by, wearing a ragged T-shirt with the logo of an American baseball team. My husband said that he must have many psychological problems to do that to himself. I mean you can remove psychological complexes, but how can you remove tattoos on your face? He had come from another planet, as far as I am concerned. Two different worlds.

Of the real England, there are still some beautiful fragments left. We have recently been on holiday in Shropshire. How lovely it is there. But I fear that England has fallen too far and cannot now be restored. Though there are still many English people who are very kind. As for the government and British politicians, I have no time for any of them. They are all liars and have made the lives of ordinary English people much worse. Nowadays you cannot find a dentist in England. Why? Because the politicians gave all our money to that atheist and murderer Zelensky.

Q: What do you think of the Royal Family?

A: There is not one any more. Queen Elizabeth was the last who still had something. We watched her funeral on television. That was the funeral of Old England. When England is free again, you will need to find an English noble family to replace all those ‘royals’. You need a new Royal Family for England. You need an Alfred II, a Patriot-King, not a false one paid by those behind the government to do and say whatever they order him to do.

Q: You have had British citizenship for four years now. Will you vote in the elections in the UK?

Only for a party that promises to stop arming the Kiev regime and help end the war there. Is there such a party? All over Western Europe the US-chosen elites are just hanging on to power, but they will be swept away by their peoples. They are war criminals, responsible for the deaths of all those poor Ukrainians, who would have been happy to live in peace with Russia years ago, if the elite had not wanted them to make war against Russia.

Q: Do you think you will return to Russia one day?

A: We have friends who have already returned, but we are attached to East Anglia. Tsar Nicholas came here, to Sandringham and Kings Lynn. We would like to open a memorial church in Kings Lynn, dedicated to the Imperial Martyrs. As regards returning to Russia, we both prefer to wait until the new Tsar. We want to be in Russia for his enthronement. Then we shall see.

Q: The new Tsar?

A: Yes. After President Putin, who does not yet love Tsar Nicholas, there will be a Tsar.

Q: Are you sure?

A: Of course, the saints and elders have said so. See how already the best of the Tsar’s Russia is being restored and reconstituted even now. Everything that was good about the Tsar’s Russia – policies like free medicine and education, including higher education for women, were kept by the USSR – is being restored. Look at how North Korea is now allied with Russia, as it was until 1904 when the Japanese treacherously attacked Russia and went on to destroy Korea.

Recently Russia became the fourth largest economy in the world, as it was in 1914. It will overtake the USA eventually. And then see how Russia is forming a mighty coalition with countries which wanted to be with Russia or were supported by Russia before 1917, with India, South Africa, Iran, Ethiopia, Thailand and many other countries like Vietnam and Algeria, Afghanistan and Cuba, Indonesia and Turkey. The whole of Eurasia and Africa are allying.

Q: But who will the candidate for the new Tsar be? A Romanov from the emigration?

A: The Romanovs were nearly all traitors to the Tsar, even before the Revolution. The émigré Romanovs definitely cannot provide any serious candidate. That is laughable. Most of them cannot even speak Russian and many are not Orthodox! The new Tsar must come from inside Rus, as his ancestors went through the Soviet period. Only such a man can understand the peoples of Rus today. Once you emigrate forever, you become irrelevant to the Motherland. We live in the present, emigres live in the past. I do not know who the next Tsar will be, but there are many people of Romanov descent inside Rus. The prophecies say that the future Tsar’s mother will be a Romanov. God will provide. You will see.

Q: Thank you. Is there anything you would like to say to our readers in conclusion?

A: Yes, those same words again: God will provide. He always does. Do not be afraid. Everything will fall back into place.

Russian Nationalism Loses Control of the Russian Church

After the 1917 Revolution and the dissolution of the Russian Empire, the Russian Orthodox Church, formerly the Church of the Russian Empire, was forced to decentralise and give up various territories like eastern Poland and Finland, and the churches in them. Thus, the new country of Poland (and also Czechoslovakia) came to form its own independent (autocephalous) Local Orthodox Church. As for Russian Orthodox in Finland, like the emigres centred in Paris, and later Ukrainian emigres, they joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

However, the bulk of the Russian emigration, then in China (from here many later moved to Australia) as well as in Western Europe (from here many later rejoined others already in North America), became independent of Moscow. Eventually the descendants of this emigration became known as ROCOR or the New York Synod. Despite the fact that in 2006 several parishes in England and France had left the jurisdiction of Moscow itself to join Constantinople, in 2007 most of this New York Synod formally returned to Moscow, though a minority went to various old calendarist sects. In 2019 many of the descendants of the Paris emigres also rejoined Moscow, though a very large minority remained with Constantinople.

Despite reunification as recent as 2019, five years on, the 2024 situation mirrors the post-1917 chaos, when parts of the Russian Church refused to be subject to the politically-driven Russian Church administration.

Firstly, the Church in the Ukraine declared itself fully independent of Moscow. So much so that it set up nearly 100 parishes for its emigration in Western Europe, quite independently of Moscow. As for the Russian Orthodox Church in Latvia, it did much the same inside Latvia. In Moldova many parishes also left politically-coloured Moscow for the Romanian Church. Abroad many Moldovans went to Romanian churches, where they are not abused by Russian racism.

There is also dissidence in Lithuania and Estonia and even in Russia itself, where some Russian Orthodox also joined Constantinople. As regards the Russian Orthodox centred in Paris, now under Moscow, most there do not commemorate (or respect) their own Russian Orthodox Patriarch, whom they see as a politician, not as a churchman. More radically, the bulk of the old Russian emigration, now centred in New York and highly Americanised (they openly advise people to vote for Trump and support other post-Protestant phenomena), are also protesting. Some of its bishops openly called on the Russian Federation to withdraw its troops from the Ukraine!

Many suspect that several bishops and senior priests of this New York group has yet again been infiltrated, just as it was between the 60s and 80s, by the CIA. In any case its American or American-linked bishops parrot anti-Russian CIA propaganda, despite the fact that they call their fragment of the Church ‘Russian’! As a result, many Russian Orthodox patriots have been obliged to leave the New York Synod for other Local Churches, since the Moscow-centred Church, suicidally, refused to accept these patriots!

Thus, scandalous corruption in the New York Synod forced quite a number of patriotic Russian Orthodox in the USA, who also objected to the CIA hold over the group and yet were abandoned by politically-driven Moscow, to join the Church of Constantinople. In England, scandalous persecution from New York forced patriots in half the local diocese, abandoned by Moscow, to leave for the canonicity of the Romanian Church, thus skilfully avoiding politically-driven Constantinople. Here they continue to live exactly as before, as Russian Orthodox using the old calendar, but in exile as Russian Orthodox, as Moscow abandoned them. They are much supported by Moldovans, who are tired of being mistreated by Russians.

Ukrainians and Moldovans alike, tired of Russian racism, have been leaving, the Ukrainians setting up their own churches, the Moldovans, as we said, going to the Romanians. Making Non-Russian Orthodox feel like second-class citizens, usually deliberately, is suicidal for the Russian Church. The Russian Church is not only becoming a National Church, but rather a Nationalist Church. Suicidal politically-motivated and nationalistically-motivated actions by individuals in, or sent from, Moscow means that it has lost the loyalty of literally tens of millions of former Russian Orthodox.

At the present time, it is difficult to see how Moscow can ever get these tens of millions back. All this seems particularly strange when the Russian Church is supposed to be the Church of the multinational Russian Federation, part of the multipolar BRICS Alliance! And yet the Russian Church appears to be unipolar and uninational! Surely a Federation would be better represented by a multinational, and not nationalist, Church? Perhaps, once the conflict with the USA and its vassals in the Ukraine is over, the Russian Church, just like the Russian military with its four corrupt and now arrested generals, will also be cleansed of treacherous corruption, CIA bishops and all the rest?

 

 

Towards the Civilisation of the Resurrection

Introduction: The Obvious Russian Victory in the Ukraine

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

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

Why the Ukraine?

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

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

The West Galician Tragedy

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

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

The Western Civilisation of Suicide

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

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

European Suicide

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

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

The Ukrainian Myth and Western Self-Esteem

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

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

Western Fascist Ideology

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

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

The World on the Nuclear Brink

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

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

Christian Civilisation

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

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

The Renewal of Orthodox Christian Civilisation

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

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

Conclusion: A Way Forward

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

A Russian Tragedy of Errors

 

Introduction: Three Fragments of the Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. ROCOR: Orthodox or Right-Wing?

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Paris: Orthodox or Left-Wing?

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

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

Conclusion: Disloyalty to the Testament of the Tsar

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

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

Notes:

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

 

The Orthodox World: The Third Way Holds the Centre Ground

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

 

Introduction: Secularist Greeks Versus Secularist Russians

So wrote the Irish poet Yeats in 1919 after the first catastrophic tribal European War of 1914-1918 was over. Since that time over a hundred years of ‘mere anarchy’ and ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ have been loosed. Still today some wonder how much longer ‘the rough beast’ will take to ‘slouch to Bethlehem to be born’, as Yeats wrote further in his same poem The Second Coming. In the affairs of the Non-Orthodox world, Protestantism seems to have lost all its faith and is now closing down, selling off its churches, as it is ‘lacking all conviction’. As for Papalism, it is led by an old and sick man who faces scandal after scandal and all is ‘falling apart’. What about the situation of the Orthodox Church?

Secularists, who only look at externals and fail to know the inner life of the Church, see Orthodoxy as divided between Russians and Greeks. They always have done so and always will ignore the vast majority of the Local Orthodox Churches. However, inside the Church we have a far different understanding from them, reaching much beyond the superficial nationalist politics of Greek and Russian elites. What amateur CIA writers call ‘The Clash of Patriarchs’ (1) is nonsense. The Church is not about personalities, politics or ethnicities, it is far deeper and broader than mere skin-deep secular racial identities, Russian, Greek or any other, for in Christ there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek’. Outside the Church there is only that.

The Centre Ground

Our place is in the centre ground of the other fourteen Local Orthodox Churches, which is also the ground held by churched Russians and Greeks, though not by Russian and Greek nationalists, who are merely ‘cultural Orthodox’, nostalgic and delusional for long since disappeared empires. The Centre is opposed to the divisive nationalism of unchurched Greeks and Russians. That nationalism is rejected by Non-Greeks and Russians, that is, by the majorities of the other fourteen Local Churches, which form ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’, covering Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania and Moldova, with Macedonia, Albania and Bulgaria standing ready nearby.

The Hellenism of the Greek world, which ended in 1453, is rejected by Non-Greeks. In the second largest Local Church, the Romanian, we ignore both Greeks and Russians. In Western Europe we are far larger, soon with twelve bishops, nearly a thousand parishes and five million faithful. At present the Romanian Church is also reclaiming Romanian Orthodox in the southern Ukraine, Moldova and Western Europe from both Greeks and Russians. Serbs, Macedonians, Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, Romanians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Syrians, Poles and Albanians also reject Greek interference. And Russian nationalism is becoming irrelevant even in the former USSR as Orthodox assimilate, as we can see below.

The Tragedy of Russian Politicisation

It seems strange that Orthodox in countries as diverse as the Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia and Kazakhstan are still formally under the Russian Church. Already in Estonia for thirty years and for a few months in Lithuania, the Russian Church has had no monopoly of jurisdiction. As for the Ukraine, the Church jurisdictional situation there is chaotic, with Moscow losing everything. though not yet as chaotic as among Orthodox in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia, where many Local Churches are represented and people are free to choose their church. And governments there are also free to allow any Local Church to operate on its territory – or not, with the Russian Church already banned in Latvia.

The sad fact is that Russian Church life has been highly politicised; much is ideology, rigidity, negativity and coldness. The old Russian emigration anecdote goes that once a Russian was discovered by a ship living on a desert island, where he had built three churches. When asked by the captain of the ship that rescued him why he had built three churches, he replied: ‘So that there are two where I must not go’. The fact is that the Russian emigration has been marked by hatred, not love, by bishops who hate their clergy and people, ‘drowning the ceremony of innocence’, who try to steal the people’s churches, sadistically punish and generally have no idea of how to be pastors and love their clergy and people (2).

The Ukraine

What of the Ukraine? What will happen there after the forthcoming Russian victory? Probably, this will at long last create a real Ukraine, divested of its very large minorities, almost a majority, over half of the old Soviet-created Ukraine. The far south-west corner, former Habsburg territory, will surely return to Hungary after its theft in 1945. In the south, North Bukovina, which was also stolen by Stalin, will return to Romania. And surely at least two of the mainly Uniat provinces in the far west may return to Poland. The rest, the real Ukraine, minus the huge Novorossija in the south and east which is largely Russian, will remain as the real Ukraine, with its centre in historic Kiev and be Ukrainian-speaking.

Clearly, the time will then be up for the so-called ‘OCU’, Constantinople’s fake Church, that absurd State-run jurisdiction of gangsters and homosexuals with 1,500 now empty churches, stolen by State-aided violence from the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, led by the heroic Metr Onufry of Kiev. On the other hand, after military victory, Moscow, which is now at the head of a Russian National Church, will have to win the peace. It will be obliged to decentralise and at last grant the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly (33 years late…). No Ukrainian wants to attend ‘alien’, Russian-controlled, churches. Ukrainians want their own Church. This will be the seventeenth Local Orthodox Church.

Moldova

Then there is Moldova. The main Church there, which depends on Metropolitan Vladimir who is under Moscow for the moment, will soon have twelve bishops. It works in competition with the smaller Metropolia of Bessarabia, which also claims historic jurisdiction in Moldova and is part of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Vladimir has recently made a tour of the very large Moldovan Diaspora. It is possible that with so many bishops he may after the fall of the US-run Ukraine want to declare autocephaly (independence) from Moscow, with the full backing of the Moldovan government and the US ambassador (which is much the same thing). However, such a move will have complex implications.

For Moscow would not recognise such a self-declared autocephaly. At that point Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova should logically, if he wished, negotiate with the Romanian Church to have his autocephaly confirmed by it. This would be on condition that he create unity with the Bessarabian Metropolia and withdrew all the absurd ‘defrockings’ of clergy who have already transferred from him to it, both inside and outside Moldova. Only if the Romanian Church granted him autocephaly, would the rest of the Orthodox world recognise it, leaving Moscow even more isolated and lacking a part of its former Diaspora in Western Europe. A Moldovan Church would be the eighteenth Local Church.

The Baltics and Beyond

Beyond this, Moscow would also have to deal with Church affairs in the three independent Baltic republics. If it does not give them autocephaly, they will be further racked by schism and destroyed and undermined by their Russophobic State authorities. Moscow’s long refusal to grant autocephaly has already led to divisions in Estonia and Lithuania. However, since the total number of bishops in the three countries is, I believe, only eight, and numbers of the faithful are fewer than half a million, it would make sense to set up a Baltic Orthodox Church, covering all three territories. Indeed, it could be argued that Finland should become a fourth part of this Baltic Orthodox Church. This would be the nineteenth Local Church.

Beyond this there is the Russian Church in the Diaspora. Here there is schism in Western Europe because of the schism of the very aggressive American Synod of Russian bishops, with its ghetto churches in backrooms and garden sheds, with a dozen or so ‘onetrue church’ converts in each one and clergy who have no theological training or qualifications, ‘making it up as they go along’. They have no idea of mass Orthodoxy. The people and priests turn away from homosexual, bisexual and schismatic psychopathic bishop-pharisees, shouting in jealousy, threatening, intimidating, punishing, trying to steal property and screaming: ‘Give me the keys!’ Their refusal to co-operate with other Orthodox is based on their ideological and racial hatred.

Africa

The Russian Church has Exarchates in Belarus (see below), and two missionary exarchates, in South-East Asia and in Africa. This latter is highly controversial, as the Patriarchate of Alexandria in Egypt has for nearly a century claimed Africa as its territory, though until the late 1920s it had claimed only Egypt and Libya. Although here it has made several hundred thousand Black African converts, its missions have been weak and control of the Church is 100% in Greek hands and Greek embassies. The Russian mission appears to have opened in revenge for the 2018 Greek setting up a ‘Church’ with US finance in the Ukraine, Russia’s canonical territory. Does the Russian missionary Exarchate in Africa have a future then?

On paper the Russian Exarchate appears to be as uncanonical as the Greek ‘Church’ in the Ukraine. However, in the Ukraine the people do not attend the top-down Greek Church, which recently adopted the ‘new’ calendar against all tradition and many of whose clergy are not even ordained. On the other hand, the Russian mission has attracted grassroots interest, with over 100 African priests and their communities joining it. Collective baptisms are taking place. If the Russian mission goes native and has black African bishops, then it will have a future. But first it has to prove that it is not a political, Russian embassy set-up. Only if it goes native, will it get canonical recognition as a fait accompli and become the twentieth Local Church.

Conclusion: The Revelation Is At Hand

There are other former Soviet, but now independent republics, such as Belarus and the five stans of Central Asia, especially Kazakhstan, where there are several million Russians. At present none of these countries has asked for its own autocephalous Church, but that time will almost certainly come. As for the Moscow Diaspora in Western Europe and the Americas, it has largely become a ghetto, as the Russian Church is seen as politically compromised and has painted itself into a nationalist corner. However, the Greek Diaspora is also politically compromised, it is largely elderly, to the point of dying out, and its episcopate suffers from severe homosexualisation, with all the usual accompanying financial and moral scandals.

The Russian Church is already facing financial difficulties inside Russia. Fewer and fewer are attending churches there, as they appear to be subordinate to politics and not to the Gospels and spirituality, which the people seek. In that respect it is like the Protestant Church of England, which is also seen as hopelessly in political thrall to the State. In general, the age when the Church can be held hostage to Greek and Russian nationalism is over. The vital forces of the Church are elsewhere. The Orthodox world is not Greeks and Russians – they are only two of the already sixteen Local Churches, perhaps to become twenty. The others, what we have called ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’, provide the Third Way. This means that the Centre can hold.

Notes:

  1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/russia-ukraine-orthodox-christian-church-bartholomew-kirill/677837/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-am&utm_term=The
  2. See the portrait of the dried-up pharisee-monk Fr Ferapont, full of hatred and jealousy for the saintly Elder Zosima in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, or the portrait of the very unpleasant émigré bishop in the 1957 novel Father Vikenty by Paul Chavchavadze. We know who the model for that crust-dry bishop was, obviously a repressed homosexual or pedophile.

 

 

 

Ideology Versus Faith and the Post-Ukrainian Russian Church

Introduction: Ideology versus Faith

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

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

A Church of Ideology

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

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

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

A Church of Faith

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

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

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

Faith Always Wins

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

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

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

Conclusion: Towards the Future

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

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