Category Archives: Russian Church

Resisting and Delaying Antichrist: The Prophetic Vision of the Russian Orthodox Church Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence and Conversations

Q: What do you think from an Orthodox viewpoint of the recent G-20 meeting in Brisbane, where much was made of the war in the Ukraine.

A: In Brisbane Western politicians – not world leaders, as they pretentiously call themselves – made much of the civil war in the Ukraine. This was because they caused it and are continuing it. At Brisbane a clear message was given to the Western bullies by the free world, led by Russia: If the West continues to destabilize, overthrow democracy by bribing mobs and destroy the sovereignty of the Ukraine, then Russia will extend its sanctions against the Western world, possibly closing Russian air space to it. The Obamas, Bidens, Camerons, Hollandes and Merkels of the West face self-imposed isolation.

The Russian Federation, the Eurasian Economic Union, China, India, much of Latin America, nearly one half of the world, are working towards a new world order and will not tolerate arrogant Western bullying. That has already caused so much bloodshed and chaos in genocidal bombing, invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan and in CIA-organized ‘coloured revolutions’ in Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. Libya was the last straw, but even now there are aggressive individuals in the US, whose minds are so power-crazed that they openly talk of starting a Third World War against Russia and China.

Q: Do you think there is any hope that heads of some countries in the European Union will speak out against this US-centred bullying?

A: The EU has more or less become an island off the western coast of the USA, in other words, a US colony or ‘protectorate’, in effect its next state, and is governed by puppets and economic thugs, as we saw in Greece and Spain. The US has isolated Europe from its own roots and its own interests. Until the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis is restored, as in the early 1900s, there is no hope for Europe. Remarkably, however, the leaders of some small countries in the EU have protested, notably the leaders of Hungary and the Czech Republic. They have of course been condemned for that by the US-run EU media.

Q: What about the leaders of once Orthodox countries like Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania and Non-EU Serbia and Montenegro?

A: Apart from Serbia, where Orthodoxy is still to some extent a political force, the elites of all those countries have betrayed the Orthodox Faith and their own peoples. We can expect nothing of such elites. They can only think of payments from Brussels into their Swiss bank accounts.

Q: When you say ‘the US has isolated Europe’, what do you mean by the US?

A: The US means the plutocratic financiers, industrialists and arms-merchants who saw their opportunity and immigrated to the US from Europe, from where they had already financed slavery, over 200 years ago and now run the US. I do not of course mean the American people. Until the end of the 1950s there was still among many ordinary Americans a small-town, Bible-based culture, however deficient and partial. That has been more or less destroyed by the plutocrats and is lamented by such popular American singers as Don McClean and Johnny Cash in nostalgic songs like American Pie and Family Bible. Americans were the first victims of the plutocrats, the first victims of the ‘US’, as we saw already in the US Civil War. There is nothing that Satan loves more than wars where brother kills brother, whether in the US or the Ukraine.

Q: Has not Russia suffered from the Western sanctions imposed because of the Ukraine?

A: There are naturally problems resulting from them, but the main result of Western bullying because of Russia’s protection of the Ukraine, so-called ‘sanctions’, has been for Russians to refind their identity. Providentially, the Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy, is preparing Russia for the future, preparing it to overcome the confusion and decadent westernization of the last 25 years, to realize that Russia has its own identity, path and role. If the Western elite really wants to start a Third World War, it must now realize that Russians will no longer simply lie down and agree to lose that War, their country and, above all, their Christian Faith to Mammon.

This is the same situation as in the thirteenth century when the Mongols invaded Russia. Until then Russians had been divided; everything changed afterwards as they found unity against the common enemy and petty squabbles were forgotten. So today Russia was divided before the Western invasion of the Ukraine, now it is finding unity once more. Today’s extraordinary consensus of national unity around President Putin has not existed in Russia for exactly 100 years, since the First World War, when Russia also united against aggressive Western enemies.

Q: To move on, there has been talk recently of the forthcoming All-Orthodox Council in 2016 and much worry has been expressed about it. Do you share in those worries?

A: No. To worry about this is really to show a lack of faith in Divine Providence and in the Church, which is not a mere human institution, but a Divino-human organism. First of all, nobody knows if there will be a Council, let alone whether one is forthcoming; remember that ‘man proposes but God disposes’. True, a meeting of several Orthodox bishops is planned in two years’ time, but a meeting is not in itself a Council. And no-one knows with the situation between Constantinople and the Czechs and Slovaks if even that meeting will take place. And who knows who the Patriarch of Constantinople will be in two years’ time.

Even if a meeting does take place and politics takes over, it will remain an ineffectual without any consensus. However, if a ‘Council’ takes place, why should that be bad? Surely a Council – rather than a mere meeting – will proclaim the Church and our Orthodox Faith to the whole world, anathematizing all isms, atheism, consumerism, ecumenism, globalism etc. How can that be bad? Remember that only canonical Orthodox will attend, those of disputed canonicity like the OCA, those in schisms, as in the Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro and Estonia, those in sects like the old calendarists, as well as heterodox, will not take part.

Q: So why do some worry?

A: I think that those who are worried, for example old calendarists, have a psychological and not theological motivation. They are really just seeking to justify their schisms. For example, they point to the decadence inside the Patriarchate of Constantinople but then forget that Mt Athos and many faithful clergy and people outside the convert fringes are under that Patriarchate. The old calendarists want a Pharisee-like, black and white world, in which they are white and everyone else is black. Such a world does not exist and has never existed. The wheat has always grown alongside the tares. Look at the twelve apostles: most of them betrayed Christ, one did not even repent, but still eleven of them became saints. Old calendarist criticisms are psychologically-motivated self-justification.

Q: But we know there are many real problems between the Local Churches, for example there is the problem of the new calendar.

A: I can recall reading the words of St Justin (Popovich) in the 1970s who denounced the concept of a Council then because the vast majority of Orthodox were living under the yoke of Communism. Then he was right of course, but now the situation is quite different. Today most Orthodox, some 85% of all, are free. True there are some 15% who are not free, who live under what may be called ‘CIA Churches’, but they are a small minority.
Who knows, if this meeting does take place and does become a Council, this may mean that the new calendar hierarchies will repent and return to the Orthodox calendar, giving up the Roman Catholic calendar. Mt Athos gave up that calendar decades ago and now the Polish Church has done so. Others will surely follow. And remember too that the CIA Churches, subject to all manner of Uniatizing and Protestantizing manipulations, are mainly small and their senior representatives elderly. Most of the free Local Churches are young and follow the Tradition. Time is on our side.

Q: What do you mean by ‘CIA Churches’?

A: Those whose leaders are appointed by the CIA, or bribed by the EU and masonic circles, which amounts to the same thing.

Q: What is the role of the Russian Church among the other Local Churches?

A: As three-quarters of the whole Church, we have a special responsibility: our vision, mission and task are prophetic. Our vision, mission and task are resistance and delaying tactics in order to oppose the coming of Antichrist, towards whom the world has been hurtling for the last hundred years and especially for the last fifty years. You remember how Reagan called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’? Well, where did the demons who had entered the Russian Empire by 1917, tipped the balance against it and created that evil empire go? They did not disappear back to hell, but, seeing their battle largely lost in Russia, they went to infest the West, where, tragedy of tragedies, they were shown no resistance and even made welcome.

Here is the message of Russia to the West: After 1917 demons took over in Russia but we eventually fought them off because of the prayers of the New Martyrs and Confessors, because of the strength of the Orthodox Faith and Orthodox culture. Russia says to the West: Follow our example, return to the Orthodox Christ and you too can shake off the demons. But of course the West is so blinded by its towering racial and nationalistic pride that it cannot even see that is being tormented by demons. Indeed, it does not even believe in demons and it rejects the sweetness of the Resurrection of Christ, Whom it considers to be an ‘uneducated Asiatic’.

Q: To say that the Russian Church’s role is to oppose the coming of Antichrist is a very serious statement, with many implications.

A: Yes, it is very serious because it means that the Russian Orthodox Church is a sort of litmus test. The world can be divided into two parts, on the one hand those who are with us, our friends, those who are also resisting and delaying the coming of Antichrist, and, on the other hand, those who resist the Russian Church and, consciously or, more usually, unconsciously, are working for Antichrist’s coming. Those who unconscious and naively think they are working for ‘freedom, democracy and humanity’ etc are pawns in Antichrist’s game. They would be shocked if they realized it and then they would repent.

In that respect the Pussy Riot incident, so completely and so obviously stage-managed by the West, was highly symbolic. There we clearly saw who is for Antichrist and who is against. Those who supported Pussy Riot, words which are simple code for the sex and violence of modern Western ‘culture’, including fifth columnist, nominally Orthodox intellectuals, some of them even clergy, modernist heterodox, the Western media and so-called human rights activists, are all working for Antichrist.

Q: You say that to resist and delay Antichrist is the task of the Russian Church. But what practically can the Russian Church do that the other Local Churches cannot?

A: The Russian Church alone is able, when the time is ripe, to set up the infrastructure for Metropolias in the Americas, Asia, Australasia and Western Europe and also help the Patriarchate of Alexandria to become the true Church of Africa and stop being a Greek colony run by the EU-controlled Greek Foreign Ministry in Athens. The other Local Churches are too small, too weak, too nationalistic and, in the cases of the CIA Churches, too unfree, to do this.

Q: This sounds like papism, setting up a worldwide Church?

A: Not at all. Papism is about empire-building and centralization, which, true, has become the ethos of many in the modern Patriarchate of Constantinople and also in its time affected careerist, nationalistic State appointees in the Russian Church before the Revolution. Today the Russian Church is about setting up Metropolias as foundations for new Local Churches, as has already happened in Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and as is under way in Japan and China. These countries are parts of its canonical territory, but will remain so only for as long as the Churches there are too small to gain autocephaly.

The aim is not empire-building, which is centralization, but decentralization, through laying the foundations for and then establishing new autocephalous Local Churches, as His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II said in 2003 when speaking of a future Metropolia in Western Europe. We have as our model not the manmade, papist, unionist, filioquist, rationalist god of Western philosophers, but the real Christian God of the Holy Trinity revealed in all Power and Glory in the New Testament, unity in diversity.

Q: Do you think that other territories will be added to the canonical territory of Rus apart from China and Japan?

A: Certainly. I think that eventually in Europe Hungary may be added, and outside Europe in South-East Asia, with the Russian Orthodox missions already there, Thailand and Laos, and I think perhaps one day Iran too.

Q: So the rest of the world, except for Africa and the other territories in the jurisdiction of the other 13 canonical Local Churches, can be covered by the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)?

A: Yes. The Church Outside Russia actually means the Church Outside Rus, outside the Russian lands. And Rus at present only covers lands of the former Soviet Union – except for Georgia – including the Ukraine, Estonia and so on, and, as we have said, China and Japan. ROCOR can cover the rest, except those countries that form the canonical territories of other Local Churches.

Q: But those countries ‘outside Rus’ often have Orthodox populations which are under other Local Churches. So how can they come under ROCOR?

A: They cannot ‘come under’ ROCOR, I said, ‘can be covered by ROCOR’, not ‘come under’. ROCOR is the Church Outside Rus. Unlike the Church inside Rus, which has a canonical territory, the Church Outside Rus has no canonical territory. However, we do have a shared territory, a territory which we can cover, and where we can have a canonical flock.

Q: What do you mean by canonical flock?

A: All those of all nationalities who live outside the canonical territory of Rus and freely belong to and confess the Russian Orthodox Church and Tradition. And at present nobody, including the US and EU elite, can stop us from belonging to ROCOR.

Q: With such a definition, where does the ‘Orthodox Church in America’, the OCA, come? That after all is in North America, on a territory covered by ROCOR, and the OCA was founded through the Russian Church.

A: I don’t know where the OCA comes. You must ask its members. The OCA was a temporary Cold War creation of Soviet times, largely made up not of descendants of subjects of the Russian Empire, but of descendants of subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For nearly 45 years now its canonicity has been disputed and it has been torn by internal dissensions. Like all conglomerates, its different parts are torn in different directions.

I think that instead of sitting between two (and sometimes more than two) chairs, one day it will split apart, with a small majority, especially but not only in Alaska, ‘Russian America’, returning to the Russian Church and spiritual freedom and integrity, and a large minority, under the influence of sectarian American nationalism and possibly under the direct influence of the US administration, going off to liberal, ecumenistic convert groups, the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople and some to the Uniats.

Q: And what about the Paris Jurisdiction? It claims to be ‘of the Russian Tradition’. Where does that fit into such a definition?

A: It too left the Russian Church and therefore our affairs do not concern it. As regards its claim, as someone in Paris said to me earlier this year, although the Paris Jurisdiction may claim to be ‘of the Russian Tradition’, the Russian Tradition has not even ‘stayed overnight’ in most of its communities. When you live, as some do, on the Roman Catholic calendar, want the Roman Catholic Easter, have no iconostasis, wear Greek vestments, abbreviate the Liturgy, give communion to Roman Catholics, write against and condemn the Russian Church, refuse to venerate Her martyrs and belong to Her, what sort of ‘Russian Tradition’ is that? That is Uniatism, not Orthodoxy. Apart from in a few last outposts, that claim is a fiction.

Thus, it is very interesting to think back before 2007, before ROCOR and the Church inside Russia entered into canonical communion with one another. Then the Paris Jurisdiction – and its members who colonized the OCA in North America – used to condemn ROCOR as ‘a sect’ for not concelebrating with the Church inside Russia because ROCOR considered that the bishops of the Church inside Russia were not free and therefore could not act canonically. However, as soon as freedom came and ROCOR and the Church inside Russia did start concelebrating, the masonic ethos of the propaganda of the Paris swung around 180 degrees. Then representatives of the Paris Jurisdiction started condemning ROCOR precisely for concelebrating with the Church inside Russia, which they then said was not free!

So they went from criticizing ROCOR for being anti-Moscow to criticizing ROCOR for being pro-Moscow, never recognizing the transformation and liberation of Moscow. It is clear that the point of view of those who control the Paris Jurisdiction is mere self-justification, which is the same psychology for all extremists, whether for the Paris new calendarists or for the Greek old calendarists. In other words, their views are a political manipulation, conditioned by anti-Russian Western political propaganda, whether sent out to manipulate weak hearts and irrational minds by the CIA or by the Vatican, and has nothing to do with spiritual values.

Q: What was it that brought ROCOR and the Church inside Russia into canonical communion?

A: The August 2000 Jubilee Council of the Church inside Russia, which met all three conditions of ROCOR, the canonization of the New Martyrs, the condemnation of collusion with the atheist State, known as sergianism, and the complete rejection of the branch theory, known as ecumenism.

Q: In that case why did ROCOR not enter into communion with the Church inside Russia straightaway in 2000?

A: Very simply because it is one thing to proclaim something at a Council, but quite another to put it into practice. For example, even after the Jubilee Council, at the London Cathedral belonging to the Church inside Russia they still refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs, on the pretext that they had no space on their bare white walls! They also forbade the sale of books written by Fr Seraphim Rose, which were at that time so popular inside Russia. In England ROCOR had to wait for the death of one individual in 2004 and then the departure of other modernists in 2006 to the Paris Jurisdiction before a new Orthodox bishop could be sent from Russia, a bishop chosen on ROCOR’s recommendation, and so we could have local unity.

Many representatives of the Church inside Russia but who lived in the West had been betraying the Russian Church and Tradition for decades, they were compromised. This is partly why ROCOR was so popular. I can remember nearly forty years ago when on a Sunday 600 Russian emigres would be standing in the ROCOR Cathedral in London and at the Patriarchal Cathedral there would be perhaps 200, over half of whom were naïve Non-Russians and visitors who knew no better. In Brussels and Paris the Patriarchal churches were also no more than house chapels. Russians and those who knew the Tradition did not go there.

Remember how, just before the Church Outside Russia and the Church inside Russia entered into communion with one another, in 2006 a small convert part of the foreign representation of the Church inside Russia in England and France abandoned Her. Why did this betrayal of the Church which, ironically, was just about to be reunited, take place? Because of two local personality cults, mainly among unintegrated converts, who placed those peculiar cults above the Russian Church and unity with Her. The individualistic mantra of cults and cultishness came before the Church of Christ.

The manipulative leaders of the naïve and misinformed who left had been doing a disservice to the Church inside Russia for decades while Moscow, paralysed by an illegitimate, militant atheist regime, had been able to do nothing about it. The lesson we learn from this is that those who are not integrated into Church life, but have their own agendas, always disintegrate. Interestingly, those who left in England were ardently supported by a rabidly Russophobic British press and, naturally, the State-run BBC.

In other words, locally, it took years for the decisions of the Jubilee Council to be implemented. There were similar situations in other parts of the Church inside Russia, where Soviet-minded individuals and their followers had to leave the scene for the decisions of that Council to be implemented. That is why fundamentally it took seven years for us to progress.

Q: But that was not the only reason for seven years’ delay. ROCOR too had committed faults on its part too, didn’t it?

A: Of course, individuals in ROCOR and in the ROCOR hierarchy had made their mistakes too. This mistake was the confusion between the Soviet Union and Russia. Emigres who had been mere children before the Revolution or who had been born outside Russia or who had been born inside the Soviet Union before 1945 and been cruelly persecuted for the Faith, often could not tell the difference between the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and Russia. In reality, despite the anti-Russian Bolshevik ideology, imported from the West, the Soviet Union had kept much of Orthodox culture.

1917 was not a light switch when the light went off – there was continuity. The victory over Fascism in the Second World War, the education and medical system, the reflexes of justice for the poor and for the Third World, the qualities of generosity, hospitality and mercifulness – they were not Soviet, they are Russian, and come from the Orthodox world view and Orthodox reflexes. On the other hand, the materialistic philosophy of the Soviet Union, the vicious persecution of the Church, the Gulag, all that was of course profoundly evil, satanic. Communism was Orthodoxy without God, just as Mammonism is Protestantism without God.

The mistakes made by some in ROCOR were why the ROCOR hierarchs and those of the Church inside Russia asked each other forgiveness before 2007. Being human, we all make mistakes. No-one is perfect. As a result of mutually asking one another for forgiveness, since 2007 the Church inside Russia has become ever more ‘de-Sovietized’ and ROCOR has become ever more ‘de-ghettoized’, more open and more international. Both parts have benefited enormously, making great strides forward. To ask for forgiveness is always beneficial, creative and dynamic. God gave us all grace for repentance.

The failure of the Paris Jurisdiction to admit its mistakes, unlike the two parts of the Russian Church inside and outside Russia which admitted theirs, is precisely the essential problem of those who control the Paris Jurisdiction. This is due to the unrepentant arrogance usual for intellectuals. In Paris the heirs of those who caused the Revolution through treachery in 1917 are still justifying themselves and their ancestors. For those who are in control in Paris are the heirs of the degradation of the Westernized Russian intelligentsia before the Revolution and their mercilessness. For example, the sins of individual representatives in the Church inside Russia were the sins of political hostages, not of free men. And if you refuse to recognize the repentance of such, you make yourself like the elder brother of the prodigal son, a merciless mountain of towering pride, refusing to take part in the banquet of the loving Father.

Q: So you distinguish between those who ‘control the Paris Jurisdiction’ and its members?

A: Of course. I have been an eyewitness of the process of return of many from the Paris Jurisdiction to both parts of the Russian Church since the 1980s. Sadly, the process of Uniatization that began there, above all from 1981 on, and which I personally tried to combat, has gone much further since then. I personally know of eight priests and deacons and four parishes which have returned from the Paris Jurisdiction since the late 1980s, when they saw through the betrayal of those in control and understood their underlying lack of love for the Russian Church.

Q: Why did Uniatization speed up there from 1981 on?

A: The disintegration of the Paris Jurisdiction began in 1981 after the repose of the ever-memorable Archbishop George (Tarasov), the last Archbishop who had been an adult before the Revolution, indeed a Russian pilot on the Western Front in the First World War. Those who returned after that to the Russian Church in order to keep their integrity, despite the slander that they faced, had realized that the Paris Jurisdiction would not return en masse as a group to the Russian Church, understanding that there were forces in it which were profoundly politicized and Russophobic, the very forces which proudly claim to be ‘apolitical!’ In fact, they are not apolitical, but simply disincarnate, ‘useful’ only to the enemies of the Church, such as the Vatican and Western spy agencies. Indeed, one of those who was in control in the Paris Jurisdiction in the 1980s has recently been proved to have been a senior agent of the French Secret Services. The exodus from there has been such that there are now only two ageing priests left in the Paris Jurisdiction who were brought up in ROCOR and so have a sense of the Tradition

Those of the Paris Jurisdiction who have now departed this life, Metr Evlogy and Vladimir, Archbishops George (Tarasov) and Sergiy (Konovalov), Bishops Methodius (Kulmann), Roman (Zolotov) and Alexander (Tian-Shansky), Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, Archpriests Alexander Rehbinder and Igor Vernik and a mass of others, clergy and people, would have returned to the Russian Church, if they were now alive. Some of these people I knew personally and I am convinced that they would be outraged by the attitude of those who refuse to return to the Russian Church today, 25 years on after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Q: Why?

A: Constantinople had for them only ever been a temporary refuge. It had always been their intention to return to the Russian Church, once She was free, just like us in ROCOR. Today there is no spiritual justification for staying in what is largely not just a Non-Russian, but an anti-Russian jurisdiction. And what is left of that jurisdiction? By and large, apart from a few unintegrated converts in each of a few dozen temporary premises and tiny chapels scattered across France and in neighbouring countries, there are only Rue Daru, mainly populated by those from the ex-Soviet Union, a tragically bankrupt St Sergius Institute, some four small Russian chapels in Paris, two convert groups in Paris, the crumbling church in Biarritz, which undemocratically has not been allowed to return to the Russian Church, and the convent in Bussy. Perhaps 5,000 people in all, and most of them arrivals from the former Soviet Union who have nowhere else to go. Since the 1980s the vital forces have left the Paris Jurisdiction. One priest who left, dear Fr Nikolai Soldatenkov, even took out Russian nationality, partly in order to be able to leave.

Q: Can you give other examples of those you mentioned above who you think would have returned to the Russian Church by now?

A: Yes. Take Metr Evlogy – he himself repented and returned, on paper, to the Russian Church twice, in 1934 and 1945, but was prevented by the freemasons in the Paris Jurisdiction from actually doing so. In the 1960s and 1970s both Bishop Methodius (Kulmann) and Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev actively tried to return to the Russian Church and suffered for their efforts. As for Bishop Roman (Zolotov), he was a Cossack by family – we had no doubts about him. As for dear Fr Igor Vernik I remember how he used to support the Russian football team against the French football team! And Archpriest Alexander Rehbinder refused to move to the USA in the 1950s because he knew that his many children would lose the Faith in the land of mammon. Archbishop Sergiy (Konovalov), whom I knew when he was a priest, was about to persuade the whole Paris Jurisdiction to move to the Church inside Russia when he died. His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II had hoped that his jurisdiction would become the foundation stone of an autonomous Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe.

Q: Let us get back to ROCOR. Why did only 95% of ROCOR enter into communion with the Church inside Russia in 2007? What about the other 5%?

A: When I left Moscow after my second visit to Soviet Russia in 1976, I promised myself as a Russian Orthodox layman that I would not return until the Russian Church was free from an atheist leader and regime. And indeed when I did return, thirty-one years later, in 2007, it was to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where I concelebrated as a priest of the Church Outside Russia, together with a great many others, with his Holiness Patriarch Alexei II and in the presence of the Orthodox President of the Russian Federation. When in 2007 some 95% of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the by then free Patriarchal Church inside Russia entered into communion with one another, true, some 5% of ROCOR did not follow precisely because they were in denial of the huge changes in Russia between 1976 and 2007. Some simply abandoned the Church, but others fell away into pro-CIA, schismatic sects based in the Ukraine, Russia and Greece. Why?

Firstly, there were the naïve idealists and the good-hearted but misinformed who were hoodwinked and have mainly since returned. Secondly, there were those who put personal grudges against individual ROCOR bishops, who had misunderstood their non-integrated convert ideas, above their own salvation. Thirdly, there were those who were on an ego trip, seeking a career. And finally, there was most of the 5% or so who left and have not since returned, who did so because they were politically-minded, as they were anti-Communist rather than pro-Orthodox. Among them were some extremists who had consciously and freely sided with Hitler in the 1940s.

It must be said that many of the ringleaders here were actually employees of the CIA or the Canadian Secret Service, just as there was at least one case of an employee of the French Secret Services in the Paris Jurisdiction. So politics and salaries paid by Western spy services, presented by the ringleaders as ‘freedom’ and an ‘apolitical stance’, were the real reason for their schisms. When Communism fell, such people had no further reason to frequent the Church, as for them the Church had mainly been only an expression of nationalistic anti-Communism. They ended up being anti-Russian, as they had not understood that anti-Soviet could also mean anti-Russian. They were unable to discern the Russian through the fog of the Soviet.

This was because fundamentally they had little loyalty to the real Russian Orthodox Church and her international ideal of Holy Rus, but rather to narrow-minded political nationalism. Their behaviour had always been the greatest discouragement to Non-Russians joining the Church. Many of us who came to the Church seeking bread were indeed actually told to go away by them and in no uncertain terms, in other words, we were given stones. As one ROCOR bishop, speaking of one well-known to me ROCOR parish in the 1980s, told me recently, ‘those people were not Christians’. As is usual, their lack of love towards others ended up by driving them themselves to leave the Church in 2007 and even before, starting in the 1990s. Today we are still here in the Church; they are the ones who have abandoned Her.

Q: To come back to the idea of a Metropolia for Western Europe that you mentioned above, how important is that concept for Western Europe itself?

A: It is vital. I know that I am about to give an absurd example because it touches such a tiny detail, but I have to tell you it because it is symbolic of the degeneration of Europe. Two weeks a Russian woman in Germany wrote to me and told me that for many Germans a woman wearing a skirt is seen either as a Russian or else as a prostitute. What I am saying through this perhaps ridiculous symbol is that even the culture of Christian vestiges that was alive in Europe 50 years ago in the normal way that people dressed then is now dead.

Young Western people whose souls are at least still alive today turn to strange subcultures or even Islam and even fight for Islamic State, since that counters the spiritually empty West of today. Their disaffection and alienation are so great that even such bizarre and lethal choices seem more logical to them than the deathly conformist consumerism, hellish vampires, aliens, monsters, drugs, drink, sex, obesity, depression, mental illness and suicide that is the modern West. Europe has zombified and infantilized itself by accepting Americanization, it has been robbed and stripped naked of its own culture and is on the point of spiritual death. Europe is the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho was robbed and left for dead. Only a Good Samaritan, one from outside the West but still linked with its roots and understanding it, can save Europe; no false priests can do anything for it, for they pass by on the other side.

How can Europe be regenerated without the Church and Her prophetic vision? It is not possible. Europe desperately needs to be raised up from the deathly spiritual filth of its vulgar, fleshly, bread and circuses consumerism, the tyranny of its Babylonian culture of death, the fruit of its thousand-year apostasy, to the vision of spiritual beauty, to spiritual purity and the culture of the soul, to the nobility of human destiny, to the heavenly Jerusalem, which are offered by the Russian Orthodox Church. We are talking here about salvation, about life and death.

Now I am reminded here of the events of 200 years ago, on 11 April 1814. This was when liberating Russian Orthodox troops celebrated Easter Night on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where a field church had been set up. Having defeated Napoleon, who had taken a burned-out Moscow only some 18 months before, Tsar Alexander I stood in that great square, where the King of France had been beheaded less than a generation before, in 1792, and where the crowned Napoleon had stood in 1804 in front of a five-pointed red star, and heard thousands of Russian troops answering the priests’ ‘Christ is Risen!’ with the words ‘Truly He is Risen!’ This was the spiritual victory over the degenerate heart of atheist Europe which followed the physical victory over atheist Europe. This spiritual victory needs to be repeated in today’s atheist Europe. Otherwise geriatric Europe will go under completely, swept away by its own atheism and the tide of Islamic immigration.

Q: Why instead of subcultures and Islam do Western young people not choose Orthodoxy, when Orthodoxy is at the roots of the West, in its first millennium?

A: Firstly, because modern Western people have been cut off from those roots, their own history has been concealed from them, they can often mentally go no further back than 1945, let alone 1,000 years. And secondly because it is so difficult to find authentic Orthodoxy in Western Europe.

Q: Which countries would a Metropolia in Europe consist of?

A: Only those in Western Europe. Slovenia and Croatia already come under the Serbian Church. The Baltic States already come under the Russian Church. Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia already have their own autocephalous Churches. As for Hungary, given the fact that its first faith came in the tenth century from the East and not from Rome, then to my mind it too should one day have its own Local Church, just like Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, which also originally received their faith from the East. Even today Hungarian Catholicism, as in certain neighbouring countries, is coloured by Orthodox values and, for example, the veneration of icons.

Twenty Western European countries are left, all post-Roman Catholic or post-Protestant, and where the Russian Church, in one or both its parts, is already present. They are: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland; Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria; Portugal, Spain, France, Italy. They, together with the tiny Andorra, Liechtenstein and San Marino, would form the territory of this Metropolia.

A: Why can’t those countries have individual Local Churches?

Q: That is a hopelessly insular, narrow and nationalistic idea. It is the sort of thing that narrow, nationalistic ex-Anglicans dream of. Western Europe is a whole and individual countries in it are far too small to have their own Local Churches. Western Europe was the territory of a single Orthodox Patriarchate. We will never divide it. A Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe is the foundation for the restoration of the single, historic Local Church on this territory. We wish to keep that historic unity. Here in Sweden, for instance, you have two great saints, St Olaf and St Anna, and they are precisely part of the whole history of Europe, not narrow, nationalistic symbols, cut off from the rest, but linked in their cases with England and Russia

Q: What is the realistic hope for the foundation of such a Metropolia?

A: Officially today there are said to be 7,000,000 Russian Orthodox in Western Europe. That is far more than the four ancient Greek Orthodox Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem combined, more than the Georgian, Polish, Cypriot and Czechoslovak Orthodox Churches put together, let alone the 30,000-100,000 who make up the OCA. Yet the infrastructure for us is pathetic. We still do not have the new Cathedral in Paris and we really need a large, purpose-built Cathedral in central London.

Altogether in Western Europe I doubt whether there are even 200 church buildings and 200 priests for these 7,000,000 Russian Orthodox. That is scandalous; at most one church and one priest for every 35,000 people! As I have said many times before, we need a huge church-building and infrastructure programme across a network of at least 500 cities and towns in Western Europe. Today, wherever you go in Western Europe, even in small towns, the flood of immigration has been such that you will meet at least one Russian Orthodox. Provision has to be made. Let every Western European town and city of over 100,000 have its own full-time bilingual Russian Orthodox church and let there be at least chapels elsewhere, so that nobody, whatever their origin and native language, is more than 50 kilometres from their own bilingual Russian Orthodox church and centre.

Q: Who is to blame for the present situation?

A: First and foremost, we are ourselves to blame for this situation. We have to make our own Church. The Church works from the grassroots. We should never blame others for this. However, it is true that if we can first show that we are motivated, then we can attract the attention of the hierarchy. Then we can attract help from above and, in terms of our Russian Orthodox world, that means help from Moscow. Economic refugees and their children, who make up the bulk of the 7,000,000, are by definition not the wealthiest people in the world. And how are Western Europeans, already Russian Orthodox or potentially Russian Orthodox, to be integrated into the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe, if there are so few churches, so few centres of Church culture?

Q: How do you see such a Metropolia?

A: For nearly a decade now I have belonged to an informal group of Russian Orthodox priests in some major towns and cities in Western Europe. We look at Western Europe as a whole, we want to draw the Orthodox Cross over Europe. We have a love of and an attachment to the Russian Orthodox Tradition but also a knowledge of local languages and local heterodox culture. We want to create bilingual oases of a Russian Orthodox Europe, where all can feel at home.

This is the opposite of the policy of the Paris Jurisdiction, which suffers from a lack of love of and a lack of knowledge of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, but instead an attachment to local languages and local heterodox culture. However, you cannot be Orthodox and at the same time have an attachment to heterodox culture. This is not Local Orthodoxy. Local Orthodoxy is created by integration into the Orthodox Faith, not by integration into heterodox culture, which disintegrates. The latter is salt that has lost its savour. Local Orthodoxy cannot grow by being attached to heterodoxy.

Q: What does this mean in practical terms?

A: All my adult life I have fought for the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church, Who is a mother gathering her chicks, like Jerusalem. I see a time, though it may still be far off, when there will be a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe, whose church buildings and infrastructure will initially be financed from Russia, but whose clergy will be paid entirely locally by the faithful, thus remaining free and independent. But we need to form a grassroots Europe-wide Russian Orthodox Brotherhood or Russian Orthodox Union, blessed by our local bishops, to advance this process.

Q: You still have not answered my question: what is the realistic hope for such a Metropolia?

A: I have answered it, but here is my answer more directly. It is in a new consciousness, both here Europe-wide and in Moscow, at the grassroots and at the level of the hierarchy, a consciousness of the international calling of the Russian Orthodox Church. Here our Europe-wide unity is vital. And what is that unity based on? Our unity is based on our love for the Russian Church, just as disunity is in a lack of love for Her. We should have a patriotism for the Church, which by principle of the Incarnation spreads to every country inasmuch as that country is part of the Church.

In other words, Holy Rus is to be made global. For this we need spiritual purity, the pre-revolutionary Church purified – we must not forget that the pre-revolutionary Church had careerist traitors in Her who supported Kerensky. We must not forget that disunity is always caused by narrowness, whether sectarian or nationalist, as today in the Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro and Estonia. Disunity is caused by the primacy of fallen, human, political concerns instead of the primacy of the Faith and the lack of a coherent Russian Orthodox world view. We need unity around the Church.

Q: Who are you grateful to for this vision of Europe-wide Russian Orthodox unity that you have?

A: Four people in particular have inspired me and to them I will always be grateful. Firstly, to the ever-memorable Archpriest Lev Lebedev, whom I first met in Krasnodar in Russia in 1976, and, despite his later illness and tragedy, was one of the finest thinkers in the Russian Church; secondly to the ever-memorable Baroness Maria Rehbinder (Cattoire) of the Paris Jurisdiction, a young woman before the Revolution, a daughter of a New Martyr and a fine Russian European, whom I first met in her little flat in Passy in Paris in 1983; thirdly to the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR, born in Kiev, a Belgrade disciple of the great Metr Antony of Kiev, once a priest of the Patriarchate and whom I first met in 1986 and who ordained me. And finally, to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, whom I met in Moscow in 2012 and who strengthened in me the understanding of the need for this Metropolia. Thank you to them all.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Representative of the ROCOR Missionary Department for Western Europe,
Halland, Sweden, November 2014

Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Available Again

This anthology of 100 essays, first published in 1995 and now with a new foreword, is at last available again from:

frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. 3rd Edition A5 495 pp.

Price: £15.00 + £2.80 p & p in the UK. Unfortunately, Air Mail to the USA is now £12.85 (surface post, which can take up to two months, is £8.00). Please make payments by Paypal button from the website: www.orthodoxengland.org.uk

From the Back Cover

Today many search for an Undivided Christendom and the traditional teachings of the Early Church, which go beyond the latter-day divisions and disputes of Roman-Catholic, Anglican and Protestant. And amid the chaos of recent years many have discovered the Orthodox Church and Her Faith, drawn from the first millennium of Christianity. In this book the author, an English Orthodox priest, looks at the authentic Orthodox Faith, beyond the historical and cultural vicissitudes surrounding it, and pinpoints its relevance to us. He writes: Orthodox Christianity is the Faith revealed to the repentant in their quest for the Holy Spirit. Should we accept it, we would thus accept the struggle for the Holy Spirit; and in so doing we would accept the struggle to build Jerusalem here, ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.

Foreword to the Third Edition

For we hope that the Lord will deliver Russia and the Russian people from the dread years of evil which have now lasted for 70 years. Russia can be reborn only through the repentance of the Russian people, through faith in God, through living the Divine commandments. Therefore the rebirth of the Russian people – the rebirth of personal, social and national life – must be founded on the Holy Orthodox Faith and their life must be built on this. And then once more, as of old, Russia will be Holy Rus, the House of the Most Holy Mother of God.

Prophecy of the Ever-Memorable Archbishop (later Metropolitan) Laurus (1987)

All my life I have been haunted by the European world that was lost by the consequences of the tragic events and sacrifices of August 1914, now exactly 100 years ago. Growing up with nineteenth-century grandparents and great-uncles who had fought in the First European War and with tragic maiden great-aunts, I knew that all of us had to live with those consequences. There has been no peace in the world since then, since the profound injustice of the victory so cruelly and ironically snatched from the Russian Empire in 1917 by Allied treachery and then the German treachery that made the slaying of the Russian Royal Family inevitable. And that, in turn, made the destruction of Germany in the Second European War inevitable, with Russian troops taking Vienna and Berlin. And that, in its turn, made the Cold War inevitable.

That War dragged on until 1991. Then the Slav, Romanian, Georgian and Albanian Churches all lived beneath the yoke of atheism and had virtually no free voices. As for the smaller and weaker Greek Churches, they were compromised by US control. Thus, the impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, at one time financed by Anglicanism, had come under US control in 1948, when Patriarch Maximos was deposed by the CIA with threats to his life and despatched into a generation of exile in Switzerland, uttering as he went the words, ‘The City is lost’.

Those were dark days of the betrayal of the Church and, virtually alone, the Church Outside Russia spoke on behalf of us all. For during the Cold War proud anti-Incarnational modernism and ecumenism (heresies, like sects and cults which are created by heresies, are always based on pride), in either their crass, pseudo-intellectual, humanist Protestant/Catholic form, as often in the US, or in their subtle, pseudo-spiritual, personalist Buddhist/Hindu form, as often in Europe, were everywhere. ‘Orthodox’ academic theology was then dominated by that spiritual decadence which may be called ‘captivity theology’. In its intellectualism that ‘theology’, ignorant of the Lives of the Saints, utterly failed to see that Orthodoxy is a striving for holiness, which is simply a life lived with prayer in conformity with the Tradition

This was the academic theology of ‘Orthodox’ intellectuals, who had studied either in Protestant centres (Oxford, Cambridge, Strasbourg, centres in Germany etc) or else in Roman Catholic centres (especially the Gregorian University in Rome, but also Paris, Louvain, Jesuit Fordham etc). The academics infected naturally reflected the proud cultural prejudices of those establishments where they had studied, resulting not in an Orthodox, but a ‘Halfodox’ vision of the world. An associated mixture of ecumenists, liberals and modernists, those intellectuals wished to reduce the Church to a mere religion, a theory and an institution, just like the Western denominations. This was, consciously or unconsciously, spiritual treachery.

Their ‘theology’, in fact philosophy, reflected the humanistic personalism and spiritually empty symbolism of that age. Most of those intellectuals have now died, if not, they are very elderly. The generation of disciple-imitators that succeeded them has even less conviction or talent. It is hardly surprising – modernism is incredibly old-fashioned in a post-modern world. With the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, that age of decadence seems increasingly distant. I remember at that time, and I mean nearly 40 years ago, being told by an ‘Orthodox’ academic at one of those above-mentioned universities that if I was not satisfied with their food that did not satisfy my soul, I should ‘go and live in Russia’. During the Cold War that was not possible; therefore I took the next best option, to frequent the last emigres of the first generation of the White emigration in Paris and the Church Outside Russia.

This anthology of essays was written between 1974 and 1995, precisely at that time when the Church Outside Russia was isolated, indeed virtually besieged, under attack from all sides and from inside, by the extremes of modernism and ‘traditionalism’ alike. Indeed, as I came to realize, the Church Outside Russia was then one of the few points of freedom anywhere in the Orthodox Church. Figures in it expressed words of truth similar only to those of the lone Serbian theologian St Justin of Chelije, canonized in 2010, and other figures on the Holy Mountain and in the monasteries of the Carpathians.

Rejoicing in the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors in New York in 1981, when the Orthodoxy hierarchy was still paralysed in the homelands, at that time we also tried to reclaim for the Church the ancient holiness of Western Europe. We knew that all holiness can only come from the Church, as we daily confess in the Creed. Our task was to help gather together the remaining living spiritual and cultural forces of the dying West and to call it back to its roots in its ancient holiness that it had for the most part renounced. This desire is very much reflected in this book. Sadly, since that time we have seen the final death-throes of once Christian-based Western civilization, witnessing the disappearance of the old culture.

For after 1991, and with great speed, the demons that had operated in the atheist Soviet Union migrated to the atheist European Union, whose spiritual deadweight has been reinforced by the atheism of North America. Only a few years ago President Putin of the Russian Federation, made wise by the failure and defeat of atheism, warned the then Prime Minister Blair that demon-inspired atheism was literally a dead end; naturally, he was ignored, for deluded arrogance never listens to wisdom. Indeed, ever since 1988 the Church that President Putin belongs to, the multicultural and multilingual Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Church of God, has been reviving, re-opening or building three churches every day somewhere on the planet.

Together with it there is reviving the social, political and economic life of the Russian Federation, the Russian Lands (Rus) and even other parts of the Orthosphere. In 2007 in Moscow we witnessed the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church and the re-establishment of canonical communion, a long-awaited miracle of our times. Our great hope of 20-40 years ago for the messianic restoration of Holy Rus, so great that it was a belief, has been coming true through repentance. We have no illusions that we may not see our hopes for the full restoration of the Sovereignty of the Tsar realized, or, much less likely, Europe liberated from its self-imposed ideological yoke, but at least we know that we are on the way. There is much to do, very far to go, but the direction is the right one.

Nearly twenty years on now since the first edition, this book is here reprinted, a few typographical errors corrected, spelling updated, long paragraphs divided and a few minor precisions and corrections made. May this third edition of these essays be a help to all those who seek. May it guide them to the spiritual awareness of the Church and Civilization of Holy Rus and that Orthodoxy is Christianity and that all else, whatever its legacy from ancient Orthodox times, is ultimately but an ism, a distortion and a compromise. ‘For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith’ (1 Jn. 5, 4).

Glory to Thee, O God, Glory to Thee!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

August 2014
St John’s Orthodox Church
Colchester, Essex, England

Towards a Russian Orthodox Brotherhood in Europe (R.O.B.E.)

Introduction

It is one thing to be a theoretical member of the Church, but it is another to practise the Faith in life. As we can see from schismatic Uniatism, which keeps many outward observances of the Church, it is possible to observe a ritual but to be spiritually separated from the Church and so degenerate. Of those who remain in the Church but want to reduce the Church to outward observances like Uniatism, it may be said that they are in a ‘pre-Uniat’ state. Indeed, in our own times, we can see from certain ideas and even practices which have entered the Church from the outside world that it is possible to be nominally or intellectually (the same thing) Orthodox, but practically to deny both Christ and the Holy Spirit in one’s heart and so in one’s life. Such temptations are schismatic because ultimately they separate from the Church, as we can see in Estonia, for instance, where a small group of Estonian Orthodox spiritually separated from their canonical Church and Her traditions. Such temptations are present everywhere, although here we are concerned with Western Europe.

The Denial of Christ

Recently a young Moldovan parishioner showed me on his iPhone pictures of an ‘Orthodox’ church (in a large city in the USA). It had no iconostasis and had frescoes which looked as though they had been painted by a child. The child had thoroughly mastered the outward technique of icon-painting but did not understand that icons are intended to make us pray, thinking that their function is purely decorative. In other words, the technique was perfect, but there was no feeling and no content, just as in Uniatism, a ritualistic or intellectual Orthodoxy. Quite naturally the parishioner asked me if the picture was of a Catholic church which was copying the Orthodox Church. I had to tell him, since I recognized the photo, that in fact it belonged to a group whose Greek Catholic (Uniat) ancestors had returned to the Church over 100 years ago, but had not yet left their Uniat mentality behind them and acquired the Orthodox spirit. He told me that although this might be ‘good for Americans’, he personally would not attend such a church if he lived in the USA. I sympathized with him.

The problem with groups which have not acquired Orthodox culture and copy heterodox culture is that pastorally they reject rooted Orthodox in favour of ethnic (in this case, American) cliques and clubs of converts. They may attract a few Non-Orthodox or Orthodox who have lost all their roots, but they do not attract Churched Orthodox. We can think of divisive convert groups in Western Europe which have made the same mistakes. Thus, in one convert chapel in England, Greek is forbidden, since the whole service ‘must be in English’. In another convert chapel of the same group, the Sunday service, the only one, has been described as ‘the Book of Common Prayer with extracts from St John Chrysostom’. In a third convert chapel of a jurisdiction in France, local Romanians are made to feel unwelcome because ‘they don’t behave like us’. And in a fourth case in the same jurisdiction there is in a large town a convert chapel, whose congregation numbers six, but over 100 ‘ethnic’ Orthodox living nearby who do not attend the chapel because ‘it doesn’t feel right’.

Such cliquish and self-serving attitudes, no ‘foreigners’ allowed, ‘go back to your own country’ (to quote the actual words of one convert) is typical of small, inward-looking groups with an ethnic Establishment superiority complex. Their pride is responsible for their jurisdictional separation from the rest of the Church. Such Anglican ethnicism is of course matched by the ethnicism of certain immigrant clergy, who categorically refuse to receive English or other people into the Church, because, I quote literally, ‘you are not dark enough’, or who tell them to ‘go away and become Anglican or Catholic’. In all these cases, the lack of desire to serve others, the lack of any missionary witness to other nationalities or ecumenist compromise, shows that such individuals fundamentally do not believe that the Orthodox Church is the Church of Christ and consider that their mission is only to those who have a certain secular passport. They have put their nationality (their worldly identity) above Christ. In other words, they deny Christ, the heavenly passport, in favour of this world.

The Denial of the Holy Spirit

In the last century there also appeared a subtle form of the denial of the Holy Spirit in a theory of ecclesiology called ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’. In origin this is a sociological reflection of the highly abnormal, uprooted conditions in which Paris Russian émigrés lived in the mid-20th century. It involves deliberate and political disincarnation and separation from their Church and State of origin through the domination of highly politicized and sectarian personalities (who, ironically, claimed to be ‘apolitical’!), without a normal episcopal presence and so without episcopal ecclesiology, without normal monastic life and so without monastic and ascetic ecclesiology. This quite cultish, personalist theory, or rather philosophy, of disincarnate spirituality was elaborated among others by the late Fr Nikolai Afanasiev. At best, such a philosophy was one-sided, but at worst, in the hands of the Protestantizing, like the late Fr Alexander Schmemann, or the politicized in Constantinople, it very rapidly became a form of Protestant congregationalism.

For the latter, extraordinarily, the centre of Church life was not repentance, which is what St John the Baptist and the whole Church Tradition calls us to, but the eucharist. However, the eucharist is not a cause, but a result, in fact a result of repentance; to invert the two in such a way is to put the cart before the horse, for there is no eucharist without first repentance (without preparation, including confession). In other words, this eucharistic ecclesiology had no ascetic sense, it was triumphalist and ‘charismatic’ – in the negative sense of self-exaltation. This Protestant/congregationalist cast of mind of the ‘we are already saved’ variety is why this philosophy was influential at the protestantizing Second Vatican Council. It is also reflected in the protestantizing, French-language liturgical books put out by a politicized lay fraternity in Paris. It is notable that the ever-memorable Fr John Romanidis rejected such a 20th century philosophy, after being influenced by it in his youth, and that most of those who still talk about it are now very elderly.

This also explains why spirituality-less modernism (like its ancestor Protestantism) rapidly descends either into boring and futile secularism and/or boring and futile moralism. The fact that moralism, which has so poisoned generations of Western people and often reduced them to amoralism and immoralism by reaction, is due to a lack of spirituality, explains why many modernists, deeply secular, are also moralists. However, although moralism can be modernistic, this does not mean that it is always left-wing; moralism can very easily descend into deep conservativism (the right-wing). And conservatism of the right is no more traditional than modernism of the left. Standing above both isms, the Tradition of the Church is instead radical, for its stands above all worldliness, whether it is left-wing and liberal or right-wing and conservative. And this we can see very clearly in the lives of such saints as St John of Shanghai, who, as a saint was obviously not a modernist, but was not at all a conservative either. This was because he was radical, that is, he belonged to the Tradition.

Conclusion

It has long been my hope, for I believe that it is long overdue, that one day we shall see a multinational Russian Orthodox Brotherhood in Europe (R.O.B.E.). If it has not been for the enslavement of Orthodoxy in the Soviet Union, it would surely have come about two generations ago. Such a Brotherhood would be under Russian Orthodox episcopal supervision, uniting all Russian Orthodox of both parts of the Russian Church, of all nationalities, in other words, uniting all of us who follow the One Tradition, together with Serbs, Georgians and lovers of the Tradition from other Local Churches. Being united, we would be witnesses to the integral Faith, able to counter ethnicism (convert or other), the anti-episcopal, anti-monastic and anti-ascetic prejudices of the older generation and the schismatic Uniatizing and protestantizing modernism prevalent in certain jurisdictions. This would mean the assertion of the Incarnation and the Ascetic, the assertion of Christ and the Holy Spirit, without which a Local Church in Western Europe can never be founded.

The International Responsibility of the Russian Orthodox Church

I belong to the generation of those outside Russia who grew up when the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia was captive to the militant atheist regime there. Her voice inside the then Soviet Union was silenced and we soon discovered that her few dependent representatives outside Russia were severely compromised in many respects. We then discovered that other fragments of the Russian emigration had abandoned the Church, unpatriotically and even treacherously never intending to return to her, going the way of the world. Only the majority part of the Church remained outside Russia, in her essence faithful, despite some fringes. This was the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), providentially founded by His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon in 1920. Then we thought it possible that the Church inside Russia might never recover and that only the Church Outside Russia would ever be free to speak on behalf of the whole Church – which is what we did.

However, in 1991 the old atheism in the Soviet Union finally collapsed. Unfortunately, it brought chaos in its train, as in the 1990s ex-Communist Westernisers, many of them Non-Russians, overnight switched to being Capitalist Westernisers, becoming oligarchs. Thus for a time they defeated patriotic forces, betraying the heritage of the former Russian Empire to the new Western atheism. As that tragic period came to an end, in the year 2000 a miracle happened. Building on the mass baptisms of the decade before, the Church inside Russia spoke freely, canonising its martyrs and confessors. From 2000 on it became obvious that the two patriotic parts of the Church, inside Russia and outside Russia, would draw together and become one once more, their voices merging in a choir. Today, the faithful remnants of Western peoples, who have been entirely abandoned by their governments to atheism, are beginning to look to the reunited Russian Orthodox Church for answers to their questions.

First of all, the reunited Russian Orthodox Church has the view of humanity as spiritual beings, beings with a spiritual destiny, free children of eternity with immortal souls, not slaves of death and determinism and of contemporary fashions and passions. Secondly, therefore, our society is based on spiritual and moral values and its purpose is to transfigure humanity positively. It encourages in humanity spiritual freedom, freedom from fashions and passions, and does not bring it down to the bestial level of animals, as does the apostatic West. Thirdly, and finally, the Orthodox Christian State therefore exists in order to raise humanity up through providing the means to both physical and spiritual life. This means encouraging traditional values, specifically those of Orthodox Christian culture. Such culture is universal in its spirit and meaning, for it is the fruit of a Church whose emblem is the double-headed eagle, uniting and not dividing East and West, Asia and Europe.

Today, specifically, we should not forget that this same Orthodox Christian culture was at the birth of Europe nearly two thousand years ago, but not at the birth of modern European culture. That culture in fact is not European at all, but anti-European, because it is anti-Christian, having rejected Christian civilisation. Indeed, Orthodox Christian culture is infinitely more European than present-day post-modern European culture. As a true European, St Nicholas of Zhicha, wrote generations ago, the real Europe was created by Christ, Who pulled it up out of the darkness of paganism and barbarism, giving it the ability to create new Christian civilisation and culture. But this is precisely what contemporary Western Europe has for exactly one hundred years rejected, spat on, murdered in its trenches, burned in its crematoria and buried. Today, through Russia, Europe has the unique and also last chance to return to its Christian roots, to the Age of the Saints, to the culture of Christ.

In other words, Western Europe now has the opportunity to follow the Russian Orthodox Church or else, as its elite is now doing in the Ukraine and in Russia, to spit on it in contempt. Only when brainwashed Western people understand the big picture, what they have been deprived of for 1,000 years, will they regain Orthodox Christian culture and so meaning to their lives and a consistent and logical world view. Inside Russia, and outside Russia in our regional, multinational Russian Orthodox churches, we offer the understanding of Incarnate Christianity as an Empire of the Spirit, genuine Orthodox Christianity, the Sovereignty of the Spirit. The time has come for the West, and the Westernised, to choose between the pseudo-culture of globalism, which is no culture at all, as it perverts and destroys the meaning of human life. Recivilisation through uncorrupted Orthodox Christianity or spiritual and physical suicide. This is the choice for the Western world.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,
East of England Orthodox Church

Patriarch of All the Northern Lands

At a press conference in Moscow on 24 September, His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill answered questions from journalists about the Church. Particular attention was paid to the historical development of the Patriarchate itself. It was noted that when the Patriarchate was created in 1589 by all the Eastern Patriarchs, the title granted to the Russian Patriarch was ‘Archbishop of Moscow and Patriarch of all the Northern Lands’. Indeed, this was the title used until the uncanonical abolition of the Patriarchate by Peter I. His Holiness explained that the word ‘Patriarchate’ does not signify some mononational entity, jurisdiction over one ethnic group (as in the modern corruption of the term), but canonical jurisdiction over a part of the world. This was, for example, the meaning of the usage in the old Roman Patriarchate in multinational Western Europe, which lasted until 1054.

It is also the meaning of the usage for the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which had jurisdiction over the now non-existent Byzantine Empire, the Pope (Patriarch) of Alexandria, whose Patriarchate has jurisdiction over lands to the south of the Byzantine Empire (Africa) and the Patriarch of Antioch whose Patriarchate has jurisdiction over lands to the east of the Byzantine Empire. Patriarch Kyrill explained that after the Patriarch (Pope) of Rome fell away from the Orthodox Christian Faith, so the ‘Patriarch of Moscow, All the Russias and All the Northern Lands’ was chosen to replace him as Patriarch of all Christendom to the north of the Byzantine Empire. Since this title has never been cancelled, it remains in force today. As the Patriarch commented, this means that the Patriarch has to take into account the interests of all the peoples who are in his jurisdiction. To imagine that he is Patriarch of only the peoples of the contemporary Russian Federation is quite unfounded.

Answers to Questions from Letters

Below are some answers to questions in recent correspondence.

Q: In your recent article ‘Truth and Mercy’, were you expressing prophecy or just wishful thinking?

A: As usual, I wanted to make people think outside the restrictive box that the secular media offer and also to comfort the weaker from the despair that is offered by those media. In both these respects from feedback it is clear that the article was successful. That article describes a possible and spiritual outcome of present world events.

Obviously, I am not a prophet, but it is clear that what is being played out in the world today, in Gaza, with massacres by US-armed Zionists, in Iraq and Syria, with massacres of Christians by Qatari-financed terrorists, and in the Ukraine, with massacres of Ukrainians by CIA-organized terrorists and mercenaries (all these events are very closely interconnected) is of vital importance. This year we are reaching another huge turning point in history, as great as that of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

However, there is a prophetic element. That article, ‘Truth and Mercy’, was based on prophecies of several holy people, of St John of Shanghai, Schemamonk Aristocleus, Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan, Fr Paisios the Athonite, Elder Jonah of Odessa and others. However, we must remember that all prophecies, theirs too, are conditional on repentance – and repentance is not certain. What I am saying is that if we do not go in the direction of ‘Truth and Mercy’, then we will go in the direction of the end of the world. There is no middle way, no compromise, as people of fantastical Anglican culture always imagine that there is. Today, we are going either towards repentance, or else, to Sodom and Gomorrah and unspeakable catastrophes before Antichrist. I want to give people hope. Catastrophe is not inevitable.

Those who think with worldly criteria do not understand that article, they find it fantasy. This is because they think in secularist, political terms only, which by definition exclude Providence, the Divine and the miraculous, from their thought processes. This is because their thought processes are not Orthodox, not Christian, they are deceived, for processes in the real world are not directed by secular forces. In reality, human affairs are directed by spiritual forces, either Divine or else, as we can see around us and throughout the history of the last 100 years, Satanic. The Divine is possible, but the Satanic, what in the Old Testament is called ‘the wrath of God’, is also possible. It is our choice. Such is human freewill.

Q: You mentioned St John of Shanghai. Why does he stand out as THE saint of the emigration?

A: Firstly, because he was a saint. That in itself is exceptional, especially with all the pseudo-saints and pseudo-elders of the Russian emigration, with false claims and personality cults, developed by themselves and then, much worse, by their disciples after their deaths. Secondly, because he was universal. He affected all Continents and spoke to all nationalities, Eastern (Chinese, Japanese and Filippino) and Western (European and American). And thirdly, because he was a monarchist, a ‘Tsarist’ to the core.

Q: Why is that significant?

A: Because that is the litmus test for the understanding of Orthodoxy today. The restoration of the monarchy in Russia for the benefit of the whole Orthodox world and indeed for the benefit of the whole world is the only direction in which we can go. Those who have not understood this have not really become Orthodox. They are disincarnate, semi-Protestant, they do not understand that Orthodoxy is the religion of the Incarnation, of the last two fingers when we make the sign of the cross. They think that Orthodoxy, and religion in general, is just a private matter, a personal theory, without any practical and public ramifications. That is a heresy. I wonder if they know how to make the sign of the cross properly. They may be full of doctorates, but I am sure they do not hold the last two fingers, representing the Divine and human natures of Christ, together. They would do well to learn from the last illiterate village greybeard in Moldova, or for that matter in Galilee.

St John is the guide to this as he possessed the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. So many converts treat Orthodoxy as ‘comfort Orthodoxy’, a kind of part-time hobby or ego-trip. Christ, that is, Orthodoxy, is not that. A hobby or ego-trip is starters, comfort eating; what we have to do is to get to the main course, the meat dish, which is in the arena. Only when we have been in the arena with the wild beasts that attack us, as they do because they are our main course – can we get to the sweet, dessert, which is paradise. As they say, you cannot get to paradise in a Rolls-Royce.

Q: What is the situation among new Orthodox (those who have been baptized in the last 20 years or so) in the Church inside Russia? Have they come to what you have called ‘the arena’, ‘the main course’?

A: That is an interesting question and the answer varies. I can remember how in the 1990s, many newly-baptized in Russia (and they numbered tens of millions) read books by Metr Anthony of Sourozh and other Russian purely intellectual and theoretical writers who wrote for Non-Orthodox in the West. In other words, they read what was appropriate for outsiders and beginners, introductions. Fortunately, a great many in Russia now, especially because of the influence of authentic monasticism (that is so sorely and disastrously lacking in the West) have got past that stage. They are no longer outsiders, converts, but insiders, Orthodox. Now they read the lives of the saints and of elders like Fr Paisios, Fr John Krestiankin and Fr Nikolai Guryanov. In other words, they have indeed got to the main course. This is encouraging.

Q: A historical question regarding the Tsarism of St John: Why did the White Counter-movement fail after the Revolution?

A: It failed precisely because it was not White. It had no single and unitive leader (that could only have been a Romanov) and it was not even firmly monarchist behind Tsar Nicholas. Even individual Whites like Wrangel and Kolchak were compromised by people around them, who were not white. Few had a pure motivation and so the White movement failed. Archbishop Averky writes very clearly about this, as several other Church writers too.

Q: Some say that St John would have been against the Church inside Russia. What would you reply?

A: The Slavonic service book that I have always used is that published under Metr Anastasy, the second First Hierarch of ROCOR. According to it, in the great litany we pray for ‘all the Orthodox Patriarchs’ before we pray for our own ROCOR bishops. This was the real Church’s position before sectarianism started creeping in through US old calendarism in the 1960s (I strongly suspect that that old calendarism was financed by the CIA), which tried to surround, abduct and divert spiritually the noble and venerable Metr Philaret, before being partly rejected by Metr Vitaly (who was then surrounded, abducted and diverted literally by it), and then rejected completely by Metr Laurus.

This traditional ecclesiological position was also the position of St John. One whom I knew, Fr Vladimir Rodzianko (later Bishop Basil), recorded St John’s words: ‘Every day I pray for Patriarch Alexis at the proskomidia. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer is still the same. By force of circumstance we have been cut off from one another, but we are still one liturgically. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we are with Her and in Her. Administratively, for the sake of our flock and well-known principles, we have to take the way that we have taken, but this in no way breaks the sacramental unity of the whole Church’.

You see pre-2007 ROCOR had two parts – the main patriotic part (those who loved Russia because she is called to be Orthodox and to save the world) and a smaller, but powerful political/ideological part (nationalists who always put their personal advantage and interests, financial or political) above the Church. Remember how it was that political wing that actually put St John of Shanghai on trial in San Francisco in the early 60s.

As a result of the actions of this political, ideological wing, many left ROCOR in England, for example, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The sectarians tried to take over in London and elsewhere. We lost at least four priests at that time as a result of them – and that was just in one small diocese. The older generation were squeezed out; the situation by the mid-1980s was dire.

Q: Were you affected by that situation in England personally?

A: Very much so. We emigrated as a result of it. I came to ROCOR not through the situation in England, but through Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who had nothing to do with the old calendarist nonsense that had come over from America. He had remained faithful to the Tradition, to the ecclesiology of St John, who had preceded him in Western Europe. Like St John, he received by chrismation. Vladyka Anthony said that we must belong to a ROCOR that did not concelebrate with Moscow, but only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. But he and his clergy concelebrated with everyone else, with all other Local Churches. Before he died 20 years ago, I know that one priest from inside Russia had already concelebrated with him, while remaining in the Patriarchate. Vladyka Antony, like St John, was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev, whom both had known in Belgrade. They are my spiritual lineage, my spiritual ancestry, that of Universal, and not sectarian, Orthodoxy. Metr Laurus belonged to the same spiritual family.

Such were the views too of hierarchs like Bp Alexander (Mileant) and Bishop Mitrofan (Znosko-Borovsky) of the generation before, whom I met. They were ardent patriots, not of Russia, but of Orthodox Russia. And that was the reason why we could not be under what was then called the Moscow Patriarchate, which outside Russia was dominated by individuals who displayed Soviet patriotism, which came from fear, and so was alien to us. All of us thought like Dostoyevsky – that a Russian who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. So there was no indiscriminate nationalism for us.

Q: What happened to the political wing?

A: It left the Church over a period of 20 years, from 1986 on, mainly leaving for various sects, including various old calendarist sects. I would remind all that both St John and Archbishop Antony had parishes under them on the new calendar (for the fixed feasts). In St John’s case, they were Western rite parishes.

Q: What about St John and the Western rite? Surely his support of Western rite means that we too should support Western rite today?

A: People who say such things have completely forgotten the historical context. St John’s Western rite worked with former Catholics (not with Anglicans and other Protestants) and he did this before the revolution of the Second Vatican Council, before, in other words, before the Protestantization or rather Americanization of Catholicism. At that time, in the 1950s, there still was a Western rite. That is the fundamental difference between then and now. St John was striying to save those who were at the end of a culture and bring them to Orthodoxy. Today that culture is all but dead – it only exists among a few upper class people or the very elderly and dying. There is no future to it, which is why the Western rite is also elderly and dying, where it is not actually dead.

For fifty years there has not been a living Western rite and you cannot renew and then modify a rite that is no more. This is why all Western rite experiments, though motivated by pastoral concerns, the best of intentions, have ended in failure. There is only one living rite today and that is the Orthodox rite. I know. I have seen the Western rite failure in France.

Q: How and why does the Russian Orthodox view of Catholics and Protestants inside Russia differ from that in the Church Outside Russia?

A: There is not a great deal of difference, but there is a difference. I would say that the view inside Russia is more pro-Catholic, but more anti-Protestant (indeed Protestants there are called ‘sectarians’). The reasons for this are as follows.

The Russian (not Ukrainian) experience of Catholicism is that of a pre-Vatican II, Eastern European confession which has a hierarchy, monastic life and sacraments, clergy who dress as clergy, believes in the Mother of God and the saints and even venerates icons. It therefore sees in Catholicism an admittedly provincialized and primitivized but still potentially Orthodox Church. It has no experience of the reality of the protestantized and infantilized Catholicism of the post-Vatican II world, as it is in Western Europe. When it discovers that, it is in a state of culture shock.

On the other hand, the Russian experience of Protestantism is that of sects which are rabidly anti-Orthodox and can hardly be recognized as Christian at all. This experience was much reinforced by aggressive American evangelical preachers who came to Russia in the 1990s and tried to bribe Orthodox into joining them. Clearly, the experience was entirely negative and hence in Russia Protestants are called sectarians.

Q: So who is right?

A: The Church inside Russia is right in Eastern Europe. The Church Outside Russia is right in its domain, in Western countries, among Western people. Catholicism and Protestantism are so variable, they are not monolithic; we have to look at the local realities of both before we decide on our attitude and the use of economy or akrivia.

Q: In various Local Churches you can find heterodox customs. How can we tolerate them?

A: We can tolerate them because we are not sectarian, but tolerant! However, that does not mean that we observe such provincial customs ourselves. We do not cultivate the fringes, but the broad mainstream of the Church. For example, I remember an ex-Anglican Antiochian priest (in England they are all ex-Anglicans, virtually without training), wanting to introduce little girls to serve in the altar because he had seen a bishop in Syria doing this! I told him that just because others had adopted Uniat customs out of pan-Arab nationalism, that did not mean that we have to. The same goes for so many customs, from certain Carpatho-Russian chants preserved in their emigration in the US and which are pure old-fashioned Catholic chants (which the Catholics have now lost), or Bulgarian icons, which are not iconography, but folk art, or beardless Ukrainian clergy as in the OCA (another Uniat hangover) etc. In other words, we do not prolong decadence, but let it die out by itself.

The lack of discrimination is typically Anglican. It is the inability to distinguish between the essential Tradition and eccentric local customs which may have nothing at all to do with Orthodoxy. Thus, in one community of the Rue Daru group in England an ex-Charismatic, ex-Anglican priest, also untrained, has his converts calling out names for commemoration during the service! It would be better if he joined the Pentecostals, especially since he maintains that he is better off without a bishop (who is in distant Paris), so that ‘I can do whatever I want’.

In general, Rue Daru claims to be of the ‘Russian Tradition’, but that was thrown out of the window there 26 years ago in 1988. If you are of the Russian Tradition, then you must be part of the Russian Church, observe the Orthodox calendar, have confession before communion, wear Russian vestments, have women wear headscarves, keep the canons and traditions of the Russian Church. As one correspondent in France wrote to me, the Russian Tradition never stayed a single night in the vast majority of the tiny convert Rue Daru communities, which Russians simply boycott because there is no Orthodox Tradition there. Once you have seen and above all experienced the real thing, you know what is false as soon as you see it.

The Russian Church to Recruit Missionaries for the Philippines

Bangkok: The Dependency of the Russian Orthodox Church in Taiwan is to recruit young people who wish to bring the news of Christ to the Philippines. The Dependency Press Service stated that:

‘The Lord has now brought about extremely favourable conditions for such a witness in the Philippines, where thousands of people wish to join the Orthodox Church’. ‘Young people of both sexes who wish to do missionary work in the Philippines must be prepared to serve the Church with zeal and self-sacrifice, must have a profound faith and be loyal to the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church and possess high moral qualities’. ‘The missionary must be ready to spend two months or more there. Knowledge of English and experience of missionary work are welcome but are not essential. It is vital to have the recommendation of your confessor, parish priest or diocesan bishop’.

From Recent Correspondence: May 2014

Q: How do you understand the current civil war in the Ukraine?

A: Whenever the Orthodox world is on the brink of victory, the West intervenes and undermines it, carrying out its genocide. So it was in the mid-eleventh century, a brilliant time of military victory and spiritual prosperity for New Rome and the whole Christian Empire. So it was in Kiev in the twelfth century, when the West tried to undermine its brilliant Orthodox civilization, so it was in Russia when the barbarian hordes from the West invaded in 1612 and in 1812, then again in 1854 in the Crimea, yet again in 1917 when Russia was on the verge of victory, and so today in the Ukraine, where we are witnessing yet another Western invasion and occupation of Kiev. The Western elite cares nothing for the Ukrainian people or history; the Ukraine is just a tool to gain more power, destroying all opposition to its domination by bread and circuses. Thus, its new President-elect is only a puppet – the real governor of the Ukraine, the next state of the USA, is the US ambassador in Kiev.

Q: This is not the version of the Western media.

A: The propaganda being pumped out day and night by the BBC, for example, is quite astounding. They have quite lost their conscience and all integrity. People are turning more and more to alternatives, especially the Internet, which is not censored – not yet anyway. It is worse than in the days of the Cold War; then you knew that the Soviet Union was atheist and persecuted the Church. Now the Russian Federation is becoming Christian and it is the West that is atheist and persecuting the Church and indeed any spiritual or traditional values at all.

Q: Who do you think was originally responsible for the problem in the Ukraine?

A: Stalin and his borders were responsible. Can you imagine a country made up of eastern Poland and western Russia? It was never going to work. It is as though you made one country out of France and Germany. It is not possible. Now a civil war is going on in the Ukraine, with Ukrainian killing Ukrainian. Little wonder that most of the Ukrainian Army refuses to take part or has surrendered to the free Ukrainians in the east; the junta in Kiev has had to bring in foreign mercenaries in the east, the same as those that brought it to power by violence last February. The civil war in the Ukraine will be interminable – until the country falls apart into its natural and quite different parts.

Q: Has the West won anything by meddling in the Ukraine?

A: No – just as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only has it lost a lot of money, which has been poured into the corrupt black hole of Kiev, but also the events in the Ukraine have affirmed post-Communist Russian identity. Before there were many in Russia who wavered in loyalty and were pro-Western. Now 82% support President Putin. I can think of one Church figure, who not so long ago was an ecumenist and papophile, but who is now appealing for faithfulness to the Tradition – like everyone else has always done! Such is repentance for the errors of youth.

President Putin has adopted the Church and its values as his emblem. This is not the Church being taken over by the State, as in the West – it is the Church influencing the State. President Putin has realized that there is nothing else. The US has made a colossal mistake by meddling in the Ukraine. It has lost all support in Russia and also now lost China, so isolating itself even further. Moreover, the US has little support in many parts of the EU itself, even in Germany. It looks as though the West has been following instructions on how to make enemies; at least that is the effect of Western imperialist meddling over the last 25 years. The West has lost international respect.

Q: Are there any other repercussions?

A: Yes, a huge one. The aggressively expansionist West has brought Russia to create the Eurasian Economic Union, with the very wealthy Kazakhstan and Belarus. Now Kyrgyzstan and Armenia want to join the EEU as soon as possible. Armenia is all the more interested since its neighbour and enemy, Azerbaijan, has become a US colony through its Turkish proxy. Other countries have expressed great interest, notably Vietnam and above all China. Generally, the stupidity of the West has thrust Russia into the arms of China. Russia is already one of the largest Christian countries in the world, but China within a generation is due to become the largest Christian country in the world.

Q: But Christian in the sense of Protestant or Roman Catholic, and not Orthodox.

A: Yes, but the spiritually sensitive there will migrate to Orthodoxy, having seen though the Western myths of Protestantism and its parent Catholicism, just as has happened in the West itself. For the moment the Chinese are not spiritually ready, but this will come and they will move to Orthodoxy and to the Russian Church, to whose canonical territory China belongs. I think the same may happen in North Korea (not in South Korea which, like Japan, has since 1945 been a US colony). In addition, once Communist ideology has collapsed in despotic North Korea, as it inevitably will do, as it already has done in China, there will be a need for another ideology and a religious one – certainly not the Western one which is atheist.

Q: Why are both Greek new calendarists and Greek old calendarists at one in condemning the Russian Church and generally being Russophobic?

A: There are five reasons for this. The first is Greek nationalism – both new calendarism and old calendarism are a purely Greek problem. The second is jealousy. For instance they accuse the Russian Church of ‘imperialism’ (!), when they really mean Greek imperialism. The third is extremism – they do not like moderation because they represent two extremes, two isms. The fourth is self-justification; if Russia is ‘imperialistic’, then that would mean that they are not. The fifth is the CIA, which finances both groups to varying degrees. Indeed, one old calendarist bishop in America actually wrote to me a few years ago vigorously defending the CIA and openly told me that many of his parishioners worked for it.

Q: But there is such a thing as Russian nationalism, isn’t there?

A: Of course, there is. We have suffered from it over the last 40 years. There are unChurched Russians who have no understanding of the word ‘Rus’. They confound culture and language with the Faith. As I said at the San Francisco Council in 2006, Rus is the Orthodox reply to globalism. Rus means Orthodox multinationality. Whether among the 100 or so peoples of the Russian Federation, or in Russian canonical territory in Japan and China, or in Alaska (at least among the natives, not among the Anglos), in North Korea, Thailand and Laos, or in the 50 or so countries of the Western world and beyond, which are covered by the Church Outside Russia, you can find Russian Orthodox. Russian Orthodoxy is a world, not a single nationality.

Q: That sounds a bit Roman Catholic.

A: The concept of Rus is not one of papist centralized unity, it is Trinitarian, unity in diversity. As one Russian philosopher put it: ‘The choice is between the Holy Trinity and hell’. We choose the Holy Trinity, not Western (= pagan Roman) centralization.

Q: Doesn’t the support recently shown by the Russian government for anti-EU movements mean that it is allying itself with right-wing movements?

A: Not at all. Both the European left and the European right, all those with actual political beliefs and principles, are alike opposed to the EU, which, as they realize, is only a US colonial project, using Germany as its executive pawn. Those who oppose the neocon EU also want social justice. This is why, in the UK for example, UKIP is not only anti-Brussels but also anti-Washington. Most Russians today bitterly regret the ‘privatizations’ inside Russia in the 1990s, carried out by Harvard–trained or at least Western-style necons. Such asset theft created the oligarchs, who now mainly live in London and Tel-Aviv. The Russian Federation has not forgotten social justice and so also supports the left-wing anti-EU movements throughout the south of Europe.

Q: But surely that is left-wingery and is just nostalgic support for the old Soviet Union?

A: Not at all. If you believe that, you have swallowed one of the main myths of Soviet/Western anti-Russian propaganda. This is that the pre-1917 government did not believe in social justice, that it was against the people. The pre-1917 government was committed to social justice, the literacy rate was nearing 90% and huge strides had been made not only in education, but also in medicine and improving working conditions. Most, if not all, of what was good in the Soviet Union had been inherited from the Tsar’s Russia. By 1917 Russia had already overtaken the West in several areas. The Tsar’s rule was a popular monarchy. Do not forget that it was brought down by the aristocrats, who were losing money and land to the people, just as today the anti-Putinists in Russia are also pro-Western oligarchs (modern aristocrats) who are frightened that they will lose their ill-gotten gains back to the people through populist government.

Q: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the West?

A: I would say ‘cautiously pessimistic’, even though the rate of spiritual decline in the West has accelerated tremendously over the last 25, and even the last 10, years. The West has for a thousand years been held in a cycle of atheist logic. It is captive to it. Everything that we in the Church do is only a delaying action, something that puts off its atheist Babylon. But even delaying it is still a miracle.

Q: What will happen in the West in the end?

A: Today political correctness is already talking of making circumcision illegal. Soon it will be the same with baptism, especially baptism by immersion. We shall be forced to flee to Russia to get baptized, just as St Seraphim of Vyritsa prophesied in the dark days of persecution in Russia.

Q: Do you have any thoughts seven years on from the great events in Moscow on Ascension Day 2007, when the two parts of the Russian Church were administratively reunited after an interval of nearly 90 years, when before there unity had only been spiritual?

A: Our ROCOR Metr Hilarion was brought up in a Diaspora parish of the Church inside Russia. Our ROCOR Archbishop Mark wanted to study in the Church inside Russia. I would not compare myself to them, but I had the same ambition in 1976. However, it was all impossible. The Diaspora parishes of the Church inside Russia were simply not free. I realized this in 1976 in Russia, when I saw the authentic Church and could compare it with non-ROCOR parishes outside Russia and saw scandals in them. One of our ROCOR bishops told me that if he had been treated by representatives of the Church inside Russia as I was treated, he would have left the Church altogether. Today those who caused all the problems are all dead; they have become history in the bad sense, just bad memories. But such was the decadence of that period because of the lack of freedom. A Church cannot live without spiritual freedom.

Fortunately, there was the Church Outside Russia which had kept and cherished that freedom. And today both parts of the Church have spiritual freedom. And that is due to two great hierarchs: Patriarch Alexis II and Metropolitan Laurus. I firmly believe that one day there will be a feast in the Church calendar in honour of Sts Alexis and Laurus, Restorers of Unity. That was, is, and will be a spiritual ascension for us all.

Ascension Day 2014

The Last Bastion of Orthodoxy

But that which ye have already hold fast till I come.

Rev. 2, 25

Introduction

For 100 years, ever since 1914, the world has constantly been at war. This is because, before the final and inevitable triumph of Christ, a One World Government must come to power in Jerusalem. Hence the recent preparatory visit there of Pope Francis, accompanied by an imam, a rabbi and a Greek Patriarch. The assaults on all the Orthodox Churches are to be seen in the light of this preparation. However, the main obstacle to the enthronement of that government, and it will be an enthronement, is the resurgent Russian Orthodox Church. This is why the multinational chorus of the Western media, orchestrated and fed as one by the powers that be, so violently expresses its hostility to this last bastion of the Church of God on earth, so proving its importance.

The Seven Ancient Churches

The first phase of the assault, launched as long ago as 1909, was on the Seven ancient Churches. First to be tempted was the tiny and impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, weakened by flattering its Greek nationalism or phyletist Hellenism. The assault was then spread to the three other tiny and impoverished but also ancient Patriarchates in the Middle East and the rest of the Greek-speaking world in Greece, Cyprus and Albania. Today, as the Patriarchate of Constantinople is tempted by Uniatism, the faithful in its jurisdiction, led by the monks of Mt Athos, resist and look to freed Russia for deliverance from the chains of modernism, ecumenism and even apostasy, provoking the question: Will these Churches survive until 2054?

The Seven New Churches

The second phase of the assault was on the Seven youngest Churches. It came first in the Balkans, by bombing and dividing Serbia, bribing Romania, Bulgaria, as also the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, into the EU and attempting to undermine Georgia. Then came the attack on the Seventh Church, the Russian. First, they tried to attack her through Syria and the Middle East, but this failed. As President Assad said this week: ‘Russia has saved Syria and the whole Middle East’. So the assault entered a second phase, through the Ukraine, where schism, a civil war and genocide have been instigated, just as they were in Serbia. The aim is to destroy the unity of the Russian Church so that the Russian State, now reviving under the Church’s influence, can also be destroyed.

Conclusion

Thus, the powerbrokers of this world have attempted to destroy the whole Orthodox Church, subordinating it to this world. In the first fifty years of the third millennium they wish to make all fall away from Orthodoxy, just as they made all fall away from Orthodoxy in the Western fifth of the Church in the first fifty years of the second millennium. So they turned to the Russian Orthodox world, undermining its vulnerable, protestantized outer fringes with renovationism. Now they are turning to the marches of the Russian Orthodox world in the western Ukraine, where they continue the genocide of Orthodox under a puppet President who made his oligarch’s fortune not from chocolate, as his PR advisors claim, but from arms-dealing and even worse. Now all is at stake.

The Liberation of Europe and Russian Orthodoxy

As the last elderly ecumenists of a dying generation meet in Jerusalem, the results of the European Union Elections give hope. Whether in France, the UK, Greece, Italy, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Germany, Italy and a number of other EU countries, the peoples of Europe are in revolt against the Babylonian European project. This has been foisted on them by the Establishment elites of Europe, their handsomely-paid Eurocrat servants and those who stand behind them. Whether left or right, anti-EU and so pro-European, pro-people, pro-social justice, pro-freedom and pro-Tradition parties are gaining support in Europe.

In the UK there is a particularly interesting situation, for just as the European Union Establishment elite is worried, so too is the British Union Establishment elite. This is not just because of the populist and misnamed UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) which should perhaps be called the EIP (the English Independence Party), as it has far less support outside England and English Wales. It is also because there are national movements especially in Scotland but also in Wales, which wish to put an end to the old Unionist structure of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, in which latter there may now be a majority in favour of reunion with the real Ireland. This move against the pseudo-British Unionism of the UK is in miniature the same move as that against the pseudo-European Unionism of the EU. It is the same yearning for freedom against Big Government.

Just as the survival of the EU (with Kievan blood still fresh on its hands) and its once seemingly inevitable development into a despotic Superstate is threatened, so too is the survival of the despotic British Union, the UK. The threat here comes above all from the independence referendum to take place in Scotland after the summer. Allowed by the same elite which ironically disallowed the overwhelming results of the democratic referendum in the Russian Crimea, Ukrainian for only 60 years, it may result in an independent Scotland, British for 300 years. This would mean the end of the UK and also of the British flag, an invention of the Imperialist, slave-trading, ‘Rule Britannia’ 18th century. It would inevitably be followed by referenda in Wales and Ireland and also, at long last, freedom for England, enslaved for 950 years by the foreign ruling elite’s myth of Britain.

Perhaps the four nations of the Isles (England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales) can be saved from the Roman-Norman-Germanic Imperialist myth of Britain and find again their freedom, sovereignty, independence and dignity. If so, they could then form a free Confederation of the Isles, with perhaps a Parliament in the Isle of Man, from where uniquely all four island nations are visible. And, following that model, the nations of Europe could also be saved from the Carolingian-Napoleonic-Hitlerian Imperialist myth of Europe and find again their freedom, sovereignty, independence and dignity. If so, they could then form a free Confederation of Europe, with perhaps a Parliament in a free Carpatho-Russia, which is after all the geographical centre of the real Europe. Is it possible that the peoples of Europe are voting for freedom which they will attain?

The EU Establishment elite is all the more concerned in that the bid for freedom in Europe is backed by President Putin (defended by the UKIP leader as well as other European politicians), from whom the foolish Mr Cameron was expecting support against Jacobite Scottish independence. The attack by the Hanoverian Establishment Prince Charles against President Putin’s support for freedom in the Ukraine, Europe and the UK is here significant. He has just returned from a $400 billion energy deal with China, with which Russia has been forced to ally itself since the aggressively anti-Russian, expansionist US/EU alliance in support of the separatist CIA-installed junta in Kiev. The President supports traditional moral values, which only a few years ago were considered to be civilized norms; today they have been thrown away as the decivilized West heads for suicide.

The choice is clear: Holy Rus or Conchita Wurst; Recivilization or Decivilization. This is the choice available today. All else has been tried and has failed. For if China, and for that matter India and the rest of the East, want to go the way of the eccentric and isolated West, they too will end up with Conchita Wurst. The only alternative to the West, Orthodoxy, is there at the heart of the Eurasian Economic Union. Christianity is and always has been a Eurasian Faith, symbolized by the double-headed eagle of the Church, uniting East and West. Just as Russia liberated Europe from Napoleon’s Empire in 1814 and liberated it again from Hitler’s Third Reich in 1945 (thus, as the ungrateful Prince Charles seems to ignore, having saved Britain from starvation and surrender to Hitler in 1942, as Churchill foresaw), will Russia be called on to save Europe again, this time from the expansionist EU Fourth Reich?

With all this in mind and the example of a dissolving UK, there is no reason why European regions such as Catalonia, Galicia, the Basque Country, Brittany, Corsica, Wallonia, Flanders, Lombardy, Sardinia, Sicily, Bavaria, Saxony, Sorbia and many others may not also become independent. It is just, but only just, possible that Europe may yet abandon the centralized bureaucracy of Imperialist EU tyranny and choose to restore freedom, sovereignty, independence and national dignity. It may still be possible that Europe will, for a time at least, postpone Babylon and choose freedom. It will be supported by the Russian Orthodox world. Hope in Europe.

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From Recent Correspondence: May 2014

The Last Bastion of Orthodoxy

The Liberation of Europe and Russian Orthodoxy