Category Archives: Russian Church

The Atheist War Against the Multinational Orthodox Church Continues

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

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

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

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

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

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

Euroatlantic Aggression Against the Unity of Holy Rus

To speak of a new Cold War between the Western secularist world and the Russian Christian world is absurd; the Western aggression of the Cold War never finishes and has been going on for centuries, at least since the age of Daniel of Galicia (1205–1255) and St Alexander of the Neva (1221-1263). True, sometimes that Cold War heats up, as in the thirteenth century, as in 1612, 1812, 1854, 1914 and 1941. Or, as in recent years, with the attempted US-funded and EU-backed Georgian invasion of Russia in 2008 and now the US-funded and EU-backed seizure of power by mainly Catholic Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine in 2014.

The roots of this aggression, ‘the ‘Cold War’, were sown over a thousand years ago, when what had been the western part of the Church assumed the ideology of papism. This ideology, known as the filioque and stating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Pope of Rome, meant that what had been the western part of the Church became a papocaesarist State, its self-proclaimed task to conquer the whole world. This globalist imperialism was in the sixteenth century inherited by a new vital force in the West, Protestantism, which asserted that all male believers are popes, not just one, so ‘democratising’ the filioque.

Today and since its long-awaited appearance in the 1960s, there is the new vital force of atheist secularism, which asserts that all, believers or not, are popes, so further democratising the filioque and making faith completely irrelevant, for the Holy Spirit proceeds from all human nature, not just from white males, but also from atheists, pagans, homosexuals, transgenders etc. So the process of apostasy that started in Rome long ago spread outside it. Rome was only the carrier of the virus that will lead to final apostasy and the end of the world.

In today’s Ukraine we see how all these forces, Catholicism (in its Uniat form), Protestantism (in the new self-appointed President), secularist atheism (in the ideology that rules all these puppets), and also schismatic and apostatic ‘Orthodoxy’ under the married ‘monk’ Denisenko who concelebrates with Catholics) the apostate front is complete. All the filioquists are together, all united, all ready to accept the rule of Antichrist, as long as the West rewards them with their toy of Ukrainian nationalism.

Yesterday in Brussels President Obama, himself the apparently lapsed Muslim leader of the collected atheist and agnostic heads of Western European states, made a clear statement of naked aggressive intent against the Christian world. He called for the stationing of more NATO troops throughout Eastern Europe, asserted that Might is Right and that a big bullying power (the USA) has the right to take over a small, bankrupt country (the Ukraine), using the puppet junta that it has put into power there. Thus, in a speech full of historical lies, the US President denied freedom and democracy, the right to self-determination, of tens of millions of Little Russians and Carpatho-Russians, now under the yoke of the Euroterrorist junta in Kiev.

To sow discord between Orthodox Christians using nationalism as the sword with which to rule and divide has always been the Western technique. Thus, in the Balkans, almost a century ago, it began to divide off the small and weak, if ancient, Greek Orthodox world from the rest of the Orthodox world, experiencing success in Anglican-subsidised Constantinople and British-controlled Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria and Antioch. Then under the masonic Patriarch Myron, it tried to pluck Latin Romania from the Orthodox Christian orbit. Today it works ardently in the same direction in EU Bulgaria, in bombed, much divided and bribed Serbia and at this very moment in puppet-regime Ukraine.

Thus using the weakness of nationalism to divide the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Orthodox world (for which nationalism the West then reproaches it!), the West hopes to disrupt the Inter-Orthodox Council which may take place as early as 2016. Now is the time of testing. If semi-modernist, Western-financed representatives of Local Churches at that Council do not return to the fullness of the Orthodox Christian Tradition, regarding for example ecumenism, the liturgical calendar and other practices, it will turn out not to have been a Council at all, merely a failed Conference. It will then be for the Russian Church to organise a real Council, attended by all the bishops of all the free Local Orthodox Churches.

Euroatlantic aggression against the unity of Holy Rus means a clear choice between Western Secularism and Orthodox Christianity. Whose side are you on?

Gathering the Russian Orthodox World Together

As the American-installed Galician junta in Kiev continues its campaign of economic suicide for the Ukrainian people according to IMF and EU criteria, it is also censoring Russian television – an act unheard of even in European Union countries. Meanwhile, the Ukraine’s former leader, the American-backed Julia Timoshenko, back from Germany, yesterday called for Russia to be obliterated by nuclear weapons and the 8 million citizens of the Ukraine who hold Russian passports to be murdered by ethnic cleansing.

The junta is currently shutting off water and electricity to the newly liberated Crimea. And in Transcarpathia (eastern Carpatho-Russia / Ruthenia), Neo-Nazis have kidnapped the heroic national leader of the Rusin people, Fr Dmitry Sidor, and taken him to an unknown destination. Many fear for his life. The kidnapping has gone unreported in the editorially censored Western media. In the south, north and east of the Ukraine, notably in Odessa, Kharkov and Donetsk, local people have asked for Russian intervention to free them from the tyranny and intimidation of the Uniat junta in Kiev.

It may be that this will not be necessary since the junta is now in a violent feud with members of the far right, anti-Semite ‘Right Sector’ clique which brought it to power. The junta is trying to replace it with US mercenaries, paid for by Washington. The Ukrainian Secret Police has indeed reported that Greystone Limited, a commercial military company, will take charge of suppressing protest movements in the Ukraine. According to a source cited by ITAR-TASS, the junta believes that it is unable by itself to suppress protests and neutralise leaders and activists of the pro-Russian movement among the 83% of Ukrainians who speak Russian in their daily life. In particular, the source said, the junta boss, the Protestant Aleksandr Turchinov, is of this opinion, ‘Therefore, they decided to hire foreign mercenaries, who would serve as political police and State security protection’.

The source stated that the idea of hiring mercenaries came from oligarchs Igor Kolomoisky and Sergei Taruta, the self-appointed junta governors of Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk provinces. Not so long ago, during a meeting with Turchinov, they discussed a plan to stop the protest movements when Kolomoisky noted, ‘Why reinvent the wheel if there are real people who understand how and how much to pay?’ According to open source information, Greystone Limited is a subsidiary of Backwater, renamed Academi. This well-known company has ties with the CIA and the US Defence Department and its employees participated in the American Afghan War and in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

In Moscow in the ‘Church and the World’ programme on the Rossiya-24 TV channel, none less than Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokalamsk has in a radical change of mind complained of the behaviour of the Uniats and their leaders, notably Archbishop Svyatoslav Shevchuk, in supporting the violent protestors who overthrew the democratic government of the Ukraine in February. He said that those leaders had not only supported joining the EU, but had also campaigned for the active meddling of Western countries in the Ukraine’s internal affairs. He pointed out that Shevchuk had even been to the State Department in Washington together with the schismatic married ‘monk’ and semi-Catholic Filaret Denisenko and asked for US intervention in the Ukraine. The Vatican, he said, had refused to intervene to discipline the Uniats.

Thus, in its crass policies in the Ukraine, the Vatican is now losing its very last friend in the Russian Orthodox Church. We may conclude that is clear that the worldwide task of gathering all faithful Russian Orthodox together will now continue all the more intensively and that even those who formerly had illusions about our ‘friends’, both in the Orthodox Church and outside Her, are rapidly losing them.

The West Further Isolates Itself: Russia Faces its Eastern Destiny

US global influence outside the club of the world’s seven most insolvent nations – the now irrelevant G7 – has declined dramatically in the last few months. Firstly, there was the Western threat to bomb Syria, which failed when it was proved that the poison gas attack in Damascus had been carried out by Western-backed terrorists. Secondly, there were the bullying Western threats against the democratic and bloodless decision of Crimeans to return to Russia after the frightening Neo-Nazi coup d’etat in Kiev, which has so frightened so many other Ukrainians. Russia had already warned the tyrannical West several times that sanctions against the self-determination of the Crimea would be counterproductive and now three geopolitical shifts are afoot.

Firstly, with the United States and much of the US-controlled European Union rejecting Russia, it is turning east for business, contracts and alliances. The US-staged and funded (5 billion dollars) coup d’etat in the Ukraine has already brought Russia and China together, encouraging bilateral trade and in the future possibly marginalising the dollar. With China refusing to vote against Russia over the Crimea at the UN (it has Taiwan in mind) and suing the bankrupt Ukraine for $3 billion for a loan repayment, the Chief Economist of Russia’s largest bank has stated that ‘China’s yuan may become the third reserve currency in the future’. If such a joint, commodity-backed reserve currency bypasses the dollar, Russia will become independent of Western financial markets.

While Europe seeks alternative sources of energy, in case Russia stops gas exports to it (the imminent rise in gas prices to the Ukraine by 40% is of great concern), Russia is preparing to announce a huge natural gas supply deal with China that is apparently close after years of negotiations. If it can be signed when President Putin visits China in May, he will be able to hold it up to show that global power has shifted eastwards and that he does not even need the West for exports, so binding Russia and China in an axis. It should be noted that China has already overtaken Germany as Russia’s biggest buyer of crude oil thanks to oil supplies via the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline and another crossing Kazakhstan.

Secondly, as if pushing Russia into the embrace of the world’s most populous nation was not enough, there is also the second most populated country in the world, India. The Russian government has taken the time to thank it too for its understanding over the Crimea – saying that India had shown restraint and objectivity. President Putin has called the Indian Prime Minister to discuss the crisis, suggesting that there is room for Russia’s ties with traditionally non-aligned India to flourish. Russian moves to regain the Crimea were seen very favourably by the Indian Establishment, which suffered enough from British colonialism and has little time for Western bullying and patronising.

Thirdly, the neo-conservative oligarchy that governs the Western world has also managed to undermine the European Union’s once good relations with the Russian Federation. Since, as they see it, Russia stands in the way of their New World Order hegemony and so has to be destroyed, if the Eurozone has to be destroyed in the process, then that too can be done, as Victoria Nuland has so ineloquently put it. Relations between the European Union and the US are, to say the least, cool, apart from with the UK government, which alone has always played the role of poodle to the US. The elite that runs the European Union has never been so unpopular with the peoples it dictates to and it risks being rejected in the May elections.

It should be noted that China and India are the two civilisations which have always resisted Westernisation and its Frankish Catholic/Protestant filioque ethos. If China and India should draw close to Russia, it may be that Russian Orthodoxy will at last become free to play its destined role in both those countries, bringing many souls to Christ. Having in its quest for global hegemony attempted to destroy Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the neocon elite has in the Ukraine now declared war on the Russian Orthodox world, where it has no power to appoint masonic patriarchs, as elsewhere. In so doing, it has further isolated itself from the Church of God and is setting its Sodom against Jerusalem. That is to play with volcanic fire. Frankly, the Western elite seems to have been so blinded by its hubris that all it is doing now is re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Why the Transformation Now?

We who were born in the dark years of the Cold War and who hoped against hope for the restoration of Orthodox Russia suffered much. Three generations of an atheist regime in the former Russian Empire was followed by one generation of decadence, of ABCDE – alcoholism, abortion, corruption, drugs and emigration. But now, in 2014, and even before this, in 2007 with the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, we have in recent days, weeks, months and years begun to see the light. Why has the wait been so long and the suffering so great?

We suffered because the treachery that brought about the ritual killing and martyrdom of God’s Anointed, Tsar Nicholas II, hung like a curse over the whole former Russian Empire and the world. For this reason those politicians and economists, Russian, European and American, who just over a hundred years ago predicted a brilliant future for the Russian Empire, that by 1950 it would dominate the world, were wrong. Equally wrong were those Western and Westernised liberals who predicted a brilliant future for Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – and for the same reason.

What has changed today? Those who read the Old Testament know what has changed. It does not require a higher degree in mathematics to understand it. Let us turn to the Book of Exodus: ‘Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me’ (Ex. 20, 5). Calculating a generation as 25 years and starting in 1914, we came to the end of the third generation of apostasy in 1989. Today we are at the end of the hundred year period, of four generations. Simple arithmetic indicates that we are now seeing the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. Restoration is at hand.

Reconstruction Begins (1914-2014)

1914 – 1939 – 1964 – 1989 – 2014. The hundred-year nightmare of four generations of decivilisation is coming to an end. The generational change is becoming apparent and the cycle of historical injustices is being broken. True, we are now witnessing only the first timid signs of this transformation, but there is the promise of much more to come. After the recent expression of the free choice of the people of the Crimea, we are now witnesses to a historic moment throughout the Russian Federation and indeed throughout the Eurasian Union. The attempt to westernise, that is, to secularise, Christian Russia by violence, that which began 100 years ago in 1914 by dragging the then Russian Empire into the contagion of a decivilising Western imperialistic war, has failed.

The attempt to destroy the millennial underlying belief system which held together the East Slav and other peoples of the Russian Empire had begun with the influx of Western materialism among the upper classes long before 1914. What was new in 1914 was the spread of Western materialist ideology in a most extreme form. First, from 1914 a foreign invasion (as in 1812 and 1854) led to weakness. However, this time the weakness became so great that in 1917, just as the Russian Empire was on the brink of victory, it led to the overthrow of the legitimate government by upper-class traitors, orchestrated from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg (just as the recent overthrow of the legitimate government in the Ukraine has been orchestrated from the US Embassy in Kiev). lmmediately, after a good many deaths, this ‘bloodless’ revolution took the legitimate ruler captive and pressure was put on the Church to compromise and accept the coup d’etat.

This first coup d’etat was followed some six months later by the seizure of power from these upper-class incompetents and traitors. This second coup d’etat was operated by a group of extreme and violent materialists, the brainwashed heirs of Voltaire, Darwin and Nietzsche, imported into Russia through and by Germany in a train (not sealed, as the myth would have it). lmmediately, the Church, which had always supplied the belief-system of the Russian Lands, came under bloody and unheard of persecution and the former ruler and his family were slaughtered. The materialists abolished the Russian Empire and founded the Soviet Union. There followed a generation of the most violent persecution, sweeping away millions of innocent lives, including 600 bishops, nearly 200,000 priests, monks and nuns and millions of faithful Christians. Mass shootings, artificial famine in Russia and the Ukraine to enforce collectivisation (on the model of the ‘Enclosures’ in England and the ‘Clearances’ in Scotland), torture chambers and concentration camps were the rule of the day. The Western world, birthplace of the ideology behind this holocaust, was mainly silent and eagerly traded with the new country.

This generation of violence ended in 1941, when the contagion that had yet again started in Western Europe, this time in 1939, also spread to the Soviet Union with yet another invasion, the fourth bout of anti-Russian Western imperialism in the five generations since 1812. On the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands, expansionist Nazi Germany invaded the former Russian Empire, causing 27 million mainly civilian victims, the greatest holocaust and genocide known to the history of humanity. However, it was also this holocaust that began to bring the new rulers of the Soviet Union to their senses. lt was a very slow and extremely painful process that lasted two generations and although direct persecution of the Church more or less ceased, indirect persecution continued most viciously. However, during that period, most stopped believing in atheism – when they had believed in it at all – and even their atheist rulers began to realise that their ideology was bankrupt.

It was in 1989, exactly two generations after the Second European War of 1939, that the signs of imminent collapse became obvious. This culminated in 1991, exactly two generations after the most recent Western invasion of the Soviet Union, that the atheist regime collapsed and the country fell apart. The West was triumphant and now, having divided, it tried to rule through its present ideology. So there began that disastrous period when Western materialism, now in its liberal consumerist form of individualist egoism, spread anarchically into the newly divided countries of the old Soviet Union. The spiritual and so moral decivilisation of the West took over. There was a decade of shame, when capitalist oligarchs (the old nomenklatura, the new aristocracy) stole the public assets and the poor were created. ABCDE – alcoholism, abortion, corruption, drugs and emigration – prevailed. Many of the best left, many of the worst seized assets and power. Only in recent years have we begun to see light, culminating now in the freedom and return home of the Crimea.

Four generations, one hundred years, since the attempt to destroy the Russian Orthodox world began in 1914, its geographical reunion has started. Christianity, in its original form and not in the apostate and compromised forms of the second millennium, is rising up against the whole tide of atheist secularism that seized power in Saint Petersburg in 1917 and in Kiev in 2014. lf those who are apostates and those who are compromised do not wish to join this movement, they are free not to do so. Thus, if the Roman Catholics of former Poland, now the far west of the Ukraine, wish to leave the Ukraine for the Poland of the secularist and bankrupt EU, let them do so, taking their Galicia with them. But let them leave the rest of the Ukraine, the other 80%, alone. As regards the rest of the smaller and weaker Orthodox Christian world in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it can now look to the Russian Orthodox Church to lead it away from the mess of pottage of the European Union and the USA, back to Orthodox Christian roots and the free and uncompromised calendar and practices of the Orthodox Tradition in the coming Inter-Orthodox Council. The Restoration, Reconstitution and Reconstruction of the world that was lost in 1914 are in the air. Our vision is clear.

Victory in Presov – but the War Continues

The enthronement in Rusin Presov in Slovakia on 9 February of Archbishop Rostislav (Hont) as the new Metropolitan of the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia marks a victory for Orthodox consciousness against the modernist, US-dictated policies of the present regime of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The failure by the Phanar to subjugate this Local Church with its 300 parishes, founded by the Russian Orthodox Church on 23 November 1951, is another defeat for the ageing episcopate of Constantinople and its unOrthodox, American policies.

The former head of this Local Church, the totally unreliable Metropolitan Christopher (Pulets), who seemed to have no firm bearings in either Church life or his personal life, was rejected in April 2013 for his compromises with Constantinople. Constantinople’s 87-year old candidate, the embittered, half-Serb Archbishop Symeon, was outvoted by the three young members of the Czech episcopate. The cause of Orthodoxy was much helped by Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of the Russian Orthodox Church. On 9 December 2013 he outwitted the two Greek Metropolitans, sent by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to outvote, slander and discredit the three Czech bishops, when interfering Greek bishops have no legitimate vote, and so take over and colonise the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia.

Of course, this victory has to be set in the context of the wider anti-Orthodox movements of the US/EU-instigated and -subsidised rioting in Kiev, the attempt by Brussels to divide and rule the Serbian Orthodox Church, the US military threats against the Syrian government and the Schadenfreude attempts by the Western media to discredit the success of the Sochi Olympics. Only today the US-loathed but truly Orthodox Metropolitan of Montenegro, Metropolitan Amphilochiy, has called on the so easily bribed and venal politicians of Montenegro to stop ‘worshipping the golden calf of Brussels’. The victory also has to be set against today’s announcement by the aggressively anti-Orthodox new papacy in Rome that it is setting up a Uniat Exarchate in the Russian Crimea.

All these events come against the proposed March meeting in Constantinople – during the first week of Lent! – of the heads of the fourteen Local Orthodox Churches and the increasingly desperate attempts by the ageing Patriarchate of Constantinople to hold a US-dictated ‘Inter-Orthodox Conference’ in 2015. (Two Patriarchs have already said that they will not attend the March meeting and it is rapidly descending into a Pan-Hellenic club meeting). It seems unlikely that the free Orthodox Churches, uncompromised by Turkish politics, Greek philetism and US foreign politics and subsidies, will yield to Phanariot papist threats that their tiny Church is ‘without equals’.

Led by the Russian Orthodox Church. which has already recently had to endure Phanariot-inspired and US and EU-backed schisms in Estonia and England, as well as threats to Church unity in the western Ukraine and even in Russia, increasingly led by the dissident and semi-renovationist Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev, the free Local Churches are unlikely to accept the politically-inspired claims of the Phanar to be an Eastern Papacy.

For long the Russian Orthodox administrative services in Moscow have concentrated on diplomacy and openness to others. With all the above events, it is now realising that its truest and closest friends are precisely those who have long warned them of too open an approach to ecumenism, especially the Russian Orthodox patriots in the worldwide Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. It is typical that the enthronement of Metropolitan Rostislav was attended only by the Patriarchate of Antioch, freed over 100 years ago from Greek colonial tutelage by the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Polish Orthodox Church.

It is clear that there is now a bloc of free Local Churches which will resist any US-orchestrated claims by the Phanar to papist hegemony over the Orthosphere. With the coming completion of the international Orthodox centre at the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, the time is coming when the Russian Orthodox Church, multinational and multilingual, will return to assume its natural and obvious leadership of the Orthodox world.

Notes on the Restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church

Introduction

At this present time of Church restoration, our Russian Orthodox consciousness and ambitions are clear – our aim is not the restoration of the Church to what it was in 1917. That is not good enough, or else there will be another Revolution. Our aim is more than historical restoration, it is also to make better. What specifically do we need to see?

1. A Patriarchate

Already in 1905 the future Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II proposed the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate after a sorrowful 200 year interval. Sadly, those who had grown used to the old uncanonical system refused his offer – they were not yet ready for restoration and preferred the bittersweet captivity of the Protestant system of Oberprocurators and Synodal government. Nevertheless, in 1918 the pro-Patriarchate forces, long led by Metropolitan Antony of Kiev, were triumphant. However, this restoration was reversed by Soviet atheism and even after its second restoration during the Second World War, it made little difference, as the militantly atheist Soviet religious affairs bureaucrats dealt with the Church in even worse ways than the worst masonic oberprocurators of the eighteenth century. After the tragic Soviet period, today it is clear that the restoration of the Patriarchate is permanent.

2. Freedom

The freedom and independence of the contemporary Patriarchate from the Russian Federation State, subject to the whims and fashions of democracy and party politics, and from other successor States, must continue as it is in today’s post-Soviet times. None must fear any State interference. This principle is all the more important inasmuch as the Patriarchate is by nature and title multinational, representing not merely the Russian Federation, but the whole of Rus and its canonical territories, covering most of the former Russian Empire, as well as Japan and China, as well as shared territories of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia – altogether 62 different nationalities. The Divino-human Church must everywhere resist subjection to the whims of westernising or other States and plainly show her freedom to preach the Gospel of Christ and not to become some mere State institution for moralism.

3. Financial Independence

Next comes the thorny question of Church finance. Before the Revolution clergy often lived in poverty and the Church was often subjected to the whims of wealthy merchants, the equivalent of modern businessmen and ‘sponsors’. Here contemporary States have a role to play. Churches have to be rebuilt by the successor States to the Soviet State which destroyed them. Successors to those responsible for destruction have moral obligations and here there is a long way to go even to return to pre-Revolutionary numbers of Church buildings. Once this task has been carried out, there are questions concerning clergy and choir finance. It is not good enough to allow clergy to live in poverty and force them to work in secular jobs and to rely on choir directors who are never free during the week, meaning that all weekday services have to be sung by priests. There must be financial security.

4. Education

The question of clergy education is connected with the previous problem, as we saw both before the Revolution and with certain erroneous ordinations of the post-Soviet 1990s. If the Church cannot pay her clergy a living wage, it will find talent going elsewhere. Thus, many study theology, but do not make use of their knowledge as clergy, for they can find better pay and much better conditions elsewhere. Some may be shocked at this, but it is only realistic; inasmuch as parish clergy are married and have children, you cannot torment them even more by depriving their wives and children of sustenance. As regards the nature of clergy education, it must be of due and moral level. Otherwise Church life may be reduced to ritualism. To reduce the Church to external ritualism may be an easy way out, but it is an error and even a heresy, which turns away the faithful who look for inner content.

5. Church Culture: Music, Iconography, Furnishings, Art and Architecture

For two centuries before the Revolution Church music was dominated either by Italianate concert-type professional singing, inaccessible to the faithful, or else by solo singing for lack of choirs. At the same time iconography was also dominated by Roman Catholic imagery of a realistic and humanistic style which expressed nothing of Orthodox iconography. The quality of vestments, at times over-ornate and excessively heavy, and Church furnishings also suffered. On the other hand, just before the Revolution there was a revival of traditional art and architecture. It is to be hoped that traditional forms will continue to revive and that the bad taste of certain ‘sponsors’, in love with gold, can be overcome, in such a way that available funds can be used not to build a few over-elaborate or luxurious churches, but many more functional churches, albeit simpler and more modest in form.

Conclusion

Restoration does not mean the blind repetition of mistakes. Authentic restoration means a return to the best models of the past. The restoration of the free, independent, educated, worldwide Patriarchate of Rus, multinational and multilingual, the protector of the other Local Churches, and a model of Church culture and practices, is our aim.

Обращение к священноначалию Русской Православной Церкви

Открытое письмо

«Передайте всем, что зло, которое в мире, будет еще сильнее, но не зло победит, а Любовь.»

Царь Николай II

С опозданием в несколько лет из-за трудностей с планированием, в новом году мы узнали о том, что на весну 2014 года намечена закладка фундамента нового русского православного кафедрального собора в Париже. В связи с этим мы хотели бы обратиться к Отделу Внешних Церковных Связей Русской Православной Церкви в Москве. Также надеемся, что в поддержку этого письма, возможно, будет составлено прошение. Это обращение посвящено тому, в честь кого будет освящен будущий кафедральный собор с прикрепленными к нему семинарией и духовно-культурным комплексом.

Вспомним, что новый собор будет построен в сердце Парижа – культурной столицы Западной Европы – и недалеко от самого красивого моста в Париже, который построен и назван в честь императора Александра III. Вспомним также, что Париж расположен в историческом сердце русской эмиграции в Западной Европе, и у нас есть все основания считать, что этот комплекс с семинарией станет центром будущей Русской Православной Митрополии в Европе, даже если оставшиеся храмы “Парижской юрисдикции” не пожелают возвращаться в лоно матери-церкви и к традициям Святой Руси. Новая митрополия будет включать в себя приходы Русской Православной Церкви за Границей, храмы в Каннах, Ментоне, Женеве, Лозанне, Брюсселе, в Лондоне и западной Германии, а также храмы, все еще зависимые от Московского Патриархата в Ницце, Мадриде, восточной Германии и других местах.

Но в честь кого будет освящен собор? В Париже уже есть православные храмы, освященные в честь таких известных святых, как Александр Невский и Сергий Радонежский. Некоторые могут подумать о преподобном Серафиме Саровском – еще более известном во всем мире святом и проповеднике покаяния. Но и в его честь в Париже уже освящен храм. Возможно, святому Серафиму следует посвятить одну из часовен нового собора. Другие могут подумать о самых известных святых Парижа – Дионисии и Женевьеве Парижских (последняя переписывалась в V веке с преподобным Симеоном Столпником). Однако оба угодника жили очень давно; хотя они великие святые, но не наши современники, и в их честь, вероятно, можно было бы освятить часовню при семинарии.

Мы считаем, что собор является настолько значимым проектом, что его следовало бы освятить в честь более чем одного русского православного святого. И это должны быть не местночтимые святые, а всемирно значимые и почитаемые всей церковью угодники. Наконец, мы предлагаем, чтобы новый собор был освящен в честь святых, живших в недавнее время, скорее всего – в честь угодников, пострадавших в сильнейшие за всю историю гонения, породившие новомучеников и исповедников. Нам думается, что наиболее очевидными, или, точнее, единственными претендентами здесь являются святые Царственные Страстотерпцы. Только они соответствуют вышеупомянутым критериям. Император Николай II, сын императора Александра III, уже увековеченного в Париже, был поистине международной фигурой, говорил на русском, английском, французском, немецком и датском языках, имел два высших образования – военное и юридическое, а царица Александра была внучкой королевы Виктории и воспитывалась в Гессене в Германии.

Было бы наиболее подобающим, если бы центр православной митрополии в Западной Европе был увенчан собором, освященным в честь царской семьи (которой неправославная Западная Европа не показала ничего, кроме “измены, трусости и обмана”). И для почти дехристианизированной Западной Европы, ставшей такой в результате «измены, трусости и обмана», семья из семи человек, все члены которой молились, держались вместе и стали святыми, является, несомненно, идеальным примером – иконой семьи, в которой мы сегодня нуждаемся. Весьма вероятно, что, ко времени постройки нового собора исполнится сто лет со дня героического и жертвенного мученичества Царственных Страстотерпцев в 1918 году. Ведь именно пример этой семьи вдохновил английского учителя их детей присоединиться к Русской Православной Церкви и стать архимандритом Николаем Гиббсом, а французского учителя, Пьера Жильяра, – написать такие слова:

“Царь и царица думали, что умирают за Россию, но они умирали за все человечество”.

Освящение нового собора в честь Царской Семьи может стать призывом Западной Европе к покаянию, отказу от всей лжи XX века и возвращению назад с нынешнего рокового пути, по которому она пошла в XXI веке.

A Plea to the Russian Orthodox Church Authorities

An Open Letter

Tell everyone that the evil that is in the world will grow even stronger, but that it is not evil that will triumph, but love’,

Tsar Nicholas II

After several years of delay caused by planning difficulties, news has reached us in this New Year that the foundation stone of the new Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris is to be laid in spring 2014. It is in this connection that we wish to make a plea to the External Relations Department of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow and also hope that a petition might even be drawn up in support of this letter. This plea concerns the dedication of the future Cathedral with the seminary and spiritual and cultural complex attached to it.

Let us recall that the new Cathedral is to be built in the heart of Paris, the cultural capital of Western Europe, and not far from the most beautiful bridge in Paris which was constructed and named in honour of Tsar Alexander III. Let us recall that Paris is at the heart of the historic Russian emigration in Western Europe and if the complex is to be built with its seminary, there is every reason to think that it will become the centre of the future Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe (ROME), even if the remaining churches of the ‘Paris Jurisdiction’ do not wish to return to the Mother-Church and the Tradition of Holy Russia. Thus, such a new Metropolia will be based on the parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, with churches in Cannes, Menton, Geneva, Lausanne, Brussels, London and in western Germany, as well as churches still dependent on the Church inside Russia, in Nice, Madrid, eastern Germany and elsewhere.

But who will this Cathedral be dedicated to? There are already dedications in Paris to such obvious saints as St Alexander Nevsky and St Sergius of Radonezh. Some may think of St Seraphim of Sarov, a better known saint internationally and preacher of repentance. But he too already has a church dedicated to him in Paris. Perhaps a side chapel in the new Cathedral could be dedicated to him. Others may think of the foremost saints of Paris, St Denis or St Genevieve of Paris, who in the 5th century corresponded with St Simeon the Stylite. However, these both lived long ago; although they are great saints, they are not contemporary – perhaps the chapel of the seminary could be dedicated to them.

It is our suggestion that the Cathedral is such an important project that it should be dedicated to more than one figure of Russian Orthodox holiness. Moreover, these figures should be not only locally venerated, but of international and universal significance and veneration. Finally, we suggest that the new Cathedral should be dedicated to saints who lived in recent times, most obviously figures from the greatest wave of persecution in history, which brought forth the New Martyrs and Confessors. It seems to us that the most obvious, indeed only obvious, figures are the Royal Martyrs. Only they meet all the above criteria. Tsar Nicholas, the son of Tsar Alexander III, already commemorated in Paris, was a highly international figure, speaking Russian, English, French, German and Danish, with a double education in both military affairs and law and Tsarina Alexandra was a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria and brought up in Hesse in Germany.

How appropriate that the Cathedral at the centre of the Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe might be crowned with a Cathedral dedicated to a family to whom Non-Orthodox Western Europe, allied with the Tsar’s Russia or not, showed only ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’. And in the almost totally deChristianised Western Europe that resulted from treachery, cowardice and deceit, surely a family of seven who prayed together, stayed together and so became saints together, is the ideal example, a literal family icon, that we need today. Moreover, it is highly likely that by the time the new Cathedral is built, it will be the centenary of their heroic and sacrificial martyrdom of 1918. After all, it was their example that inspired their English tutor to join the Russian Orthodox Church and become Fr Nicholas Gibbes and their French tutor, Pierre Gilliard, to write of them:

‘The Tsar and the Tsarina thought that they were dying for Russia. In fact, they died for all mankind’.

To dedicate the new Cathedral to the Royal Martyrs would be a call to Western Europe to repent and renounce all the lies of the twentieth century and to turn back from the present fatal course which it has undertaken in the twenty-first century.