Category Archives: Princes of the Church

On St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and the Old ROCOR

Introduction

Faithfulness to the beliefs and practices of St John and the Old ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), to which he belonged, is vital for us his spiritual children, for he is a saint. The Old ROCOR of St John greatly venerated the martyred Tsar, who so loved and supported Orthodox of all nationalities, However, this heritage has largely been lost among the politicised bishops of today’s North America, who have adopted the practice of rebaptising other Orthodox into the Church, contrary to the Creed. Ironically, concelebration there with other Local Churches is rarer now than before the Act of Canonical Communion.

That was signed in Moscow in 2007, and we had fought for it for decades. This isolation is especially so in various dioceses, which today are virtually becoming a de facto American Russian Old Calendarist Church Outside Russia. All in St John’s life and writings contradicts the sectarian-minded, old calendarist bishops of today. Whether it is his attitude to the Catholicity of all the Orthodox Churches, his attitude to the Russian Church inside Russia, to the Tsar, to missionary work, and to money, all is different. To throw away his attitudes has been an act of spiritual suicide.

The Catholicity of the Church

In St John’s time, as in my time in the generation after him, the time of our beloved Abba Vladyka Antony of Geneva, the successor to St John in the see of Western Europe, our Archdiocese was in communion with all, whether the Churches of Constantinople, Serbia and Jerusalem or, already from 1991 on, with the Russian Church inside Russia, known as the Moscow Patriarchate. And ROCOR’s new calendar Romanian parish in Paris, with three priests, was the Archdiocese’s largest. There were no connections between him and old calendarist sectarians.

As St John said at the ROCOR Council in 1938: ROCOR must not cut off communion with other Local Churches (1). And in 1960 he preached that: We in ROCOR keep our unity, in communion with all the Churches, with whom it is possible to be in communion with (2). He concelebrated with all he could concelebrate with, just like Vladyka Antony and all of our generation. This is quite unlike today’s proud schismatics, who consider that communion with others would dirty them, for only they are ‘the One True Church’.

In St John’s time, ROCOR never declared that it was a separate Church or the whole Church, but simply an inseparable part of the Russian Church, temporarily working on a self-governing Synodal basis, until such time as the atheist regime in Russia has been abolished. St John wrote that each Local Church has a significance of its own…all together make up the one Universal Church and contribute to it their own specialities and gifts…Our ROCOR is the free part of the Russian Church…Spiritually the Russian Church is indivisible…

The Russian Church Inside Russia

You ask why I commemorate Patriarch Aleksei of Moscow. You say, ‘He’s a Soviet!’ I tell you, ‘Inside Soviet Rus is Holy Rus! God hasn’t abandoned our people. The Soviet Union is still Holy Russia’.

St John was clear that ROCOR was only part of the Local Russian Church and that it maintained spiritual unity with the other part, but it had been only temporarily forced to reject its administration. Just like us today. In 1960 he wrote that ROCOR is not spiritually divided from its suffering Mother, It prays for Her and at the same time is united with Her, until such time as the reasons for disunity have vanished (3).

In other words, just as in our case, corrupt administration did not mean spiritual division, only administrative separation and so freedom from its hatred, corruption and decay. Therefore, we live within a canonical Church, even if not in the Russian Church, which today is no longer captive to Communist atheism, but which is captive to Capitalist mammonism, the dollar, with all its forces of self-interested schism.

St John added that: ROCOR, no longer administratively submitted to Metropolitan Sergius and his Synod, remains as before, feeling spiritually one with the suffering Mother Church (4). Naturally, at that time the Synod never declared that the Church inside Russia was without grace. Indeed, Vladyka John said that the official Church in Russia does of course have grace, even if individual bishops behave unworthily (5). Moreover, in 1945 in Shanghai St John restored the commemoration of Patriarch Alexei II in his diocese and encouraged others to do so.

On 31 July 1945 he wrote to Archbishop Viktor of Beijing:  In view of the lack of information about the Synod Abroad for several years, any other decision of our diocese would make it completely independent, autocephalous. There are no canonical reasons for such independence…and would not be recognised by the Patriarch. Relations with the administration of the Church are now possible (6).

In his Epistle to his flock in Shanghai, written on 2 August 1946, he said: The information that canonical communion with the Moscow Patriarchate has been restored without hindrance has brought us sincere joy…We pray to the Lord, that he will hasten that desired and awaited moment when the First Hierarch of All Rus, going up to his Patriarchal place in the Church of the Dormition in Moscow will gather around himself all the Russian hierarchs who have come from all the Russia land and all foreign lands (7). This prophecy was realised in 2007.

True, in obedience to Metr Anastasy, St John later ceased publicly commemorating the Patriarch in the litanies, but he still commemorated him at the Great Entrance and the Proskomidia. Indeed, he continued to commemorate the Patriarch every day when he was in Paris. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer for him remains…liturgically we are one. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we with it and in it (8). When he was in Western Europe, for almost four times longer than he was in America, St John continued to correspond with Patriarch Alexei II and blessed parishioners to go to Patriarchal churches.

He certainly never accused the Moscow Patriarchate of heresy. Fr Peter Perekrestov pointed out that: ‘St John never in a single piece of writing, sermon or letter used the term ‘Sergianist’’. This was of course the purely political accusation, a pseudo-heresy invented for political reasons by the CIA and its asset Count Grabbe and their others. And they themselves later did fall away from the Church in the first manifestation of the ROCOR rebaptism heresy in the 1970s, so resisted by Vladyka Antony of Geneva (9). This was followed by the second manifestation of this same heresy in 2021.

The Tsar

The greatest crime committed with regard to the family of the martyred Tsar must be erased by ardent veneration for them and glorification of their spiritual feat.

The Russian Imperial Family in exile stayed in Tobolsk, the city of St John’s 18th century ancestor and patron saint, also called St John (Maximovich). Here too is another spiritual link. Increasingly, especially in Russia, St John the Wonderworker (another of his titles) is venerated as a second St Nicholas the Wonderworker, as he helps travellers. He is after all ‘Wonderworker of the latter times’, as we sing to him in his Akathist, composed by one of his spiritual children, who also later composed an Akathist to the martyred Tsar.

In his preaching St John rejected the lies of both liberals and conservatives about the Tsar and always sought the truth. The cosmopolitan, anti-patriotic bourgeois liberals, who helped depose the Tsar in February 1917, openly mocked and slandered him. They called him reactionary, corrupt and bloody, and most of them wanted to adopt an atheist Republican or possibly agnostic Constitutional (as in the UK) political system. Thus, they naively led the country into the bloody tyrannical yoke of the Communist atheists, who followed a German rabbi’s grandson, Marx.

The Western-loving conservatives, who also helped depose the Tsar in February 1917, bishops among them, lost their careers, money or estates and were bitter for this reason. They called the Tsar weak, indecisive, stupid, a religious fanatic and they murdered the slandered, pious family man Gregory Rasputin. Some of them said that the peace-loving Tsar should have murdered all his opponents (as they did under the White flag – it is little known that most so-called Whites were anti-Tsar) and especially hated anyone who reminded them of the state of the poor in Russia. Having sold out to Western countries in 1919, most went to live in Western Europe and some of them later even fought for Hitler.

St John considered that the Emperor Nicholas II had always been a model of piety and total dedication to God’s will, showing the patience of the Righteous Job, on whose day Tsar Nicholas had been born. St John deemed that the crime against the Tsar and his Tsarina was made all the worse by the murder of their innocent children. He said that such crimes do not go unpunished. They cry to heaven and bring down the wrath of God onto the earth. And so he called all in the Russian Lands to repentance:

Rus’ must bow down before the humiliated, slandered and martyred Passion-Bearer Tsar. Only then will he will have that daring before God, and his prayer will save the Russian Land from the misfortunes that it has had to bear. St John constantly repeated to others that only in such a case would the martyred Tsar and his Holy Family become new heavenly defenders of Holy Rus’ and that their innocently spilled blood would regenerate Russia.

Missionary Work

Orthodoxy in the West will revive. There will be Orthodoxy in Britain and Ireland, in France and Germany, in Holland and Spain and in America, too. Every language and nation will have Holy Orthodoxy. This is the charge laid on our Russian immigration for our repentance.

St John converted people to the faith wherever he lived, in Serbia, in Macedonia, in China, in the countries of Western Europe and in the USA. And he also united people. In Shanghai, he brought warring, nationalistic Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs and Chinese together. Later he did the same in San Francisco. For he was no Russian nationalist and imperialist, unlike the ROCOR bishops who put him on trial in America.

This openness to all nationalities, which he took from the Tsar, who had wanted to establish an Orthodox church in every European capital, is why St John was much criticised for his pastoral concern that brought him to allow a Western rite. Unlike Western Europe, where he lived for nearly twelve years, he lasted only three years among the Russian nationalists in the USA. What the critics of the Western rite at that time do not understand is that in the 1950s and early 60s there was a real Western liturgical rite, a living tradition. It then existed, just as St Tikhon had understood fifty years before St John.

All the rite then needed was modifying, returning to Orthodoxy. This is quite unlike today’s situation, when fantasy Western rites are developed. Since there is no living Western rite, all was tragically done away with in the 1960s, today’s ‘Western rites’ are artificial, inorganic restorations, resurrected museum pieces. They attract and live very few, they are not passed down organically from generation to generation. This is unlike the Orthodox rite which is organic, living, is passed down, and for which people know how to sing and read and feel the spontaneous gestures that go with it.

Love of Money

America is a great country, but greed and sensuality will be its downfall.

Here is the prophecy which says everything and for which some so much hate him. For they suffer precisely from these two passions – love of money and perversion. This is why they proclaim that St John did not wear shoes and gave them away to the poor, only because he found them uncomfortable! They need the very expensive vestments from Belarus, gold and diamonds.

For the new, dollar-driven Americanised bishops in their very expensive black leather shoes and with the obsessive personal cleanliness of the sensual, to dress barefoot and in an old cassock and vestments like St John (or St Seraphim) is unthinkable. They need silk and velvet. The most terrifying thing is that in the sixty years since St John was tormented to death, we have seen his above prophecy come true.

Notes: 

[1] Acts of the Second ROCOR Council, Belgrade 1939, P. 402

[2] St John Maximovich. On the Spiritual and Moral Significance of ROCOR, Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, No 6 (2007)

[3] Archbishop John (Maximovich), Brussels 1960, P. 13

[4] Ibid. P. 9.

[5] Letters of Archbp Antony of Geneva to Fr Dimitry Dudko (Posev, 1979 No 12

[6] Decree No 650 of 6 September 1945. Priest Dionysy Pozdnyayev, The Acceptance of the Jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Church Schism in Shanghai. Alfa and Omega No 2 (13) 1997, Pp. 150-151

[7] Ibid. Pp.153, 158.

[8] Bishop Basil Rodzyanko, On Vladyka John. http://www.episkopvasily.ru/ru/works/

[9] Archpriest Peter Perekrestov. The Helmsman of the Church, then and now – the All-Powerful Spirit.  http://www.pravos.org/docs/doc466.htm

 

 

 

The Russian Nationalist and Imperialist Church or a Trinity of East Slav Orthodox Churches?

By this all men shall know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

Jn. 13, 34

You ask why I commemorate Patriarch Aleksei of Moscow. You say, ‘He’s a Soviet!’ I tell you, ‘Inside Soviet Rus is Holy Rus! God has not abandoned our people’.

St John of Shanghai and Western Europe

Foreword: ‘Princes of the Church’

I was brought up in the old, persecuted Russian Orthodox Church of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, who himself was persecuted, suspended and put on trial by nationalist and imperialist ROCOR bishops, who also wanted to defrock him. For forty-seven years I remained faithful to that Church, until it became abundantly clear, in early 2022 before operations in the Ukraine, that the once Persecuted Church, which we had so loved, had become the Persecuting Church.

Worse still, the persecutors were shown to be none other than ROCOR’s newly-appointed, untrained, half-baked bishops. Those who called themselves ‘princes of the Church’ were those who loved money, stole, lied, slandered and cheated. The old bishops who belonged to the Tsar and whom we so loved and respected, must be spinning in their graves. How did this happen? Below I recount the story.

The Ukraine Tragedy and the Future of the Russian Church 

The armies of two brotherly peoples, both East Slav and both largely Orthodox Christian by history and culture, have been slaughtering one another for nearly five years in a war of attrition, just as in WWII. As a war of attrition, it will end just as suddenly. Two million have been killed or maimed, some 90% of them Ukrainians. Several thousand civilians have also been caught up in this since 2014 and died, mostly Russians (14,000 between 2014 and 2022 alone), let alone those killed in the NATO-armed Ukrainian invasion of Russia in 2024, run by NATO from Wiesbaden. And well over seven million Ukrainians have fled their country, heading, in almost equal numbers, east to Russia and west to Western Europe. They refused to be recruited by violence and needlessly die for the Globalists, who are being paid for Kiev’s NATO proxy Army to die.

Meanwhile, the majority of baptised Orthodox, whether practising or not, in both countries, as well as in Belarus and other countries in the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church, look on many bishops as bullying bandits, feudal mini-oligarchs (I quote Russian clergy and laity here), who, like the New ROCOR ones, are out to steal their churches. And that mentality feeds down to many priests, obliged to squeeze money out of their flocks for their bishops. Then the clericalist contagion spreads to them and they squeeze some out for themselves. The example comes from the top. Many freshly-baptised, post-Soviet clergy (and then by imitation ROCOR bishops) fell into the money-loving, ‘Wild East’ Capitalism of the 1990s and got stuck there. (There are also the sexual scandals with bishops, but that is another story).

How is all this possible? Only when the majority of ‘baptised Orthodox’ in both countries long ago renounced Christ and are only nominally Orthodox Christians, if Orthodox Christians at all. (As they say, ‘many are Orthodox, but few are Christians’). And only when a majority have patriots and not the politicians, who prefer hundreds of billions of dollars, euros and pounds and huge quantities of lethal Western arms to peace. In reality, most in both countries, baptised but never instructed (despite Christ’s commandment in Matt. 28.20), are pagans who have not accepted Christ, Who told us to love one another. And most want to dominate one another as imperialists, again contrary to Christ, Who told us to serve one another. How do this paganism and imperialism manifest themselves in the Church?

Paganism

The paganism of both peoples can be seen in their superstitiousness, the use of witchcraft and the evil eye, which have always been very widespread in all the Slav (as also in Catholic Southern European) lands. This comes from the underlying paganism, which has never been completely defeated by the Church, as is witnessed to by accounts both in the nineteenth century and in Soviet times, and which then revived enormously in the spiritual vacuum after the ideological collapse of the USSR, with a fascination for ‘extrasenses’, that is, for occultists, magicians, wizards and gurus and their weird, exploitative sects for the naïve and disoriented, who felt lost after the Soviet fall. This paganism is clear in the utter confusion between the spiritual and inward, that is primary, and the material and outward, that is secondary.

This can be seen, for example, in the aggressive preference for secondary Church rituals and customs of dress over kindness and tolerance for one another, in a belief in magic, ‘miracles’, ‘prophecies’ and ‘elders’, rather than in the effort to overcome our sinful, fallen nature. Again, the outward and bodily prevail over the inward and spiritual. And the spiritual is what is required in order to acquire Divine grace. For these pagans, everything is automatic, as in magic – which the devil can indeed provide, if people do not exercise their own will and sell themselves to his occultist magicians and witches. In the real world, nothing comes automatically, including the grace of eucharistic communion. And acquiring grace, as St Seraphim of Sarov said, is the aim of our lives, needs effort – the meaning of the word ‘ascetic’.

This superficiality was also manifest in the Russian Emigration, where One Church split into three warring, spiteful and hateful sectarian groups, not because of any difference in doctrines and beliefs, but because of politics. Love one another, said Christ, but the main practice of each group appeared to be, Hate one another. Similarly, as is well-known, many Russian churches, run by careerists who are devoid of pastoral activity and interest, appear to have a bigoted and ignorant woman or two at their entrance, who enjoy shouting at visitors and insulting them because they have committed some ritual error or are not dressed according to the taste of the insulters. Poorly-trained priests or laity who make others cry through their insults appear to be the anti-pastoral norm in certain churches, especially at confession and during sermons.

In turn, superstition, the almost fanatical attachment to mere outward rites, grew into a love for schism. It is deeply significant that the main, State-enforced schism in Russian Church history is called ‘Old Ritualism’. There was never any difference in doctrine between the Old Ritualists and the majority, who may be called ‘New Ritualists’, all was about ritual differences, all about the arrangement of the fingers in making the sign of the cross. Superstition bred obscurantism, the spiritual disease of pharisaically and joyfully condemning and denouncing others, and the obsession with finding and identifying ‘heresies’ and ‘schisms’, words hatefully and lovingly bandied about in Russian as the ultimate insult. In the land of record numbers of abortions and divorce, all agree on the Creed, but as for someone who differs in ritual…

Here is the origin of the cult of holy water among some Russian Orthodox. Clearly, this relates back to Slavic paganism. Now there is a great need for holy water, to be baptised in it, to drink it and to sprinkle it, but the concept that a child will be magically protected from colds by it, or that you can virtually trample on other people in church in order to get some at the Feast of Theophany or at water-blessing services of intercession after the Liturgy, having ignored confession and communion, is not Christian. And the concept that the use of holy water will magically heal or transform everything is pagan. I remember being asked if I could bless a Russian brothel. I refused. Again, others have been asked to bless the palaces and limousines of Slav oligarchs, who obtained their money over the dead bodies of others. I would refuse.

It has often been said that if the Russian Revolution took place, it was because of the virtual clerical prohibition before it to take communion more than once a year, a practice long conserved by ROCOR, as I only too well remember. In other words, church practice had become a ritual of private services, memorials or intercessions, rather than the common act of taking communion and so becoming a community. The secondary and outward had taken over from the primary and inward. Most Russian town churches today appear to be railway stations, people coming and going, staying for a few minutes to light a candle, or coming only after communion for some private service they have ordered. There are in fact very few parishes in Russia, in the correct sense of communities. Indeed, they are almost unknown.

Imperialism

Like Rome and then Constantinople (the ‘Second Rome’), Russia became an Empire and so was in its turn called the ‘Third Rome’. In other words, all three of these important historical Christian centres were tainted by one and the same Imperialism. The worst case was Rome, which actually developed a systematic, theologically justified and institutionalised structure of centralised power, called Papism, which actually changed the Creed, in order to vindicate its desire to control the whole world. According to this, a mere human-being, the Pope of Rome is the Vicar (Replacement) of Christ, the Head of the Church, the Holy Spirit proceeds from Him, and he is therefore infallible. All this is logical, if you accept a human-being as the replacement for Christ. But that leads to humanist idolatry, as the God-man is replaced by a mere man.

However, if you think that this article is some anti-Roman Catholic polemic, you are mistaken. The Second and Third Romes have exactly the same Imperialism as the First Rome, even if they have not (yet) justified it theologically. Thus, there are virulent Greek nationalists who will tell you in all seriousness (!) that nobody can be Orthodox, if they are not in communion with their favourite Turkish citizen, their Greek ethnarch (‘the first without equals’, as some heretically call him), the Patriarch of Constantinople (by the way, that has not existed for 573 years, it is called Istanbul). However, there are Russian imperialists/nationalists who will tell you that anyone who does not commemorate the Russian ethnarch, the Patriarch of Moscow (his present title), in services is a schismatic. (That favourite Russian word again!)

The Greek case is very strange, since many Patriarchs of Constantinople were heretics, especially in the first ten centuries, until the fall of the City in 1453, though more recently too. So we have to be in communion with a heretic in order to be an Orthodox Christian?! What about being in communion with Christ? As for the equally strange Russian case, it is a result of superstition and in turn of nationalist ignorance. The average baptised Russian Orthodox has no idea that there are 16 Orthodox Churches and that only one of them, the Russian, commemorates its Patriarch or main bishop in the litanies in services. What about commemorating Christ? Does this mean then that the Russian Orthodox Church is the only true Church, as the Old Ritualists claim, and all others are schismatics? (That favourite Russian word again!)

Moreover, the Russian Church had itself to grant independence (autocephaly) to three of the 15 other Local Churches, the Polish, the Czechoslovak and the American – and therefore they do not commemorate the Russian Patriarch. And parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation do not commemorate the Patriarch (as in France), or are not allowed to do so, by law, (as in the Ukraine and Latvia). Indeed, the Russian Patriarch is banned from even visiting such countries. The imperialist ignorance of many Russian Orthodox that there is a much older Orthodox world that exists outside Russia is astounding. Yes, diversity exists. The Church is like a bouquet of 16 flowers, all flowers, but all different. Accept the real Church, instead of living in a narrow nationalist ghetto, ignorant of history and reality.

Here we come to the essence of the ecclesial problem of both Greeks and Russians. Both have reduced the Church to a Greek or Russian Imperialist/Nationalist Church, they have put Caesar above Christ. This explains in the Russian case the aggressiveness, ignorance and even hatred towards Non-Russians, as displayed by Russians who were adults before the Revolution (I knew plenty of them), let alone by those after the process of Sovietisation. That Imperialisation of the local mentality has led to aggressive militarism, as can be seen in the recently-built Military Cathedral near Moscow, as can be seen in the behaviour of preachers such as Fr Andrey Tkachov, who appear to think, like other anti-pastors, Russian bishops and priests, that insulting Orthodox people is normal. How many women did you make cry today?

Some Russians were hated even before the Revolution, most notably in Poland, the Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltics, wherever people had been oppressed by centralised Russian nationalism and militarism. Nothing that happened after 1917 did anything to change that – indeed, Sovietisation made it all much worse. ‘We have the right to do anything we want, and local people must use our language in order to live’, they said, talking exactly like brash American Imperialists from ROCOR. Here is why the Estonian Kaja Kallas, the Pole Donald Tusk, the Moldovan Maya Sandu, the Ukrainian Yuliya Timoshenko and many a Georgian, came to hate Russians. And they found plenty of hypocritical and equally Imperialist Westerners, very jealous of Russia and greedy to steal its resources, to fund them for purely selfish reasons.

Towards the Restoration of Orthodoxy in the East Slav Lands

As the end of the Ukrainian tragedy and the Ukraine in its Soviet form draws near and it is carved up between the different countries, from which parts of it were taken, what is the future for the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’? For this is still the Soviet-invented name for the Russian Orthodox Church. Clearly, both names are incorrect in the sense that a Patriarchate in Moscow and a Russian Orthodox Church can only be relevant to the territory of the Russian Federation. Therefore, it has to stop imperialistically clinging on to territories outside the Russian Federation. Let the Baltics, Moldova, Belarus and the future Ukraine, whatever its actual national borders and future name (Kievska Rus?) will be, have their independence, just as the Orthodox in Georgia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and America had theirs generations before them.

Many Russians, and not only Russians, speak of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine as a trinity. Indeed, they are, as all are East Slav nations, all speak similar, if not the same, languages, all are Orthodox by culture and history, all are closely related, with intermarriage normal. Now, the Holy Trinity is the model of Unity in Diversity, three Separate Persons in One ‘Undivided and Consubstantial Trinity’ in Church language. Is it not time for the three peoples and countries to have their own independent Churches, a trinity of Churches of Unity in Diversity, as is our model? Let each of them co-exist as friends, not as enemies, loving one another and intermarrying with one another, and not hating and warring against one another. Then we will see that they are really, and not merely nominally, Orthodox Christians.

For the moment, our hope is that all will start referring to the common spiritual heritage of the Russian Orthodox Church, that is, to the saints of all, perhaps especially to the New Martyrs and Confessors. The problem is that at present many only pay lip-service to the latter. The lives of the tens of thousands of those canonised so far are virtually unknown. Significantly, the baptised Orthodox masses still often prefer Stalin to his victims. The reason for this is that in their heads they belong to the Russian Nationalist and Imperialist Church, not to the Russian Orthodox Church. And this concerns not only many people, but also many clergy. The sad fact is that there has not yet been repentance for the past. And that is why they are still killing one another, idolising Lenin and Stalin, and massively aborting, divorcing and swearing.

Afterword: The King is Coming

Those who find this story sad or are scandalised by these truths should take consolation, recalling that the 16 Local Orthodox Churches number nearly 200 million. We, the masses of honest clergy and people, have suffered from or been misled by just a few thousand, who have like bandits seized and cling onto power and riches and war. Now when, as the proverb says, the fish rots from the head, then the head will be replaced by those rejected and placed at the bottom. Those despised, neglected, abandoned and hated at the bottom will replace the head. For when the King comes, and He is coming, the ‘princes of the Church’ will be swept away like so much chaff. This is not our doing, it is the doing of the Lord and it is marvellous in our eyes, for the stone that the builders rejected will become the head of the corner.

In the words of the Tsar’s Archbishop, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, on the 950th Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus:

The reality of Holy Rus is not a delusion or a phantom, but true. The prayer of the saints does not cease to rise up to heaven, those who shone forth in the Russian Lands pray for them now at the throne of God. But not only in heaven, but also here, on our sinful earth Holy Rus continues to exist. The power of those who fight against God has enslaved, but not destroyed Her. The Council of the ungodly who have dominion over the Russian people is alien to them, for it has nothing in common with the essence of Russia.

St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, on the 950th Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus

 

 

More on Fr Seraphim (Rose)

The latest article by Sergei Chapnin, Canonization and the Act of Betrayal,  https://publicorthodoxy.org/2026/05/11/canonization-and-the-act-of-betrayal/ highlights the catastrophic identity crisis of the new ROCOR. Having ejected the old traditional ROCOR priests (yet another one has left the tiny Western Europe Diocese, mainly staffed by converts and Moldovans, this time for South America), the latest crop of American bishops has no idea of what ROCOR was and is. The proposed canonisation process for Fr. Seraphim Rose (1934–1982), the first possible convert-saint of recent years, unlike the wonderful non-convert St Olga of Alaska. As Sergei, press officer of Patriarch Alexei II, who loved the old ROCOR ever since his visit to us in 1997, points out:

The decision to move toward Fr. Seraphim’s glorification forces ROCOR to confront the inner logic of his own ecclesiology—and it is precisely here that the Synod may already have stepped into a trap….I suggested that ROCOR is now opening the way to a political canonization, responding to a specific demand for ideological Orthodoxy in the contemporary American context.

Sergei refers here to the sectarian and schismatic ideology of the new, post-2017 ROCOR. He continues:

A church body that has severed itself from the ecclesiological horizon within which Fr. Seraphim understood truth, apostasy, and fidelity cannot quietly edit away the sharpest lines of his worldview and then glorify him as though no contradiction existed. In his own eyes, the present ROCOR would no longer obviously belong to the “genuine Holy Orthodoxy” of which he wrote. And if a church community has lost its own living bond with what he regarded as true Orthodoxy, then it has also lost the spiritual right to deliberate about his sanctity. In that light, a canonization carried out by the present ROCOR would appear, from within Fr. Seraphim’s own ecclesiological logic, not as a triumph of holiness, but as a cheap spectacle.

In 2021 we left the new schismatic American ROCOR after the old ROCOR had been assassinated by American converts. We duly returned to the Western European Archdiocese, from which we had been loaned in 1988, our 2007 mission to return ROCOR to canonical communion completed. When Metropolitan Jean was forced by Moscow career politicians to abandon us after fifty years of fidelity to the real Russian Orthodox Church, he issued us with letters of canonical leave, which took us at once to the Patriarchate of Romania. Unlike Russian bishops, Romanian bishops at once blessed our missionary work, did not try to steal our churches and even awarded us, not persecuted us, for resisting theological schism.