Category Archives: Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia

On the Six Divisions in the Russian Orthodox Church in the Diaspora

In the twentieth century the Russian Orthodox Church outside the borders of Russia split into six groups, three splits took place for ethnic reasons and three splits took place for political reasons.

The Three Non-Russian Ethnic Divisions

Firstly, there was quite a large Carpatho-Rusyn group in the USA, founded by immigrants who had been forced into Uniatism. They had arrived in the US from 1880 on, not from the Russian Empire, but from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Once in freedom in the USA, most of them returned to Russian Orthodoxy (the strongly Uniatised did not and were called by the absurd term ‘Ruthenians’). The return was for two reasons. Firstly, an infamous Roman Catholic Archbishop in the USA, called John Ireland (1838-1918), refused to let the Carpatho-Rusyns have married clergy and, secondly, he tried to steal their churches from them. As a Roman Catholic bishop (just like ROCOR bishops today), he did not understand that Carpathian Orthodoxy is founded on churches built or paid for by the people for the people. In real and not clericalist Orthodoxy, the hierarchical principle is always balanced by the congregational principle.  Led by the future saint, Fr Alexis (Toth), most people returned to the Church. The People’s Orthodoxy always triumphs over greedy clericalist bishops, who have the State mentality and dreams of power and riches. The Carpatho-Rusyns came to form a group known as the Metropolia and then from 1971 on the OCA (Orthodox Church in America).

After 1945 there formed second and third groups, a small Belarussian group and a very large and also very nationalistic Ukrainian group, mainly in Northern America, but also to some extent in Western Europe and elsewhere. After the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, most of the Ukrainian group, hating Russians, ended up under Constantinople. The small and weak Belarusian group more or less died out.

The Three Russian Political Divisions

As for the ethnic Russians in the Diaspora, after 1917 they too split into three. Initially, until the 1990s and renewed emigration, the smallest group was the Moscow Patriarchate group. This was at the centre of Soviet patriotism, which after 1991 transferred to Russian Federation patriotism. Many in this group never dared contradict whoever was in power in Moscow, whether they intervened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan or the Ukraine. A blind patriotic loyalty even to an atheist regime (!) prevailed among some in this Church. For them, the Russian Patriarch is an ethnarch, in the same way as the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople is an ethnarch. For example, when Orthodox in Latvia were recently obliged by the local government to stop commemorating the Russian Patriarch, many there stopped going to church. I was asked if people should continue to attend churches there. I answered: If churches there continue to commemorate Christ, then of course they should attend them. Clearly, for many, the commemoration of the Patriarch was much more important than the commemoration of Christ. This is a parallel to the Roman Catholic attitude to the Popes of Rome. For them too the Pope is the head of the Church. No Pope, no Church! And the same ‘phyletist’ disease is present among some in Constantinople, Moscow and elsewhere.

The second smallest group in the Diaspora after 1917 was the Paris-centred group. This was led by Westernised aristocrats and intellectuals, mainly from Saint Petersburg, who had betrayed the Tsar, organised the first ‘Revolution’ (palace coup) to overthrow him and showed loyalty to Western values such as liberalism, ecumenism etc. In general, they showed little interest in fasting, monasticism and piety. This is now an even smaller group, as it has largely died out.

The largest émigré group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, also Russian Orthodox Church Abroad or in Exile), was always anti-Communist. However, since being anti-Communist is not the same as Orthodox Christianity (to the amazement of some of them!), this led them into deviations and perversions, such as Nazism, then the CIA, NATO, the Republican Party and American Imperialism. The erroneous idea was that anyone who was anti-Communist was their friend. That hatred blinded many of them to the fact that all those movements embodied hatred for Russia. And yet these people were supposedly pro-Russian! After multiple scandals in ROCOR over the last decade, involving narcissists, homosexual and pedophile clergy, this group has also become very small. Many have left it in disgust at its anti-Christian ethos and so it has in recent years become a rather irrelevant fringe group and a very great embarrassment to its Mother-Church in Moscow.

As for us, we continue to confess our loyalty to Christ and His Saints, the New Martyrs and the New Confessors, in faithfulness to St John of Shanghai and his successor the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. In 1975, we were already venerating the still uncanonised (after some 50 years!) New Martyrs and Confessors. Moscow refused to canonise them, like the two other groups – refusals all from lack of spiritual freedom. Apart from some quite exceptional individuals such as St John of Shanghai, all three groups also refused to venerate the Saints of the first millennium West when it was still Orthodox.

After the long overdue reconciliations with Moscow and apparent unity of the three ethnic Russian groups between 2007 and 2018, in the 2020s, the situation worsened sharply, as nationalism, Russian, American or French, seized hold of the leadership of the three groups. Moreover, as a result of Soviet-style nationalist centralisation, the Russian Church began to suffer from further splits with Orthodox in Estonia, the Ukraine, Moldova and Latvia. These splits spread everywhere outside the borders of the Russian Federation, among all who felt they had been treated as second-class citizens by the Centre and its emissaries. This left the Russian Church drifting rudderless and heading for shipwreck, as we continually described at that time.

Although we ordinary clergy and people were left leaderless and abandoned by politicians instead of pastors, we shall never respond to lies with lies, to slanders with slanders, to hatred with hatred. But neither shall we remain silent in the face of lies, slander, hatred, schism and sect. We shall continue to defend our canonical communion with the mainstream, all the Local Churches of the Orthodox Faith, and defend the spiritual freedom of our clergy and parishioners to be in communion with the whole Conciliar Church, to guard our Catholicity, and to keep the memory of the Saints, who are the identity of our Church. And in our case they are the identity of our England, as also of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And no foreign sectarian and schismatic interloper from the USA has impeded us from so doing.

 

Keeping to the Golden Mean: Avoiding both New Calendarism and Old Calendarism

Last week the Greek Patriarch once again compromised himself with the Pope of Rome, this time in Muslim Turkey. Many have been shocked by his ecumenism. It seems strange, since this Greek Patriarch has been doing such things for decades. And he is not the first Greek Patriarch to do such things. Many fail to understand that he has once again compromised only himself, not the Church. The Church is not some member of the clergy, a mere individual, whatever his title. Our salvation comes only through Divine Mercy following our repentance for our own sins, not through trying to save someone else. Only Christ saves.

Just because one of the Twelve was called Judas Iscariot, we do not reject the Eleven. Christ did not do so. Just because one of the apples in the basket is bad, we do not throw away all the others. To do so is puritanism, phariseeism, the heresy of the Donatists. As I remarked to a parishioner, at the Dread Last Judgement we shall have to answer for our own sins, not for the personal sins of someone else’s Patriarch. And even if he were our Patriarch, his personal sins would engage only himself, not us.

Here is the error of those who are scandalised by the deeds of such a Patriarch and join the old calendarists. Through not wishing to be in theoretical communion with such a Patriarch, they then put themselves out of actual communion with the whole Church! The old calendarists are not Orthodox, as they claim to be, since they are not in communion with the Orthodox Church, but only with a tiny sect, made up mostly of neophytes who are not rooted and grounded in the Faith.

Once again, the old calendarist group in question consists of members of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlTaXUfyL6U&ntb=1&msockid=c33b6ec0ce1e11f0b05ac565ade6baa5).

That small group which has been spawning and feeding multiple old calendarist groups ever since 1986. In 2007 the campaign, in which we played an active part, to reunite ROCOR, especially in the USA, with the Mother-Church in Moscow, so that it would never again entertain the temptation of falling away from the Orthodox mainstream, seemed to be successful. All went well for the first ten years after 2007 until about 2017. Then sectarian elements in the USA, basically Russian old calendarists, took over ROCOR.

Then ROCOR soon began to fall out of communion from the rest of the Church, most notably in December 2021 under pressure from a former old calendarist priest, from another part of the Russian Orthodox Church! To quote the Book of Proverbs and the Second Epistle of the Apostle Peter, the dog returned to its vomit. When this became known, six parishes, twelve clergy and some 5,000 people, well over half of the ROCOR Diocese in England, warned the governing body of ROCOR in New York. However, that body, the American Synod, backed the schism. Thus we left the newly schismatic ROCOR, so that we would be able to remain in communion with the mainstream, the Church of God.

The only confusing matter here is that the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow itself did not take any action against the uncanonical and schismatic actions of ROCOR. For ROCOR, by the Act of Canonical Communion signed by ROCOR in 2007 (I was present), was supposed to be in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. This was why in 2006 my friend, Fr Alexander Lebedev, had visited the tiny old calendarist groups in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania to make it clear to them that no part of ROCOR was any longer in communion with them (our Western European part of ROCOR had never been in communion with them anyway).

It has been suggested that the inconsistent policy of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow in this matter was connected with political affairs connected with the Ukraine. Once the military operations in the Ukraine have been concluded, we can only hope that Moscow will discipline ROCOR and bring it to obey the canons. However, much of ROCOR will refuse to do this and break away from the Church into full-blown old calendarist schism.

 

How Could the Russian Church Break Free of its Soviet Past?

Save me, O Lord, for there is no longer any that is godly; for the truth fails from among the sons of men.

Psalm 11, 2 (Septuagint) /12, 1

 

The title ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ was ‘Made in the USSR’, under Stalin just over eighty years ago. The title refers to the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has been involved in a great many divisive scandals from the outset. These have involved every level of lack of Christianity, from ignorance, financial corruption, theft, alcoholism and moral depravity, from Russia to Budapest, from London to Paris, to, more recently, the bullying narcissistic schismatic and the international poker-playing Metropolitan. In the first case, all the ROCOR bishops supported the schism, whereas in the second case, Moscow removed him.

In the last fifty years we have seen the Russian Church destroyed by one Russian nationalist bishop after another, and this with an old flock that utterly rejected atheist Communism and chose Church independence outside Moscow’s jurisdiction. And today the same has happened, but with a flock which was more recently assembled from Kazakhstan, the Baltic States and, above all, from the Ukraine and Moldova, who as Non-Russians were treated like third-class citizens. Will they too reject Moscow’s jurisdiction, just like the post-1917 emigration?

Is it all a deliberate attempt at suicide, or just the nightmarish incompetence of choosing the worst possible episcopal candidates? How can the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church reform and revert to being quite simply the administration of the Orthodox Church of Russia, as it historically was? We suggest eight stages:

 

  1. Abandon the Soviet legacy and rename itself ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’. The Patriarch and his administration could move physically to the New Jerusalem Monastery, founded by Patriarch Nikon in 1656 near the River Istra outside Moscow, and which I visited in 2007. On founding it, Patriarch Nikon recruited a number of monks of non-Russian origin as monks for the monastery, as it was intended to represent the multinational Orthodoxy of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Here is the true vocation of the Russian Orthodox clergy, not in corruption, depravity, nationalist politics and war, but in pastoral care, in love for all Orthodox people. For why else did God grant the Orthodox world the potential protection of by far the largest and richest country in the world? Was it so that it could become a bastion of racist nationalism? Or to become atheised and militarised Stalinist State puppets? Or to become a clerical caste of bureaucrats obsessed with protocols and ritualism? Or to become greedy, grasping capitalists and mini-oligarchs?
  1. It restores communion with all other canonical (therefore not the present fake Church in the Ukraine, known as the OCU) Local Churches and refrocks all the clergy, who had been uncanonically ‘defrocked’ for purely political and nationalistic reasons since January 2022.
  2. It grants Autocephaly to the Church in the New Ukraine (that is, to the Church for Ukrainians in the Ukrainian-speaking Ukraine) and to the Church in Belarus, and founds the Baltic Orthodox Church (for Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Finland) and the African Orthodox Church for Sub-Saharan Africa. (This would leave mainly Muslim North Africa to the jurisdiction of the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Coptic Church and the Churches of Ethiopia and Eritrea).
  3. It grants permission to all Orthodox in Moldova the right to join the Autonomous Bessarabian Metropolia of the Romanian Orthodox Church, and to all Moldovans in the Diaspora to join the Romanian Church, if they so wish.
  4. It reaffirms the Autocephaly given in 1971 to American Orthodox of the OCA, modifying its name to the NAOC (Northern American Orthodox Church), defining its territory as the USA, Canada, Greenland and the offshore islands of Bermuda and St Pierre et Miquelon. It then invites all other Orthodox in that territory to join it, unless they are still much attached to their countries of origin.
  5. It sells all other property belonging to the Patriarchs of Moscow and uses the receipts for missionary work in these new Local Churches, especially in poor Africa.
  6. It defrocks all financially, sexually or ecumenically corrupt bishops and priests.
  7. It closes the ecumenist DECR (Department of External Church Relations, in Russian OVTsS) and replaces it with a Department of Inter-Orthodox Relations (DIOR, or in Russian, OMPO).

 

If only one of these suggestions were followed, it would be a miracle. The implementation of any of them would in any case be to take one step closer to the long-awaited Great Council of the whole Church. There the Catholicity of the Church could at last be affirmed, instead of being denied by narrow nationalism, Russian, Greek or any other.

The Times of London, Monday 3 November 2025

 

The leading article, written by Jennifer Kennedy, and comparing the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church, was published on Page 34 of The Times of the above date. It contains many factual mistakes (there are 16, not 17, Local Orthodox Churches, and the Russian Orthodox Church has for the moment 145 million members, not 95 million). It also contains much Russophobic propaganda and disinformation (the absurd description of an ‘all-out invasion of the Ukraine’ by Russia and the non-existent Russian backing of the Non-EU and highly popular candidate for President of Romania) and other ridiculous tropes. These have been as usual reproduced and paid for on State orders by Western propaganda mouthpieces, such as The Times.

However, the article is correct in its description of those who in England left the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia for the Romanian Orthodox Church (ourselves) – 12 clergy and 5,000 people. However, this took place nearly four years ago and not because of the new Cathedral in Bucharest. Moreover, none of this was at all because of disillusionment, but because of our persecution by the Russian Church authorities, a persecution for resisting schism. This was carried out by a local bishop, despite the warnings of Patriarch Kyrill not to pursue this persecution, and the lies and slanders that followed.

And there is no rivalry between the Russian and Romanian Churches; the new Cathedral of the People’s Salvation in Bucharest is a monument to the triumph of Christ over the dictatorships of both Fascism and Communism which Romania suffered in the last century. Nevertheless, the article is correct in asserting that certain leading bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church have tried to fuse Orthodoxy with Russian nationalism. And this did indeed alienate millions of lifelong Orthodox, Ukrainians, Moldovans, English, French and many others, including even some well-known Russians. They fused the spiritual with crude nationalism at their peril and they are now reaping its bitter fruits, which have so discredited the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church. The once Persecuted Church has indeed become a Persecuting Church.

 

Questions and Answers August 2025

Church Unity 

Q: How can we arrive at Church Unity, when all sixteen Local Churches are at last in communion with one another?

A: I can answer this on the basis of the achievement of Russian Church unity (2007-2021), in which I helped a little. This was achieved by the compromises made by all sides, which got rid of the extremes of the three Russian jurisdictions. The MP had to renounce, at least for a time, Sergianist Sovietism, ROCOR had to renounce, at least for a time, Russian Fascism, and Rue Daru had to renounce Western Liberalism. It will be the same in the question of the unity of the whole Church. Greek, Russian and other nationalisms (Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian and others) are responsible for the present divisions. Who will have the courage to renounce such nationalism?

A word of warning, however. Since 2021 when Russian Church unity was achieved, some powerful elements have renounced their compromises and gone back to their extremes, so unity has been lost. Thus, the fanatical and schismatic US convert elements in ROCOR broke communion with Rue Daru and centralising MP nationalists are pushing the Church back towards Stalinist Sovietism. Through nationalist fanaticism and schism the Persecuted Church has become once more the Persecuting Church, the Church of the Pharisees, thus scandalously renouncing the legacy of the New Martyrs and Confessors. And so regained internal Church unity has been lost, even inside the Russian Church.

Conversion to Orthodoxy and the Non-Orthodox World

Q: Why have so few Western Europeans joined and remained faithful to the Orthodox Church? I mean at most it can only be a few tens of thousands out of over 470 million.

A: In order to become a real and not a superficial Orthodox Christian, it is no good admiring ‘mystical’ monks, ‘pretty’ icons, ‘lovely’ singing, or the ‘traditional’ liturgy. That is all emotional, superficial. You have to renounce, spiritually, the anti-Christian historical and contemporary acts committed by your national elites in acts of repentance. This means renouncing blind nationalism, for we are called to be not of this world – blind nationalism, the attachment to artificial States and elites, cannot be part of our Faith. This is true for all nationalities.

For example, if you are an Orthodox Russian, you venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors who were persecuted by Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet regime, which you therefore renounce, as well as renouncing the anti-Church acts of the pre-Revolutionary governments which go back to the seventeenth century and the resulting Old Ritualist schism of that time. Then you renounce the serfdom copied and introduced by the Western-style Russian aristocracy, which led to the anti-aristocrat Pugachov revolt, suppressed by the German Empress Catherine II, and later to the 1917 revolt. This is renouncing parts of your ‘national tradition’ also.

If you are from Western Europe, you have to go back much further, rejecting not just the atheistic secularist woke modernism of contemporary post-Protestantism or post-Catholicism, but also the imperialism and colonialism of the nineteenth century, the iconoclasm of the Protestants, the Popish heresy of the filioque, which claimed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Bishop of Rome, introduced feudalism with its castle and knight protection rackets and the barbarian plundering and massacring of the Crusades with their ideology of racial superiority over others. The vast majority of Western Europeans are unable to do this, consciously or, far more often, unconsciously. Yet, such repentance for a culture gone wrong is at the heart of conversion to Orthodoxy.

Q: You appear to be opposed to converts. Is that so?

A: Not at all! I am opposed only to crazy converts, the pathological types, as they are called in French, especially when they are made priests, or, horror of horrors, bishops! The downfall of ROCOR was not because of convert clergy, but crazy convert clergy.

Q: Where do moralism and intellectualism come from?

A: They are both deviations which come from a lack of spirituality, from those who have ‘quenched the Spirit’. Moralism generally produces conservatism and then phariseeism. Intellectualism generally produces liberalism and then homosexuality.

Q: Why should the Church be opposed to tithing when there was a Church of the Tithes in Kiev?

A: ‘Desyatinnaja Tserkov’, ‘the Church of the Tithes’, is a well-known church in Kiev in the history of Ancient Rus, precisely because it was unique, built by tithes imposed on rich people. No other examples of an Orthodox church built by tithes are recorded. It is always quoted by US converts from Protestantism in order to justify the tithes they want to impose on Orthodoxy. Tithes are a practice of the Old Testament, beloved by Protestant sects, and are not part of the practice of the Orthodox Church, except in exceptional missionary circumstances, and only then when they can be enforced on the rich by the secular authorities, as they were in Kiev. In other words, the Church is not opposed to tithes as such, it is opposed to them being made compulsory.

Q: If the Pope were found to be a homosexual or a pedophile, there would be an existential crisis in the Roman Catholic world. When we know that some leaders of Orthodox Churches are such, why is there not some huge crisis inside them?

A: The short answer is because we are not clericalists. In other words, the Head of our Church is Christ, not some man, who by some sort of magic, has inherited his title from St Peter. The sins of others, including of Patriarchs, are their affair for their personal repentance. The Church goes on without them. The Church belongs to all, not to some mere clerical elite. They are here today, gone tomorrow.

Q: Are you shocked by the election of a new Protestant Archbishop of Wales who is a lesbian?

A: Stop the hypocrisy! That is none of our Orthodox business, it is theirs. Our business is that there are so many effeminate, homosexual Orthodox bishops, notorious for persecuting happily married parish priests, for their contempt for women and children, for their spiritually empty intellectualism and for their avarice. One small part of the Russian Church is increasingly looking like a Church of pedophiles and perverts, who ‘defrock’ all whistleblowers.

All these vices have the same origin – in their faithless lack of love. If Orthodox complain, then in the future, all Non-Orthodox engaged in ecumenical relations with Orthodox should demand to speak only to Orthodox clerics who are heterosexuals. The clericalist mafia always justifies itself. But the people know and they massively followed the ‘defrocked’ clergy, who before being ‘defrocked’ had transferred to a canonical, non-schismatic Local Church, where they concelebrate with all other Local Churches.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you compass sea and land to make one convert, and when he is made, you make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves (Matt: 23:15)

It would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and to be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble (Lk: 17:2)

Q: What is the attitude of the Orthodox Church towards black people?

A: The same as its attitude to white people, or people of any other colour. All people were created in God’s image. In any case, Christ in His human nature was olive-skinned, not white. Look at any icon.

The only case of racism I have every come across was a white American convert bishop who said when George Floyd was murdered by a white policeman in the USA in 2020 that, ‘it does not matter because he was only a black’. Moreover, he said this in front of a mixed-race young woman, who never had anything to do with him again and when we left him, she was elated. And yet such a hateful bishop claimed to be canonical. It was one of the last straws, as he also publicly proclaimed that he disliked Greeks and Romanians and only half-liked Moldovans. That was in front of representatives of all those nationalities, to their faces. It really is time for those who consecrate new bishops to make sure that they are Christians first.

Q: How do you feel about no longer being in the Russian Church?

A: The only important thing for me is to belong to the Orthodox Church. The fact that a Russophobic agent, inspired by NATO, chased me and thousands of others out of the Russian Church and into another Local Church, in my own case after 47 years of faithfulness, is not on my conscience, but on the conscience of the authorities of the Russian Church who allowed this to happen for purely political reasons. This will go down in history. And I am quoting a Russian bishop who said precisely this to me.

Q: How can you belong to a Church that uses the new calendar when you use the old calendar?

A: Probably because I have always belonged to such a Church!

I distinguish between the dogmatic and the pastoral. I belong to a Local Church, just like the Russian Church also, that allows both calendars, according to pastoral need – as the old, pre-crazy convert, ROCOR also used to allow both. So many schisms and sects have been founded by confusions between issues that are dogmatic and issues that are merely pastoral, between primary issues and secondary issues. We reject that confusion.

Q: As you are an English nationalist, what do you think of illegal immigration? 

A: I am not an English nationalist. Nationalism is an ugly thing, as we can see from inhuman nationalist demonstrations, which create fear among poor refugees who have been chased out of their countries by Western-created wars. Nationalists are Little Englanders; Globalists are Great Britishers. I am a Great Englander. A patriot. I am English, more exactly East Anglian, and above all I am an Orthodox (not a heterodox) Christian.

In other words, I am a patriot of England, the real England of the saints and poets, of the spiritually sensitive. I am also a patriot of the real France before that horrible atheism began in 1789, and I am a patriot of the real Russia before corrupt aristocrats seized power and introduced serfdom and then when power was seized by atheists, Leninists and Stalinists. I have nothing in common with Masonic Russia, Fascist Russia or Stalinist Russia.

As for illegal immigration, I think it is illegal.

Q: Is it normal for Orthodox to write ‘the unworthy’ in front of your name?

A: Not at all. This is the false piety of pride of some converts. We are all unworthy and we know it. There is no need to display it. Stay modest, do not become proud, even of your unworthiness. Stop boasting!

The Russian Church 

Q: Since only 1-3% of the Orthodox population go to church in Russia, how can it be called ‘Orthodox Russia’?

A: This way of thinking, that going to a building on a Sunday makes you a Christian, is purely Protestant, moralising and abstract. Orthodox Christianity is our way of life, our culture, our values, our self-identification and nothing else.

Q: Where in your view did the Russian Church go wrong?

A: In 2003 His Holiness Patriarch Alexiy II, whom I met in 2007, proposed to open a multinational Exarchate and Metropolia in Western Europe, centred in Paris, that would be the foundation of a future Autocephalous Western European Orthodox Church. Who here could not go along with that? We all did. However, in recent years that idea has been abolished in favour of a nationalist Russian Metropolia, on paper centred in Paris, but in reality in Moscow. It increasingly excludes all Non-Russians, including Ukrainians and Moldovans, let alone native Western Europeans, from itself.

This is exactly the same mistake, made decades ago, as that of the Greek nationalist Patriarchate of Constantinople. It seems that some people never learn! This is not only the complete renunciation of the apostolic call and promise of Christ in the last chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel, and also of Patriarch Alexiy II and of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. When the Russian Church renounces its saints on account of the same nationalism, bureaucracy, militaristic rigidity as the Greeks suffer from, then we know that we have to go elsewhere to live Church life.

Where did it all go wrong? Since the repose of Patriarch Alexiy II, especially from about 2016 on. Orthodox England rejoices in the Orthodoxy of Russia, but not in the rest.

Illustrations of this new political and anti-pastoral mentality include charging 100 roubles for holy water (as now in one Siberian Metropolia) or the recent Russian Church scandal in a former Soviet Republic. Here a youngish hieromonk, the secretary of the local bishop (who is a well-known active homosexual), asked to be defrocked in order to get married. He was granted his request. Some time later the defrocked man went to church with his wife, only to find a priest who, looking directly at him, said to all ‘some people here will not be saved’. This is sadly typical of the pure phariseeism that has become the norm in a few parts of the Russian Church in recent years. It has nothing to do with the Russian Church of the Emigration and of the New Martyrs and Confessors.

Q: Why do we not hear about Sergianism in the Russian Church any more?

A: I think we do hear about it, only much less. This is because it was always a purely political, anti-Communist, accusation from the Cold War, promoted by the CIA as a ‘heresy’. It was never a heresy, just a sin that come about from human weakness and cowardice, resisted by the vast majority of Russian Orthodox, and affecting only a few at the administrative head of the Russian Church.

The nature of this sin is to say in words, and sometimes in actions, that whatever the State, Communist or not Communist, proclaims, is true. This is known as erastianism and all the national Protestant Churches in Northern Europe have always suffered from it. However, we find it in the leadership of the Russian Church because since the age of Peter I, they have been protestantised in this respect. It could be said that the Russian Church reflects the error of the Church of England, whose bishops are all appointed by the Prime Minister of Great Britain and dare not contradict the Establishment, from which they profit and draw prestige.

Q: Why is the Russian Church sometimes very rigid, with many rules and regulations?

A: Firstly, the Russian State Church mentality, above all today with its militarisation, means that sometimes people give the impression that the Russian Church is an Army, not a Church. Secondly, neophytes/converts like to reduce everything to lists of rules on dress and outward conduct. This is not the Church, but a convert fantasy. Comparisons with other Local Churches immediately indicate how some are going astray from the mainstream. Moreover, the authentic émigré traditions of the Russian Church were of the mainstream.

Q: The life of St Antony the Roman states that he sailed from Italy to Novgorod on a stone. Do you really believe this?

A: I believe that he sailed from Italy to Novgorod on a merchant’s ship and at night he slept in a stone coffin, which he took with him. Many monks at that time slept in coffins, either wooden or, especially in the south of Europe, stone.

The Ukraine

Q: What do you think the war between Russia and the Ukraine is really about?

A: This conflict is not a war between Russia and the Ukraine. It is a proxy war between Russia and the Western world (the US and its Western European NATO vassals), which is taking place on a small part of the territory of the Soviet Ukraine and on all the other post-Soviet territories, where the US is trying to encircle Russia. In other words, it is a war between two different ideologies, between Globalism, the Western Oligarchic System of the 10%, and Nationalism, the National Systems of the Peoples of the 90%. The racist and Nazi West could not care less about the Ukrainians themselves, in fact, as they openly proclaim, they can ‘die to the last Ukrainian’ in defence of Western economic interests. As a result, the Russians are slowly going to demilitarise and denazify NATO, and not just the Ukraine.

This means conflict between the unipolar world of the West-centric woke ideology, led by the atheistic USA against the multipolar world of traditional cultures (cultures based on spiritual and moral values), led by Russia. The latter founded BRICS, an alliance for the co-operation of the multipolar world of sovereign countries, which all respect faith or morality (traditional forms of Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism). After military victory, the immediate task of Russia will be to refound and restore a Sovereign country with its own identity within its natural (= Non-Soviet, historical) borders, centred around Kiev, without its oligarchs. Only then will there be peace.

Q: Do you think the CIA is paying ROCOR for its anti-Russian stance on the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: I don’t know.

As you know, the ultra-right-wing Grabbe faction received large amounts of cash for ROCOR from the CIA from the 1960s right up until 1991, when it was abruptly cut off, as the Soviet Union had been dissolved. Today the ROCOR Synod in New York is dominated by Americans, one of whom has a father, who held a senior position in the CIA and NATO, and is a great lover of Tony Blair. The CIA loves to have dirt on such bishops.

Among the others, who all speak fluent American, are those who have received support from the American administration (even a Cathedral and other properties in former West Germany), which is why it is known as the American Synod. Since for many in the US administration the Russian Federation is Public Enemy No 1, maybe in a few years’ time your speculation about the virulently anti-Russian statements of most of its bishops will be shown to be correct. However, of this there is no proof at the present time, all is circumstantial, so you may be wrong.

Q: You have been criticised for being political. What would you answer?

A: I have often spoken about politics, but not about party politics, probably because I support no political party. We have to speak about politics, when one Greek nationalist Patriarch is installed by the CIA and another Patriarch refuses to say anything which counters Russian nationalist politics. Both are examples of those who put local nationalism above Christ. We are not of the world, but we do live in the world, and like the Church Fathers we have to show that we understand who is who in this world, who we can support and who not. We refuse, as ever, to work for the CIA (or for its branches in the Brussels Politburo and MI6) or for the FSB. Naivety and cowardice are not solutions! We have to be aware, wise but gentle, as Christ instructed His disciples. The fact is that all divisions from the Church are caused by politics, nationalist or left and right, CIA or KGB.

 

Church and State: Lessons from History for the Present Day

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

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

05 August 11:06

Author: Nazar Golovko

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the Church ceases to be the Body of Christ

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

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

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

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

The Church and the Authorities: harm or benefit?

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

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

As a result:

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

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

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

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

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

Church and Revolution

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

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

Besides, let us not forget the failed seminarian Stalin.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

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

Why?

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

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

A Fatal Union

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

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

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

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

What about today?

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

But—

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

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

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

 

Questions and Answers July 2025

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

Q: What for you is the True Faith?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What then is the future of ROCOR?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: When will the war in the Ukraine end?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Are the media censored in the UK?

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

 

 

 

 

125 Years of Putting Off the Inevitable

Introduction: What If?

The First World War was triggered by great imperial rivalries, above all those between Britain and Germany, and financed by the big banks, centred in London and New York, and encouraged by greedy arms merchants. They were helped by French and Austro-Hungarian revanchism and the feelings of the oppressed small peoples, the Serbian, Irish, Polish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croat etc. The unjust outcome at Versailles in 1919 made the Second World War inevitable. And its injustices in turn made inevitable the collapse of the USSR, the wars in Yugoslavia and now in the Ukraine. Yet, peace could have been arrived at, perhaps in the Tsar’s Hague in 1900, without the needless bloodshed of tens of millions. For the unviable Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires would have collapsed anyway and the other colonial empires, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, German and Belgian, could have dissolved peacefully.

Towards Today’s World

Imperial Russia could have decentralised then, as it did in any case between 1917 and 1991. The world would then inevitably and peacefully have seen what we see today: an economically German-dominated Western Europe, a Russian-dominated North Asia (Eurasia), a Chinese-dominated East Asia, an Indian-dominated South Asia, an Arab-dominated West Asia (‘the Middle East’), and a US-dominated Northern America. In the Global South, Latin America, Africa and Oceania would all have gone their own ways, free of colonial tyranny and ruthless imperialist exploitation. Only because the banks and the arms dealers did not want it, did it not happen then. Just as today in the Ukraine, so then there plenty who did not want peace. However, none of this ‘what if’, suppositional, counterfactual history addresses the real situation today in 2025. How could the problems of the present be resolved, despite the huge errors of the past?

If there is to be peace in Europe, there can be no more Western support for the Fascist regime in Kiev, neither military, nor financial (nor for the Fascist regimes in the Baltics, Scandinavia, Germany, France and the UK). The ‘Ukrainians’ must be freed of the regime that has been massively killing its own men as proxies to die for the USA. Then the Russian Federation would be able to create a new, smaller, but historically-based, and not Soviet-fantasy Ukraine, with the nine provinces of Crimea and the south and east returning to Russia, the four and a half south-western provinces returning to Poland (two and a half provinces), Hungary (one province) and Romania (one province), and the remaining half of the old Soviet Ukraine becoming historic Kievan Rus. That could be its new name with a new flag, as the name ‘Ukraine’ and its flag, Austrian inventions of the century before last, are absurd.

If it created peace, the bankrupt USA could withdraw its forces from all over Europe and close its bases there, and the anachronism of NATO could at last disappear, saving the USA trillions of dollars. It should have disappeared on 25 February 1991, when the Warsaw Pact disappeared. Similarly, if there is to be peace in West Asia, there can be no more US (and UK) support for the Fascist regime in Israel (even if that means that those compromised by the Mossad Epstein, are outed). Israeli Zionism has largely bankrupted the US through the futile wars of the US and its defeats in those wars. Finally, Taiwan would at last be free to return to China, and so Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia could save hundreds of billions of dollars in needless offence (‘defence’) spending. And the USA could withdraw its troops and close its bases there too, saving it hundreds of billions of wasted dollars.

The Russian Church

If there is to be peace in the Church, a new Patriarch would have to be elected in Moscow. This would be he who would restore communion with the Patriarchate Constantinople, except with the invaders under it on Russian canonical territory, and begin talks with the Patriarchate of Alexandria about its jurisdiction in Africa. Then the ball would be in Constantinople’s court to elect a new and at last politically free Patriarch. The full Council of Bishops in Moscow could grant autocephaly to the twelve and a half provinces of Kievan Rus, also allowing the Kievan Church to control its Diaspora. Then it could grant autocephaly to Moldova, in concert with the Romanian Church, in exchange for the return of North Bukovina to Romania, retiring the four discredited Moscow bishops in Moldova, refrocking all those defrocked for political reasons and allowing the Moldovan Church to control its Diaspora.

Autocephaly could also be granted to the Belarusian Church, the Baltic Orthodox Church (covering Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland) and to the Hungarian Orthodox Church, which would be based on the 600+ parishes of the old Transcarpathia, the province transferred back to Hungary from the Soviet Ukraine. The already Autocephalous Orthodox Church in America (OCA) could at last rename itself OCNA (Orthodox Church of Northern America), in return receiving into itself the forty or so parishes in Northern America at present under Moscow, on condition that Bishop Alexander Belja head the new ‘Kievan and Russian Diocese’ of the OCNA. Moscow should dissolve the anachronistic and largely schismatic Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), with its Russian parishes in the USA and Canada joining the OCNA in two dioceses, of east and west. Those who refused would go off to sects, as usual.

The remaining ROCOR parishes, in Western Europe and Australia, and its few small communities still left in Latin America and the Caribbean, could be handed over to Moscow, as part of three newly Autonomous Metropolias, namely those of Western Europe, Latin America, and Oceania. Internally, Moscow’s Soviet-founded, ecumenist Department of External Relations could be transformed into the Department for Inter-Orthodox Friendship. Bishop-bureaucrats should either become diocesan bishops or else be ‘retired’. There would be no place for ecumenists and ‘cardinal-metropolitans’ in the truly post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church, which should drop the Soviet title of ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ for the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem.’ Finally, discredited bishops should be ‘retired’ and all priests and deacons absurdly defrocked for political reasons since 2022 should be refrocked and restored.

Conclusion: In the Church

As by far the largest Local Church, eight times bigger than the second largest, a de-Sovietised Russian Church has a special responsibility to the other at present fifteen Local Orthodox Churches, not least to a de-CIA-ised Constantinople. Only such actions as the above could help gather together all the other Local Churches in an Inter-Orthodox Council. Here there would be one overriding topic of discussion: the uncanonical Orthodox Diaspora situation, the inevitable resolution to which has been put off for over a century only by politics. The paralysis of the Church from the Soviet age, when Constantinople was used as a Cold War pawn against Russia, and today’s paralysis from the Second Cold War, also launched by the USA, must end. And the Soviet centralisation of the Russian Church must end. There is hope for the future, but only in a Church at last free of both Soviet and CIA mentalities and interference.

4/17 July 2025, The Imperial Martyrs

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Paris the Cathedral of the Paris Archdiocese.

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

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

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

The two ROCOR convents in Jerusalem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Latest ROCOR Scandal – This Time in Australia

https://news-pravda.com/world/2025/06/29/1477487.html

It is with great sadness that we have heard from multiple sources (a google search confirms all) of the latest Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) scandal, this time in Australia. There it has made all the main newspapers and media, though of course it will probably not make the largely ROCOR-run, anti-Greek, and heavily censored ‘orthochristian’ website.

Indeed, the Australian story has done nothing for the American Synod (ROCOR), which had already been publicly shamed in a court case for its blatant lies about Fr Alexander Belya and his Vicariate, as shown by the very expensive court case which it lost, and also for its blatant lies about the ‘Colchester Diocese’ in England. Here ROCOR lost half its Western European diocese through its anti-canonical, anti-Moscow schism, racist and sectarian persecution, slander and greed.

As a result, in all the nineteen churches combined of its so-called ‘Western European Diocese’, it is doubtful if on an average Sunday there are even 1,500 people inside them, many of which it does not even own. The ROCOR scandal in Geneva, with the vicious persecution and expulsion of the most faithful of the old ROCOR, all disciples of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, also remains unresolved. The Old Pre-Revolutionary Tradition ROCOR has been killed off by the New Convert ROCOR. St John of Shanghai has ben put on trial and suspended by the American Synod for a second time.

Now in Australia, after the sentencing of the ROCOR pedophile priest from Bombala, publicly known about for over seven years, though in the 1990s they had wanted to make him a bishop (!), another cleric, Fr Boris Ignatievsky, has made a shocking statement typical of ROCOR clericalism: ‘The sheep must not judge the shepherds’. Several of the Russian ‘gyprocker’ clergy in Australia, have already been responsible for scandals, including alcoholism, infidelity and wife-beating. Little wonder that our dear friend in Australia, a priest of integrity, Abbot Sergei Shatrov, left monasticism and the priesthood and became a taxi-driver. (Fr Michael Boyko, another Jordanville graduate, also left the priesthood and became a miner).

It all comes after the arrest and court case involving the notorious Fr Seraphim (Scuratov) in England back in the 1980s (the one whom they also wanted to make a bishop!), and the equally disgusting sexual scandals in the USA, in Boston, Blanco, Jordanville, Platina and Virginia. In the latter case a ROCOR monk left after being approached by a pervert-monk, went to his ROCOR bishop to talk of his trouble and then got touched up by the no less pervert-bishop, who claims to be ‘canonical’. (The monk threw off his monastic garb and walked away in disgust). Is all their monasticism composed of pedophiles? The half a dozen still active bishops of ROCOR (a generation ago, there were twenty – there are several who have ‘retired’ with disgust at the manner in which the new American Synod operates) do not know what to do.

The American ROCOR Archbishop for Australia, a former traditionalist Roman Catholic, rebaptised into ROCOR, is now spreading traditionalist Roman Catholic-style anti-birth control booklets, also to the scandal of the faithful. Russians have no truck with this. The pastoral crisis is in full swing here too. The ROCOR policy of sending out convert American bishops, who have no idea of the Russian Orthodox pastoral and cultural realities outside US convert ghettos, to the ROCOR colonies overseas, has been shown to be a catastrophic mistake.

Meanwhile, at their headquarters in Moscow, certain senior metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church (I know two of them, who informed me so) are thinking of replacing the ROCOR bishops with their own. They wanted ROCOR to be an embassy Church for them to improve their image abroad. In reality, ROCOR has made their image worse. Moscow is just waiting for the key old one to die, for he ‘zasidelsja’, has stayed on for too long. Most of the increasingly small numbers of ROCOR laypeople who are left would follow Moscow bishops. As for many former ROCOR clergy and faithful, they are now scattered as refugees from gross injustice, in the Patriarchates of Constantinople or Romania.

Moreover, both Patriarchates are keen to take even more of those fleeing the anti-canonical and schismatic actions of the rebaptising and anti-family ROCOR Synod. Therefore, they will take them all without letters of leave, which have no value or importance, as the new ROCOR is a schismatic group, which continues to persecute, in the harshest of ways, faithful clergy and people.

Scandals always accompany the decadence that comes before the end. It is just another nail in the coffin of the corpse of what was even twenty years ago a Russian Emigration Church with a largely respected and even glorious history. Sadly, a Persecuted Church has over the last generation become a Persecuting Church. All we can say to all is: Keep well away from ROCOR, approach it at your peril, for the old ROCOR is dead, killed by crazy converts, with their sexual and financial scandals.

To repeat the words of Fr Boris Ignatievsky: ‘Condemnation is a form of pride’. But the American Synod has been condemning the good and faithful for decades. Now it condemns the parents of outraged sons, who denounce pedophile clergy. Presumably then, in their view, pedophilia is a form of humility?

One commentator has asked: How did the Bombala pedophile get away with it for so long? All I know is that he had a terrible reputation when he was in Jerusalem in the 1980s. And all I can say is that either the bishops concerned are stupid, poor judges of character, or else, less charitably, they operate just like the Roman Catholics, as a gay mafia, protecting their own. One or the other. Sad, but true. The need for an Inter-Orthodox Council becomes ever more obvious to us, though apparently not to the majority of the bishops.