Category Archives: Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Russian Nationalism Loses Control of the Russian Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

A Russian Tragedy of Errors

 

Introduction: Three Fragments of the Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. ROCOR: Orthodox or Right-Wing?

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Paris: Orthodox or Left-Wing?

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

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

Conclusion: Disloyalty to the Testament of the Tsar

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

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

Notes:

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

 

Ideology Versus Faith and the Post-Ukrainian Russian Church

Introduction: Ideology versus Faith

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

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

A Church of Ideology

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

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

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

A Church of Faith

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

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

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

Faith Always Wins

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

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

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

Conclusion: Towards the Future

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

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

 

 

Tragedy in the Collective West and Tragedy in the Russian Orthodox Church

A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power. It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty, which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.

Walter Lippman, US political thinker and journalist, Congressional Record, Vol III, Part 7, 1965

Introduction: The Rise of the Collective West

In 1066 the Papally-backed bandits of North-Western Europe, Normans, Bretons and Flemings, led by Duke William the Bastard, invaded England to oust the ‘schismatic’ English. They were greatly helped by English traitors placed there by the half-Norman King Edward the Confessor. It was one of the first acts of aggression of the Collective West, which was then being assembled and united by its ideological and infallible head, the Pope of Rome. This ‘Crusade’ was followed by other Papally-backed ‘Crusades’, which were also acts of gangsterism and thuggery by the same Collective West. Those Crusades massacred tens of thousands not only in the Holy Land, but also along the Baltic. Here knights and mercenaries of various Western nationalities took delight in murdering the ‘schismatic’ Russians and other Non-Catholics. In the following centuries Poles, Lithuanians, Swedes and Germans took part in further attacks on Russia and in Papally-backed efforts at regime-change, most notably in the Time of the Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century.

However, the greatest examples of violent aggression against Russia by the Collective West were the campaigns of the Papally-crowned Napoleon in 1812 and of the nominally Catholic Hitler in 1941. Napoleon’s aggression was multinational and, indeed, the Russian rout of Napoleon is still celebrated there as a victory over the ‘Twelve Nations’. In 1854, the French, joined by the Ottomans, British and Sardinians, invaded Russia again, this time mainly through the Crimea, the Cardinal of Paris calling it a ‘Crusade against the schismatics’. It was another joint effort of the West. Then in 1914 Germany and Austro-Hungary also attacked Russia. In 1941, having learned nothing from Napoleon’s defeat, Hitler also invaded Russia with an Army of just as many nationalities, but whose losses were many times huger than those of Napoleon. Nearly all of them died and this time instead of troops from the Russian Empire liberating Paris as in 1814, in 1945 troops from the Soviet Empire liberated Berlin and this time stayed there for over forty years.

Today the USA, of which NATO is only a puppet, continues to try and dominate Eurasia. However, the USA island, like Britain before it, is only a maritime power and cannot fight on the Eurasian landmass, but can only attempt to divide and rule it. This is why US allies are on islands like Britain, Japan and Taiwan, on coastal strips like Israel and on peninsulas like South Korea and Western Europe. As soon as it tries to penetrate the Eurasian landmass, it is resisted by huge land-based forces, like those of Russia and China. And because the USA is trying to weaken and destroy Russia through the Ukraine and China through Taiwan, both those countries have now allied themselves to defend each other from the USA.

Some modify the statement that ‘history repeats itself’ and declare rather that ‘history echoes’. Whatever the case, geography does not change. Land-based Russia dominates Northern Eurasia and the maritime island empires, Britain and after it the USA, are still trying to destroy Russia from the sea, whether from the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Ocean, the Black Sea or the Pacific Ocean. The Western ideology of superiority and indispensable exceptionalism remains just as jealous as ever of those who have lived for up to a millennium and a half in the eastern half of Europe. These are the lands of the East Slav peoples, of ‘Rus’, represented above all by the Russians, with their rich agricultural land and abundant mineral resources. Today the Collective West continues, as before, to attack Russia along its northern and southern flanks, with the fantasy of making ‘NATO lakes’ in the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, but also in headlong frontal warfare in proxy warfare with bloody consequences for the hoodwinked Ukrainians, who are simply being used and abused.

However, even the very unpopular elites of the Collective West (Macron and Scholz at about 17%, and Sunak at 9%) are increasingly divided on this issue. This division is very complex, as the forty nations of the western half of Europe are divided by different views and experiences. But all those elites have committed suicide because they have invested so heavily in the lost Ukraine project. Now the US is abandoning the Ukraine and ultimately Europe too. There only ambition now is to stretch out the Ukrainian tragedy until after the US elections. The situation is like that in Britain in the Year 410. Then the Roman Emperor Honorius replied to a request for assistance from Britain against pagan attacks, telling the Roman cities to see to their own defence. It was a tacit acceptance of British self-government. No forces could be spared to protect distant Britain. Roman control of Britannia was entirely lost. So too the declining and bankrupt USA is abandoning Western Europe. Like a pet dog abandoned by his master, the pet dog no longer knows what to do.

NATO – Today’s Collective West

Europe is divided. Apart from the fact that a few European countries are not even members of the US NATO organisation, that is, of today’s Collective West, or else are not members of its political and economic wing, the US-controlled EU, there are those in the western half of Europe who simply want good relations with Russia. Here there stands out Hungary and it has been joined by Slovakia. Remarkable is the aggressive, colonial attitude of the very unpopular Czech regime of Pavel (now more ferociously anti-Russian than even the Americans – perhaps overcompensating for his Communist past?) towards Slovakia. This is why the Slovaks divorced from the patronising Czech elite over thirty years ago. These two countries will not get on until the that elite is removed by the Czech people. More or less openly, Serbia and minorities in every country in the western half of Europe, from Moldova to Germany, from Cyprus to Montenegro, from Bulgaria to Italy, from Austria to Portugal, from Ireland to Sweden, also have pro-Putin attitudes and want to oust their highly unpopular elites.

NATO Romania will become pro-Putin, if he gives it back its land stolen by Stalin in the south of the Ukraine and if it gets back the Romanian parts of Moldova. Many other countries near Russia will also change their attitudes, if their small and unpopular US-elites are removed and, of course, if they can make favourable agreements with Russia about supplies of oil and gas. These include Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Spain, Portugal and above all Germany. I would also include Poland, Finland and the Baltics, whose aggressive Russophobia exists only because their elites believe that they have US backing for it, which for the moment they have. However, Poland is already changing its attitude and its workers are blockading the Ukrainian border. As for Switzerland and Ireland, they too could return to real neutrality. As for Finland and Sweden, they never asked their peoples in a referendum if they wanted to join NATO because they knew that the peoples would have rejected it. Indeed, even their corrupt elites have already declared that they will have no NATO bases in their countries. Their NATO membership is therefore meaningless and unnecessary.

In any case, what is NATO? NATO Turkey does what it wants and NATO Greece arms against Turkey. Denmark has virtually no military equipment left, Slovakia has no air force left, Hungary has no tanks, the Baltics have minute armed forces, France has no howitzers left, Britain has a navy with submarines and aircraft carriers that have become an international joke, is unable to recruit enough sailors to man its small fleet of boats, has had to scrap one third of its operational planes because it has no pilots for them, has no self-propelled artillery left, only 40 tanks that actually work and has to recruit soldiers for its underpaid army in Nepal. In France the mere mention of conscription is greeted by rioting. Could France supply even 15,000 troops to invade the Ukraine? In any case, they would be killed within two weeks. As for deindustrialised Germany, it has little left to give and what it gave, like Leopard tanks, has been shown to be useless. Its increase in military spending does nothing for its own forces, all the increase is given to prop up the Ukraine.

The End of NATO and of the EU

NATO is going to collapse into the grave it has dug for itself by ‘poking the bear’. Its elitist sister-organisation, the EU, will follow NATO, all the quicker if Trump is elected in eight months’ time, but, in any case, it is inevitable. Western Europe is utterly divided, as we saw with Brexit. True, the British elite which hates the English, Scottish, Welsh and most obviously Irish peoples, has refused to implement Brexit. This is because it wants to continue to line its pockets with EU money, which is why it has always loved the EU. Germany, under its much-disliked US puppet Scholz, and France, under its deluded and detested Emperor ‘Jupiter’ Macron, are also divided.

The ‘Big Three’ pygmies, Germany, France and the UK, are at each other’s throats. The cat (USA) is away, so now the (three) mice play. The three are still respectively obsessed with their need to dominate (Scholz), imperialist superiority (Johnson etc) and delusions of grandeur (Emperor of Europe Macron), they are today irrelevant and squabbling clowns. The German elite still dreams about Lebensraum in the east, its tanks are still burning on the steppes of the Ukraine. The proud and arrogant British Establishment still thinks it rules an Empire and is a race apart (which it is, but not in the way it thinks, for no-one has yet told them the sun has set on them). As for preening and pretentious members of the French elite, they are still as narcissistic, self-important and therefore as petulant as ever. However, the last statesman in Europe, De Gaulle, overthrown in the CIA operation of 1968, died soon after. Now, after the US has destroyed Europe, especially since 2022, there are left only European political midgets, all suffering from megalomania.

Unlike in 1914, in 2024 Russia has the biggest economy in Europe and has by far the most powerful military with invincible arms. Russia was forced by the West into liberating the Donbass. NATO then forced Russia into liberating all the Ukraine and the EU. Russia was forced by the West into demilitarising and denazifying the Ukraine. NATO then forced Russia into demilitarising and denazifying NATO. The irony of all this is that the split and unwieldy 32-nation NATO alliance, most members of which refuse to spend more money on their inadequate armed forces, is fighting against Non-Communist Russia. And yet, during the Cold War, NATO never fought a war against the ‘evil empire’ of the Communist Soviet Union. Today Soviet Imperialism is long since dead inside Russia, though not, ironically, in Kiev.

What is alive, however, is the nationalism of democratic Russia, which is a millennial Civilisation. So is the ultra-nationalism of anti-democratic and autocratic Ukraine. But Ukrainian nationalism is artificial, without historical roots, as the Ukraine has no deep historical past, and now exists in a half-Russian country. Moreover, pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, which the West despises as it also despises the failed state of the Ukraine and despises Ukrainians. It has been artificially revived only as a tool of Russophobia for purely political and military reasons, financed with hundreds of billions of dollars, trained and armed by Western Imperialism only in order to weaken and then destroy Russia through ‘regime change’ and to die ‘to the last Ukrainian’.

This opposition of nationalisms is why the conflict in the Russian east and south of the Soviet-created and NATO-defended Ukraine was inevitable. Like it or not, the reality is that Russia was always, and obviously, going to defeat the Ukraine in any military conflict, thanks to its far greater land mass, its world-respected diplomacy and backing from the multipolar BRICS, its population that is now seven times greater and far superior military technology. The self-deluded West, blinded by hubris and contempt and stuck in its bullying, arrogant, ignorant and triumphalist ‘end of history’ myths of the 1990s, lived in a virtual world, a world of wishful thinking. As a result of this fantasy, it totally underestimated the diplomatic and military might of Superpower Russia of the 2020s. As it could not even defeat Iraqi conscripts and Afghan goatherds, what chance does it have against the most advanced military equipment in the world?

Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not first sit down and consult whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him that comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else while the other is a great way off, he sends an embassy and desires conditions of peace?

Luke 14, 31-32

The Tragedy in the Russian Orthodox Church

Today, we are fighting so that it would never occur to anyone that Russia, our people, our language, or our culture can be erased from history. Today, we need a consolidated society, and this consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion.

President Vladimir Putin, 30 September 2022

‘Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion’. So proclaims the Russian State, whether you believe it or not. Ironically, against this background of the victorious Russian State and its reconstruction of ‘Rus’ (the Union State of the Russian Federation, Belarus and the New Ukraine), we see the defeat of the nationalistic administration of Russian Orthodox Church. What are the values of this administration? ‘Humanity, mercy and compassion’? The administration of this Church, known as the Moscow Patriarchate, has been to some extent discredited because of its militaristic and nationalistic attitude to the conflict in the Ukraine. As a result, the Moscow Patriarchate has lost the loyalty of many of the multinational faithful outside the Russian Federation and Belarus. And even inside these two countries, it has lost the loyalty of many who are not devoted to Russian nationalism, but put Christ above a nation.

The Church is not an army. However, some in the Russian Church administration is demanding that its clergy and people behave as if they were in an army. That is suicidal behaviour in what is by definition a volunteer organisation. Fewer attend Russian Orthodox churches inside Russia, especially those of the two younger generations, who did not experience the persecution and nobility of the Church in the Soviet past. They see many of today’s Russian clergy, especially the episcopate, as corrupt mini-oligarchs and anti-spiritual bureaucrats and politicians, who are incapable of spiritual values. It is not surprising. What is the origin of the tragedy, this self-imposed defeat, which is so paradoxical in view of the victory of the Russian State?

The tragedy is that after the collapse of the USSR, the Russian State desovietised itself, but the Russian Church did not. The Russian State had to face up to reality in order to survive in the real global world and so became the leader of the multinational, multicontinental and multicivilisational BRICS Alliance of black, brown, yellow and white. This reality was that Moscow, the Russian State, knew that it could no longer hold on to Non-East Slavs, as the USSR had split into 15 independent republics, let alone hold on to its Eastern European Empire, where the USSR had come to be hated. Tragically, however, the Moscow Patriarchate did not realise this and did not desovietise itself, as symbolised by its keeping of its Soviet name, ‘the Moscow Patriarchate’.

We have repeatedly suggested that it be renamed ‘the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’, which is a monastery just outside Moscow. Instead, many in it has continued to live in the bubble and ghetto of the Soviet past, thinking it had power over all Non-Russians, over whom it still held jurisdiction. In other words, it is to some extent a remnant of Soviet Imperialism in the post-Soviet world. Leaving to one side the glory of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the real Russian Orthodox Church, the senior administration, the Moscow Patriarchate seems to have retained a centralised, Soviet-style bureaucracy with a mentality of subservience, cancelling all independent thinking. Will it really need the interference of the Russian State to desovietise the Russian Church? It would be the irony of ironies.

Nationalism and money-making, which soon turned into oligarch-style corruption, became the order of the day for many. The only qualifications to be a bishop were to be single, have an idea of the Church services and history, and to be good at raising funds, to be ‘an effective manager’. Some were pedophiles or spies, psychopaths or drug-dealers. Spirituality and morality never entered into it. Episcopal money-making means exploiting priests, who in turn are supposed to exploit the people. As the proverb says: ‘A fish rots from the head’. Such exploitation means aggressively grabbing and then micro-managing territory, property and income. The larger the territory, the more the parishes, the greater the number of parishes, the greater the income. This means misusing the canons (which such mafiosi always call ‘holy’!) for purely territorial, ideological, financial and sectarian claims.

Any Russian Orthodox pastors or spiritual fathers who disagree with the canonical deviations or just political opinions of their superiors seem to be ‘defrocked’! This includes ‘defrocking’ those who have left the persecution of the Russian Church without letters of leave, because the Russian Church refused to grant them for no good reason, though the Russian Church itself has received hundreds of clergy from other Local Churches without letters of leave, especially in Europe and Africa. The word ‘hypocrisy’ comes to mind! Such a militaristic, nationalistic, centralised and unipolar command and control system has made some in the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, and those who imitate it, into something that scandalises. And this is in a country whose State has championed not centralisation, but the non-nationalistic and decentralised multipolar BRICS Alliance! Some claim that Moscow is ‘the Third Rome’. But Rome had the ability to unite different peoples and cultures. This is not what ‘the Third Rome’ is doing, because of its exclusivist nationalism.

The Russian Orthodox Fragments in the Emigration

Given recent events, even before the Russian State launched its Special Military Operation against NATO in the Ukraine, some have asked me if I regret helping to foster the unity of the two émigré fragments of the Russian Church, centred respectively in New York and Paris, with the Russian Orthodox Church, centred in Moscow. The answer is a resounding ‘No’, and for the reasons below:

The New York émigré group, known familiarly as ROCOR, numbering about 60,000, essentially in the English-speaking and German-speaking world, was by the 1990s turning into an old calendarist sect. Our victory was that on its reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Mother-Church in 2007, its then hierarchy rejected its past, self-imposed isolation and its emerging status as a pharisaical right-wing sect. Indeed, as a result of this reconciliation, some 5% of the most extreme part of the New York group left it and created four different tiny and exclusivist sects, which were not in communion with any part of the worldwide Orthodox Church. If it had not been for the reconciliation in 2007, the New York group would not have survived, it would have split into two, a sect and the rest – who, like myself, would have joined the Mother-Church.

The Paris émigré group, known familiarly as Rue Daru, numbering about 15,000, essentially in French-speaking Europe, was by the 1990s turning into a modernist cult. Our victory was that on reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Mother-Church in 2019, it rejected its past, self-imposed isolation and its emerging status as a Tradition-less, make-it-up-as-you-go-along cult. However, as a result of its reconciliation, some 43% of the most extreme part of the Paris group left it, mainly for the modernist section in the Church of Constantinople. If it had not been for the reconciliation in 2019, the Paris group would not have survived, it would have split into two, a cult and the rest – who, like my close friends there, would have joined the Mother-Church.

The Results

Some, reading the above statistics, may say that the reconciliation of the New York group, four times larger than the small Paris group, was by far the more successful. However, the story since 2007 proves otherwise. Having been cleansed of extremists, the Paris group has remained firm. And although only some 5% of the New York group abandoned it, they left behind a large number of others, perhaps about 38%, who still had a sectarian mentality. They just hid behind their paper reconciliation with the Mother-Church as a justification to continue to do exactly as before. Hypocrisy. They had never intended to repent. In other words, there had always been the same proportion of extremists in the New York group as in the Paris group (43%), but the New York group was not cleansed of them. It is this remaining extremist part of the New York group, over a third of the whole, which a decade after the reconciliation, since 2017, began to take revenge for the reconciliation, seized power and caused all the problems. Notably it has actually completely unjustifiably initiated a public schism with the Paris group, supposedly another part of the same Russian Orthodox Church! Moreover, this schism, inside itself, has passively been backed by the administration of the Moscow Patriarchate!

There are already examples of senior clergy and people exiting the New York group, either by ‘retiring’, or else by joining non-schismatic Local Churches. And there are those who have not left yet, but are still suffering the same moral torment as those who have left, seeing the disgraceful behaviour of its new hierarchy. Its pious bishops of the last century must be spinning in their graves. The new sectarian ROCOR hierarchy is reverting to the pro-Nazi or Vlasovite ROCOR mentality in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and to the sectarian CIA-funded, Vlasovite ROCOR of the 1960s to the 1980s. Its degeneration is its own fault. You cannot blame the corruption of individuals in the Moscow Patriarchate for your own corruption. You must take responsibility for yourselves. Individual corruption is a personal choice, not something forced on New York by Moscow, even if New York episcopal corruption follows exactly the same pattern, falling to exactly the same corruption of accumulating territory, property and income. The larger the territory, the more the parishes, the greater the number of people, the greater the income. Power has gone to all their heads.

This pathological micro-management, popularly known as control freakery, also means misusing the canons (which they always called ‘holy’ as part of their absurd self-justification!) as weapons for uncanonical political and territorial claims. Any clergy who disagree because they are Christians are ‘defrocked’ by the corrupt, not least in Non-Russian Moldova, where large numbers of parishes are leaving the Russian Church for their ancestral Romanian Church. Homosexuality and love of money and luxury, living as ‘princes of the Church’ and not as servants of the people, is their choice. Don’t blame Moscow for that. The proof of this is that the Paris group, however naïve some may say that it is, has not followed this path of episcopal and clerical corruption and has no desire to do so. The Paris group has not left to one side the glorious victory of the New Martyrs and Confessors over atheism. It has in no way a centralised, Soviet-style bureaucracy with its mentality of subservience, cancelling all independent thinking. On the contrary, Paris has retained the multinational Russian Orthodox missionary vision. Here is the tragedy of the New York ROCOR group. It has, purely voluntarily, abolished its heritage in suicidal acts of self-destruction.

Conclusion: Quenching the Spirit

Thus, the heritage of multinationality and catholicity of both the Moscow and New York parts of the Russian Orthodox Church have been rejected by their clerical administrations, with the ensuing isolation of the Russian Church. The senior hierarchy of both parts has shut itself off from concelebration with other Local Churches and promoted those of Russian nationality above all others, whom it treats as second-class citizens. Interestingly, the Russian State did not impose any of this. The senior Church hierarchy, acting like a Stalinist Soviet Politburo, did. And quite freely. This has been suicidal. Essentially, the Holy Spirit is being replaced by the human spirit.

The tiny Paris group alone has not chosen that path. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Divine calling of the émigré fragments of the Russian Orthodox Church was firstly to reunite with the freed Mother-Church in Moscow and secondly to call its administration, the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’, to repentance after the nightmare of Sovietisation, by witnessing to Russian Orthodoxy, and so desovietise it. The New York group did the opposite of this. It not only remained silent on desovietisation. It actually imitated and sovietised itself, making itself too into a ‘Soviet tank’. It opposed baptism with the heresy of rebaptism, Christian love with phariseeism, and catholicity with right-wing sectarianism. It could all have been so different, it was all so unnecessary. New York, like Moscow, chose suicidal self-destruction and the living forces of the Russian Orthodox Church are deserting it, as its hierarchy quenches the Spirit.

After reconciling with Moscow, the New York hierarchy copied the worst of it, also becoming corrupt – financially, ideologically and morally. The errors of both Moscow and New York can be measured in the destinies of those who have left them, seeing the unrighteous life lived by bishops and priests and therefore their inability and unwillingness to proclaim Christ. Whatever you think of the inevitable outcome of Russian military victory, the profoundly tragic inter-East Slav war in the Ukraine is Divine punishment for the sins of the hierarchies of both Moscow and New York. The Russian Orthodox Church, let alone Orthodox Rus, let alone Holy Rus, has been torn by civil war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands. This is not pleasing to God. This is hardly the Triumph of Orthodoxy, let alone the Triumph of Orthodox. But it is what happens when there is no repentance for all that went before and when the Russian Orthodox Faith is dominated by corrupt and highly centralised clerical administrations, which compromise everything. However, after the resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Church, we remain convinced that it will shed the bloody graveclothes with which it is still wrapped from the Crucifixion and be cleansed of the unworthy and corrupted.

I tell you, No: but unless you repent, you shall all likewise perish.

Luke 13, 5

 

Church of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe,

England

The Triumph of Orthodoxy, 24 March 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Great Cleansing of the Russian Church Begins At Last

According to the official website of the Moscow Diocese, by decision of the Diocesan Court of Moscow, the very well-known Abbot Peter (Eremeev), former rector of the Russian Orthodox University and Abbot of Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, was defrocked. The brief message stated: “The Moscow Diocesan Court of the Russian Orthodox Church, sitting on 02/08/2024 in the case of the banned cleric of the Moscow Diocese, Hegumen Peter (Eremeev), after summoning him three times to meetings of the church court, to which he did not appear, decided: “Recognise that, on the basis of the rule of the 25th Holy Apostles, Abbot Peter (Eremeev) is subject to canonical reprimand in the form of demotion from the priesthood.” The decision will come into force after approval by His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’.”

The message further states: “This decision is published in order to give the banned Abbot Peter (Eremeev) the opportunity to familiarise himself with it within the time period established by Article 54, paragraph 2 of the Regulations on the Church Court.” This is an important remark so that there would be no talk later that the former Abbot, who, apparently, simply “fell silent”, was not informed, etc.

This news was republished by some telegram channels without any comments – apparently, they did not know how to react. And this is indirect proof of the sensational nature of the news. However, some people responded. Thus, the telegram channel “Bishop Lucifer” adds that Abbot Peter (Eremeev) “having robbed the church, went abroad.” According to our information, he fled to Bulgaria from prosecution by Russian justice.

A little earlier, the same channel recalled that from 2011 to 2021, Abbot Peter (Eremeev) was the rector of the Russian Orthodox University, and from 2013 to 2021, the Abbot of Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery. However, in October 2021, by patriarchal decree, he was first released from the post of rector of the RPU, and at the end of December of the same year, by decision of the Holy Synod, he was also released from the post of Abbot of Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery.

Let us add that at that time – apparently to sweeten the pill – the Synod nevertheless expressed gratitude to Father Peter for his labours as the abbot of the monastery, and the Patriarch left him as rector of two famous Moscow churches – the Church of the Great Martyr Dmitry of Thessalonica in Dmitrovskoye, located on the prestigious Rublyovka , and the Church of the Resurrection of the Word at the Vagankovskoye cemetery.

However, less than two years later, in November 2023, he was first released from the rectorship in the Church of the Great Martyr Dmitry of Thessaloniki, and at the end of last year he was deprived of the rectorship in the Church of the Resurrection of the Word at the Vagankovskoye Cemetery and was banned from serving. And so, on 8 February, the church court of the Moscow diocese decides to depose him. However, we should not forget that this decision will come into force only after its approval by the Patriarch.

Quite a popular channel “Religion and Politics. Alexander Voznesensky” reacted to the incident with reference to the same channel “Bishop Lucifer” as follows: “At the same time, the channel has repeatedly hinted that Eremeev is allegedly a member of the “gay oyster” club. I heard a similar opinion on this issue from my interlocutor in the Patriarchate.”

So, for now it is reported that Abbot Peter is accused, firstly, of robbing the church. And it should be noted that the Church of the Great Martyr Dmitry of Thessalonica in Dmitrovskoye was not closed during Soviet times. It was famous for having many ancient icons that were of great value. And since the temple and its property belong to the state (according to established practice, the Church owns it on an indefinite and free lease), it seems that we are talking about the theft of not church property, but state property.

Secondly, we are talking about the fact that Eremeev was involved in the so-called “gay lobby” in the Church. Scandals in this regard have long been associated with his name. In 2005, Patriarch Alexy unexpectedly sent him – at that time a doctor of theology, executive secretary of the Educational Committee of the Russian Orthodox Church, vice-rector of the Moscow Theological Academy – to Khabarovsk, as vice-rector of the newly created seminary. In the Wikipedia article, which apparently was later edited by Abbot Peter, this is called a mission to get the new seminary off the ground. This, of course, is ridiculous – if this were so, then Fr Peter would be sent to Khabarovsk as rector. Then they whispered on the sidelines that the scandal with his harassment of a seminary student was to blame. But Eremeev was unlucky; the student’s fiancée turned out to be the daughter of a high-ranking Airborne Forces officer, who, having learned about the outrage, sent strong guys to the abbot for a ‘preventative’ conversation.

In 2010, the educated abbot was returned to Moscow, skilfully putting into the ears of the clergy the idea that the reason for his exile to Khabarovsk was his ‘progressive’ views on the need for state accreditation of religious educational institutions. Allegedly, these views were not shared by the inert circle of Patriarch Alexy and sent the advanced abbot away from Moscow.

Eremeev received high positions – he became the rector of the RPU, the abbot of Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery, the rector of the Moscow churches mentioned above, and acquired connections among officials and businessmen. However, after some time, publications appeared online about his involvement in the creation of a sodomite den in Moscow. Moreover, these publications very transparently hinted that this was all a leak from the intelligence services. Be that as it may, in the fall of 2021, for no apparent reason, Abbot Peter was relieved of his post as rector of the RPU and abbot of Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery. There were rumours that a folder about his adventures was placed on the Patriarch’s table.In fact, what happened is an example of the moral cleansing of the Church.

Abbreviated from:

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2024/02/12/goluboe_lobbi_v_rpc_poneslo_tyazheluyu_poteryu

Editorial comment: We were wondering who will be next, when we heard that on 13 February Bishop Ignaty (Punin) has been relieved of his responsibility for the Diocese of Minusinsk. It seems that he too will be sent to a monastery for repentance like the other two homosexual Bishops Ignaty, or maybe even defrocked. Sources suggest that an order may have at last gone out from the Kremlin to cleanse the Church of these compromising figures, who are seriously destroying the unity and witness of the Russian Church. Other well-known, or rather notorious, homosexual bishops, about whom we too have known very well for decades, both inside and outside Russia, including in the Western world, must be quaking.

https://pravoslavie.ru/158675.html

 

 

The Future of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe

Introduction: Orthodox Church Immigration to Western Europe

Since 1917 there have been three large-scale waves of immigration of Orthodox Christians from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. These have been: the Russian-speaking, mainly since 1917, though in four sociologically very different generations, the Greek-speaking, mainly since 1950, and the Romanian-speaking, mainly since 2000. This latest immigration is composed of well over four million Romanians with a million and a half Moldovans, probably six million people in all. Nearly half of these now live in Italy, Spain and Portugal, since Romanian is very similar to those languages. This recent immigration dwarves all previous Orthodox immigrations to Western Europe, not just the Russian and Greek, but also the much smaller ones, like the Serbian, the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Macedonian, the Bulgarian, the Antiochian (Arab) and the Georgian.

The Greek-speaking (Greek and Cypriot) immigration has remained very closed to others and remains stuck in its ethnic identity, but its leaders also have very strong pro-US politics. Both these factors alienate nearly everyone else from it. It does not in general and cannot in reality attract many native Europeans to its religious practice. As regards the Romanian and Moldovan immigration, it is still too early to say whether it will attract others to it in any number, though there are some promising signs of openings to others, as a result of its youthfulness, its ten bishops, including a French one, and some Non-Romanian clergy and people. The Romanians are helped here by their Latin language and by being very open and welcoming, but the infrastructure remains weak.

The Russian Immigration

What of the oldest, most political and most complex immigration, the Russian-speaking? In four waves, this consisted of anti-Bolsheviks from pre-1917 Russia, anti-Stalinists from pre-1945 Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, those from the small, largely ethnically Jewish, dissident intellectual immigration of the 1970s and 1980s, and those from the post-USSR but still Soviet immigration, especially from the Baltic States, Kazakhstan and Moldova. These waves of immigration are sadly divided into three different and quite disjointed ‘jurisdictions’ with separate episcopates, one of which (ROCOR) since January 2021 has officially decided to be in schism with and not concelebrate with one of the others (WEA). (See below).

  1. The MP

Firstly, there is the largest jurisdiction, that of the Mother-Church, the Moscow-based Moscow Patriarchate (MP), which is 99% of the whole Russian Church, mostly in the ex-Soviet Union, but also has eight bishops in Western Europe. This is organised under a Paris-based Exarchate and its people come from all over the ex-Soviet Union, especially from Moldova and the Baltic States, but also from the Ukraine, though in the last two years many Ukrainians have left it to help found yet another group of over eighty quite separate new Ukrainian Orthodox communities, mainly composed of Ukrainian refugees (most of whom appear not to be baptised Orthodox – the Orthodox have stayed in the Ukraine or in Eastern Europe). This MP Exarchate has been patterned by a number of Exarchs and bishops, who have embarrassingly compromised themselves in some way or other and so have met with failure.

One of the great current problems here is the dramatic events now going on in Moscow against the background of the war in the Ukraine. Here, ‘traitors’ are being tried by Church courts. These include the once senior Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachov), the former Exarch in Africa, who is under suspicion of various misdeeds (1). If treachery to the Russian State is the real charge, then there must also be bishops in the very divided New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) (see below) who must also be trembling. Astonishingly, several of the latter have from the outset publicly called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukraine and openly supported anti-Russian US policies and persecuted pro-Russians. If there is one thing that Russians cannot support, it is treachery.

  1. b) The WEA

Secondly, there is by far the smallest group, the Paris-based Western European Archdiocese (WEA) with only three bishops, whose aristocratic founders from Saint Petersburg created it in the 1920s. This elitist intellectual group is now very small outside Paris. It has either not been able, or perhaps not wanted, to take off and expand outside the intellectual group. At the present time, most believe that its often elderly leaders will die out within the next generation. Essentially it has only three church properties of its own and these are all in Paris. The death or removal of two individuals would hasten the takeover of those properties by the much larger MP and its inevitable absorption of the small remains of this group.

  1. ROCOR

Thirdly, there is the New York-based ROCOR, which was formed over 100 years ago, in 1919 and has its own Synod, now of only thirteen active bishops. In Western Europe it has four bishops. By 2001 its first generation had essentially died out. Thus, in order to survive it had to reinvent itself. A few very elderly individuals, including its own Metropolitan, were expelled in what was essentially a coup d’etat. Having taken over, the new Synod, which had accepted large numbers of new immigrants from the ex-USSR, was then forced to reconcile itself with Moscow. However, it was also recruiting converts, especially in the USA. Unfortunately, it purposely recruited some very strange and right-wing extremist converts, many of whom it made priests and even bishops, putting them into oppositions of power. These now form a very powerful group and are harshly persecuting those who are Russian-speaking, pro-Russian and anti-schism.

Apart from about 150 communities, many of them very small, mainly in the USA, and about 30 communities in Australia, the other main centre of ROCOR is its 70 or so communities in Germany, where it has many historic and beautiful churches and a large flock, with both clergy and laity nearly all from the ex-USSR, especially from Kazakhstan. As well as these churches, it also has a few historic churches in Switzerland, two historic churches (recently taken from the WEA) in northern Italy and one in Brussels. Elsewhere it has virtually nothing, apart from some very small and often unstable communities, making some 300 communities in all and at least 50,000 people. It is clear that the MP is waiting to take over the historic churches in Western Europe from the declining ROCOR and add them to its Exarchate of Western Europe. The death or removal of two very divisive and very aggressive, US-trained individuals in Western Europe, who have very strong anti-Russian political backgrounds and connections, would hasten this process.

At the present time the New York Synod is very divided, not least about its heretical programme of rebaptising other Orthodox, in defiance of the teachings and practices of the Russian Church and of the whole of the Orthodox Church. Although there are three Russian bishops against a break with the MP (they have already broken with the WEA part of the MP), there are three bishops for, and the other seven are fence-sitting. We expect further events.

Conclusion: The Future

Most countries in Eastern Europe already have their own independent Local Orthodox Churches. It seems quite likely that the small Orthodox population (3% ?) from among the eleven million people of the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and from Nordic Finland, whose language is related to Estonian, will form their own Local Baltic Orthodox Church. All these Eastern European countries have strong historic Russian connections and a current Russian presence and historic churches. Similarly, Eastern European Hungary, to which Carpatho-Russian Transcarpathia and its 600 Orthodox parishes may soon return, may also obtain its own Local Orthodox Church. This is just like the Church of Czechia and Slovakia, the main part of whose traditional flock also consists of Carpatho-Russians.

This would leave a geographical West of Europe, with an eastern border stretching from Norway down to Sweden, Germany, Austria and Italy, enclosing the at present twenty-one countries of Western Europe, with its population of 400 million and area of 3.5 million square kilometres. This has a population of some 10 million nominal Orthodox, about 40 bishops and perhaps 2,000 communities. If they banded together into eight multinational dioceses and worked towards forming their own Local Orthodox Church, they would then form the fourth largest Local Orthodox Church, after the Russian, Romanian and Greek.

These eight dioceses could cover the territories of: Italia (Italy, Malta and San Marino); Iberia (Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar); Germania (Germany and Austria); Gallia (France, Wallonia (Southern Belgium), Luxembourg and Monaco); The Isles (the British Isles of England, Scotland, Wales etc, as well as the island of Ireland); Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland); the Netherlands (the Netherlands plus Flanders (Northern Belgium)); Helvetia (Switzerland and Liechtenstein). The main task here would be to maintain Orthodox and their descendants in the Faith, protecting them from the surrounding ocean of ever more aggressive Western secularist atheism. However, it would also be for these dioceses to conduct missionary work among the native peoples of their territories, though in this profoundly atheist (ex-Catholic and ex-Protestant) region, the results of that work would be modest, for sadly few want real Orthodox Christianity, often preferring at best a virtual version of podcasts, internet nonsense and negativity.

Note:

  1. The retired Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachev) of the ROC said the upcoming trial against him will be a betrayal of the Church and Fatherland” and “all who participate in this lawlessness are traitors”.

    Former African Exarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Leonid called the upcoming hearing on his case in the Supreme All-Church Court “a betrayal of the Church and the Fatherland” and said that “all those who participate in this lawlessness are traitors”. He wrote about this on his Telegram channel.

    According to him, with the upcoming trial, “we have passed the line of realisation of good and evil”.

    “Now everything is possible if you have uncontrolled power in your hands,” the retired bishop said, without specifying whom he meant.

    The hierarch is convinced that his work in the African Exarchate was “the first breakthrough since 988,” and Gorbachev appreciates its results very highly.

    The hierarch also noted that his trial benefits the Vatican and is “giving up one’s own people”, and that all those involved in it are “traitors”.

    The metropolitan threatened to “provide details afterwards,” adding that he “did not want this”.

 

 

 

Is this the End of ROCOR?

Despite the very strong opposition of the CIA, in 2007 the New York-based émigré Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) at last entered into canonical communion with the Mother-Church, 99% of the Russian Orthodox Church (‘MP’), which is based in Moscow. At the end of the last century ROCOR had been strongly tempted by a politicised, ghetto-style, sectarian and isolationist position. It had been out of communion with the MP for over 80 years for political reasons, as Communist-enslaved Moscow had not been politically free until the 1990s. However, after this period the ROCOR position no longer made any sense.

Indeed, there were those of us who for years since the 1990s had battled for the establishment of this canonical communion in our struggle to reclaim ROCOR from sectarianism. Finally, we were present at our victory over the ROCOR temptation of sectarianism in Moscow in 2007, rewarded at last. Clearly, from 2007 on, ROCOR was called on to merge with other Orthodox in the Diaspora, contributing the liturgical and ascetic heritage of the old ROCOR to others, especially, but not only, to Non-Russian Orthodox who often lacked it. The later Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), who like the rest of us loved the old ROCOR of St John of Shanghai, whom he had met, was just one of those to call on it to do so.

However, to our enormous sadness, ROCOR refused these invitations and overtures. Instead of contributing to a solid basis for the establishment of new Local Churches in Western Europe, Northern America and Oceania, the new ROCOR gradually allied itself with extreme right-wing, ex-Protestant neophytes. These were isolationist sectarians with very, very little idea of the real Russian Orthodox Tradition and the Russian language, history and culture, let alone the general Orthodox Tradition. Such individuals were called ‘crazy converts’ by ordinary parishioners, Russian and Non-Russian alike. Moreover, to our profound shock, racist hatred was openly expressed by this new ROCOR for Non-Russian Orthodox, and by at least one new American ROCOR bishop. He also publicly declared that’ the Patriarch of Constantinople is possessed’. We were all horrified.

With the increasingly serious dementia and physical ailments of the then ROCOR First Hierarch, Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral), ROCOR gradually began to drift away from the Church, to whose communion it had returned in 2007. Certain extremist individuals, seeking revenge for our victory over sectarianism in 2007, and perhaps regretting the cutting off of generous CIA subsidies to ROCOR, usurped the Metropolitan’s position. They began using his electronic signature on very harsh documents which favoured their extremist positions.

Thus, a whole series of utterly anti-canonical actions took place, quite noticeably from 2016 on. These included the ousting of well-respected traditional ROCOR priests, even one of its old archbishops, all those linked with pre-Revolutionary Russia. Then there was also the Fr Alexander Belya affair. In this affair, a Ukrainian hieromonk, selected to be a bishop by ROCOR, was abruptly accused of extraordinary and still unproven crimes and then ousted and ‘defrocked’ by American ROCOR bishops, even though he, like many others, had already taken refuge in a canonical Orthodox jurisdiction.

What was the reason for this? We cannot be certain, but we can imagine the opposition to and jealousy of a seminary-trained, fluent Russian and Ukrainian-speaking episcopal candidate in ROCOR on the part of non-fluent speakers among certain members of the episcopate and candidates for the episcopate. As clergy of the old, traditional ROCOR were ejected, there had followed the consecration of extreme right-wing convert bishops and the ordination of extreme right-wing convert priests, all of Protestant backgrounds. They were now taking over, pushing those of the Tradition out according to plan.

The new ones wanted to replace grounded Orthodox like Fr Alexander Belya and senior clergy of the old ROCOR, who had nothing to do with sectarianism. The main interest of the new American ROCOR clergy appears to be in attracting extremist right-wing Protestants to their supposedly Russian Orthodox ROCOR jurisdiction. They certainly despised ordinary Russians, who were told (in front of me) to learn English! As supposed members of the Orthodox Church, these converts would quote out of context and misunderstood canons instead of quoting out of context and misunderstood chapter and verse. The dark and depressing spirit of the Puritan pharisees and of Calvinist New England witch-hunters remained the same.

As a result of such intrigues, in England there began the scandal of a very young and very inexperienced ROCOR convert bishop, received into the Church from Lutheranism by chrismation (!), who had only been in ROCOR for a few years (!). Under the influence of a newly-received old calendarist priest, he dictatorially (no discussion, let alone disagreement, would be allowed) even forbade his clergy to concelebrate with an ex-Catholic priest of the MP and his people to take communion in the MP Russian Orthodox jurisdiction of this priest. This priest had been received into the MP in the normal Russian Orthodox way by confession and concelebration. This young convert bishop created a schism, but, amazingly, he was actually backed up by other convert bishops!  Clearly, the disease was already ingrained.

After up to 50 years of faithfulness to the old ROCOR, over a dozen clergy and thousands of people left the new ROCOR because of this convert bishop’s schism. They wanted to be in communion with their families and friends. Thus, the convert bishop’s schism from the MP led to the loss of well over half his diocese, the vital and living part, which did not serve in tiny ghetto-groups of converts in small rented chapels, backrooms and garden sheds. Although warned well in advance of exactly how many clergy, real parishes and people he was going to lose, he, backed by the American Synod, still went ahead with this insanity, to the distress of the MP, which looked on in disbelief and whose Patriarch told him not to do it. Some in the MP called for a ‘psychiatric ambulance’. Instead of obeying his own Patriarch, the young convert bishop proceeded to ‘suspend’ and then defrock’ clergy of another jurisdiction!

Although the MP were sympathetic to the ex-ROCOR group, who were only supporting traditional Russian Orthodox theology and practice, the MP could not take in the group who had petitioned the MP to do this. This was because the MP was frightened of upsetting political relations with the increasingly deviant and aggressive ROCOR, which was blackmailing the MP: ‘If you do this, we shall not attend your Council of Bishops and we shall go into schism with you all’. This fear of blackmail will not last. For the moment distracted by the Ukraine, from which affair Moscow will clearly emerge triumphant, as has always been obvious, though Moscow’s attitude in the Ukraine have repeatedly been condemned by the anti-Russian American ROCOR (!), as also by the CIA (a coincidence?!), sooner or later the MP will call ROCOR’s bluff. Enough is enough!

Now the convert bishop has, contradicting himself, concelebrated with an Antiochian bishop, who has just defrocked one of his priests, who had objected to the standard Antiochian (and Orthodox) practice of receiving converts by chrismation, and not rebaptism. This priest, who openly calls his bishop and all Antiochian bishops ‘heretics’ (!), had also objected to the long-standing local Antiochian practice of giving communion to nominally Miaphysite Syrians, Copts, Ethiopians and Eritreans. The defrocked Antiochian priest has received the sympathy of many ROCOR converts in the USA. After all, as they logically point out, in the USA ROCOR there even has one bishop who openly, and he claims with an official blessing, rebaptises unrebaptised converts who have already been members of the Orthodox Church for many years! (He calls this by the unknown and heretical term ‘corrective baptism’).

The Antiochian bishop in question, Metr Silouan (Oner), has specifically declared that he will defrock any priests who carry out such ‘corrective baptisms’. He has also said that any jurisdiction that does this has ‘schismatic tendencies’ and these people are ‘extremists’. As well we know. But you have to suffer, be persecuted and slandered for proclaiming the Church Truth. Logically, ROCOR will have to fall out of communion with yet another Local Church, the Antiochian, painting themselves ever more into their sectarian corner. Or else it must renounce the practices of its own bishops in England and in the USA.

Clearly, once the distraction of the Ukraine is over, the MP will have to intervene and bring order. As just one example, Fr Alexander Belya and his large group of parishes, mainly ex-ROCOR, could be made bishop for the MP parishes in North America, if Moscow were to take him in from the Greek Church, where he and most of the others were forced to take refuge from ROCOR Protestant sectarianism and, presumably, from clerical jealousy. It looks as though we are seeing the death rattle of ROCOR, which has been riding roughshod over the canons and obedience to the Mother-Church.

ROCOR will have to make up its mind whether it accepts the Orthodox Tradition of the Mother-Church, or if it wants to be just another weird American old calendarist sect, a ROCOR, Russian Old Calendarists Outside Russia, made up of crazy converts from Protestantism and of children of immigrants who long ago lost their roots. Moscow will no longer tolerate the persecution of Orthodox inside ROCOR. A split inside ROCOR, between the increasingly fewer actual Russian Orthodox and the new sectarians now looks inevitable.

It is all so tiresome. Again and again the same indiscipline and ignorance on the part of ROCOR. Just when you think it is back in the saving fold of the Church, its American wing again rejects canonical Orthodoxy. This is all a repeat of baptism controversies like that of Palmer in the 19th century and more recently those in ROCOR in the 1970s and 1980s. We have seen it all before. Is ROCOR condemned to repeat the same extremist, old calendarist-type errors in every generation? If so, it is time that it was brought to heel by Moscow, which alone can instruct it to stop persecuting Orthodox. If it refuses, then Moscow will be forced to step in to protect the persecuted, saving them from the schisms, anti-canonical acts and anti-Christian persecutions of ROCOR.

When I was last in California, in 2006, as a speaker at the Fourth ROCOR Council, I expressed surprise at the bizarre things I saw in San Francisco. A priest from the East Coast explained to me with a smile: ‘When God made America, he tilted it slightly, so that all the oddballs ran down to California’. In England, Russians, Romanians, Greeks, French, Germans and those of other nations behave themselves and are polite. They are welcome here. It is only certain Americans who come here, swaggering around like Mormons, Scientologists and members of other US sects and cults, trying to change the way you speak!, as though they owned the place, and are spectacularly rude and insult the local people. They do not behave as gentlemen. You are not welcome here and you should go home. American ROCOR: You have become a laughing-stock throughout Europe. Your time is up, the farce is over, take the psychiatric ambulance and go. It is time for mismanaged ROCOR to hand over to the MP, who are competent. It is what we have been saying for years.

 

What Went Wrong With ROCOR?

In 1974 I asked the then Fr Kallistos (Ware) what the situation in ROCOR was. He told me that he had met the future St John of Shanghai (+ 1966) in the 1950s and had seriously thought about transferring to ROCOR in the 1960s. However, the well-respected priest at the ROCOR Cathedral in London, Fr George Sheremetiev (+ 1971), who had been the confessor of the Tsar’s sister, Xenia Aleksandrovna (+ 20 April 1960), had dissuaded him.

Fr George had told him that the new censoriousness coming from the then CIA-financed ROCOR in the USA was poisoning ROCOR in England and he had better not join it. As an elderly priest, he would stay, for him the old ROCOR was still alive, but it was not a jurisdiction for the young. Consequently, Fr Kallistos remained a priest of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, though also remained priest and confessor at the ROCOR Convent in London until 1976, when the poison from the USA reached a new crescendo. In any case, Fr Kallistos’ witness dissuaded me from joining ROCOR in 1974.

Leaving England for Paris in 1979, there I encountered the old ROCOR, still uncontaminated by the US ROCOR, unlike in England. The ROCOR Western European Diocese, living in the spirit of its former Archbishop, St John of Shanghai, had as its ruling hierarch St John’s successor, Archbishop Antony of Geneva. The Dean for France was Archpriest Alexander Trubnikov, who was priest at the parish of the Resurrection in Meudon in the Paris suburbs. He had a great influence on me, an inspiration, and I knew his matushka and children very well.

Fr Alexander had been born in 1908 in Tsarskoe Selo, where the Tsar and his Family and servants lived, into the noble family of a hereditary Russian imperial officer. During World War I, his father was posted as a military attaché to France. After graduating from a French high school, the future Fr. Alexander had to take on various jobs to make ends meet. At the same time he completed military classes organised by White Russian émigrés in France.

The majority of White Russians went indiscriminately to any Russian church. St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, his vicar Bishop Nathaniel of Brussels, Archbishop Anthony of Geneva and all of us considered that both those in the Paris Jurisdiction, then under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and ROCOR were our common flock in France and Benelux and ignored the minority of freemasons in the Paris Jurisdiction. Thus, we freely concelebrated with it. Fr Alexander was the rector of the Parish of the Resurrection in Meudon from 1954 until 1984, where he inspired several young men to become priests and rebuilt the Meudon chapel, courageously mortgaging his own home to do so. Besides his role as rector, Fr. Alexander served as chaplain to the Russian scouting organisation, the Vitiazi, which educated children from all jurisdictions.

Fr Alexander was also actively involved in inter-Orthodox and inter-Christian relations for many years, publishing books and a newsletter in French that shared news of the Orthodox world. This publishing activity brought Fr. Alexander to participate in the Second Vatican Council in Rome, where he met the then Pope. He wrote books, published his newsletter and attended the Vatican Council, hoping to represent the point of view of the free Russian Orthodox Church to all who would listen, not least to the Roman Catholics who were, and still are, undergoing a crisis, as they threw out the baby, but kept the bathwater. A priest and a diplomat, Fr Alexander reposed 35 years ago in November 1988. Eternal Memory!

After the repose of Archbishop Antony of Geneva five years later, in 1993, the last barrier fell. Thus, the censoriousness began to appear in the Western European Diocese from the USA, but now via Germany. All the clergy at the funeral were profoundly shocked when we found ourselves forbidden from celebrating. Thus, the new order of categorical phariseeism and judgementalism was already remarked at Archbishop Antony’s funeral. We patiently withstood it to defeat it in 2007, at last bringing ROCOR into canonical communion with Moscow. However, a decade later the censoriousness returned and took revenge; communion with Moscow had for them just been a delaying tactic to give their schismatic spirit outward legitimacy.

The new order of the new pharisees was founded on cupidity, jealousy, narcissistic egoism and the love of power of those who manipulate and use others as instruments for their own benefit, before discarding them. Those of the new order corrupted and destroyed everything they touched. Therefore, we did not allow them to touch, out of respect for St John of Shanghai, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, Fr George Sheremetiev, Fr Alexander Trubnikov and all those of the old and traditional ROCOR. You could accept their sectarian and schismatic censoriousness or else resist it. It all depended on whether you were a careerist or someone of principle and integrity. One day it will all be over. Our victory is inevitable because those who occupy the spiritual and moral high ground always win, even though patience will be required in waiting for Moscow to reject the Americanised and schismatic CIA-shaped ROCOR sect.

American ROCOR took over fifty years to spread its tentacles and take over completely. Once the American proxy war in the Ukraine is over, the unprincipled American ROCOR, which has lost so much by sitting on the fence in that conflict, will divide into two camps. On the one hand, there will be the pro-Russian non-schismatics and, on the other hand, the anti-Russian schismatics, the right-wing crazies and persecutors, penetrated by the CIA, heirs to the pro-Hitler Russians of the 1930s and 1940s. This will be the end of ROCOR, as the healthy part will be absorbed into the Moscow Patriarchate or into other Local Churches who obey the canons.

When it is all over, all of us together, from all the Local Churches, will at last be able to build the new Local Church of Western Europe in a US-free Europe, a Sovereign and Confederal Europe, co-operating with all the Local Churches, including a decentralised Moscow, and stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Only then will Europeans be able to recover their lost Motherland of the Church and their lost fatherlands of their own freed countries. At last, with a mother and a father, they will be able to become true brothers and sisters, fleeing the towering pride that created sectarianism and schism, which is what went wrong with ROCOR.