Category Archives: Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia

Divisions of the Russian Orthodox Church

Introduction: Divisions Outside the Church

The Western world began its separate and exclusivist existence when the Roman Papacy destroyed the Local Church entrusted to its care by enforcing a radical separation between clergy and laity, depriving the latter of communion with Christ. In this way Christians were no longer members of the Church, but subjugated to political clericalism. This centralising ideology of Papal supremacy replacing Christ dominated Western European history from the Gregorian Reform of the mid-eleventh century on, causing divisions everywhere. It was a radical departure from Orthodox Christianity, which the new ideologues hypocritically derided as ‘caesaropapism’. Moreover, it was the First Germanic Reformation of the mid-eleventh century, often called ‘the Gregorian Reform’ after the German Pope Gregory VII (c. 1015-1085), which led directly to the Second Germanic Reform, which essentially began in 1517. From here on, already much divided Catholicism split into thousands of protesting sects.

Divisions of the Russian Orthodox Church

Divisions Caused by Statism

Right-Leaning Groups: Nationalists and Provincials

In the 17th century changes in ritual in Russia, enforced by the State, created the tragic Old Ritualist schism. If the changes had not been enforced by the State and had been left to be enacted voluntarily, this schism would not have occurred. Indeed, under Tsar Nicholas II, the Church accepted both rituals, old and new, as equally valid. However, round about the same time, other State bureaucrats enforced a persecution of simple and pious Russian monks on Mt Athos, who considered that the Name of God was in itself holy. Instead of leaving the pious if simple and uneducated alone, State persecution created another unnecessary, though this time far smaller, division.

Atheist persecution in the USSR, tacitly complied with by weak bishop-survivors, again created division. Small groups of Russian Orthodox celebrated secret services in the ‘catacombs’. They were soon divided from one another and, with time, became increasingly small and sectarian, attracting only the uneducated. It was zeal without knowledge. The same atheist persecution also led to potential divisions among Russian exiles outside Russia in the small Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). Already in the late 1940s there were zealous but poorly-educated individuals in it who began to propound the Cold War theory that the Russian Church inside Russia had somehow, at some point, mysteriously, ‘lost grace’ and therefore that its sacraments were no longer valid. This piece of self-flattery would mean that those individuals, living in the USA, formed the ‘One True Church’. Free of extreme right-wing political prejudices, the reasonable and the holy in Europe like St Seraphim of Boguchar and St John of Shanghai, or in Serbia, St Nikolai of Ochrid and St Justin of Chelije, naturally rejected such fantastic delusions.

Left-Leaning Groups: Modernists and Liberals

Already before 1917 there was a group of modernists in Saint Petersburg. Profoundly Westernised, they basically wanted to make Orthodoxy into Protestantism. The notorious seductor-priest George Gapon, encouraged and not defrocked by his liberal bishop, was a typical representative. After 1917 these proto-Protestants formed the renovationist movement, a schism actively encouraged and enforced by the atheist Communist Party in order to weaken the Church.

Meanwhile, outside the former Russian Empire, Russian emigres in the USA, in Paris and in the Paris-based Sourozh Diocese in the UK continued the legacy of Renovationism, though in much more moderate forms. It was partly the fault of such semi-renovationists that there was no jurisdictional unity within the Russian emigration either in Western Europe or in Northern America. Those more traditional could not accept the left-wing and sometimes iconoclastic politics of these semi-renovationists.

Divisions Caused by Nationalism

After the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, various national groups of the former Empire began forming their own nationalist ‘Churches’, separated from the Russian Orthodox Church. This was especially the case in the Ukraine and indeed, over 100 years on, the same Ukrainian nationalist separatism has been behind much of the present catastrophe in the Ukraine. They shout ‘Glory to the Ukraine’, and not ‘Glory to God’. They destroy themselves.

However, separatist and nationalist movements began elsewhere in the coming decades, notably in Latvia and Belarus, from where emigres formed separate Churches after 1945. In 1994, after the fall of the USSR, another division took place in Estonia, promoted by the power-hungry and dollar-backed Patriarchate of Constantinople and lately, after its similar disastrous recent adventure in the Ukraine, it has been tempted to start nationalist schisms in Belarus and Lithuania.

Divisions Caused by Sectarianism

Until the fall of the USSR at the end of 1991, the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR, had a clear self-identity as the politically free part of the Russian Orthodox Church, free because it was outside Russia. As such it at last canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors. However, once atheist Communism had fallen inside the USSR, which then disappeared, ROCOR lost its identity. It had no more reason to exist as a separate entity. However, instead of taking up the cause of helping the Russian Orthodox Mother-Church in Moscow to form new Local Churches on the continents where it existed, ROCOR gradually adopted a sectarian identity. In the 1990s some of its bishops uncanonically opened tiny communities inside (not outside!) the ex-USSR. This was in defiance of the views of such as Metr Anastasy and St John of Shanghai that ROCOR’s separate existence could only be temporary and that its meaning was to bring Orthodoxy to the rest of the world. At the same time some ROCOR bishops took up with sectarian Old Calendarists in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, though they were ignored by other bishops and the mass of the clergy and faithful.

When in 2007 the anti-sectarian part of ROCOR at last forced the sectarians to abandon such Old Calendarist fantasies and enter into canonical communion with the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, small groups left ROCOR and actually joined or formed various sectarian groups, some of them in effect becoming Russian Old Calendarists. Naturally, they were all divided from each other and warred with one another. However, this was not the end of the sectarian spirit in ROCOR. Despite strong and reasoned opposition, at the end of 2020 it returned with a vengeance and ROCOR created a schism with the Paris Archdiocese, both of them parts of the same Mother-Church! Worse still, this schism was suicidally encouraged by political elements in Moscow itself! Naturally, those who valued canonicity and moral justice left ROCOR for the canonical Orthodox Church. There now began in ROCOR a right-wing, Protestant-style, convert cult of isolationism, with some very strange and queer undercurrents.

Conclusion

Statism, Nationalism and Sectarianism. All are isms. The solution to overcoming all such temptations is to cease isolationism and engage constructively in forming and taking part in new Local Churches.

 

 

Q and A on the Shipwreck of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1 December 2022: Follow the Money or Follow the Saints

The darker the night, the brighter the stars.

Q: Why did the émigré Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), based in New York, enter into communion with the Moscow Patriarchate (MP), based in Moscow, in 2007? I heard it was for money.

A: It was definitely not for money. No money was involved. This story comes from the self-justification of old calendarists, who left ROCOR rather than enter into communion with the MP and had to give a reason for it. Ironically, some ignorant people in Moscow at the time – and I was there – said that the link-up was because Moscow wanted ‘all the ROCOR money’! Of course, that was an inherited Soviet fantasy, which imagined that all emigres were wealthy aristocrats. ROCOR, which was and is in any case only 1% of the size of the MP, had very little money in those days and Jordanville had survived till the mid-1980s only thanks to handouts from the CIA.

Q: Why did Moscow want to enter into communion?

A: Moscow wanted the link-up for political prestige: if the anti-Communist ROCOR entered into communion, it would mean that Moscow was clearly no longer tainted by Communism, which had fallen 16 years before 2007 in 1991. They needed the ROCOR rubber stamp on that. Patriarch Kyrill himself told a Russian Orthodox Metropolitan whom I know well this very fact.

Q: But surely the MP bishops had KGB code-names?

A: When it still existed, the KGB gave everyone code-names, including Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Neither of them was a KGB agent – as far as I know! Who knows, maybe they had a code-name for you!

Q: But weren’t the old calendarists justified? Surely the MP was corrupt and controlled by the KGB?

A: The MP? You mean the MP bishops? Bishops are not the Church. The MP hierarchy had been held hostage before under the Soviets, yes. And it is true that bishops then were forbidden to speak freely under the Soviet Union, when the KGB still existed. But actually ‘controlled by the KGB’? I spoke to many bishops, priests and laypeople of the MP in private conversations and they were quite free with me! In any case, all that was over 30 years ago. The KGB no longer existed in 2007 and most of the men who were bishops in the KGB’s time are no longer alive today.

True, some of the MP bishops were then, and are now, corrupted by power and money, but that is nothing to do with Soviet rule. Some of the Russian bishops before the Revolution – and judging by their behaviour after the February Revolution perhaps most of them – were corrupted by power and money. That is just human, not systematic. That is and that was their personal choice, not a Church dogma or because of a political system.

For instance, one of the present defrocked MP bishops, Maxim, is in London now. He was already notorious as a loose-living young priest in London a few years ago, but he still got made a bishop, after which he was accused of drug-dealing (no surprises there, for those who knew him) and ran away from police arrest in Russia. Of course, here the authorities gave this criminal asylum. All he had to say to get asylum was that he was against Putin! Two other bishops, both called Ignaty, are in monasteries in Russia, for repentance after moral crimes. What is remarkable is that all three unworthy candidates somehow got made bishops. How was that possible? That is the real question. Why are there so many clearly unworthy bishops in both parts of the Russian Church?

Q: So why did the link-up take place in 2007, if no money was involved? What was in it for ROCOR?

A: It was to stop the already very isolated ROCOR becoming a Protestant-style right-wing sect of the old calendarist variety (which it has now largely become). Unity was the great desire of Metr Laurus and all the Church wing in ROCOR, who could see the danger and temptation of becoming a sect. ROCOR’s only remaining friends, the Serbian Church and the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, both advised ROCOR to enter communion with the MP, or else it would become a sect and fall out of communion even with them.

However, the desire of the political wing in ROCOR was to be sectarian, they liked their isolation and life in the ‘One True Church’ ghetto. So some of the isolationists left in 2007 for multiple old calendarist-style, sectarian ‘One True Church’ groups, one of them CIA-financed. Others stayed behind. Those who stayed behind have contributed to some of the present problems. For example, they took in an extremist priest who was with the right-wing mob at the Capitol on 6 January 2021 (the OCA quite rightly did not want him any more after that). Then there were the open recommendations to vote Trump from ROCOR bishops. In other words, American ROCOR refused to keep out of US party politics and even told us, Non-Americans, to support Trump!

Q: Where exactly do the problems and scandals in ROCOR today come from?

A: The problems come from the corruption by power and money of individuals in ROCOR, which at one time was mostly above and outside that. There was, after all, in those days, no money to be corrupted by in ROCOR. There was still nobility and honour, bishops were still servants of the Church, and nobody mentioned the dread phrase, ‘we bishops are princes of the Church’. ROCOR decided to be corrupted, it was under no obligation to be so. In other words, individuals in ROCOR corrupted themselves with American money, the dollar.

This was a tendency that was already present among a few in the 1960s (the ones who put St John of Shanghai and Western Europe on trial in the fleshpots of San Francisco), but the trend grew enormously in the 2000s. The younger generation, who never knew the old, principled and poor emigre ROCOR of St John of Shanghai and others, fell, and they took ROCOR down with them. This will go into the history books and be marvelled at by future generations.

Going to the USA after World War II finished ROCOR, not going to the post-USSR. ROCOR was corrupted by the USA, not by the USSR! That is the irony of it. ROCOR’s corruption was nothing to do with the MP. That is not to say that there are not parallels or that the MP does not have the same problems and even worse. As we have said, what is sad is that corrupt individuals have been made bishops in both parts of the Russian Church, rather than being exposed beforehand and dealt with before they could bring their corruption up to the episcopal level. These anti-pastors and anti-missionaries who with their profound desire for money and property, are mini-oligarchs and have wrecked whole dioceses. They are wolves in archpastors’ clothing

How did they get away with it? How did they deceive those above them? Were those above them blind? Did these individuals corrupt or bribe those above them? Here there are many, many unanswered questions. We understand that the Russian Church only had 150 bishops at the time in 2007. Another 250 have been made since then. But was there no examination of the candidates first? We have indeed returned to the scandals of the fourth century when most bishops were corrupt.

Q: Is the Ukraine affair and ROCOR support for President Putin the end of ROCOR?

A: Yes, it probably is, but only as the last nail in the coffin, which ROCOR had already decided to make for itself long before 24 February 2022. If the Ukraine had not happened, there would have been something else. ROCOR was already on its way out, as it had refused to take the only logical path of survival, that of helping to build up Local Churches. With so little humility, mercy and love, it had become spiritually irrelevant, a tiny Church of tiny ghetto communities in rented properties and wooden sheds, with very little idea of the authentic Russian Orthodox tradition, let alone other Orthodox traditions.

Q: What about the Ukraine and the MP?

A: Above all, the Ukrainian affair is the end of the highly centralised Soviet and post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, as it developed after 1925, after the repose/martyrdom of the holy Patriarch Tikhon, who was also, by the way, an American citizen and after whom a New York street has now been named. It is the end of the ‘Soviet Orthodoxy’ of Metropolitan Sergius and those who admire him, the end of erastianism, the end of that strange mixture of centralised bureaucracy, protocols, narrow nationalism, ritualism and superstition that was accepted on account of the ignorance of people, who had been held captive by Soviet atheism for three generations.

Q: What is the future?

A: Today the whole Russian Church, the MP and ROCOR, has to be recast. Both will have to change names, restructuring themselves completely and granting autocephalies, founding new Local Churches. They will both have to stop living in the past, whether centralising Soviet or CIA-funded anti-Soviet. That period is over. Both terms, MP and ROCOR, are purely Soviet and anti-Soviet, purely political and belong to a historical period in the past. They are not relevant today. An anti-corruption purge among senior clergy must take place before both parts of the Russian Church can recover and become credible once more. Now is an incredibly decadent period, when both the Church hierarchies are living under the shadow of the money-money corruption that began in the 1990s. However, great potential is still there, the potential of the New Martyrs and the New Confessors. All the corrupt have to do is to recognise and to repent for their huge errors and only then can they both move forwards.

Q: How could ROCOR have avoided compromising itself on the Ukrainian question?

A: As I said, by providing three foundation-stones for new Local Churches, that is, in Western Europe, North America and Australia. Instead of that, ROCOR continued to make out that it was Russian and a kind of super-territorial Church, refusing to work together with other local Orthodox, pridefully placing itself above them and persecuting its own clergy and people, siding with Moscow like obedient slaves. The fall from grace, from the moral high ground, has been great. But, as ever, a fall is always preceded by pride and it was the towering pride of the pharisees that destroyed ROCOR.

The refusal to help build Local Churches, to live in the here and now, thus losing generations of young people who found it all so alien, is in defiance of the Dogma of the Incarnation. The rejection of the implications of that Dogma has been an open invitation to cultivate phariseeism, sectarianism and Californian-style cultishness. And that is precisely how it has ended up: a right-wing, Protestant-style sect, like so many others in the USA, only with the folklore of exotic, purposely untranslated words to mystify the uneducated, with vestments, ritual and incense.

It is also hypocritical because today the language of the New York Synod is English. Most of its bishops cannot speak Russian correctly or grammatically. It grates on the ears of real Russians. In conversation they break into English as soon as possible. Thus, we have a pretend-Russian Church. Why not be honest and co-operate with other Orthodox locally and help build up new Local Churches? Instead of that, ROCOR has pridefully said that it is better than others, superior to them, whom it despises.

It has also been uncanonically stealing priests from Constantinople and uncanonically ‘defrocking’ pastors and even attempting to close down the communities of the canonically-minded, who with integrity object to ROCOR’s uncanonical and schismatic activities, as well as to ROCOR’s illegal attempts to seize property. (This is exactly what the present regime in Kiev is doing to canonical churches in the Ukraine, seizing them in order to close them down. Nobody will go to the seized and uncanonical churches. So that is the same situation as here).

As a result, other Local Churches are, quite rightly, refusing to concelebrate with this new ROCOR. In Europe, ROCOR is not even in communion with the MP’s own very small Parisian Archdiocese of Western Europe. It is sheer hypocrisy.

Q: But isn’t the MP also corrupt, perhaps even more so?

A: Individuals in both parts of the Russian Church have been corrupted by power and money. In the MP it is only worse because it has access to greater temptations – more power and more money. That is why all the mini-oligarchs now face the same chastisement – the war in the Ukraine. This has for ever divided both parts of the Russian Church. The Russian Church is no longer an agent of unity between Russia and the Ukraine, but an agent of division.

Most Orthodox no longer want to go to Russian churches. The Cathedral they built in Paris ten years ago for 50 million euros is virtually empty, the oligarchs gone, the local people rejected, no parish community has been formed. The same in the Cathedral in Nice, where they spent 20 million euros on restoration. They have all put their petty nationalism and ritualism above Christ. The fact that they can have a war with each other shows how low the spiritual level is in both countries. I have seen this coming over the last fifteen years on frequent visits to Russia and the Ukraine, as well as here. Golden or blue cupolas, gold decorations, colourful frescoes, but empty churches. No pastors, and so no parishes, just priests carrying out rituals.

Q: When did the situation for ROCOR change?

A: I think the turning-point here came in 2018. That was the beginning of the end. The leader of ROCOR, the meek and weak Metr Hilarion, became prey to dementia and cancer. Others around him, lacking the traditional Orthodox Christian spirit, read and signed his letters in his place and he had no idea what was going on behind his back.

Q: And in the MP?

A: In the MP the weight of careerists hit a tipping-point around the same time too, in about 2018, having, just like ROCOR, also failed to drain its swamp. The results: lack of prayer, the refusal to take the sacraments, churches like railway stations with people going in and coming out, the lack of any parish communities, the need for paid choirs (or else there will be no-one to sing) and no sense of belonging. Superficiality and folklore, passed down from great-grandparents. Money, money, money. No wonder so many Russian Orthodox have become Protestants, especially in the Ukraine and in the West. In the Ukraine it is said that up to 18% are Evangelicals. Outside San Francisco there is a huge Russian Protestant/Pentecostal church. In London, UK, too.

All of this is the result of almost total pastoral failure, which has brought with it the persecution of the pastors who do exist. There are clergy, whether MP or ROCOR, who are clergy simply because it is a career and they would fail or have failed in a secular career. The careerists are notable for their ‘Popeness’, their narcissism and total lack of love. They are heartless. Some of them are not even believers, let alone were pious laypeople before ordination.

Now they are paying the price. How did they think they could ever get away with it? The only solution is repentance. Because otherwise: ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’ (Rom. 12: 19). And that vengeance is terrible, as we can already see in the Ukraine and it is not finished yet. Once you cut yourself off from God and commit blasphemy, like these careerists have, you have no more spiritual protection from the demons.

Q: How do you feel about having left the Russian Church after nearly 50 years?

A: I think we all feel the same – we feel a huge sense of relief. We got off the Titanic eight days before it hit the Ukrainian iceberg. We left a nightmare, which has become far worse since last February. We got out just in time and feel sorry for those who did not leave then. We were on the last flight out of Kabul. That was Divine Providence for us. But we still hope that good can come out of evil. We await the great cleansing of the Russian Church and so its re-formation, reconfiguration and restructuring. The old is completely compromised; they decided to follow the money instead of following the saints. The Russian Church has to return to being a Church of the Saints, of the New Martyrs. Otherwise it has no reason to exist, except as a money-making business organisation, if you consider that that is  a reason to exist.

Today, more and more are coming to us, refugees from the Russian Church, Russians and Ukrainians, who put Christ above their passports. They are all disgusted with what is happening there. So we have become an oasis for the refugees from the very real shipwreck that is the Russian Church today.

 

 

On the Sadness of Mammon: Whatever Happened to the Russian Orthodox Church? (1992-2022)

Thirty years have gone by since Communism fell and the Russian Orthodox Church began to revive on a mass level. But over the last three or four years, before the events in the Ukraine, more and more have become disgusted with the behaviour of some in the Russian Orthodox episcopate, both in the Moscow Patriarchate (MP), based in the former Soviet Union, and in the émigré Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), based in New York. When did this decadence among the Russian episcopate begin?

The historically-minded would go back to the Judaisers of Skhariya in fifteenth century Russia, or to the Old Ritualist schism in the seventeenth century, yet others to Peter I and the German Catherine II (both dubbed by Westernisers ‘the Great’). In any case, the decadence certainly began well before 1917 and there are probably very few nowadays who still believe the old ‘lightswitch’ myths of the children of émigrés about how everything was perfect before 1917 and suddenly everything was awful afterwards. Revolutions do not happen without a cause.

A reading of the early volumes of the works of the incredibly frank Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky) (+ 1936) or of ‘The Russian Ideology’ by St Seraphim of Boguchar (Sofia) (+ 1950), describing the deviations of a State Church, is enough to see through that nonsense. As the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva used to point out to us with a shrug of his shoulders: ‘They complain about the Russian bishops inside Russia who have swish black cars. Well, before the Revolution they had swish black carriages with swish black horses’.

However, none of the above distant historical references explain, let alone justify, what is going on today, with calls to ‘cancel’ (1) scandalous Russian Orthodox bishops, both in the Moscow Patriarchate and in its ROCOR subsidiary, for whom everything is wonderful. We are talking about the here and now. As one recent correspondent has put it: ‘I really think this is the reason why Orthodoxy is in such a mess today, it comes from the top down. Nowadays bishops have no humility, they’re full of pride and have a never-ending love of luxury which is corrupting them. Bishops in the MP and ROCOR live in a far more luxurious way them the vast majority of their parishioners and the worst thing is they think it’s normal.’

We were used to the old decadence of the Patriarchate of Constantinople: its careerist bishops, usually homosexuals, ordaining their boyfriend who then turned alcoholic, occasionally pedophiles, the womanisers with their mistress(es), the amassing of money for a villa in Greece, getting their teeth whitened in Turkey so they could look even more like the Hollywood stars they adore. But then exactly the selfsame disease spread to the Russian Church. What is the difference?

We can remember Metropolitan Philaret Denysenko of Kiev who in the 1970s (!) built himself a palace with the help of his Communist friends. The fact that he was married and had two children bothered no-one: in Moscow they turned a blind eye to married bishops – there were a lot of them then (as there are today, including in Western Europe), with at least one in the then ROCOR. The only problem was that Denysenko, like all careerists, wanted to be the Patriarch and then, like so many Communists, in 1992 turned overnight into a nationalist in the hope of achieving his aim (2). So he created a schism. Understandably, Moscow turned against him then. You could turn a blind eye to his moral weakness and his pickpocketing of money from the Church till, but not to schism. He is now defrocked, a shame, but also one who makes you shudder.

I remember Dmitry, an old émigré of the second generation (those nostalgic for something they had never known were always the worst – the real emigres, adults before the Revolution, knew all about what it had really been like and all the scandals). He told me in 2005 that ROCOR could not possibly be linked to the Moscow Patriarchate because that would be like a glass of pure water being mixed with a glass of dirty water. Pure phariseeism. I mentioned the word ‘Grabbe’ to him. Not the CIA and freemason father George/Gregory or Nasty News Nastia, but the notorious womanising son (3), Antony, who in ROCOR was called ‘the six-million dollar man’. That, after all, is how much he had made by selling Russian Church property in the Holy Land to the Jews. Poor old Dmitry pretended to know nothing about it. But he did, just as he knew about the alcoholic ROCOR protodeacon, the defrocked ROCOR priest, the womanising ROCOR priest who stole tens of thousands from his church and was awarded for it all by his naïve (or not so naïve?) archbishop. No, Dmitry, there were two glasses of dirty water.

Inside Russia, some blame the 250 bishops consecrated over the last 14 years by Patriarch Kyrill, too many of whom were clearly unworthy. Yet the search for more bishops was necessary. True, too many of them were not men of prayer, just ‘effective managers’ (code for ‘fundraising bureaucrats’) and they turned out to be just homosexuals and careerists (often one and the same, as among the Greeks), on the thrones of whose vacant souls sat the mocking satan. But despite even their numbers, the Russian Church still needs to find another 1,000 bishops, build another 100,000 churches and real Christian communities (rather than trying to persecute them and close them down) and find another 100,000 priests (rather than expelling them to other Local Churches), before it can say that it has really revived. The path for them has barely begun, as I have said time and time again.

Sadly, since the fall of Communism and the USSR in December 1991, many have fallen by the wayside in Russia. First there were the liberals like Kuraev, who adored Bulgakov, Schmemann and Meyendorff etc more than the saints. Then there were the ‘Orthodox Stalinists’, yesterday’s left-wing Bolsheviks who became today’s right-wing nationalists, under the cloak of Orthodoxy (2). These extremes all lead nowhere. The liberal Kuraev is defrocked, just as the anti-Semitic, right-wing ‘worshipper of Tsar as God’ Sergei Romanov from the Urals Convent. I met them both.

But perhaps the worst cases are in the Russian emigration. How we recall a very naïve young man from the ex-USSR seeing in Europe in the 1990s an elderly emigre bishop sweeping the floor of his church. He blurted out: ‘Clearly, he is a saint’. What nonsense. All émigré bishops and priests swept (and some of us still sweep) the floors of our churches. Are we all saints then?! We well remember the old school, of all jurisdictions: Archbishop George Tarasov in Paris, the widowed World War One pilot who became a bishop and had no clothes to wear; Archbishop Seraphim (Dulgov), the ROCOR bishop who lived in poverty and was happy so; Metropolitan Benjamin (Fedchenkov), whose only food was that given to him by his few parishioners and who slept on a concrete floor because he had given his bed to a beggar. Let me assure you that all this was completely normal. We never thought of ourselves as saints. We were, and are, simply confessing Orthodox Christians. It is you who are abnormal, which is why we are calling you to shame and repentance now.

And then in recent years there have come to Europe new ‘princes of the Church’, as they call themselves. There were a young bishop whose first act was to buy himself a fancy car and another even younger one, who refused to live next to his church and instead rented a whole very expensive house miles away, near a foreign embassy, from where he took his orders as their asset, so depriving a married priest of a salary! Both then tried to grab properties and cash, bullying like racketeering Chicago gangsters. Both discredited themselves immediately among their flocks, though they were lauded by their fellow-bishops. They convinced no-one and their dioceses are visibly and actually quite rapidly contracting as a direct result. But they say that everything is wonderful. Because they cannot see the elephants in the room. Themselves.

The curse of today’s Russian Orthodoxy, MP and ROCOR, is undoubtedly love of money. And this is not because ROCOR has been corrupted by the money of the MP. The MP never gave ROCOR a penny. You could perhaps argue just the opposite: ROCOR corrupted the MP with its American love of money. Already fifty years ago, the new ROCOR celibate priests sent to Europe in the 70s and 80s were not like the old ones, the authentic poor monks and probable saints. Fr George Sheremetiev (+ 1971) warned us even then of ‘the American disease’ coming to ROCOR. The new ones all wanted to live like the wealthy Americans they already were or else wanted to be. One turned out to be a pedophile, others were long ago defrocked. On the other hand, in 2018 I met a priest in Russia, who had been through the Americanisation of Russia in the 1990s, who boasted that he had 15 kilos of gold inside the magnificent church he had built. I told him to sell it and give it to the poor. ‘In England we use gold paint. That’s good enough for us’.

We know all their stories and all their names, from the photos with the ostrich feathers down. (You know who you are). But as St Paisios the Athonite told me in 1979: ‘When you see the excrement of wild animals on a path between monasteries, you gather it together and throw it away into the bushes, so that the next passer-by does not walk in it and spread it around’. As with the excrement of wild animals, so we do with the scandals of bishops.

I remember that same old son of an émigré, Dmitry, who told me that we in ROCOR could not possibly concelebrate with the corrupt of the Moscow Patriarchate. I quietly reminded him that all the New Martyrs belonged to the Moscow Patriarchate, for there were none in ROCOR, and that we belonged to the New Martyrs. He had no answer. We Orthodox belong to the Persecuted Church, not to the Persecuting Church and we are not afraid, for as it is written:

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, incontinent, fierce, haters of the good, traitors, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof. From such turn away…But they will not get very far: for their folly shall be made plain to all.

Prophecies of Paul the Apostle, 2 Timothy 3, 1-5, 9

And if you are disheartened by all this, know that we are still here, despite all the mud they have slung at us and which has stuck only to them. And then read the prophecies from outside Russia and from inside Russia:

The Lord has already chosen the future Tsar. He will be a man of fiery faith, having the mind of a genius and a will of iron. First of all, he will introduce order into the Orthodox Church, removing all the untrue, heretical and lukewarm hierarchs. And many, very many – with few exceptions, all – will be deposed, and new, true, unshakeable hierarchs will take their place.

Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, in exile in France (+ 1940)

The bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church will fall away from the truth of the Orthodox Faith, they will not believe in the prophecies of the resurrection of Russia. To reprove them, St Seraphim of Sarov will be raised from the dead. He will reprove the clergy for their treachery and betrayal and will preach repentance to the whole world.

Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan (+ 1968)

Judgement Day is coming.

 

Notes:

  1. In the same way as the recent ‘cancelling’ of the scandalous Metr Joseph of the Antiochian Archdiocese in the USA has already led to his ‘retirement’.
  2. Communists who see that they have lost always then play the nationalist card, as in Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, Yugoslavia etc. And in China. The overnight techniques are the same, as are the results. The biggest Nazis in today’s Ukraine were the biggest Communists thirty years ago. Denysenko is but one example.
  3. The old ROCOR quip on father and son clerics has always been: ‘Yes, I saw the father and the son, only I didn’t see the Holy Spirit’.

 

ROCOR in Desperate Search of an Identity

Introduction

The small émigré Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which was formed after 1917 largely from White Russian refugees, has desperately been in search of an identity since 2007. Then, as it joined up with the rest of the much larger Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate or MP), at a ratio of 1% to 99% (300 parishes to 30,000 parishes), it gave up being a museum or heritage church. After all, the old  generation, adults before the 1917 evolution, had completely died out by then. Many of their children had abandoned Church life and it was increasingly dependent on people and clergy from the ex-USSR.

The traditional ROCOR position was to keep its pre-Revolutionary heritage, to stand with the New Martyrs and Confessors and to condemn the collaboration of bishops inside the USSR with the atheist State. However, once the USSR and the atheist State had ceased to exist in 1992, once the post-Soviet MP had begun canonising its New Martyrs and Confessors and reviving its pre-Revolutionary heritage in 2000, then ROCOR had to find a new role to justify its existence. There was nothing distinctive any more. Since 2007, there have been discussions as to what that role should be. Two schools of thought have appeared in the past fifteen years.

The First Choice

The first choice was to be absorbed by the Moscow Patriarchate and their immigrant parishioners all over the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union, clearly outnumbering the old ROCOR parishioners, who were dying out. Unfortunately, at the same time corruption from inside the oligarchic ex-USSR spread to ROCOR too. Bishops became corrupted by the temptations of money, prestige and property. Some ROCOR churches became virtual embassy churches for the Moscow Patriarchate and its nationalist policy in the Ukraine, others became nationalist nostalgia clubs, ghettos which are irrelevant to others. Others became tiny, inward-looking and sectarian and cultish groups for rather right-wing US Protestants with the OneTrueChurchism of some converts with their conspiracy theories, as also in England and Belgium, for example.

I have been to ROCOR churches in the USA four times since 1996, once as a speaker at the 2006 ROCOR Council in San Francisco under the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus (only six out of the nine ROCOR speakers there remain in ROCOR). No fewer than three ROCOR bishops (I know them all) told me since 2017 that their hero is Trump. I was told never to say anything against Trump or else face censorship! If ROCOR follows this political, indeed totalitarian, path, it will not only fall out of communion with the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Alexandria and the Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate, as it already has, but with all the other Local Churches, as seems highly likely. In fact one of their bishops told us that this was his aim!

The Second Choice

The second choice is to insist on ROCOR autonomy and freedom, realising the full potential of ROCOR, and remain faithful to the Russian Orthodox ascetic and liturgical tradition of the old bishops, clergy and laity, whom I knew and loved so well. Completely unmercenary, they had no love of money, prestige, power, fancy apartments and cars and of what we may in general call ‘bling’. This is faithfulness to the New Martyrs and Confessors and the Three Diaspora Saints: St John of Shanghai, St Seraphim of Boguchar and St Jonah of Hankou. It would be well if ROCOR ceased commemorating Patriarch Kyrill, as they have already ceased doing in the Ukraine and Latvia. No Ukrainian refugees will ever set foot and stay in any church that commemorates him. We know: we do not commemorate him, as we are not under him, and so plenty of Ukrainian refugees from the canonical Ukrainian Church come to us.

The fact is that the only long-term purpose of any Orthodox presence and structure in Western Europe, North America, Latin America and Oceania is to help lay the groundwork for future Local Churches in those four Continents and regions in the local languages. Witness is essential. This has been patently obvious for at least two generations. And this means inter-Orthodox, inter-calendar and multinational co-operation, being part of the mainstream, not being part of a schismatic sect or cult. Down with politics and racist ideologies! Long live Orthodox Christianity!

Conclusion

The choice for ROCOR is simple: Either to side with the Persecuting Church or else to stand with the Persecuted Church. The first way is spiritual death, as some with suicidal tendencies here have already done, the second way is spiritual life. The clash between these two visions of the Church has already taken place here. The result of this was that, because of years of persecution and being ignored, half a ROCOR diocese and most of its people left for the Patriarchate of Romania. Will this pattern be repeated elsewhere? Today we have heard that the new First Hierarch of ROCOR is Metropolitan Nicholas (Olhovsky). It was the obvious choice, since the two senior candidates had compromised themselves in politics. Metr Nicholas is a candidate of the Lukianov group, but also has many qualities, not least that he is a son from the post-1945 generation and knew Metr Laurus very well, as his cell-attendant. But some fear that this young bishop may be manipulated by others and compromise himself by obeying them again.

If Metr Nicholas wants to survive in the much contracted ROCOR (that has all but lost South America, where forty years ago it had six bishops, Indonesia and much of Western Europe), he will now have to allow parishes to cease commemorating Patriarch Kyrill, deal with the Western Rite problem, the House Springs scandal and the Belya scandal in the USA, and then all the scandals in what remains of the tiny ‘Western European Diocese’. He may be tempted to avoid many problems by doing the swap that Moscow has long wanted and exchange the ROCOR parishes in Western Europe (after, or as regards the 20 mainly small parishes of the Western European Diocese even before, Metr Mark has gone) for the bishopless MP parishes in North America. This will leave him with his American Synod in control of Russian and convert parishes in North America and Australia. Then he will have to steer ROCOR towards co-operation with the OCA. Otherwise, ROCOR will simply die out.

 

 

Six Months On: The Completely Avoidable Tragedy of the Ukraine and the Curse of Nationalism

‘Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity, but I’m not so sure about the universe’.

Words Attributed to Albert Einstein

 

Foreword

We have never had any doubt that the Russian Federation would win militarily in the conflict in the Ukraine, for which eventuality it had carefully prepared for eight long years. (I stress the word ‘militarily’). During that time the West continually poked the bear and then was surprised when the bear’s patience ran out – on 24 February 2022. That does not mean that I approve of anything that has happened in the Ukraine since 2014. I visited different parts of the Ukraine six times between 2014 and 2021 and my many parishioners from all over the Ukraine only confirmed what I had seen.

I could see only too well its immense problems, the corruption which led to an infrastructure, far worse even than that in the oligarch-dominated UK, and the poverty of the masses, making it poorer than many African countries. In this article I take no sides. All wars are huge human tragedies and cannot be approved of. However, I am interested in the truth, not in propaganda, whichever side it comes from. And here, as everywhere and always on this site, without the burden of any careerism I am free to be interested only in the truth and its causes and consequences for Church life.

Introduction: The Tragedy: 2014-2022

After the 2014 US-organised coup d’etat (cost to the US taxpayer = $5 billion, as officially admitted by the US politician Victoria Nuland), one thing was at once obvious. This was that the new Kiev government needed to carry out internationally-observed referenda. Then they could let the various peoples in the Ukraine, with its purely artificial, Soviet-made borders, assigned to it by the atheist monsters Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, freely decide which country they wanted to belong to. Any enforcement of the old atheist centralisation from Kiev would, as in Yugoslavia, lead to exactly the same tragedy and war as in Yugoslavia. Both amalgams, Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, were hangovers from the Communist period with their absurd borders, jamming together peoples who had little in common and no desire to live in the same country as one another.

Sadly, the reality is that this current completely avoidable tragedy in the Ukraine is ‘Yugoslavia II’, that is, it the same thing again, only on a far greater and more serious scale. And here, unlike in Serbia, NATO cannot use its air force, for it will be shot down by superior Russian technology, and its army and navy are shut out.  In 2014 an internationally-observed referendum was held in the Crimea, and all went well, with a clear 97% majority choosing to return to Russia, after 60 years of enforced separation from it. However, Kiev itself refused to allow referenda anywhere, including in the Crimea. Therefore, the Kiev government, or rather those behind them who would not allow referenda, are responsible for today’s catastrophic consequences and tens and probably hundreds of thousands of deaths. They have blood, a lot of it, on their hands. What are those consequences?

The Catastrophe: 2022-

  1. Local Consequences: The Human Cost

In 2014 war broke out in the Ukraine, specifically in the Russian-speaking Donbass, whose language and culture were oppressed and mocked by the racist centralisers in Kiev. Up to 14,000 people, including 400 children, were massacred by the Kiev authorities and the other 6 million were told to leave the Ukraine, if they did not like Kiev’s new ‘democracy’. This year, there has been much worse. Six months of conflict have now passed, though it was clear from the beginning, like it or not, that the small Russian expeditionary force had already won in the first few weeks. Their feint to the North, as if to take Kiev, locked up the Kiev military there (the same tactic as the US used in Iraq with a feint from the sea), enabling Russian forces to achieve their aims of conquering much of the Russian-speaking East and take the Russian-speaking South as far as Kherson, where they were greeted by many as liberators. This was what the Russians had openly stated that they intended doing all along, but they had been disbelieved.

Like it or not, the ensuing decision by the USA/West/NATO to send billions of dollars of their weapons, disarming their own troops, to be destroyed by Russian missiles, sometimes before they can even be unpacked (as on 24 February at Borispol Airport), is only prolonging the inevitable defeat and making the bloodshed far worse. So far the Russians and their Allies have lost over 6,000 troops dead, although over the last two months since they took strategic Mariupol, casualties have been very low, as this has largely become a war of satellites, drones, artillery and precision missiles. On the other hand, the Kiev Army has lost some 250,000, at least 60,000 of them killed, and continues to lose many hundreds of ill-trained, ill-equipped and often very young or very old troops almost every day, whether killed, wounded, or by surrender and desertion.

You should not be fighting a modern war when you do not have air superiority. Kiev does not, as most of its air force was destroyed in the first few days. It is a catastrophe and leaves widows and orphans everywhere. Every son killed had a mother and a father, a brother and a sister. The whole country is in bitter mourning. Its population is now down to 30 million. Of 6 million refugees, Russia is the European country that has taken the most, with 2 million fleeing the bankrupt Ukraine. However, 4 million others have left futureless bankruptcy for various countries in Western Europe, over half going to Poland and Germany. It costs the US taxpayer $5 billion every month just to keep the Kiev government afloat, let alone the billions of dollars of destroyed US military equipment.

Unless the 13% of the world, which is all the Western world/G7/NATO is, really wants a nuclear war to annihilate humanity, as Mrs Truss says she does, the West will just have to accept that Russia has taken back the Russian Lands within the former Ukraine. People like Mrs Truss, with her extraordinary ignorance of the basic history and geography of the Ukraine, simply do not realise that this is an existential war for Russia on its doorstep, even though V. Putin explained this quite clearly. Russians will die to win this war to free their brothers and sisters in the East and South of the Ukraine.

However, despite what Mr Johnson has recently proclaimed, no-one in the UK has chosen to pay 400% more for fuel bills, let alone die for the Ukraine, of which country few in the UK had even heard until six months ago. The result of the UK government’s refusal to buy Russian gas and other commodities and to arm the Ukraine, without consulting the electorate, which is not even allowed to elect the next Prime Minister, is soaring inflation, social disruption, strikes and grinding poverty, which will probably topple the UK government in the near future. Here is the difference with Russia. Nobody in the UK wants to suffer, let alone die, for an unknown country.

Local Consequences: What Does the Future Ukraine Look Like?

It looks something like the following – something that could have happened without any bloodshed, had democratic referenda been allowed back in 2014:

The Real Ukraine of Ukrainian speakers, the ‘Kyiv Protectorate’, or whatever it will come to be called, may take 11 demilitarised central and western provinces of the former Soviet Ukraine: Sumy, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, Ternopil. Population: 11.2 million. This will be a landlocked nation, in effect a Second Belarus, with a population of just over a quarter of the 1991 Soviet Ukraine.

Russia may take the 9 Russian-speaking eastern and southern provinces: Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhe, Kherson, Crimea (Crimea of course already rejoined Russia in 2014), Nikolaev, Odessa. Population: 14.2 million.

Poland may, with Russia’s permission, take back the 3 far western ‘Habsburg’ provinces: Volyn (though a small number in the north of Volyn might want to join Belarus), Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk. Population: 3.2 million. This is the historic ‘Ukraina’ – the word that simply means the borderlands (that are next to Poland). Clearly, this real Ukraine would have to receive some sort of autonomy within the NATO-ruled Polish Republic as a demilitarised buffer-zone.

Hungary may take 1 province: Zakarpattia. Population: 0.85 million. This is providing that its mainly Carpatho-Russian people vote for this by referendum, though, true, many have already accepted Hungarian passports. This region would also have to receive some sort of autonomy within Hungary.

Romania may take 1 province: Chernivtsy. Population: 0.6 million. This is providing that its largely Romanian-speaking people vote for it by referendum, which seems highly likely.

  1. Global Consequences: Western Sanctions Cause Chaos in Western Europe

Why is the Russian campaign taking so long, why did Russia not use 25% or even 50% of its armed forces and take the whole of the Ukraine within a few weeks? Because that is not its strategy. By its own admission Russia has never had any intention of occupying the whole of the Ukraine and its capital Kiev. Therefore, only 5%-10% of the highly professional Russian Armed Forces have been engaged in order to take back the Russian-speaking areas, which were separated from it by Marxist diktat exactly 100 years ago. In any case, most of the fighting is being done by the local anti-Kiev Eastern Ukrainians and Chechen allies, who have suffered most of the casualties.

Then there is no hurry – the Russians want to conserve the lives of their own troops and of Ukrainian civilians and to conserve infrastructure. Time in any case is on the Russian side: their greatest ally is, as is usual in Russia, General Winter. By deliberately stretching the conflict out by agreeing to provide arms ‘until the last Ukrainian is dead’, Western European governments have foolishly fallen into the trap of extending the war into the winter. In this way they will have to suffer a winter with little fuel and face national emergencies, probable popular uprisings and riots and the fall of governments. The West has been completely outwitted – by its own stupidity.

Nowhere in Western Europe is the situation as grim as in the UK. With its privatised utilities, which are in reality unregulated, the law of the jungle prevails. For example the energy price cap imposed by the French government on its State energy monopolies is 4%. In the deregulated UK, prices by January will probably have increased by 400%. This is unsustainable. Expect a universal bill boycott, already started, and food riots. In the UK, Johnson’s words of 25 August, ‘You (note, ‘you’ not ‘we’) must endure to defeat Putin’ do not work. Nobody in the UK voted for this. Moreover, in the ‘democratic’ UK, 160,000 mainly elderly, wealthier people are taking two months just to choose the next Prime Minister, the fourth in six years. The UK used to mock political instability in Italy; it had better look at itself.

Global Consequences: Sanctions and Dedollarisation

Europe’s own anti-Russian sanctions, even though forced on it by the USA, are suicidal. Bankruptcy stares it in the face. The rouble has stabilised at a very healthy 60 to the dollar (before the conflict it was over 90 and briefly went up to 120) and money is flooding into Russian coffers as the whole Non-Western world wants its oil, gas, grain, fertilisers, rare earth metals, not to mention its highly effective arms. They are available to anyone in Western Europe who does not sanction them, as long as they pay for them in the Russian currency. On the other hand, the euro has sunk to parity with, or is even below, the dollar. The conspiracy theorists are even saying that the whole conflict was created by the USA to destroy, not Russia or even the Ukraine, but the EU, notably the German economy. Probably crazy, but actually quite logical.

China, India and indeed over 85% of the world have no sanctions against Russia, indeed they basically support Russia. The West is isolated, with its manufacturing dependent on China, which will soon claim back Taiwan. And Russia and other countries are now insisting on payment for their essential commodities in roubles or in their own currencies. The world economy is being dedollarised – that is a disaster for the USA.

  1. Church Consequences

Now we come to the second half of this article, what interests us most. What are the Church consequences of the conflict in the Ukraine, especially, what is happening to the Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Orthodox Church? Here the situation is grim indeed. On 25 August the Russian Church was forced to abandon plans for its Patriarch Kyrill, already sanctioned and banned from visiting the UK and Canada, to meet the Pope of Rome in Kazakhstan in September. Centralised Church authorities in Moscow had totally misread the public mood and the proposition had led to a huge scandal.

However, the misreading, or just plain non-understanding of the views of the local Orthodox grassroots, is far more generalised than this mere detail. The authorities of the formerly multinational Russian Orthodox Church has tried to impose the political views of Russia on its multinational flock. The result? Its Non-Russian flock has largely left it. This is a repeat of what happened in the 1920s when the leader of the Church then, Metropolitan Sergius, tried to enforce loyalty to the atheist Soviet State on his flock outside Russia. Result? He lost his flock outside the Soviet Union. We can see exactly the same result, all over again, in many regions of the world. For instance:

a) The Ukraine.

Few can describe the hatred felt by Ukrainians, mostly from central and western Ukraine, for Russia and Russians. They are simply boycotting the churches where the name of Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned. I speak from what I have seen. Even here, for example, Ukrainian refugees come to us and ask who our Patriarch is. When I reply that last February we were issued with letters of leave to quit the Moscow Patriarchate (its Western European Archdiocese) for Patriarch Daniel of Romania because of political persecution, they smile and say they will return to us. They feel at home with us; we are neutral. However, wherever the name Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned in church services, Ukrainian refugees, like many other Ukrainians who have already been here for some time, vote with their feet and leave. Understandably so.

Even Autonomy for the only canonical Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, that which is led by Metropolitan Onufry, is now no longer enough. It is too late. Moscow has totally lost control. It is Autocephaly that has to be granted, exactly as the saintly Serbian Patriarch Porfiry recently granted to the Church of North Macedonia. This simple message has yet to get through to Moscow, but it is a fact. Otherwise, the Ukrainian Church will simply be an empty shell. This need for Autocephaly is not a top-down case of political manoeuvrings by a nationalistic elite who want their ‘own’ National Church to command and control, as was the case of the Protestant Churches in Western Europe (e.g. the Church of England or those in Scandinavia) or the purely political group founded in the Ukraine in 2018 under the Church of Constantinople.  This is a case of the people demanding Autocephaly, it is a ‘down-top’ movement.

b. The Baltic States

Russophobia here is virulent. There are already two Churches in Estonia and there are about to be two in Lithuania because of nationalism and hatred for Russia. The US-sponsored Patriarchate of Constantinople stands behind both breakaway groups in Estonia and Lithuania. It seems to me that at the very least the three Baltic States must have their own Local, Autonomous, if not Autocephalous, Orthodox Church. Only that will stop the schisms. Again the message is clear to everyone, except to Moscow. Does Moscow really think it can weather the storms and hold on?

The situation in Lithuania is especially disastrous, where priests have been defrocked for a purely political disagreement with Moscow. This is an abuse of the canons. As our bishop, Metropolitan Joseph, said to us in a recent conversation, defrocking happens to clergy for moral, financial or criminal reasons, not because the clergy disagree with their bishop about politics or, as missionaries, are defending their churches from predatory and anti-missionary bishops. Nobody in the free Orthodox world recognises political defrockings. They are not only uncanonical, they are anti-canonical. They are particularly ironical, when those who should be defrocked for molesting women parishioners or stealing money from parish funds are not only not defrocked, but receive all manner of awards!

c. Moldova

Already 20% of churches in Moldova have left the Russian Church for the Patriarchate of Romania. The conflict in the Ukraine is making Moldovans shudder. Will we be next? The tiny Russian Transdnestria was of course long ago lost to Moldova, but what about Moldova itself? It seems inevitable that Moscow will lose the remaining 80% of its parishes there to the Romanian Church. Large parts of the Russian Diaspora are also composed of Moldovans, for example some 70 of the 72 Moscow Patriarchate parishes in Italy are Moldovan. Surely they too will leave for the Romanian Church?

Already in England most Moldovans have had to leave the Russian Church because of Slav nationalism and, sadly, a certain corruption. Here too, Russian nationalism appears to have destroyed the Russian Church’s once multinational character, as everywhere in the Western world. One nationalist bishop of the Russian Church in the Diaspora actually said in public: ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. That seemed to amuse him: it did not amuse the Romanians and Moldovans, or any of the Non-Russians, present. Here there is cause for the suspension of the bishop, if not for his actual defrocking. As far as I know, Christ never commanded us to hate other races.

d. The Western European Exarchate

In 2018 Moscow at last set up a Western European Exarchate, its centre in its brand-new, purpose-built Cathedral and centre in the most prestigious part of Paris, rumoured to have cost 50 million euros. Today, the Exarchate too is shattered, seemingly destroyed by Russian nationalism. Its first head lived in the Cathedral with his wife and child, and had another vice. He was duly sent away. (Though not sent so far as their Bishop Gury in the 1990s, who did something so serious that he ‘had to go’ and freeze in Magadan, opposite the Sea of Japan). The second head, a very politically-minded and very ecumenically-minded and very young man, who has not spent any time in a monastery and who speaks no French and poor English, now lives in Moscow and does administrative things.

Meanwhile, the Moscow Patriarchate Diocese in the UK no longer has a bishop, he is in Moscow. Few even remember who was the last Englishman to be ordained to the Russian Orthodox clergy in the UK. And the Moscow Patriarchate bishop in the Netherlands also seems to have disappeared. He got into great trouble with the Dutch government for threatening the clergy of his huge church in Amsterdam with ‘the Russian Embassy’, because, as Non-Russians, they had expressed purely political disagreement with the conflict in the Ukraine. As a result, the parish and about 70% of the people transferred to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as did a parish in Italy and another in Germany. Frankly, it appears as if the Western European Exarchate had its chance and failed. Does it have any future after the events in the Ukraine? That it might become the foundation to set up a future Western European Orthodox Church, as Patriarch Alexiy II wanted twenty years ago, now sounds like a bad joke. Hopes have been dashed by those who have betrayed their pastoral duties.

e. North America and ROCOR

In the USA the Moscow Patriarchate has also lost its bishop. Its forty or so parishes are left without a leader and, it seems perhaps without any possibility of even survival through new ordinations, let alone expansion. However, in general, all parts of the Orthodox Church in North America are in chaos. The largest group by far, the Greek Archdiocese, is facing scandal and disorder with the probable deposition of its new, highly political and secularising Archbishop Elpidiphoros. The second largest group, the OCA, which has Russian origins, is facing many difficulties, mot least the behaviour of its administration in over-zealously closing churches and persecuting clergy during lockdowns. The third largest group, Antioch, sometimes called ‘The Church of the Four Families’, faces a scandal involving allegations against its Metropolitan Joseph.

The fourth largest group, quite small in fact, a Russian group, ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), faces very embarrassing accusations of defamation, precisely from a Ukrainian priest, Fr Alexander Belya. The US courts will clearly favour him, though they must first justify his allegations to find out if they are true. Several other scandals in the USA involving properties and Russian clergy who have fled it for the Greek Church are also left unanswered. On top of all this, questions have been raised about the use of the electronic signature of the late Metropolitan Hilarion of ROCOR. He was clearly very ill for quite some time, at least for a year, if not for several years, before his death in May 2022, and yet all manner of very serious documents were being issued in his name by others. His death also leaves his Western Rite group, already dissolved in England, all at sea.

Moreover, ROCOR faces huge difficulties outside the USA. In Western Europe it lost half its English Diocese, 12 clergy, 5,000 people and two million pounds worth of Church buildings, ultimately to the Church of Romania, which canonically received them all, with the blessing of Patriarch Daniel himself. In 2007 they had already lost their only two monasteries in England to an Old Calendarist Church only because their analysis of the degree of the deSovietisation of the Church inside Russia varied with that of their bishop. On top of that, that English diocese then lost another four clergy to various other jurisdictions. Although still (!!) in complete denial of this reality, ROCOR here has now largely become an internet presence. The churches that left it for the Romanian Church are full and growing in clergy and people. Its very few remaining churches are very small. Meanwhile, in Geneva it also faces yet another court case on internal matters concerning administration and very embarrassing sackings, allegedly illegal, involving its appointment of freemasons.

From 1917-1991 ROCOR existed as the free and unpersecuted branch of the Russian Church outside the Soviet Union. After the atheist Soviet Union fell in 1991, and even more after ROCOR’s long-awaited reconciliation with the post-Soviet Russian Church in 2007, many began to question the reason for its continued existence. Some felt that Providence had given it a chance to justify its continued existence as the missionary part of the Russian Church outside Russia. It had the chance to prove itself as such from 2007 to 2017. Then all was still possible. Sadly, it failed to realise its potential and openly abandoned missionary work in whole areas of the world, such as Latin America, Indonesia and most of Western Europe, and instead concentrated on trying to amass money and striving to obtain impossible-to-obtain properties gained by previous unsupported missionary work. It seems as though the once persecuted Church has become the persecuting Church.

At the same time, some of its members turned inwards and selected Trumpism, and not Christ, as their ideology. It was clear that some in ROCOR had lost their way. Having chosen not faith, but a political ideology, and one which fails to work outside narrow US Republican ghettos, and lost most of itself outside North America, ROCOR may now be obliged to retreat to North America and lick its wounds. A well-known Russian Orthodox Metropolitan wrote to me only last week and told me that he does not think that it can survive at all; ROCOR risks becoming an embarrassment to the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia. This is a Church Titanic, of which Fr Alexander Belya is only the tip of the iceberg.

Conclusion: Lose-Lose?

The curse of nationalism has been lose-lose for all who have taken that particular acid bath. The Kiev government has lost by persecuting its own people and playing with several different nationalist and schismatic ‘Glory to the Ukraine churches’ and persecuting its only canonical Glory to God Church. Its false ‘churches’ have not only not created unity, but they have destroyed all remaining unity by persecuting and striving to seize the properties of the canonical Church (more parallels with the situation in the Diaspora). The Church of Constantinople has lost by playing with Greek and then Ukrainian nationalism. Western Europe has lost by playing with European nationalism (its ‘freedom and democracy’ myths) and enforcing Russophobic sanctions to cut off its nose to spite its face. ROCOR has lost by playing with American nationalism, exactly as the much persecuted St John of Shanghai prophesied. And the once multinational Russian Church has lost most of all by betraying its multinational vocation, that very vocation set by Tsar Nicholas II, with Russian nationalism, thus wrecking its multinational reputation. It will not recover from that for at least a generation.

Everyone is a loser. However, Divine Providence can and does make good out of bad. You will see and are already seeing it. Here is the possible end of schisms in the Ukraine and its opportunity, shorn of its Russian territories, to find its true identity and unite around a liberated and demilitarised Kiev. Here is the opportunity for scandal-ridden Constantinople to become a missionary Church, having understood that nobody is interested in a secular-minded, political and racist Church. Here is the opportunity for Europe, including the UK, to make peace with Russia after nearly 1,000 years of hatred based on jealousy and intolerance. Here is the opportunity for the two parts of the Russian Church in North America, the OCA and ROCOR, together with the bishopless Moscow parishes, to unite and love one another, instead of hating one another. (The apparently still unknown commandment of loving one another is to be found in the Gospels). It is all so simple. Here is the opportunity for the Russian Church, having for now lost Europe, to turn to serious missionary work in Asia and in Africa. God always gives opportunities. Sadly, men do not always take them.

 

A Centenary Icon for the Russian Orthodox Church in the Emigration

Introduction

Our Russian Orthodox Faith in the Holy Trinity has long been expressed by the words: ‘For the Faith, For the Tsar, For Rus’, which represent the actions of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit throughout the Russian Orthodox Lands all over the world. These words were expressed in recent history in the lives of the Three Saints of the Russian Emigration, the Three New Hierarchs, the Three New Pillars of Orthodoxy.

St Jonah

‘For the Faith’ was expressed by St Jonah of Hankou (+ 1925), the first saint of the Emigration. Fleeing as a refugee with other White Russians to China and absolutely faithful to the fullness of Russian Orthodoxy, within a very short time of becoming a bishop at a very young age in Manchuria, he established an orphanage, a school and a dining hall for the poor. Thus he combined the love of the Liturgy with practical love for our neighbour, as the Gospel calls us to do, for ‘Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you’ (Matt. 6.33). This is indeed the essence of the Orthodox Christian Faith. St Jonah expressed faithfulness in the face of the betrayal of the Faith by others.

St Seraphim

‘For the Faith and for the Tsar’ was expressed a generation later by St Seraphim of Boguchar (+ 1950). He fearlessly expressed the historic values of Russian Orthodoxy in his writings and was a Defender of Orthodoxy against the heresies of the renovationist Paris School in the 1930s and against ecumenism, notably at the Moscow Council of 1948. In his study ‘The Russian Ideology’, he asked: What is the role of the Tsar? He answered that the Tsar is the incarnation of our Faith in social, political and economic affairs. All this has become very relevant today, in the wake of the events that have followed the 2016 meeting in Crete organized by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. St Seraphim lived for decades outside Russia, but never made any compromise with the Orthodox Faith at any time, including in the last few years of his life. He expressed bravery in the face of the cowardice of others before the political pressures of the powerbrokers of this world.

St John

All of these values, ‘For the Faith and for the Tsar and for Rus’ were expressed by St John of Shanghai and San Francisco (+ 1966) two decades after St Seraphim. The first ‘universal saint’, as St John has been called, he defended the Orthodox Faith and the Tsar from their enemies. He lived all over the planet, celebrating the Liturgy and preaching in many languages, extending the understanding and practice of ‘Rus’ worldwide far beyond East Slavdom, which itself stretches from Carpatho-Russia to the shores of the Pacific. Thus, outside those lands we speak of American Rus, Argentinian Rus, Australian Rus, Canadian Rus, English Rus, French Rus, German Rus, Irish Rus, Italian Rus, Peruvian Rus, Swiss Rus and so on. Wherever, worldwide, there is the uncorrupted Christian Faith of the people of the Russian Orthodox world, there is Rus. St John expressed the truth which sets us free from the deceit of those who do not love Christ and His Holy Church.

The Three Saints and the Six Continents

The Russian Emigration expressed the truths ‘For the Faith, for the Tsar, for Rus’ with a more refined purity and much more extended significance than ever before. The three values of faithfulness, bravery and truthfulness were above all expressed by the Three New Hierarchs, after apostates expressed the opposite of ‘For the Faith, for the Tsar and For Rus’ in their ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’ which caused the 1917 Revolution and brought persecution to the faithful. And these Three New Pillars of Orthodoxy completed their lives on three different continents: St Jonah in China in Asia; St Seraphim in Bulgaria in Europe and St John in San Francisco in North America. It is this, the global reality of Rus, which the Church inside Russia is now learning from us in our outposts here.

It is for this reason that we now have their Icon in our Church in Colchester, showing the Three Saints full length against the blue and green background of the planet – St John walking and blessing North and South America (where his parents went to live), St Seraphim walking and blessing Europe and Africa (where some of his spiritual children went to live), and St Jonah walking and blessing Asia and Oceania (where some of his spiritual children went to live). All of them walk beneath the Protecting Veil of the Directress of the Church here, the Kursk-Root Mother of God, the Icon of the Sign, She Who Shows the Way.

Thus, in this global age, we see all six inhabited Continents of the planet beneath the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God, blessed by the Three New Hierarchs, the Three New Pillars of Orthodoxy, the Three Saints of the Emigration, St Jonah, St Seraphim and St John. Their feasts, on 20 October, 26 February and 2 July respectively are spread almost equally, every four months, throughout the Church year, and each represents a new generation of Church life. Together they represent the essential identity, unique service, planetary mission and future of our whole Russian Orthodox Church, come forth from the past of Imperial Russia, now living in the present and worldwide.

Conclusion

All three saints are part of the historic contribution of the twentieth century to the common worldwide mission of our reunited Russian Orthodox Church now and in the future. We know that our Russian Orthodoxy – like all Traditional Orthodoxy – is being persecuted by the alien and secular mentality which has infiltrated parts of the Orthodox world. What better symbol of our common struggle for the Faith than this Icon of the Three Saints, all the fruit of Imperial Russia, all the fruit of the One Russian Church, and all of them our offering to the whole world for our common future?

Parish of St John of Shanghai, Colchester, Essex

Feast of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia

25 January/7 February 2021

 

 

 

Towards the Fifth Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia

Foreword

At the present time, in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) are thinking about the significance of this our centenary year. Many will be thinking about the past, the last hundred years, and its important events. However, I would rather focus on the future, though it is also perfectly true that we cannot think of our future if we do not first understand our past. Here is a small offering.

Introduction: Four Councils

Church Councils are called whenever major decisions have to be taken, whenever there are controversies, for which solutions are urgently needed. Thus, a period without Councils can in some respects be seen as a calm and positive period, a period without divisive controversies. For we do not hold Councils just for the sake of them. This is as true of the Seven Universal (Oecumenical) Councils as it is of Local Councils. Thus, in the one hundred year history of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which was founded effectively by a Russian and an American citizen, St Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, by his decree No 362 of 20 November 1920, four ‘All-Diaspora’ ROCOR Councils of clergy and laity have so far taken place. These were in 1921, 1938, 1974 and 2006. Although not occurring exactly every generation, they have in effect marked generational change, turning-points in our history.

The Four Councils

  1. The First Council – Foundation and Organisation – 1921

The First Council was called by Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev, who was the most senior Russian bishop forced into exile. It took place in 1921 in Sremsky Karlovtsy, in what later became Yugoslavia, with the blessing of the Serbian Orthodox Church. This was in the foundational period of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and this Council was devoted to organizing administrative and canonical structures for the Church. In this way, the thirty-four Russian bishops forced into exile worldwide were able to establish a united Church structure of metropolia, dioceses and parishes for their flocks, composed almost uniquely of Russian Orthodox refugees.

  1. The Second Council – Consolidation and Pastoral Care – 1938

The Second Council was held in 1938, also in Sremsky Karlovtsy. This Council, led by the second primate of ROCOR, Metropolitan Anastasy (Gribanovsky), consolidated the organization of the Church for the second generation. It considered the spiritual rebirth needed by the émigré flock and the new generation, the struggles against sectarianism, political schisms, the persecutions of the Church inside Russia and the missionary sense of the Russian Diaspora. Here, ROCOR continued to assert that ‘the part of the Russian Church which is outside Russia is an indissoluble, spiritually united branch of the Russian Church. She does not separate Herself from the Mother Church and is not autocephalous’.

  1. The Third Council – Resistance and Canonisation – 1974

The Third Council was held in 1974 at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY, under the third primate of ROCOR, Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky). Facing the challenges met by the third generation, this Council examined Church life in the ever more difficult conditions of the Western world where most had been born or were settled for ever. It also called for unity among the parts of the Russian Diaspora that were in schism from the Church Outside Russia. It noted the dangers of ecumenism and modernism in Church life and the need to resist these disintegrating movements. It also drew attention to the continuing persecution of the Church inside Russia, thus paving the way for the heroic and history-changing canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia in 1981.

  1. The Fourth Council – Reconciliation and Mission – 2006

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and so the end of persecution, the situation of the Church inside Russia changed radically. ROCOR now had to re-examine attitudes to the once Soviet-enslaved Church and hierarchy there. Following the long-awaited canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors in Moscow in 2000, which confirmed the ROCOR canonisation of 1981, and other acts showing new freedom and at last the beginning of the multi-generational process of de-Sovietisation, in 2003 the ROCOR Council of Bishops entered into dialogue with the Patriarchal administration. Very important questions had arisen, relating to normalizing relations with the Church inside Russia and to ROCOR’s temporary self-governance, which in its fourth generation needed to become permanent. Also examined were issues regarding ROCOR’s future identity, purpose and mission as an integral yet also spiritually independent part of the Western world, with only very few of the faithful, many of them born in the ex-Soviet Union, ever intending to return to their impoverished native lands.

The Fifth Council?

In 2020, our centenary year, no-one is as yet talking about the need for a Fifth Council. Indeed, such a Council could easily be a generation away, in 2045, or even after. However, whatever may happen, it is clear that there are temptations to avoid in the second century of our existence. These temptations come about because, whatever our origins and native languages, we, the fifth generation, and our children, grandchildren and all our descendants in the 21st and perhaps 22nd centuries, are here to stay. We are clearly outside both disappeared (Imperial) Russia and the disappeared Soviet Union. We are not abroad. We are not a Diaspora.

Indeed, most of us are not Russian, but Ukrainian, Moldovan, Latvian, Kazakh, American, English, Australian, but most hold the passports of Anglosphere countries. Though there are faithful in Germany as well as in Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Venezuela and other countries, most members of our Church now belong to the English-speaking world, whether to the USA, which is our centre and almost unique source of bishops, or Canada, Australia, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand or countries in some way dependent on the Anglosphere (Costa Rica, Haiti, Jamaica etc). In this, our real situation, what are the two temptations to avoid, temptations which in one way or another will certainly be discussed at any future Fifth Council?

  1. The Temptation of being a Church, but not Local

The first temptation to avoid is that of ceding to any form of political pressure from Russia, direct or indirect, and so becoming a mere mouthpiece for some form of post-Soviet nationalism. This was the error of parts of the old ROCOR, which died out because they looked back only to a disappeared past, a past that was irrelevant to the generations born here. Any forms of nationalism and cultural nostalgia, Russian, Soviet, post-Soviet or other, are not the way to go. They are an indulgence that rapidly becomes spiritually perilous. That is the way to the ghetto which will inevitably die out, like all ghettoes, the way to the old people’s home and the cemetery.

  1. The Temptation of being Local, but not a Church

The second temptation to avoid is that of ceding to local Western pressure, direct pressure by persecution from local Western States or indirect pressure by assimilation, and becoming, like so many ‘ethnic’ and flag-waving ‘jurisdictions’ of so many nationalities, just another mouthpiece for US/Western nationalism and secularism. Then we would be just another secularist organization, integrated not into Western society but into Western secularism, an organisation with a mere religious and ethnic façade, that has lost its identity, except for titles, folkloric food recipes and folk dancing and costumes. Salt that has lost its savour. Such organisations are always absorbed and disappear into history.

Conclusion

In order to avoid both temptations we must at one and the same time be faithful to the (Imperial) Russian Orthodox Tradition which we have gratefully received and continue to receive, but also be local in the present, for the sake of the future. We must be transcendent, but also immanent, be godly, but also incarnate locally, be divine, but also human. We must be pastoral and so stop losing generation after generation of young people through their assimilation. We have to look back to our inheritance, but also to be incarnate in our present for the sake of our future. In short, we have to be a real Church, but also really Local.

 

On 35 years of Service at the Altar in France, Portugal and England

46 years ago, in 1974, after six years of waiting, I was at last able to move to a town which had a Russian Orthodox church: at that time there were only two permanent Russian Orthodox churches and four chapels in the whole of England. Later I worked in Greece and studied at seminary in Paris. Exactly 39 years ago I was tonsured reader by Metropolitan Antony Bloom at the Ennismore Gardens Cathedral in Knightsbridge. In the last 35 years since being ordained deacon at St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris on 27 January 1985, God has allowed me to serve His Church in many countries in Western Europe, in France, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Portugal, by the grace of God setting up the first ever Russian Orthodox church in Lisbon and then some the first ever churches and communities in Eastern England.

Thus, this church began in tiny temporary premises in Felixstowe, which then moved to my native town of Colchester, as soon as I had raised the funds to buy the first suitable property which appeared, here in Colchester. I then did the same in Norwich, raising the funds to buy, convert and equip premises. I have also served and serve in Bury St Edmunds and Wisbech and made missionary travels all over Eastern England, including to Kent and Yorkshire. Others have been brought back into our Church in the East of England from suspension and schism, notably a reader and two priests, and I have also obtained three new priests for our Diocese, Fr Ion here, Fr Spasimir for Norwich, Fr Yaroslav for London and, God willing, very soon a fourth for our church here. After 22 years of struggle, I was honoured when the Synod awarded me the gold cross for this tenacity in the face of every discouragement. I thank God for everything, as He has done all these things using us all as His instruments. Glory to God for all things!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

The Baptism of the Lord, 19 January 2020

 

Москва третий Рим? Взгляд священника Русской Православной Церкви из дальнего зарубежья

Предисловие:Советский Союз и Русь

Многие жители России, особенно пожилые, временами испытывают ностальгию по Советскому Союзу или, скорее, по отдельным аспектам советского государства (конечно, не по очередям за продуктами). И это не удивительно. Распад СССР, подготовленный Горбачевым и Ельциным под контролем США с их политикой «разделяй и властвуй», явился предательством и катастрофой. Безбожники (будь то советские или американские), ответственные за развал Советского Союза, не имели ни малейшего понятия о «Руси» – землях, принадлежавших народам исторической Руси, где Православие всегда было верой большинства.

«Русь», то есть нынешние Российская Федерация, Беларусь, большая часть Украины и половина Казахстана, нельзя было разделять – она должна была остаться единой. Также, в отличие от современной капиталистической России, в СССР были бесплатные медицина и образование, общественный порядок и культура. Однако, те кто предаются ностальгии по социальной справедливости, порядку и культуре Советского прошлого, не осознают, что и порядок, и бесплатные образование и медицина были также при царе Николае II. Все хорошее в Советском Союзе было унаследовано от Российской империи.

Империя в географическом смысле и в духовном

Причиной всех катастрофических ошибок Советского Союза стали его разрушительный и самоубийственный атеизм, гонения на Церковь и все религии. Подавление всего духовного в итоге подорвало культуру, которая всегда зиждется на духовных убеждениях. В результате этого советская элита (как и любые империалисты за всю историю, как и американская элита сегодня) считала, что великая империя имеет только географическое измерение. Конечно, это не так. Великая империя всегда имеет духовное измерение. Таким образом, ошибкой СССР было то, что он перепутал третий интернационал с третьим Римом и попытался построить Рай на земле – «светлое будущее»  – без Христа. Алкоголизм, аборты, коррупция, разводы и экологическая катастрофабыли лишь логическими последствиями.

Также, ошибочно приняв империю в географическом смысле за духовную, сегодня многие жители Восточной Европы ненавидят Россию, «империю зла»: достаточно приехать в западную Украину, Прибалтику, Польшу или Румынию, чтобы увидеть таких людей. И, к сожалению, эти ксенофобы ненавидят именно Россию, которую путают с Советским Союзом. Хуже того: некоторые из них питают ненависть к русским, не понимая, что многие русские, ставшие наивными из-за своего маловерия, испытывали комплекс неполноценности по отношению к Западу. Поэтому они стали жертвами большевиков (большинство из которых были нерусские) с принесенной ими извне марксистской идеологией – фантазиями внука немецкого раввина.

То что они путают Советский Союз и Россию отчасти можно понять, потому что некоторые негативные стороны немецкого марксизма СССР были унаследованы с более ранних времен, особенно с эпохи императрицы-немки Екатерины II. Понятия «Православие» и «Русь» так и остались для нее чуждыми, поэтому Екатерина сделала ошибку, присоединив к Российской империи всю Восточную Польшу, но в то же время позволив Австрийской империи контролировать и преследовать православных в Карпатской Руси. Последовали неверные действия в Финляндии, странах Балтии и других местах. Однако все это ничто по сравнению с ужасными промахами СССР в Восточной Европе начиная с 1939 года, которые гарантировали ненависть со стороны местного населения.

Настоящий третий Рим?

Все империалисты на протяжении истории представляли, что великая империя – понятие географическое, а не духовное. Таковым было заблуждение первого Рима с его католическими крестовыми походами и инквизицией, которые в XX веке породили фашизм. Что касается второго Рима с его эллинским национализмом, мы видим пагубные последствия последнего при нынешних фанариотах, которыми манипулируют США. Если Москва претендует на статус третьего Рима, то ей, следовательно, надо стать вторым Иерусалимом, Новым Иерусалимом (который Патриарх Никон пытался построить на реке Истра в XVII веке). Ибо лишь духовное является имперским; географическое же всегда является империалистическим и имеет плачевный конец, как было с первым и вторым Римом.

Таким образом, современную Церковь Руси нужно в первую очередь «перестроить». Русская Православная Церковь сегодня должна показать, что не компрометирует себя и не применяет двойные стандарты. Она может сделать это, подтвердив, что искренне отвергает три еретических «изма», которые сильно нарушали мир в Церкви последние 100 лет: модернизм, экуменизм (которые она переняла у протестантизма) и Восточный папизм (заимствован у римо-католицизма). И прежде чем Русская Православная Церковь сможет отвергнуть что-либо из этого, ей необходимо выйти из «всепротестантского» Всемирного совета Церквей и отказаться от того, что некоторые называют компромиссами с Ватиканом, то есть Западным папизмом.

Церковь всегда страдала из-за слабостей отдельных представителей своего духовенства, ставящих свою карьеру и личность выше Христа. Сегодня крайне необходимо возродить приходскую жизнь, уничтоженную атеизмом после 1917 года (она и до этого зачастую была слаба). Ее возрождение могут осуществить только пастыри, а не карьеристы. Приход – это семья, и финансовая отчетность приходов должна быть прозрачной.  Что же касается монастырей и епископата, то здесь не нужны интеллектуалы, безликие дипломаты, бюрократы и «эффективные менеджеры», а тем более– ревнивые «феодалы», не любящие женатых священников. Нам нужны любящие епископы-пастыри. Епископат должен любить, заботиться и проявлять понимание по отношению к священникам и диаконам, избегая несправедливости.

Заключение

Со времени подписания Акта о каноническом общении в 2007 году, основанная эмигрантами  Русская Православная Церковь Заграницей с административным центром в Нью-Йорке обновилась. Осуществляется ее преобразование в Русскую Православную Церковь англоязычного мира, Нового света – в основном, в Северной Америке и Океании – как «Североамериканскую Русь» и «Австралийскую Русь». Смелое учреждение в прошлом году Русской Православной Церковью долгожданных Патриарших экзархатов в Западной Европе и в юго-восточной Азии тоже является знаком того, что у Русской Православной Церкви международная миссия.

«Русь Нового света», «Западно-европейская Русь» (формированию которой поспособствовало возвращение Парижской архиепископии к своим корням в РПЦ в ноябре этого года) и «Русь юго-восточной Азии» вполне могут стать реальностью. Однако Церковь на землях старой Руси, особенно в Российской Федерации, Беларуси и многострадальной Украине, тоже должна быть «перестроена». Только таким образом Русская Православная Церковь сможет продемонстрировать, что она в центре здоровых сил вселенской Православной Церкви, что она борется за благочестие и чистоту святого Православия. Москва заслужит любовь как настоящий «Рим», только когда  станет духовной империей.

 

Протоиерей Андрей Филлипс,

Храм свт Иоанна Шанхайского,

Колчестер, Англия

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moscow the Third Rome? A View from a Russian Orthodox Priest in the Far Abroad

Introduction: The Soviet Union and Rus

Many, especially older, Russians are at times nostalgic for the Soviet Union, or rather, for certain aspects of the Soviet Union (certainly not nostalgic for queuing for food). Little wonder they can be nostalgic. The break-up of the Soviet Union by Gorbachov and Yeltsin, carried out largely under American divide and rule supervision, was a treasonous catastrophe. The atheists in charge of the collapse of the Soviet Union, whether Soviet or American, had no concept of ‘Rus’, the lands of the peoples of historic Rus, wherever the majority Faith was clearly Orthodoxy.

‘Rus’, that is the Russian Federation, Belarus, most of the Ukraine and half of Kazakhstan, should have remained united, instead of being divided. Also, compared to today’s capitalist Russia, Soviet Union had free education and medicine and there was public order and culture. However, what those nostalgic for the social justice and order and culture of the Soviet past do not realize is that education and medicine were largely free under Tsar Nicholas II and order was kept. Everything that was good about the Soviet Union had been inherited from the Russian Empire.

A Geographical Empire and a Spiritual Empire

All the Soviet Union’s catastrophic mistakes came from its genocidal and suicidal atheism, the persecution of the Church and all faiths. The persecution of the spiritual undermined all culture, which is always founded on spiritual belief. As a result, the Soviet elite, like all imperialists in history, like the American elite today, thought that a great empire is always geographical. Of course, it is not – a great empire is always a spiritual one. Thus, the Soviet error consisted of confusing the Third International with the Third Rome, trying to build paradise on earth without Christ. The ravages of alcoholism, abortion, corruption, divorce and ecological disaster were only the logical consequences.

Also, as a result of this error of confusing a geographical empire with a spiritual empire, today many people in Eastern Europe hate Russia, ‘the evil empire’: you only have to visit the Western Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland, Romania and elsewhere to meet them. And unfortunately these xenophobes hate precisely Russia, confusing it with the Soviet Union. Even worse, some of them hate Russians, not understanding that many Russians, made naïve by their weak faith, suffered from an inferiority complex vis a vis the West. This was why they were among the victims of the mainly foreign Bolsheviks with their alien imported ideology of Marxism, the fantasy of a German rabbi’s grandson.

Their confusion of the Soviet Union with Russia is partly understandable because certain negative aspects of the Marxist German Soviet Union were inherited from before, especially from the German Empress Catherine II. She had no understanding of Orthodoxy and of Rus, and so made the mistake of taking into the Empire of Rus the whole Eastern half of Poland, yet, for example, allowing Austria to control and persecute Orthodox in Carpatho-Russia. There followed errors in Finland, the Baltic States and elsewhere. However, none of this was comparable with the errors of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe from 1939 on. Those errors guaranteed local hatred there.

A Real Third Rome?

Thus, all imperialists throughout history have imagined that a great empire is geographical, and not spiritual. This was the error of the First Rome, with its totalitarian Crusades and Inquisitions which ultimately produced Catholic Fascism in the last century. As for the Second Rome with its Greek racism, we can see its disaster under the US-manipulated Phanariots today. If Moscow is to be the Third Rome, it must therefore first be a Second Jerusalem, a New Jerusalem, as Patriarch Nikon wanted to create on the River Istra in the seventeenth century. For only the Spiritual is Imperial; the Geographical is merely Imperialist and always ends badly, like the First and Second Romes.

Therefore, today the Church of Rus has first to be rebuilt. Today the Russian Orthodox Church must show that it is in no way compromised by or practises double standards. It can do this by proving that it wholeheartedly rejects the three heretical isms which have so troubled the peace of the Church for a century: modernism and ecumenism (adopted from Protestantism) and Eastern Papism (adopted from Roman Catholicism). And the Russian Orthodox Church cannot reject any of these without first renouncing its membership of the Pan-Protestant World Council of Churches and renouncing what some see as compromises it has made with the Vatican, that is, with Western Papism.

The Church has always suffered from the failings of clergy who put their own careers and personalities above Christ. What is needed today is the restoration of parish life, wiped out by atheism after 1917 (and it was often weak before that). This restoration can only be led by pastors, not by careerists. The parish is a family and the financial affairs of parishes must be transparent. As for the monasteries and the episcopate, they do not need intellectuals, wishy-washy diplomats, bureaucrats and ‘managers’, or the feudal and jealous who dislike married clergy. We need loving pastor-bishops. The episcopate must love, care for and show understanding of priests and deacons, avoiding injustices.

Conclusion

Since signing the Act of Canonical Communion in 2007, the émigré-founded Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, based in New York, has begun a renewal. Its establishment as the Russian Orthodox Church of the English-speaking world, in the New Worlds of North America and Oceania, as North American Rus and Australian Rus, and perhaps elsewhere, is potentially under way. Last year’s bold establishment by the Russian Orthodox Church of a long-awaited Western European Exarchate and a South-East Asian Exarchate are also signs that the Russian Orthodox Church has an international mission.

A Rus of the New World, a Western European Rus, helped by the return this November of the Paris Archdiocese to its roots in the Russian Church, and a South-East Asian Rus could all become real. However, the Church inside the lands of Old Rus, especially in the Russian Federation, Belarus and the much-troubled Ukraine, also needs to be rebuilt. Only in this way can the Russian Orthodox Church show that it is at the centre of healthy forces in the wider Orthodox Church, that it fights for the piety and purity of Holy Orthodoxy. Only when Moscow is a spiritual empire will it earn love as a real ‘Rome’.