It has been announced that Archbishop Mark of Berlin is ‘shortly’ to resign as bishop in charge of the ROCOR Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland. The Diocese will temporarily become stavropegic under Metroplitan Hilarion. It is hoped that the Metropolitan will deal with the backlog of ordinations and other issues before a permanent resident English-speaking bishop is at last installed in London next year.
Category Archives: Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia
Let us Protect the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox World!
The most basic trait in the identity of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) is faithfulness to our inherited Tradition. This need for faithfulness to the Tradition is vital precisely because we are outside Russia, where we continually have to ‘guard the deposit’ from the threat of the alien influences which are all around us. Only in this way can we witness to the integrity of our Russian Orthodox Faith and Civilization. Such a need for spiritual purity automatically also entails our independence from local politics. Our need for independence is all the greater precisely because of our international nature, which would be undermined by local nationalist influences. Indeed, on no fewer than three occasions in our ninety-year history our political independence has been under serious threat from local nationalism: firstly, from Bolshevik atheism, secondly from Hitler’s Fascism, and thirdly from the Russophobic politics of the American Cold War.
On the first occasion we were asked to swear loyalty to a militant atheist State which held captive the Church inside Russia and was most cruelly martyring Her. We refused, using the independence granted us by the marvellous foresight of the holy Patriarch Tikhon. On the second occasion the German Fascists wanted us to take part in a war which was in fact against the Slav Motherland. With the exceptions of a few who were deluded by the temptation of Nazi propaganda into thinking that Bolshevik atheism could be defeated by joining with Nazi atheism, we refused. On the third occasion, we were asked to declare ourselves a sect and the Church inside Russia without grace! With the exception of a few politicized by CIA money or deluded by sectarian pride, we again refused. Each time the continued existence of ROCOR as an integral part of the Russian Orthodox world was under threat, but each time we survived, although with the losses of small, isolationist groups.
Thus, exactly ten years ago, the greatest task of the Fourth All-Diaspora Council of the Church in San Francisco was in fact to ensure our independence from local Western politics, from ‘Western values’. At that time, as still today, these were in fact pro-secularist and anti-Christian beneath anti-atheist camouflage. For eighty long years we had undergone an enforced separation from the Patriarchate in Moscow, for long held captive by atheists. We understood that it had become free again through the long-awaited canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors and the rejection of ecumenist and erastian compromises. At that point our independence and survival meant precisely no longer living in separation from it, but returning to canonical communion, as Patriarch Tikhon would have wanted. It is therefore part of our essential identity to ensure that the Patriarchate continues to be free, to protect the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox world from threats to its integrity.
Although the threat from State atheism is long gone inside Russia, today the Patriarchate faces a new threat from outside Russia. This is the threat precisely from where we are, from the new atheism of ‘Western values’ infiltrating into Russia. Last year it became known that one person who had worked for the Patriarchate’s sometimes controversial Foreign Affairs Department in Moscow, a certain Evgeny Petrin, was a CIA agent. Now there is a rumour that at least one ecumenist who works there may have long ago been recruited by spy services abroad and then passed on to CIA handlers. If this rumour is true, and it is only a rumour for the moment, though he does have contacts with the US ambassador, then there could have been very serious leaks of information. Whether Western agents and traitors in Moscow are acting through foolish naivety, or utter stupidity, or because they are anti-Orthodox, pro-Western liberals and modernists, is here irrelevant. The result is the same – treason.
It is the duty of all Russian Orthodox, and all the more so of us Russian Orthodox outside Russia, to protect our Patriarchate, whose freedom has been fought for with such great sacrifices, from those who may try to infiltrate ‘Western values’ into the Church. As time has passed and the Old West has died out, so has its half-Christianity; it is precisely the New West and its atheistic values that are flagrantly anti-Christian. There is little grey now, as before, and much more black and white, plainly wrong and plainly right. The so-called ‘Western values’, the values of the New West, are marked by the fingerprints of Satan, as was made plain two years ago when they were introduced into the Ukraine by the Western-installed, genocidal junta in Kiev. One of its first acts was to recognize the ‘Church of Satan’, then to attack the canonical Church and intimidate and martyr its clergy, and it is now set on promoting perversions. Every day they hear Satan’s laughter.
At a time when some are trying to infiltrate ‘Western values’ onto the agenda at the so-called All-Orthodox Council in Crete in June, we must tread carefully. Ever since the legitimate Patriarch of Constantinople, Maximos V, was replaced by the CIA in 1948, threatened with death and flown to exile in Switzerland on President Truman’s personal aeroplane, the Patriarchs of Constantinople, who are organizing that Council, have all been carefully vetted by the US State Department with its ‘Western values’. We who live in the West, manning the outposts and oases of the Russian Orthodox world in the Western spiritual desert, know exactly the ravages of the slavery of ‘Western values’, which are the very opposite of Christian values. That is why we stand firmly against them, for, together with our free Patriarchate, we stand for Christ. If ecumenists and liberals try to infiltrate the Church, we shall fight to the last against them to protect the freedom of our Patriarchate! We fear not, for Christ is Risen!
On the Past Divisions in the Russian Orthodox Emigration
Why did divisions take place in the Russian emigration: I mean, there were some everywhere who chose the Non-Patriarchal ROCOR, a few stayed under Moscow, others locally in North America set up the OCA and yet some others locally set up the Paris group. Four groups! And a second question: what do you think will happen to them in the future?
D.O., Kent
The Past
A correction: Three groups: the OCA, as it is now called, was built on Non-Russians, ex-Uniats from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who had emigrated to the USA and Canada well before the Russian Revolution, and, to a lesser degree, on native Alaskans. True, precedents of the OCA were under the Russian Church (either Moscow or else ROCOR) for periods, but it was never part of the Russian emigration. The only émigrés who joined it, and that after the Second World War, were elitist aristocrats with the Paris superiority complex, for instance, Fr Alexander Schmemann, Fr John Meyendorff and Sophia Kulomzina.
As regards the three Russian groups, they represented earlier social divisions – notice ‘represented’ in the past tense, since there are now essentially only two groups or, arguably, only one. One is minute and, as it is outside the Russian Church, in effect schismatic (Patriarch Alexei II’s words), the other is the Russian Church. These divisions existed well before the Revolution, even in the nineteenth century. Thus, those few who remained loyal to Moscow inherited to some extent the old Statist mentality of the pre-Revolutionary period. Their leaders remained loyal to the State, whatever, though there were also many very sincere Orthodox patriots among clergy and people. This mentality was inherent in the infamous decree of 1927, signed under duress by Metr Sergius, commanding all Orthodox outside Russia, including Non-Russians, to swear loyalty to the Church-persecuting, atheist State! A situation, which the Patriarchate in Moscow is still paying for, trying to retrieve the trust that it lost then, and again later, by appointing morally corrupt or renovationist individuals to its episcopate.
ROCOR, on the other hand, inherited the mentality of the pre-Revolutionary monastic revival. This was led by the neo-Patristic (and therefore slandered) figure of Metr Antony of Kiev, but had both positive and negative aspects. The positive aspects included faithfulness to the Tradition (and not to corrupt customs), with its ascetic, canonical and liturgical disciplines, and the love of the saints. The negative aspects, mainly on the fringes, included conservatism (instead of the Tradition), narrow Russian nationalism (instead of the multinational, Imperial Tradition), dry and formalist, at times pharisaic, ritualism, narrow negativism stifling any initiative, an elitist lack of pastoral understanding of and compassion for married clergy, children, parish life and the people in general, eccentric right-wingery and a sectarian mentality. It was these aspects that led some extremist individuals in ROCOR to support Hitler, to persecute and put on trial the spiritually vibrant St John of Shanghai and, more recently, to break away from the Church altogether, forming strange and tiny right-wing sects with all the usual sectarian infighting.
The Paris group, always very small, represented the pro-Western aristocrats and elitist intellectuals. They were already disloyal and even treacherous to Christ, both Church and State, long before the Revolution, going back to the Decembrist traitors of 1825. Many of them actually plotted and prepared the February 1917 Revolution with British and other anti-Christian foreign encouragement. That overthrew the legitimate rule of the Anointed Tsar and Orthodox Christian Empire, which ironically resulted in the self-punishment of their exile, once the ruthless Bolsheviks soon took over from their incompetent misrule in October 1917. (A similar situation to that of the corrupt English-speaking oligarchs who misrule the Ukraine today). Most of these emigres, mostly from Saint Petersburg, speaking fluent French, sometimes better than Russian, naturally headed for Paris. They were the oligarchs of their day.
The Present
Naturally, after the dissolution of the Soviet State in 1991, the first two groups, Moscow and ROCOR, joined together, but only once they had overcome their mutual political prejudices, which took them sixteen years to do. It is difficult and probably unfair to apportion blame for this lack of haste – history will do that. Clearly, there could be no unity until Moscow had at least on paper condemned co-operation with the atheist State and ecumenism (defined as intercommunion, prayer with heretics etc, and not simply talking to heterodox and witnessing to them) and canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors. All that happened in 2000. Nine years lost, but that is how long it took to overcome on paper the Statist Soviet mentality that refused to criticize even Stalin. On the other hand, many in ROCOR must bear a share of responsibility for their lack of haste too.
A few elderly, KGB-appointed individuals in the old Soviet Union never overcame the Statist mentality. Such is the tragic case of the 87-year old dinosaur, Michael Denysenko, who now calls himself ‘Metr Philaret of Kiev’. A provincial Party hack from the Ukraine of the old days, and reputedly an atheist, he is certainly married with two children. Obsessively jealous that he was not chosen Patriarch after the death of Patriarch Pimen in 1990 and seeing the way the tide was turning, he overnight converted himself to Ukrainian nationalism. This he had previously strongly and mockingly condemned, but he changed his ways in order to further his career, thus, like any vulgar vagans, giving himself the right to dress up in a patriarch’s costume! He depends entirely on political support from US-backed, neo-Nazi nationalists. What happens to him when the provincialist regime in Kiev, put in place by the US colonial administration, inevitably collapses, is unknown, but he may be dead by then anyway.
For its part, ROCOR had to lose its fringe sectarians and pharisees who had been troubling Church life since the 1960s. In the 1990s they even dared to forge alliances with old calendarists and received various mainly sectarian individuals on ex-Soviet territory into the Church, though these were never accepted by the unconsulted clergy and people in ROCOR. These sectarian elements actually claimed that the martyric Church in Russia was without grace and made political co-operation with the atheist State, i.e. the simple human sins of weakness and cowardice, into a new heresy! But if sin is heresy, then we are all heretics, the apostles and saints included. Their longer-term knowledge of Church history was extraordinarily weak and their practice of Orthodoxy seemed mainly to be limited to formalities and ritual.
The worst example was perhaps the politicking of the defrocked bishop, Barnabas (Prokofiev), in the south of France, who was later rightly put on trial and sentenced by the French government for embezzlement. In this country I know three laypeople, then in ROCOR, who, though too young to remember much about him, shocked me in the 1990s by telling me that they thought that Hitler had been a good thing. All three were extremely ignorant and all three unsurprisingly left the Church in 2007, joining various extremist sects. The strange thing is that two of them are married to Anglicans, i. e. in their own abrasive language, married to heretics!
The Future
As regards the future of the fourth, in fact, Non-Russian, group, the OCA, who knows? It is certainly suffering from a severe identity crisis and undergoing great tensions, constantly changing metropolitans. Two questions can be asked about it: Will it be able to survive as one intact group or will it split into its artificially combined constituent fragments, with a large part returning to the Russian Church? And would that be a negative or a positive thing? These questions are not for us to answer; those who constitute the OCA will answer those questions themselves, voting with their feet. As they are outside the Russian Church, we are merely onlookers and can only observe events.
With the exception of some non-Saint Petersburgers, and despite repeated invitations, the tiny third group, centred in Paris, has no intention of returning to the Russian Church and Her ascetic, canonical and liturgical disciplines. It can therefore be termed ‘ex-Russian’. Such a state of politicized, adolescent rebellion does not bode well. Indeed, we can already see the ‘withered branch syndrome’, as this self-isolated group gets ever smaller, though with several dozen quite untrained clergy with tiny ‘parishes’ (often between five and ten!) who sometimes do the strangest things. It will inevitably die out, as it runs out of bishops and Church-educated people and veers towards full secularization by the local Western Establishments which for obvious reasons encourage it, losing the reason for its existence. But that is not a problem for the Russian Church, which it ignores.
This leaves us with the first two groups, now more or less united into one. Here also it is difficult to know what will happen. At present there is no case for an administrative merger of the two, despite them sometimes sharing the same territory. The Moscow group, which gets ever larger in Western Europe, is in drastic need of many more missionary-minded bishops and clergy and a less ‘Soviet’ mentality, adapted to local needs and languages. It also suffers from a lack of premises, the result of the chronic lack of vision and maladministration of the past. Often, but not always, it still appears to lack leadership, vision and dynamism, still dealing with the short-term situation on a day to day basis – a recipe for long-term disaster.
As for ROCOR, it urgently needs dynamic young bishops and priests. Some seem to forget that the canonical age for consecrating a bishop is 35: to have nearly all your bishops (and too many clergy) in their sixties and seventies is profoundly abnormal and makes it likely that any group will die out. Now is the time of the wake-up call for ROCOR, if it wishes to survive in some form or other in the longer term. The result of any lack of leadership and direction is always that you live in the past and do not look to the future. Any loss of dynamism has to be remedied now. However, it is not too late and everything is still possible. ROCOR still has huge potential: whether that will be squandered or not, we cannot say.
On the Revival of the Veneration of Local Western Saints in the Orthodox Church
Answers to Questions in Recent Correspondence
Q: Fr Andrew, when did you become interested in the Local Saints?
A: Almost exactly fifty years ago when I was nine years old, at school I read about the saintly Alfred the Great and did a child’s project on him. From here I began enquiring about nearby places that commemorated such saints. Near where I lived there was a little place named after St Albright (Ethelbert + 794) and the town of St Osyth (+ c.700), the town of Bury St Edmunds (St Edmund + 869), the town of Ely (St Audrey + 679) and Felixstowe (St Felix + 647) and a railway station named after St Botolph (+ 680). However, as a child, all I could do was ask questions of adults and wonder who these men and women had been and why they were called saints, who must have been great because 1300 years later people still remembered them in place names.
The year after that, when I was ten years old, there was the 900th anniversary of the so-called Battle of Hastings. I understood that something catastrophic had happened then, which had destroyed and buried a whole, mysterious English Christian Civilization together with all these saints and holiness. And that was kept secret.
It was only in my teens that I began reading and wondering why exactly these saints had been forgotten and hidden and how a whole new layer of unsaintliness and even anti-saintliness had covered them over, obscuring them. The other question that I asked myself was why there were no longer any saints, no new saints, only these ancient ones. The source of holiness had clearly dried up. No-one was interested in holiness any more. We now lived in a different Civilization, with different values, alien to me. Why? That was a question that no-one around me could answer, so I read and understood that it was because the Church, the source of all holiness, had been lost. Without the Church there is no holiness, no saints, because only the Church is Holy.
Q: How did the Church lose the memory of these saints?
A: The memory of major or international Orthodox Saints of the West has never been lost by the Church: for example, many of the Roman martyrs like St Tatiana or St Anastasia and others like St Alexis, St Justin Martyr, St Irinaeus of Lyon, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose of Milan, St John Cassian, St Martin of Tours, St Leo the Great, St Gregory the Dialogist and St Martin of Rome have always been well-known and always been in the Church calendar. But the local Western saints, commemorated only in certain limited regions or even individual villages in Western Europe, were lost, quite simply for geographical reasons. When Orthodox no longer lived locally, then there was simply no-one left to venerate them and their memory was increasingly lost.
Q: Did Catholics not venerate them then?
A: Only to a very small extent; they had largely replaced the saints with new individuals, philosophers and the spiritually deluded, Anselms, Bernards, Dominics, Teresas and what have you. In other words, they replaced the first millennium with the second, that is, they replaced Orthodoxy with Catholicism. For Orthodox these new figures are not saints, since they have a quite alien mentality to that of the Church. Here is the reason why today we know so little about most of the saints – they were forgotten or their real Lives were replaced by false lives, legends and folklore. Even today you can go to Irish villages and instead of the local sixth-century Irish hermit being commemorated, you will find that the local church is dedicated to Bernadette and has a grotto with a statue. A completely alien mentality.
As for the Protestants, they of course completely denied the saints in their general rejection of even the concept of holiness and ascetic life. Nowadays, the ever more protestantized Catholics have stopped venerating the relics of the saints; for instance, in Bari in Italy, it is only Russian Orthodox who venerate St Nicholas, the Catholics have forgotten him. Relics in Catholic churches are kept tucked away in glass boxes in accessible places. And if you go to the Vatican and ask to venerate the relics of St Peter, they will tell you that you have to send a letter asking for permission three weeks in advance! They have lost it.
Q: How did the revival of veneration of these local saints begin among Orthodox?
A: Without doubt this was due to St John of Shanghai, when he became Archbishop of Western Europe in the 1950s. He loved the saints and was no narrow nationalist.
Q: Was it he who influenced you?
A: No, not at all. I had never heard of him then. I came to venerate these saints quite independently, in childhood, as I described. In any case, I only discovered St John in 1978, long after I had done a great deal of research and reading on these saints in Oxford, made pilgrimages to many sites and compiled a calendar in 1975. In Oxford St John had been kept a secret from me. However, the discovery of St John was reassuring because it confirmed my inmost intuitions and he was in fact the only one who spiritually, if invisibly, supported me. Obviously, I don’t compare myself to him, but there were and are parallel paths in the lives of many people who have come to venerate the local Western saints.
Q: So no-one else you knew was interested at that time?
A: One person who had an academic interest was the then Fr Kallistos, who, as he told me in 1976, liked St Cuthbert and St Bede the Venerable, though he never expressed this publicly and there were no icons of local saints in the Oxford parish at that time. Indeed, many parishioners there were very hostile, dismissing these saints as some personal fantasy of my own and as ‘not Orthodox’. My heart had told me differently and I felt sorry for their ignorance and narrow ethnic and political views. However, also in 1976 Fr Benedict Ramsden showed me the draft Canon to the Saints of the Isles that he had written. That was inspiring.
Q: What was the attitude of Metr Antony (Bloom)?
A: I spoke to him about the subject in 1977 and he clearly had no interest in these saints at all at that time, but I think he changed in about 1990, because he realized that he was losing people to the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which was interested. So it was a question of keeping up with the competition.
Q: And the attitude of Fr Sophrony (Sakharov)?
A: He had no interest either, nor did any of his monks. Abbot Kyrill told me in 1977 that since the Cypriots did not venerate the local Western saints, Tolleshunt Knights would not promote them. Of course, such an attitude drove those who did venerate the saints away to jurisdictions that were interested.
Q: Why do you think that Fr Sophrony was not interested?
A: Fr Sophrony, as you know, was a philosopher and an artist and was fascinated by expressing philosophically his experience of meeting a peasant saint, St Silouan. His great interest was in the saint’s words, ‘Keep your mind in hell and do not despair’, even though these are essentially not new words, being the words of the Holy Scriptures, Matt 16, 18 and 2 Cor 4, 8. St Silouan’s revelation was the same as that of all the saints throughout the ages, but Fr Sophrony spent his whole life working on the philosophical implications of those words. Remember he had been the librarian at St Panteleimon’s, where he had met Fr Silouan – he was very erudite. Tolleshunt Knights probably has the best Patristic library in this country, where Orthodoxy ascetics can be studied.
Q: When did you begin writing about the saints?
A: In 1974. In 1977 for the first time I hesitantly showed someone, one of the nuns at Tolleshunt Knights, one of my articles, but she was not interested and simply said that the article was ‘poetic’. She later left the convent there and went back to being Anglican. Publication of my writings did not follow until the very late 1980s and early 90s.
Q: But surely, there were other individuals who were interested in these saints?
A: Yes, some individuals. In parallel to me, though I did not know it at the time, in the early 70s Fr Mark (Meyrick – Fr David when he became a monk) of the ROCOR chapel in Walsingham began including saints’ names in his St Seraphim’s calendar, but he seemed to have a view that only Celtic saints, however obscure, should be included. I first met him in 1976, but I could not understand a certain hostility to the English and other Western saints, especially when he lived in England and he was so English. It was very insular.
Two of his Anglican converts compiled a small book about these Celtic saints, some of them very obscure, but they mainly copied from the 19th century Anglican writer Baring-Gould, though they added troparia that they had written. They seemed to think that only Celts or those who had lived before the seventh century could be saints. But I was still encouraged by this, since I had had no support at all until then and was quite isolated. Moreover, very importantly, Fr Mark was the first to begin painting icons of these saints, notably St Alban (+ c. 304) and St Columba (+ 597), though not St Augustine (+ 604).
In 1981, I think it was, an ex-Anglican, old calendarist mission opened in England under ROCOR and it was given the relics of St Edward the Martyr. They openly venerated all the Western saints. Again that too was refreshing and I went there twice before they left the Church in 2007, although the Anglo-Catholic old calendarism was offputting. In 1984, when I lived in France and worked on the saints of France, I discovered Fr Seraphim Rose and learned that he had had some interest, especially in the saints in Gaul, something he had understood through St John.
Then there was a Greek bishop in London, the late Bp Christopher of Telmissos, who in 1985 wrote a booklet about these saints in Greek. In 1989 I discovered that Fr Peter (Cantacuzene – later Bp Ambrose of Vevey) of ROCOR had composed a service to All the Saints of Switzerland. In 1992 I discovered the veneration for the Portuguese and Spanish saints in Portugal and I learned that similar processes were going on in Sweden and Germany. But all these movements were linked with ROCOR.
Q: Why was it that ROCOR began everything in this field and no other jurisdictions showed any interest at all until later?
A: Simply because the other jurisdictions were inward-looking, either engrossed in their home-countries’ politics and identities or else local personality cults. ROCOR had lost its home-country and could not return to it. As a result, some simply lived in the past, in a cultural nostalgia, a kind of Russian Edwardianism. But others realized that the future was in incarnating ourselves as Orthodox without compromise in our countries of adoption. We were precisely the Church Outside, not inside, Russia. That is why in ROCOR we have had had magazines like Orthodox America, Orthodox Australia and Orthodox England. It is the principle of the Incarnation. Other jurisdictions were either interested only in nationalist politics, Greek, Soviet or Balkan, or else some vague, academic, woolly, disincarnate, philosophical, Oxbridge ‘spirituality’, which feeds only the brain, never the heart. That is self-satisfying consolation for intellectuals only. This is part of modernism.
Q: So when did people outside ROCOR start becoming interested?
A: First of all, in the 1990s, if not earlier, there was the calendar of the Greek Orthodox Fellowship of St John the Baptist, edited by the then Bp Kallistos and other ex-Anglicans, which began including some of these saints, as Fr Mark of ROCOR had been doing for some 20 years already. Then in 1996 a group of 300 Anglicans joined the Patriarchate of Antioch and they started venerating these saints and dedicating their churches to them. That was very refreshing. After this the veneration of Local Saints and pilgrimages to them became fashionable, quite incredibly.
A great step forward was the appointment of the then Bishop Elisei as head of the Sourozh Diocese in 2006. People who had scorned me in the 70s and 80s suddenly became interested! If only Bishop Elisei had been there in the 1970s! What I had written in the 70s and 80s was published and even translated into Russian and parts into other languages. After about 2000 people like Misha Sarni of Sourozh and also the excellent Dmitry Lapa in Moscow became very interested.
Q: When did you compose the first services to the local saints and which ones have you done?
A: I began in 1998 or 1999 with services to St Edmund, St Felix and St Audrey, then to All the Saints of the Isles and later, in 2014, to All the Saints of the Lands of Europe. These efforts are of course dwarfed by the work of Isaac Lambertson, who has composed services to dozens of saints of the Western Lands, all the main saints. Our debt to him is huge for this and for his translations.
Q: What for you was the highlight?
A: I think in 2008 when we opened the first ever chapel to All the Saints of the Isles, in my native town of Colchester. An ambition forty years old had been realized! Then in 2012 we at last had a new icon of All the Saints of the Isles painted for the iconostasis, which corrected the pioneering work of dear Fr Mark.
Q: What of the future?
A: In Moscow they are still thinking of incorporating some of these saints, who were already venerated in the first millennium in the West, into the Russian Church calendar, at least St Alban. They have been considering this for at least eight years. But this would merely mean catching up with the last 60 years of developments here. Sometimes someone starts something in the provinces and only later do others in the Centre catch up. One of the problems for them is the pronunciation of unfamiliar names like Alfred and Ethelbert and the fact that they are Catholic-sounding, though if you translate them into Russian, they come out more or less as Miroslav and Svetoslav.
Q: What advice would you give to those who want to venerate these saints? Do we accept everyone up until 1054?
A: The Schism was not an event, but a process. It is still going on, the process of substituting human sin for Divine revelation, man-worship for the worship of the God-man, the essence of the Schism, continues to this day. But the question for us is when exactly did people begin falling away from the Church?
As we can see from the Greek Archbishop of Canterbury, St Theodore (+ 690) or the Greek Pope of Rome, St Zacharias (+ 752), the process of Schism clearly did not start until the mid-eighth century. However, there was a bad period with the heretical and genocidal King of the Franks, Charlemagne (Blessed Charlemagne for the papists), and his Council of Frankfurt in 794. But Charlemagne died in 814 and his heresies and so-called ‘empire’ collapsed and Orthodoxy revived. In Rome they did not accept his heresy and dismissed him as an ignorant, power-grabbing barbarian.
There was another bad period in the late ninth century, corrected by the anti-filioque Council of Constantinople in 879-80 and Pope John VIII, assassinated for his Orthodoxy and anti-filioquism in 882, but it left the memory of the heretical Pope Nicholas of Rome (St Nicholas for the papists). This occasioned the work of St Photius against the filioque heresy. Then there was a revival of Orthodoxy in Germany with the Greek Empress of the West, Theophano (+ 991). However, we can also see the spiritual decline of the West from the end of the tenth century, when the first signs of feudalism – thoroughly alien to Christianity – appeared. Probably in 1014 the filioque was sung at Rome for the first time. At the same time there were ever fewer pilgrims from the West going to Jerusalem and Constantinople and ever fewer Greek monks and clergy visiting the West. This was symptomatic of a spiritual change, a decline.
In other words, we have to look very carefully at the lives of anyone in the West, especially in what is now Germany and northern France, after the mid-eighth century until the mid-eleventh century, the symbolic date of 1054. However, we also have to look carefully after this in certain regions, because there were Orthodox saints on Western territory even after 1054, probably in England until at least 1066 (though not the half-Norman traitor Edward), perhaps in Celtic areas and Scandinavia even after this, and certainly in Greek Sicily and Calabria, where Orthodoxy survived intact until at least into the twelfth century.
Q: What is the importance of the venation of these saints?
A: The veneration of these saints means the reintegration and reincorporation of Western people into the holiness of the Church. That is spiritually significant, not only personally, but nationally. There can be no salvation for the separated Western world until this happens. Eschatologically, it is part of the gathering in of the Church before the end, the coming together of the Church in heaven, the saints, and the Church on earth, us.
From Recent Correspondence (Lent 2016)
Q: Why is there so much opposition among the Orthodox faithful to the forthcoming Council in Crete?
A: Because it promises to be merely a politicized meeting of bishops. First of all, how can you say that you are having a Council when you do not know if it is a Council, because you do not know if the Holy Spirit will be present? We must understand that a meeting can only become a Council if the Holy Spirit is present. This is why meetings only become Councils on their reception by the people of God, who recognize the inspiring presence of the Holy Spirit. So far this looks like a meeting of bishops, with the US, the EU and the Vatican in the background, which is not Pan-Orthodox because it does not include all the bishops or, for the moment, even representatives of all the Local Churches. To call a meeting a Council before the event is presumptious and pretentious, even more so when you call it ‘Great and Holy’.
Secondly, how can you have a Council when only a small selected minority of Orthodox bishops have been invited? Thirdly, how can you have a Council when the most important question, the calendar issue, has been removed from the agenda? Fourthly, how can you have a Council when several Local Churches or authoritative voices in Local Churches have been raised in particular against the anti-dogmatic contradictions in the proposed important document on relations with Non-Orthodox? Finally, many have been disturbed by the date of the opening of this meeting: 16/06/16. It contains the triple six of Antichrist. How could the organizers, so blind to any transparency, also be so provocative as to start the meeting on that date, so greatly perturbing the faithful?
Q: You say that the US, the EU and the Vatican are in the background. What exactly do they want?
A: All thisworldly institutions want an aggiornamento of the Church, like that which Roman Catholicism underwent in the 1960s. They want to introduce into the Church secularism, humanism, new calendarism, homosexual marriage, banning fasting and monasticism. In other words, they want to destroy the Church, they want a modernist, spiritually toothless and spineless Church, degutted of ascetic life, spirituality and the sacred, so that they can adapt the Church to their worldly agenda, reducing it to a mere human institution, as they have done elsewhere. And who is their prince, the prince of this world? Satan.
Q: So you are against this meeting?
A: I did not say that. Let us wait and see. This meeting could produce schism, given the arrogant lack of consultation by its organizers with the monasteries, parish clergy and people, with the people of God. For example, why have they not invited a distinguished monastic elder from each Local Church to the meeting to represent the people of God? And, as I said, a meeting, however unpromising, can become a Council. All depends on the Holy Spirit. Man proposes, but God disposes. Sadly, for the moment, all we have seen is bureaucratic men proposing.
Q: You have reported elsewhere the opening of the Russian Cathedral in Paris in the autumn. What are your hopes?
A: Our hopes are that the statement of Patriarch Alexei II thirteen years ago will at last be realized. In other words, we hope that this will be the foundation stone of a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Western Europe and that that will be the foundation of a future Local Church.
Q: So you want to see in Western Europe a kind of European OCA?
A: Before answering, I should perhaps say that what I want is not really relevant, what is important is what God wants. I will answer only because you have asked.
Not at all, we do not want another OCA. The OCA was a failure firstly because its foundation was politicized, being founded during the Cold War, secondly because it was granted autocephaly unilaterally without consultation with the other far more numerous dioceses of other Local Churches on the same territory, and thirdly because it was founded on compromises of ascetic, liturgical and canonical culture, caused by its protestantization, putting American culture above the Church. This meant that a great many English-speaking Orthodox in the USA, the ones whom it was allegedly designed for, simply ignored it. Personally, if I lived in the USA, I would not belong to the OCA. That is no judgement on the many sincere and pious people who do belong to it or the good work that parts of it do, this is merely a personal statement.
Q: So what do you want to see in Western Europe?
A: What we want to see is what we want to see everywhere, including in North America. That is, quite simply, a Local Church that is fully Orthodox, spiritually pure, politically independent and faithful to the Tradition, but which freely celebrates, whenever pastorally necessary, in the local language and venerates the local saints. What could be simpler? And yet human beings with their compromising political cults or narcissistic personality cults make it all so complicated.
Q: To come back to the OCA, what do you make of the concelebration between Patriarch Bartholomew and Metr Tikhon of the OCA?
A: There are modernist, political dissidents in the OCA who want to become a sub-department of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, in some special American Metropolia, just like the Rue Daru group of ex-Russians in Paris, the ex-Sourozhian schismatics in England, or some schismatic Diaspora Ukrainians. It seems to me that a battle is going on between the two factions there, the modernists who want to leave for Constantinople and those with at least some sense of the Tradition who want to stay as a group under the protection of the Russian Church. Personally, I have always thought that a split is inevitable, with all the parishes in Alaska and most in Canada and Pennsylvania around St Tikhon’s, returning to the Russian Church, perhaps within ROCOR, and the others, like those at St Vladimir’s, going over to the Greeks. That would be logical and at last clear up the canonical anomaly once and for all.
Q: The OCA was founded nearly two generations ago. Why has it taken so much longer to begin even thinking about a Local Church in Western Europe?
A: So much longer? We have been thinking about it for thirty years and more! On the other hand, you do not do things prematurely. In my view, the OCA was premature – it should have remained a Metropolia, English-speaking but faithful to Russian Orthodox Tradition, waiting for freedom in Russia, which came 20 years after its independence.
The main problem in Western Europe has been the delay caused by the Paris schism over eighty years ago. The divisive defection of Russophobic aristocrats and modernist intellectuals from the Russian Tradition to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and a self-invented ‘tradition’ meant that the development of an authentically Orthodox Local Church was greatly delayed because the Russian Orthodox presence was so weakened by their disaffection. For instance, although (or because) the Constantinople Parisians are bankrupt, they are still occupying the (smallish) 19th-century Russian Cathedral in Paris, and therefore a new Cathedral and seminary have had to built and equipped at vast expense and with great political complications.
Q: Does the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR, have a role in the construction of this Metropolia in Western Europe?
A: That depends on the leadership of ROCOR, not on mere parish priests like me.
Q: Does that answer mean that in Western Europe at least ROCOR will become dependent on the Church inside Russia?
A: Not necessarily. Everything is still possible. There are parishes in Western Europe dependent on the Church inside Russia and parishes dependent on the Church Outside Russia that are identical in ethos. Some, sadly, are definitely not identical in ethos because of the hangover from the Soviet past despite transfers of controversial clergy out of Europe by Moscow in the last few years. In ROCOR we patiently wait for that vestigial ethos to die out, as it is dying out. Once it has died out altogether, convergence will come.
Q: You mean that ROCOR in Western Europe will merge with the Church inside Russia or that the Church inside Russia in Western Europe will merge with ROCOR?
A: I don’t know. What I do know is that the most active and most missionary, the most spiritually alive, will dominate. Those who are spiritually asleep will be absorbed. If you do not have younger bishops, resident bishops, active bishops, missionary bishops, bishops who are interested in their flocks and local saints, you will die in your self-made ghetto. This is what happened to ROCOR in South America. This is of course true for all Local Churches and their dioceses in the Diaspora. If you do not live, you will die. Surely, that is not too complicated to understand?
For example, today, just in the eastern third of England, we need twelve priests who can speak at least some Russian and some English – if they are bilingual, that would be perfect. I could name the places where they are needed. But where are we going to find them? We have to encourage men to think about this. That requires leadership, time, effort and energy.
Q: How can you describe the ethos of ROCOR, as compared with the ethos of parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia?
A: The emphasis of ROCOR in the last 25 years especially has quite clearly been on the New Martyrs and Confessors, Anti-Sergianism and Anti-Ecumenism. Wherever within the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia there is veneration for the New Martyrs and Confessors (and it is very extensive), wherever there is resistance to the ideas that the Church must swim with the secular tide of the State and resistance to ecumenist compromises (also extensive), there is joy in ROCOR. However, the fact is that some of the foreign parishes in the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia, suffered in the past from modernism, ecumenism and liberalism, unlike parishes inside Russia. When the ethos becomes identical, then there will be a complete merger, though, as I say, it is not clear which part of the Church will dominate it. That will depend on the leadership of bishops.
Q: You mentioned local saints in Western Europe. Who at present venerates those local saints?
A: It mostly seems to be immigrants from Eastern Europe, who have the sense of saints and relics. Sadly, despite all our decades of efforts, there are few native Western European Orthodox.
Q: Why? I thought there were many converts?
A: That is a myth. There have never been ‘many’ converts. At most about 2,000-3,000 in the heyday and many of those soon lapsed because they were received into the Church for the wrong reasons or for ideological reasons, with certain clergy trying to build up artificial empires, which of course soon collapsed. Most of their children also lapsed. I doubt if there were ever more than 1,000 serious converts.
However, in the last ten years, I have witnessed a change. Converts started coming in numbers in the 1960s after the collapse of Anglicanism. In other words, most converts were from an Anglican background, often of a public school or wealthy background and most were at that time 30 or 40 years old. Well, that generation, what I call the ‘Kallistos generation’, is literally dying out. Some are still alive, but are in their late sixties or older. The vast majority of these are either in the Antiochian jurisdiction which at last has a new, young, local bishop, or else under the Constantinople Vicariate, which is dependent on an elderly French bishop in France, whom I knew when he was a young priest.
Together, about 600 in all, they together form a sort of Anglican Orthodoxy. For example, as far as I know, the Antiochian clergy are ex-Anglican vicars who have not received training in Orthodoxy and do not know how to do all the services; then the people do not know how to sing; the Vicariate situation is similar. I know one such Antiochian community, where the priest has banned any language other than English! This is racism, though I suspect partly it is because the priest does not understand any language other than English, let alone the Orthodox ethos.
Q: So converts are dying out?
A: Not exactly, rather their nature is changing. There are some new converts, but they do not usually have an Anglican background; after all very few English people nowadays do – even in the mid-19th century, only 50% of English people were ‘Anglican’, that is, they belonged to the Church of England. Although there are few of these new converts, at least they are converting properly and not creating a semi-Orthodoxy, an Anglican-Orthodox club.
Q: So what does that mean for these convert communities?
A: It means that many Vicariate communities number fewer than ten, usually quite elderly people, and form a kind of ex-Anglican clique, centred on the dead Metr Antony Bloom. Where they are more numerous, most of the people are Eastern Europeans. In a similar way, ageing Antiochian groups are being saved from extinction by Eastern Europeans, especially church-deprived Romanians. Most of these groups do not have their own premises and use Anglican churches.
Q: So what is the justification for using English in services, if there are fewer converts?
A: There are now three justifications. Firstly, there are still English people, converts or children and grandchildren of converts with the English husbands of Orthodox women, secondly, there are the English-speaking children of Eastern Europeans and thirdly, in mixed-nationality parishes, English is simply the common language. The future is with the second group, children of Eastern Europeans, because they are now the majority of English-speaking Orthodox.
Q: How are they to be kept in the Church?
A: That is the key question. In ROCOR, for example, the London Cathedral lost virtually everyone from its second generation, let alone from the third and fourth. And that is a typical story for all jurisdictions everywhere. Why? Because they had no identity, apart from an ethnic one, which they naturally disowned. It is vital for Orthodox children born here or going to school here to have an Orthodox identity, to know and appreciate our civilizational values, to know that we are simply Christians. The old generations generally failed to do this, their identity was purely ethnic, not spiritual.
Thus, the children went to school, lost their parents’ language and said, ‘I’m English, this is nothing to do with me, it’s only for old people’. Assimilation. For example, there are six Anglican Cypriot priests in the Diocese of London. Why? Because they did not understand Greek, so they left the Greek Orthodox Church. Of course, we can only give children this identity if parents bring their children to church regularly. Those children have to be instructed in Sunday schools and they have to have activities, which creates in them a sense of belonging to the Church. If parents do not bring up their children in the church, then they will be completely lost.
Q: Why do Protestants so value the Old Testament?
A: The Reformation was largely financed by Jews (despite Luther’s virulent anti-Jewishness) and most Protestants have always been pro-Jewish. Cromwell depended on them almost entirely. (Even today Israel depends entirely on Protestant countries, especially the USA; Catholics have always been more sceptical). Thus, the Protestants even use the Jewish Old Testament in favour of the Christian one! For Orthodox, by far the most important book of the Old Testament is the Psalter, which is why you rarely find Orthodox reading the Old Testament (other than Genesis and Exodus), but rather just the New Testament and the Psalms.
Q: Why is the USA forcing countries, like the Ukraine and also African countries, into accepting homosexual marriage? Is Obama a homosexual?
A: I have no idea what Obama is – except that he supported thuggery by toppling the democratically-elected government of the Ukraine and replacing it with a murderous Fascist junta, which has little control of the country outside Kiev. Then there are the US drones which can murder anyone anywhere. As regards his other personal inclinations, I would not rely on internet rumours.
Now for your main question, which needs a historical answer.
When, in the 11th century, Satan set about destroying Christendom, his first target was to desacralize, that is, secularize, the Church. Satan cannot stand the presence of the sacred, the sacred must be removed from the world because it prevents him from realizing his plans to take total control of the world. This he did by attacking the Church at its weakest point, that is, in the Western provinces, where all had been weakened by the barbarian invasions. In the 11th century the Western Patriarchate was converted to secularism, with what had been the Church becoming a State, becoming secular, changing the Creed, controlling murderous armies, the courts and sponsoring invasions etc. In history this is called papocaesarism.
In other words, the first step to Satanization, was to remove the Altar. The second step was to remove the Throne, that is, to remove the sacral monarchy. This act came later and was done in the 17th century in England, in the 18th century in France and in the 20th century in Russia, although it is true that the Western monarchies had been deformed before then, either by parliamentarianism, or else by absolutism, neither of which conforms to the Orthodox Christian understanding of monarchy, which is the presence of the Lord’s Anointed among the people.
Thus, having removed the spiritual content of the Faith and the Ruler, having desacralized the Faith and the King, there remained the third and final stage, to desacralize or secularize the Christian People and popular culture. This means destroying Christian cultural values (a process that was very rapid in the 20th century), destroying the family – very rapid from the 1960s on after the fall of the Second Vatican Council, when fasting was abolished and so now today we have an obesity crisis). Then they also started destroying the identity of the human person in the unisex movement that since the 1960s has resulted in only two generations in a transgender, transhuman society.
This enslavement is a form of suicide. It is why Russian Orthodox Tsardom, the Christian Empire, had to be destroyed in 1917. With its slogan of Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People, the Faith, Tsar and Rus, in English, Altar, Throne, Cottage, in French, Foi, Roi, Loi, its existence was the one thing that made upside down Satanism, with its aim of destroying the Church, the Ruler and the People, impossible.
Q: Can this situation of spiritual enslavement be reversed, or is an imminent end inevitable?
A: Nothing is inevitable because for human beings repentance is always possible. In Russia, the Church is slowly being restored and with Her the ideal of a Spiritual Empire, with a Christian Emperor and People. However, nothing is certain and there are reasons for both profound pessimism and profound optimism. May God’s will be done. On 18 December 1917 the Tsarina Alexandra wrote in her diary: (The Revolution in Russia) ‘is a disease, after which Russia will grow stronger. O Lord, be merciful and save Russia!’ May this hopeful prophecy be true.
Patriarch and Pope to Meet in Cuba on 12 February
It has been announced today in the Third Rome and also in Old Rome that Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Pope are to meet briefly at Havana Airport in Cuba on 12 February. This meeting will take place during the Patriarch’s long-awaited eleven-day pastoral visit to the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Latin America, notably to Cuba, Brazil and Paraguay.
This high-level trip, involving visits to the political leaders of all three countries follows repeated invitations. The 15,000 strong Russian Orthodox flock in Cuba will especially greet our Patriarch, but the Patriarch will also recognize the important role played by Russian Orthodox in Paraguay before the Second World War and in Brazil over the last 100 years. However, beyond pastoral matters, this is also clearly a brilliant diplomatic move – for five reasons:
Firstly, it upstages and sidelines the absurd claims of the tiny Patriarchate of Constantinople to make out that it is somehow the ‘leader’ of the Orthodox world, whereas in reality it is fifty times smaller than the Russian Orthodox Church! It also ends the Phanariot myth that only it can represent the Orthodox Church at the Vatican, the real, de facto, leader of the Orthodox Church is Patriarch Kyrill. There will be anger at the Phanar, as it realizes that after nearly 100 years of trying to monopolize attention its diplomatic end has come.
Secondly, this is clearly a move aimed at further undermining the ridiculous pretensions of the sectarian Ukrainian Uniats, who have done so much and are still doing so much to encourage aggression and hatred towards Ukrainian Christians in the civil war that they have fostered in the Ukraine. They will be extremely worried that their official leader, the Pope of Old Rome, is in fact renouncing them and their psychotic Russophobia.
Thirdly, this meeting marks the enormous concern of the Russian Orthodox Church for Orthodox and other Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, who have been abandoned by the West, which has also abandoned the Papacy. Only the Russian Federation has substantially intervened in the war in Syria to bolster the majority there against the Western-trained, armed and financed terrorist movements intent on genocide, as has been made clear by Catholic leaders in the Middle East. Notably, during his visit, Patriarch Kyrill will lead the service at the Syrian Cathedral in San Paulo.
Fourthly, this meeting is taking place outside Europe in the course of a pastoral visit by the Russian Orthodox Patriarch to Latin America. This marks the internationalization of the Russian Orthodox world before the rest of the world. Having settled many of the outstanding problems of the Church inside the Russian Federation and brought numbers of bishops up to 361 and of clergy to 40,000 from the pitiful few 25 years ago, the Patriarch is now looking further afield outside Eastern Europe and the Federation. The second generation of renewal can begin. We can now expect that the Patriarch will make other high-profile visits to the more distant territories of the Russian Orthodox Church, including, God willing, to ourselves.
And finally, this meeting on the US doorstep, specifically in independent and sovereign Cuba, also marks the fact that the uncompromised Orthodox world does not recognize the globalist power grab of the Neocon Empire based in Washington. This move against the New world Order is an outstretched hand to the independent peoples of the world – the vast majority – in an unprecedented missionary endeavour. We cannot but welcome it.
Some Autobiographical Notes
I have been asked a number of questions about how, coming from a simple, earthy English background in rural England, I came to be a Russian Orthodox priest of the Church Outside Russia. Making use of some unexpected time this week, I have looked back through some old papers which I had forgotten and can now answer those questions with some dates.
Q: How did you come to the Russian Church?
A: After a countryside childhood strangely filled with interest in faraway Russia, I started teaching myself Russian in October 1968. I was told to do so in a particular spot in Colchester, which I could take you to now, by a voice heard coming, brought as it were by a wind from the east. So I began to read a lot of Russian literature in translation and Russian history. Two years later, in 1970, I had decided that I wanted to be part of the Russian Church and had begun reading as much as I could to find out about it (very little was available at that time). However, it was only after my sixteenth birthday that I managed to visit Russian churches.
Q: Where? In London?
A: No, my family never went to London, which we always looked on as a different planet, ‘the smoke’ as we still called it. The countryside was our home. I won a bursary and at the end of February 1973 I managed to visit a Russian church in England. This was the tiny Russian Patriarchal house chapel in Oxford, where I prayed at vespers on two successive Saturdays. Then in the same year I won another bursary to visit the then Soviet Union; in fact the first church I visited there was St Vladimir’s Cathedral in Kiev. As I entered those churches, I knew that I wanted to be part of their inner life and that this was my destiny, the whole meaning of my life, regardless of all the barriers that would be put in front of me. I felt that I had always been here, that this was in my blood. (Only in 2004 did I discover any possible though very distant explanation in a Carpatho-Russian great-grandmother – my mother’s mother’s mother). At the end of 1973 I also managed to visit the Patriarchal Cathedral in London, of which I had heard. ROCOR then had no existence outside itself, being largely unknown to the outside world, at least in England.
Q: Which part of the Russian Church did you join?
A: As soon as I was free to do so at the age of 18, in 1974, I asked to join the Russian Church. Of course, there were two parts then. Firstly, I met two representatives of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), who solemnly informed me that I would not be allowed to join their Church since it was in any case ‘for Russians only’. I also met other, rather fanatical and sectarian individuals from ROCOR, who completely turned me away. I therefore took the only option left to me and joined the Patriarchal Church, presuming that this was identical to the Church that I had seen in Russia and the Ukraine.
However, I very soon found out that the small Oxford Patriarchal parish was dominated by two opposing clans – on the one hand, by haughty Parisian-type modernists, and, on the other hand, by Soviet chauvinist nationalists, for whom the Communist Party could do no ill! I gave myself spiritual life by reading Russian theological books I ordered from Jordanville and elsewhere. Visiting Soviet Russia for a second time in 1976 and spending time there, I saw again how the real Russian Church was different from the Oxford cliques. In 1977 a priest I had met in Russia the year before suggested that I study at the Moscow Theological Academy. I would very much like to have done that, but at the height of the Cold War this was absolutely impossible. That was tragic.
Q: What did you do?
A: I did the next best thing and in 1978 went to live and work in Thessaloniki in Greece for one year. Here, I saw how traditional the ethos could be, quite different from the Church of Constantinople, which I had seen in England, but also, unfortunately, I saw narrow Balkan nationalism and came across the semi-Protestant Zoe and Sotir organizations – closer to Methodism than Orthodoxy! However, I also visited Mt Athos and was especially influenced by Fr Ephraim at Philotheou and the very poor and heroic monks at the Russian St Panteleimon’s Monastery. I remember especially Fr Seraphim, Fr Misail (who wanted me to join the monastery and be the librarian) and the choir director from Odessa. These were real, exemplary Orthodox. It was at this point that I decided that I should go and study at a Russian seminary.
Since I had been told (in fact lied to) that Jordanville only accepted Russians, I took the only option left and went to St Serge in Paris. (The two ‘seminary’ establishments of the OCA held no interest for me since they were both on the Catholic/Protestant calendar and deviated in other ways from the ethos and practice of the Russian Church inside Russia. I knew enough from talking to people who had been to them and from my visits to Russia to understand that they were not right for me. I wanted the real thing).
Q: What happened next?
A: I went to study at St Serge in Paris. There I experienced the battle royal between the two factions in Paris at that time. The first, led by Protopresbyter Alexis Knyazev, a wonderful teacher, was the pro-Russian one that was clear-sighted enough to see that the only future was to rejoin the Russian Church, but on some autonomous basis.
The second group, the Fraternite Orthodoxe, led basically by the Jesuit-educated Count, Fr Boris Bobrinskoy, notorious for having celebrated the liturgy in a Catholic convent with the filioque (!) – so as ‘not to offend our Catholic brethren’, was virtually composed of Uniats. Other members included the fantasist and Athos-hater Olivier Clement and a Georgian priest who spent his time extolling the Second Vatican Council. I soon gave up going to their courses. The modernist and manipulative Fraternite was populated by patronizing aristocrats and fantasist ideologues who preyed on naïve Catholics and converts. Descendants of those who had carried out the Revolution, they absolutely hated Russia and had no intention of ever returning to the sobriety and discipline of the Russian Church. Naturally, I supported the first group which alone was authentic and also realistic.
These two groups depended on the Rue Daru bishop, the weak, elderly but saintly Archbishop George (Tarasov). The Fraternite was clearly waiting for him to die and then seize power, which they only managed to do in full twenty years later. Members of the Fraternite, some soon to become priests, used to hiss, mock and boo Archbishop George publicly. It was awful. I believe that Archbishop George, a former WWI Russian pilot from the Western Front, was a saint. Had he been in good health and lived another fifteen years, he would have returned the group to the Russian Church with the status of an autonomous Metropolia.
Q: Where did you go after St Serge?
A: Having met my wife, who is basically of Anglo-Italian-Romanian origin, and married in Paris, we returned to England. We stayed here for three years, trying to find some sort of balanced spiritual life between the extremes of the pseudo-Patriarchal Church and the Church Outside Russia, with their cliques which were not Churchly at all, quite different from the Church inside Russia, which I had seen in 1972 and 1976, and again at St Panteleimon’s on Mt Athos.
Having discovered the scandalous truths about the extremists dominating both groups in England, we returned disillusioned to France and my wife’s jurisdiction (Rue Daru). Here the new German Archbishop had personally promised us that he was going to steer the Church away from the modernist and ecumenist Fraternite Orthodoxe and back to Russian Orthodox Tradition, but using Western languages whenever necessary. Enthused by this sensible direction and the support of Fr Alexis Knyazev, who was still alive then, I was ordained in Paris in January 1985.
Q: What happened?
A: I had fallen from the frying pan into the fire. Within four months I was asked to become a freemason, which I refused to do, thus signing a kind of spiritual death warrant for myself. Through weakness of character, the new Archbishop had by then taken a suicidal path. He was ordaining freemasons and other members of the Fraternite, while also forbidding the use of local languages, doing exactly the opposite of everything he had promised. He was guaranteeing the death of Rue Daru, whose only hope for survival was in fact to return to one or other of the parts of the Russian Church.
So I surrendered to God’s Will. And in 1987 I was granted the grace of meeting the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, a representative of the real ROCOR, just waiting to return to a politically free Russian Church. Coming from Kiev, where I had first been to an Orthodox service, Archbishop Antony showed me the real, multinational ROCOR, which I had read about, but totally failed to meet in London with its nationalism and sectarianism. In July 1988, Rue Daru held a service in honour of the millennium of Orthodoxy in Rus, attended by the modernist Catholic Cardinal of Paris, but from which all Russian bishops had been banned!
It was the last straw and, thanks to God, Archbishop Antony gladly received a group of 17 of us spiritual refugees into ROCOR at the end of that year. This was actually a turning-point for the Rue Daru group, as ever since then the flow of serious Orthodox leaving it has not ceased, giving up the fight to save it. We now realize of course that that fight was impossible and we had undertaken it out of misplaced idealism. The well had been poisoned from the outset. It was also a turning-point for us, from which we have never looked back.
Q: Looking back, what would you do if you had your time again?
A: A purely hypothetical question. Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing. At the time I had no advice at all, except for very bad advice, and there was no internet. Today, there is no doubt in my mind at all that I should have studied in London and then, in 1977, gone and studied at Jordanville. However, if I had not done what I had done then, how could I know all this now? Only experience teaches.
If I had not done what I did do, I would never have understood the Church of Greece, I would never have met the saintly Archbishop George Tarasov, the heroic Archbishop Antony of Geneva and so many other saintly figures, like the last representatives of the real White Russian movement, Fr Silouan of Athos of the Patriarchate (the disciple of St Silouan), the wonderful Baroness Maria Rehbinder, that exquisite Parisian poetess Lyudmila Sergeevna Brizhatova, the last White officer Vladimir Ivanovich Labunsky, and so many others, the representatives of the real Holy Rus in all jurisdictions of the Russian emigration.
Neither would I ever have understood the tragic renovationist decadence and absurd Soviet nationalism within parts of the Patriarchate outside Russia at that time, the two sides of the suicidal Rue Daru jurisdiction (sadly, today there is largely only one side left) and how ROCOR was nearly enveloped by the marginal extremes of narrow Russian nationalist chauvinism and fanatical old calendarist converts, but saved by the holiness of Metropolitan Laurus and the many with him, who so exactly expressed our values in Holy Rus, Eternal Russia.
There is in even this short, forty-year experience a lifetime of joys and sorrows. I have been privileged to know it all. In that sense I do not regret anything, even though I have met many tragic individuals, seen much waste and many lost opportunities, and seen parts of the Russian Diaspora committing suicide through spiritual impurity. However, I have been even more privileged in that I have also seen the old and artificial disunity fall away and become heartfelt unity and so life in the dynamic present and future. The worst, and it was really bad, is over and the best is now and in the future. Over nearly the last twenty years Providence has allowed me to work freely for the Russian Orthodox Church in missionary work in my own homeland of the three counties of the East of England.
Third Saint of the Church Outside Russia Canonized
Today Archbishop of Boguchar in Bulgaria (+ 1950) was canonized in Moscow in front of Patriarch Kyrill, Metropolitan Hilarion of New York and other Russian bishops. His feast day will be 13/26 February, the day of his repose. He is the third ROCOR saint to be canonized so far, after St John of Shanghai and St Jonah of Hangchow.
http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2016/02/03/sostoyalas_kanonizaciya_arhiepiskopa_serafima_soboleva/
The Russian Orthodox Church: Pessimism, Idealism and Realism
Any reading of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, not least from the many volumes of the biography of the Patristically-minded Metropolitan Antony of Kiev and Galicia (1), confirms that there were many negative aspects to her life before the Revolution. Notably, partly because she had been deprived of a Patriarch by Peter I some 200 years before, a careerist mentality had developed within her senior clergy, some of whom had become civil servant administrators on behalf of a bureaucratic State. This meant that many a bishop had been appointed to his position without reference to his zeal for the Faith or to any Faith in general, but only with reference to his ability to ‘administrate’.
Also the Academies and seminaries had become hotbeds of German Protestant and protesting philosophical influence. Some reckon that 90% of pre-Revolutionary seminarists were atheists and revolutionaries – among them many a Bolshevik, including Joseph Jugashvili, later called Stalin, who was ejected from one. An example of a product of an Academy was the very senior Protopresbyter George Shavelsky, a treacherous bureaucrat who had little time for piety, which he dismissed as ‘mysticism’. He was also an enemy of Tsar Nicholas II and the spiritually alive, as is made quite clear in his detailed and self-condemning autobiography (2). In the emigration his sympathies were entirely with the masonic-led Paris Jurisdiction which actually abandoned both parts of the Russian Church!
The paralysing hand of State bureaucracy, eminently disloyal to the Tsar and infected with the Revolutionary virus, with its careerism, conformism and nationalist centralization seemed to penetrate everywhere. These bureaucratic abuses all formed the suicidal basis of the later Soviet regime, in which the old ‘chinovniki’ (civil servants) simply turned overnight into Communist ‘apparatchiki’; their stifling spirit, so detested by the people, was exactly the same. Thus, the State bureaucracy had made the ancient Church of Georgia into a department of the Russian Church! And when Russian forces at last liberated Eastern Galicia (the area centred around Lvov) from Austro-Hungarian control in 1915, incompetent Saint Petersburg bureaucrats soon turned the people away from Orthodoxy and back to Uniatism.
Sadly, there was decadence in many a wealthy monastery too; the stories are legion. As for some village priests, often through no fault of their own, their lack of education, impoverished situation and need for money simply to survive had discredited the Church in many places. The fact is that the Church looked after the State, but for the most part the State did not look after the Church. This was because the State was increasingly run by atheist bureaucrats, which is why they had no problem in serving the atheist Bolshevik State and why the State machine, Duma masons and generals among them, betrayed the Tsar, the Lord’s Anointed. For example, the grandfather of a relative of mine was the last pre-Revolutionary ambassador to Washington – and an atheist….
Indeed, a generation or two ago there was no need to read to read about all this. It was enough to talk to old émigrés who had been adults before the 1917 Revolution or whose parents had accurately described the then situation to them. They were the best remedy for the idealism of later émigrés and others who idealized pre-Revolutionary times for ideological reasons. I well remember one émigré’s grandson who condemned contemporary Russian bishops for having comfortable black cars, driven by their deacons. The ever-memorable patriot and missionary, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, soon corrected him: ‘And what about pre-Revolutionary bishops who each had a black carriage and horses with their driver?’
Another émigré, Prince Boris Galitsin (may his memory be eternal), told me of his youthful naivety and that he only realized that brothels had attached themselves to the First World War Russian Army when he was in his thirties. (Though any reader of the late Archimandrite Sophrony’s version of the life of St Silouan can read of the same and also of how the future saint had lived before the Revolution, not keeping the fasts and getting a village girl pregnant). Another émigré aristocrat told me that the Church in the emigration was like a glass of clear water, inside Russia it was dirty water. I asked him why then we in the emigration had so many defrocked priests and such a severe shortage of priests in general. He had no answer.
The simple fact is that if the members of the Russian Church had all been as they should have been, then no Revolution would ever have happened. The betrayal of the living spirit of the Church is why some bishops then betrayed the Tsar in 1917. This is why the 1917-18 Church Council took place without freedom, under the masonic influence of the democrat Aaron Adler (later called Alexander Kerensky), though it did at least restore the Patriarchate, despite the vigorous opposition of many lay professors of theology and bishops. One of Kerensky’s first and typical acts had been to remove the saintly, such as Metr (now St) Macarius of Moscow. No saints for him! This is why the Bolshevik-sponsored Renovationists (under Metr Alexander Vvedensky and his three wives) prospered for a few short years, many of their clergy being graduates from the decadent pre-Revolutionary Academies and seminaries.
This betrayal is why Metr (later Patriarch) Sergius could make his infamous Declaration of loyalty to a militant atheist government, thus guaranteeing division, so that many inside enslaved Russia and virtually everyone in the entirely free Russian Church in the emigration would not follow him. This is why one small part of the emigration, members of which had created and welcomed the February Revolution, left the Russian Church altogether. And this is why such second generation émigré Parisian academics like the late Fr Alexander Schmemann (born 1921) and their American disciples turned to Renovationism, denying that Holy Rus had ever existed (!), and that the only hope for the Church (!) was in its American-style Protestantization, that is, Desacralization, which produces not a single saint. These were words he said to me, but also words that he wrote in books.
So much for both second-generation emigre cynicism and second-generation idealism. Fortunately, that is only part of the story and, by far the least interesting part. Beyond the superficial froth of both, academic cynics and naïve and ill-informed idealists there is a far deeper story, a real story, an edifying story, the story of saintliness, of the real Church of God.
Before the Revolution the Russian Orthodox Church was what any real Church should be – a seedbed of saints, a saint-making machine. We only have to think of St Seraphim of Sarov, the Optina and Glinsk Elders and St John of Kronstadt. But above all we can think of the preparation of the millions of martyrs and confessors for the Faith under the Soviet yoke (3), the tens of thousands of martyred and confessing clergy and laypeople, as well as confessor-saints like St Seraphim of Vyritsa, St Matrona of Moscow and St Luke of Simferopol, who had been prepared by the pre-Revolutionary Church. It was their victory that guaranteed the cleansing of the Church inside Russia by blood and persecution from the abuses from before the Revolution and her Resurrection after the atheist Golgotha was over.
However, there was a parallel situation in the emigration. We can say that perhaps 50% of the emigration was not only anti-Orthodox, but also (and as a result) anti-patriotic. These were those who had carried out the Revolution with pride, largely aristocrats. In the emigration, highly politicized, they deserted the Russian Church and Russian history, and went to one or another extreme. Either they became unChristian, narrow-minded nationalists who died out and disappeared, or else they became enamoured of the countries where they lived, lost the Russian language, culture and culture and never even thought of repenting for their treason, cowardice and deceit. Just the opposite – they actually justified their apostasy! Not for the Renovationists either St John of Kronstadt or St John of Shanghai, both of whom they ferociously slandered and rejected, and I am a witness to this.
However, another perhaps 50% of the emigration were not only Orthodox but also, and as a result, patriots. Indeed, the more saintly the Orthodox, the more they were patriots. For them exile was a call to repentance, a chastisement deserved for the sins of the fathers. The cases of the saints of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, St Jonah of Manchuria, St John of Shanghai and the future St Seraphim of Sofia, are well-known. However, there were a great many others, their graves scattered all over the world, seeds of spiritual renewal for the whole earth, from France to Serbia, from Brazil to Australia, from Ireland to New Zealand, from Canada to Germany, from Italy to Venezuela, from the USA to Portugal, from Finland to Tunisia.
Among those I could mention are the repentant hermit Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, buried in the tiny village cemetery of Limeray near Tours in western France. Condemned by some émigrés for his love for the saints, surely the relics of this highly-educated ascetic will be taken up from obscurity and oblivion and moved to the new Russian Cathedral in Paris? What of the White Russian general Anton Denikin, whose last words in distant exile in the USA in 1947 were: ‘So I shall not see how Russia will be saved’, demonstrating his innate faith that Russia would be saved. What of the great Russian philosopher and patriot Ivan Ilyin, whose words are now rightly considered as prophetic?
What about Archbishop George (Tarasov), Bishop Methodius (Kulmann) and Bishop Roman (Zolotov) in France? They all loved the Church and Russia to the core. Then there was Bishop Mitrofan of Boston, a man ingrained with patriotism who desperately wanted to return to Russia. Or Fr George Sheremetiev in London who, as Count Sheremetiev, went from being one of the richest men in Russia to one of the poorest men in England, so that he could repent for the sins of his class, whose betrayals he blamed for the Revolution.
What can I say of the patriot parish priest Archpriest Igor Vernik in Paris? Or, in the same city, Vladimir Ivanovich Labunsky, the last of the 4,000 White Russian officers in our parish. In 1990, on introducing him to the first visiting priest from Russia, he begged him: ‘Bless me with the blessing hand of Holy Rus’. He was typical of so many. And what of the suffering heart of Lyudmila Sergeevna Brizhatova, the delightful Russian émigré poetess, faithful to the end in her lonely Parisian exile? The more saintly, the more Orthodox, the more missionary-minded but also the more patriotic. To some the idea of being both Russian patriots and missionary-minded may seem contradictory, but it is not.
This is because those who were Russian patriots were not simply patriots of Russia, but patriots of Holy Rus, the multinational ideal of the Orthodox Church, the Imperial ideal, the missionary ideal. Not for them nationalism and narrow-minded chauvinism, but the message to the whole world that God is with us. Not for them treason, cowardice and deceit, the slogan of the other 50% of the emigration, but faithfulness, courage and the truth. Faithfulness to Holy Rus, courage in the face of temptation, slander and exile, and words of truth against both the lies spread by the Bolsheviks and against the Russophobic myths spread by Western academics and politicians.
As widespread repentance and so the restoration of Holy Rus begins (and it has only just begun – you have seen nothing yet), old bad habits, a casual and nominal attitude to Church-going, fasting and prayer, a superstitious mentality based on ignorance, a few money-grubbing and compromised clergy, still exist. However, since 1917 the Church has been through a great movement of cleansing. Inside Russia, she has been cleansed by blood and persecution; outside Russia she has been cleansed by poverty and confession. Temptations have been taken away so that we can be faithful.
This is why, in 2007, at the signing of the Act of Canonical Communion by both parts of the Church, inside and outside Russia, there took place not the ‘reunion’ of the two parts of the Russian Church, inside and outside Russia, but the reaffirmation of our mutual unity, which had always existed, for we were always One and never spiritually divided. We, the faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church of all nationalities and tongues, have always believed in the Resurrection, Restoration and Recreation of Holy Rus, not in her national garments from before the Revolution, but in her heavenly raiment all over the world.
The Russian Golgotha delayed us for 100 years, but it has not stopped us, on the contrary it has strengthened us. Thus, one hundred years ago the Russian Church was on the verge of creating Metropolitan districts so that the people and the bishops would be brought together. That is at last happening only today. 100 years ago the most devout and much slandered Metr Pitirim of Saint Petersburg, in charge of churches outside Russia, was proposing to build a Russian church in every Western capital and translate the liturgical treasures of the Church into every Western language. That is at last happening only today. As the deputy of the last lay administrator of the Most Holy Synod in Russia, the spiritually alive Prince D. N. Zhevakhov, wrote prophetically over ninety years ago:
‘Educated society in Russia neglected its duty before God and the Tsar and cast Russia into such a state of terrifying chaos that only God and only a Tsar can extract her from it’ (4).
Notes:
1. See especially the first four of the seventeen volumes of his biography, as compiled by Bishop Nikon (Rklitsky), Jordanville, 1957-1971. Characteristically frank, Metr Antony, who taught in all the Academies, leaves us in no doubt as to the real situation of the Church at the time.
2. Fr George Shavelsky’s autobiography was first published in New York in the 1950s, but is now freely available electronically in Russian and also in a recent French translation.
3. See especially the two volumes of lives of the New Martyrs of Russia by Fr Michael Polsky (original editions in 1957 and 1980) or the thousands of pages in the more contemporary volumes researched and written in Moscow by Fr Damaskin Orlovsky.
4. P. 338 of the first two volumes of his 900-page ‘Reminiscences’ covering 1915-1923, first published in Munich in 1923 and republished by Tsarskoe Delo in Saint Petersburg in 2014. Sadly, the two later volumes are still lost.
Русская Православная Церковь: вчера и завтра
http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2015/12/02/russkaya_pravoslavnaya_cerkov_vchera_i_zavtra/
«Император и императрица думали,
что они умирают за Отчизну.
Они умерли за все человечество».
(швейцарец Пьер Жильяр, учитель царских детей)
Предисловие
Десять лет назад, в 2005 году, в Русской Православной Церкви Заграницей начались споры о наших взаимоотношениях с Московским Патриархатом. Обсуждался вопрос: стала ли Русская Церковь в России наконец-то свободной, и можем ли мы вступить в каноническое общение, чтобы вместе трудиться и строить будущее? Споры настолько разгорелись, что даже был созван IVвсезарубежный собор РПЦЗ в Сан-Франциско, чтобы разрешить поставленные вопросы. Нам тогда предстояло опровергнуть ложные аргументы, выдвинутые ради сектантской самоизоляции и продиктованные политикой и психологией, а не чистым богословием. Ниже приведем примеры.
Вчера
Человеческая слабость митрополита (а позднее патриарха) Сергия (Страгородского; 1867-1944) и его последователей, выраженная компромиссами с правительством атеиста-гонителя Сталина и известная как «сергианство», возведена некоторыми людьми в «богословскую ересь». На самом деле, это была разновидность эрастианизма – ложной идеи о верховенстве государства над Церковью, чему мы видели много примеров в Ветхом Завете и в 1900-летней истории Христианской Церкви. Фактически здесь не было ничего богословского, но лишь человеческая слабость иерарха, находившегося под огромным давлением воинственного безбожного государства. Никто не может осуждать патриарха Сергия за его слабость, ибо только Бог судья нам всем, и здесь не должно быть места фарисейству.
Хотя эти компромиссы не имели в себе ничего догматического или богословского, но нашлись те, кто, под влиянием североамериканского политического пуританства решили, что таинства в Русской Церкви в России мистическим образом «потеряли силу» из-за компромиссов с властью на протяжении трех поколений. Как священник РПЦЗ я впервые столкнулся с этим ошеломляющим политическим мнением, выдаваемым за богословское, в 1992 году. Конечно, сергианство не является ересью, в то время как пуританство с его врожденной нечистотой новатиан, донатистов и евстафиан (как видно из канонов Гангрского собора 340 года) – очевидная ересь.
В 2006 году в Сан-Франциско также осуждался экуменизм – то есть политическая и экономическая поддержка, которую просили некоторые представители Русской Церкви в России у католиков и протестантов. Однако это очень странная идея, будто мнения и действия нескольких людей должны восприниматься как свидетельство о том, что вся Русская Церковь Московского Патриархата (а это примерно 160 миллионов человек) запятнала себя ересью экуменизма! На самом деле, абсолютное большинство членов Русской Церкви в России никогда и не слышали об экуменизме, а те немногие, кто слышали, отвергали его. К тому же, к 2005 году экуменизм уже означал не то, чем он был в период своего зенита – в 1960-е и 1980е годы. Вместо компромиссов под политическим давлением – фактически ереси – он превратился к тому времени в поддержание добрососедских отношений с инославными христианами, чем РПЦЗ всегда и занимается, принимая во внимание многочисленные смешанные браки наших прихожан и необходимость во многих случаях совершать богослужения в помещениях неправославных храмов.
Самым странным предложением, которое мы тогда услышали, было не связывать себя никак с Русской Церковью в России из-за компромиссов отдельных представителей Церкви. Это была вопиющая ошибка, потому что, следуя такой логике, мы не должны были вступать в общение с Церковью новомучеников и исповедников российских! Да, мы, будучи свободными, канонизировали новомучеников в 1981 году – за 19 лет до того момента, когда это смог сделать Московский Патриархат. Но многие из верующих РПЦЗ, включая и меня, удивлялись, почему мы, имея свободу, не прославили новомучеников и исповедников гораздо раньше, начиная с 1920-х годов? Нам тоже было стыдно за себя.
Эта задержка в РПЦЗ произошла из-за того, что некоторые элементы нашей Церкви были заражены политикой. Хорошо помню, как ряд прихожан кафедрального собора Зарубежной Церкви в Лондоне и других местах возражали против этой канонизации в 1981 году. В любом случае, это был только первый шаг, самое начало. Как я уже писал в свое время: начатое в Нью-Йорке должно завершиться в Москве. Кроме того, ввиду недостатка достоверной информации мы канонизировали только около 8000 новомучеников, в то время как Русская Церковь с ее хорошим доступом к архивам уже прославила более 30 000 новомучеников, и этот процесс продолжается.
Некоторые на Соборе в Сан-Франциско заявили, что мы не должны иметь ничего общего с Церковью, чьи епископы работали на КГБ. Я бы согласился с этим утверждением, если бы и правда нашлись такие епископы, каким был (как нам верится), например, отлученный от Церкви еретик Филарет Денисенко – ныне любимчик ЦРУ. Но в реальности таких архиереев не было. Старшие архиереи в Церкви в России просто имели кодовые имена КГБ, так же как и наши светские гражданские власти, за которых мы молились на богослужениях. Точно так же имели право сказать и в Московском Патриархате: «Мы не должны иметь дело с Церковью, молящейся за лиц, которым присвоены кодовые имена КГБ». Это был бы такой же ложный аргумент.
Некоторые в РПЦЗ признали, что у нас были члены Церкви, ранее работавшие на ЦРУ и другие Западные шпионские службы. Но они оправдали это тем, что в церквях России тоже были члены КГБ. Это снова ложная информация: единственными членами КГБ, заходившими в российские храмы, были шпионы. Они записывали имена священников и молодых людей, которым собирались создать большие проблемы.
Сектантски настроенные представители РПЦЗ говорили, что мы не можем вступить в каноническое общение с РПЦ, потому что придется находиться в общении с остальной частью Православной Церкви!
Впервые я услышал такой невероятный аргумент году в 1999, когда один священник Зарубежной Церкви из Лондона сослужил со священником из Константинопольского патриархата. Против этого сослужения высказывался один священник-изоляционист, обученный в Северной Америке. В Западноевропейской Епархии РПЦЗ, где я был рукоположен и служил до 1997 года, такие совместные богослужения были нормой и совершались регулярно. Как священник РПЦЗ я был поражен таким сектантским духом, который мне до этого почти никогда не встречался. Логика этого аргумента была такова, что мы в РПЦЗ больше не находимся в общении со Святой Горой Афон, которая относится к юрисдикции Константинопольского Патриархата. Абсолютно немыслимое утверждение! (Эти изоляционисты позднее сами покинули РПЦЗ).
Более серьезно и практично настроенные делегаты РПЦЗ указали на то, что среди представителей Московского Патриархата за пределами России все еще оставались обновленцы и священнослужители с дурной репутацией, в том числе и на высшем уровне, хотя некоторые из них к тому времени уже умерли. Это была проблема. Хотя эти модернисты называли нас клеветниками за то, что мы говорили правду и «порочили» их идолов (так делают обновленцы до сих пор), проблема была почти преодолена в 2006 году, когда большая часть этих клириков в Англии и Франции ушла из Русской Церкви Московского Патриархата в созданный ими же самими раскол; с тех пор два или три таких представителя были сняты, и теперь они не смогут устроить скандал.
Наконец, ряд делегатов сказали, что мы не можем сотрудничать с российской Церковью потому, что ситуация в России сегодня отличается от ситуации до революции. Советские практики перешли в российское общество, алкоголизм, аборты, коррупция и разводы стали обычным делом, мумия русофоба-убийцы Ленина все еще лежит на Красной площади, а площади и улицы городов изобилуют его статуями или носят его имя и имена его последователей. Они требовали, чтобы постсоветское российское государство (ответственное за эти дела) вело себя так, словно оно часть Русской Церкви! На этот аргумент мы возразили, что дореволюционная Россия тоже не была идеальной (тогда бы и не было революции). Мы попросили их быть снисходительными к людям, которые целых три поколения были лишены свободной Церкви, попросили терпения и сказали, что со временем Церковь будет иметь влияние на государство, потому что покаяние (в котором нуждаемся все мы) меняет людей.
Победа
Приведенные выше аргументы были отвергнуты более чем 95% членов РПЦЗ как принадлежащие крошечному, сектантскому, изолированному и политизированному меньшинству, пытавшемуся захватить РПЦЗ, сдерживавшему нас и мешавшему в осуществлении нашего универсального призвания вместе с остальной частью Русской Православной Церкви. Как мы знаем, в 2007 году абсолютное большинство иерархов, духовенства и народа нашей маленькой Русской Церкви Заграницей были счастливы наконец-то вступить в каноническое общение с огромным большинством остальной части Церкви, духовной частью которой мы всегда оставались. Наше разделение, произошедшее чисто по политическим причинам, не связанным с Церковью, было преодолено. Мы были уверены, что Церковь в России стала свободной, о чем свидетельствовал Юбилейный Архиерейский Собор 2000 года. Наконец-то полное единство – внутреннее и внешнее – стало возможным и, преодолев все преграды, мы смогли пойти вместе к нашей общей судьбе и важной миссии.
Завтра
Сегодня, спустя поколение после падения государственного атеизма, мы видим в Российской Федерации интереснейшие перемены, обещающие будущее. После ужасного периода капитализма по «закону джунглей» 1990-х годов с властью «семибанкирщины», бандитскими приватизациями «дикого Востока» и появлением прозападных преступников-олигархов и либералов, Россия увидела истинную суть этой альтернативы коммунизму, предложенной Западным миром с его культом потребления.
Мы сами, живя в Западном мире, в свое время тоже не дали себя обмануть. Во многом «благодаря» хаосу и страданиям, посеянным западными силами в Ираке, Афганистане, Ливии, Сирии и на Украине, российское общество увидело истинное лицо евросодома. Если порошенковская хунта, поставленная ЦРУ в Киеве – матери русских городов, хочет самоубийства в виде «европейских ценностей», то пусть их имеет. Мы же останемся верными ценностям святых равноапостольных Владимира и Ольги из святого Киева. Веруя во Христа, своейсмертию поправшего смерть, мы выбираем жизнь. Веря сатане, поправшего смертью жизнь, они выбирают смерть. Вот в чем разница между нами.
После нападения Запада на Святую Русь, российское общество сегодня в большинстве своем осознало, что Запад – неверный выбор. Россия должна следовать по своему, историческому, Богом предначертанному пути – как проповедовали наши святые и подвижники РПЦЗ. Россия должна исцелиться и восстановить Святую Русь. Мы, живущие вне России, можем только молиться и поддерживать, ибо наша основная задача – распространять Православие за пределами русских земель и быть верными Святой Руси. Мы всего лишь смиренные ученики, следующие заветам Святой Руси.
Сегодня говорят, что нынешнее российское общество напоминает Россию 1917 года. Но, в отличие от 1917 года, современная Россия движется не к 1918, а к 1916 году. Другими словами, хотя ситуация щекотливая, но Россия идет не к катастрофе, как это было в 1917 году, а в обратном направлении. Если, даст Бог, мы продолжим двигаться в этом избранном Богом направлении, то Церковь России однажды приведет нас к исполнению нашей судьбы. В чем же оно состоит?
Из-за полного провала Западных идей, Россия, увидев свое возможное будущее, поняла, что это не ее путь. Сегодня она изо всех сил пытается выбраться из ямы, в то время как Западный мир во главе с США стремительно падает в нее головой вниз. Сейчас некоторые трезвые Западные политики и мыслители посещают Россию и следят за событиями в ней, чтобы правильно ориентироваться. К таковым относятся Герхард Шрёдер, Николя Саркози, Филипп де Вилье, Патрик Бьюкенен, Рон Пол, Пол Крейк Робертс, Франклин Грэм и другие.
Теперь мистическая и историческая роль России – быть посредником между Востоком и Западом, между Китаем и западной Европой. Духовная судьба Китая – войти в подлинно православный христианский мир, став восточными провинциями Святой Руси; ровно как судьба западной Европы – это вернуться к своим православным корням с помощью своих древних святых, стать западными провинциями Святой Руси. Чрезмерная национальная гордость европейцев пока мешает осуществлению этого, потому что там, где нет смирения и кротости, нет и спасения. На самом деле, одна из задач России – не спасение Европы от США, как думают некоторые, а спасение Европы от самой себя. Как Россия, а не Запад, виновата в том, что выбрала Западную идеологию, которая привела к революции в феврале 1917 года, так и европейцы не должны винить никого другого в бедах, которые мы себе выбрали.
Ключ ко всеобщему спасению в эти последние времена лежит в восстановлении Святой Руси и ее распространении на весь мир. Следуя Пресвятой Троице, мы призваны быть не только хранителями и собирателями Святой Руси (следуя Отцу и Сыну), но и распространителями идеалов Святой Руси (следуя Святому Духу). Те, кто живут на Востоке и на Западе и желают трудиться вместе с Русской Православной Церковью, следовать ее традициям и строить новые Поместные Православные Церкви, всегда будут радостно приняты. Но если кто-то не желает этого делать и отворачивается от пророческой и мистической Церковной традиции ради усталого, старого, секулярного и гуманистическогонеомодернизма, то Бог с ним.
В 1917 году последний христианский император не отрекся от власти. Это Россия и остальной мир отреклись от христианского императора и христианской империи и, в конечном счете, от Христа. С того момента земля не знала мира, требовалось воздаяние за грехи всех: каждый получил свое наказание, чтобы научиться смирению. В России народ столкнулся с гонениями и фашистским вторжением; за пределами России, в эмиграции, люди получили изгнание и изоляцию; европейские страны были наказаны войной, а также унижением в виде потери былой силы и величия; остальная же часть мира постоянно мучилась от войн и раздоров. Все это продолжается с тех пор, как в 1917 году был взят от среды «удерживающий теперь» (2 Фесс. 2:7). Все страдания мира после 1917 года являются возможностью научиться смирению.
Наше призвание заключается в том, чтобы проповедовать Святую Русь, послание последнего христианского императора по всему миру ради покаяния перед концом. Приходит время, когда мир наконец будет готов услышать о Святой Руси, об универсальности воплотившегося Христа, о подлинном Христианстве, а не о двух обманчивых «измах» (подготовленных Западным язычеством, языческим Римом и северным варварством): римо-католицизме и протестантизме.
Заключение
Мой прадедушка родился в том же году, что и Николай II, последний христианский царь, убитый в Екатеринбурге в 1918 году. Спустя сто лет после рождения императора и 50 лет после его мученической смерти, я, рожденный в годовщину уничтожения останков Царской Семьи, получил откровение с востока, что должен познать сам, а затем идти и говорить о Святой Руси, о воплотившемся Христе всем, кого встречу на своем пути. Это не только мое личное призвание, но и многих других людей, как прекрасно описано в стихотворении «Апостолы», написанном в изгнании в 1928 году царским поэтом Сергеем Бехтеевым:
Мы во мглу раболепного мира
Светоч духа победно несем
И в чертог православного пира
Божьих избранных громко зовем.
Мы идеи по дороге терновой,
Мы парим над мирской суетой,
Мы – апостолы веры Христовой,
Провозвестники правды святой.
Мы зовем племена и народы,
Обагренные в братской крови,
В царство истинной, вечной свободы,
В царство света, добра и любви.
Надежды и молитвы на будущее устремляются в Екатеринбург, к восстановлению монархии и коронации нового царя.
Протоиерей Андрей Филлипс,
Колчестер, Англия.