Category Archives: Scandal

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

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

The Three Non-Russian Ethnic Divisions

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

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

The Three Russian Political Divisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

We Have Seen It All Before

To the Tsar you did not  belong,

And that is how it all went wrong:

The foe whispered: Scatter and squander,

Give your treasure to the rich yonder,

Your power to slaves, your strength to enemies,

To serfs your honour, to traitors your keys.

Holy Rus, Maximilian Voloshin, 1918

Introduction

It is said that history does not repeat itself, it only echoes down the ages. This is hair splitting. It is the same thing in different words. Since geography does not change, mountains and plains, oceans and rivers do not move, and since human nature does not change, history does repeat itself. We have seen it all before.

The Ukraine

The Ukraine has been known for decades to be the most corrupt country on earth. The West has poured in hundreds of billions of dollars over the last four years. The money has all disappeared, just as the trillions did in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Kiev regime is utterly corrupt. Ministers are now finally being threatened with charges for corruption involving a mere $100 million. Some have fled abroad, their suitcases stuffed with dollar bills (London, the money-laundering capital, is a popular destination). The US is trying to regime-change by charging members of the regime with corruption, rather than by assassinating them. It is time to get rid of the intransigent Zelensky. Its oligarchs and their puppets, like the violent medieval princes and their corrupt retainers who used to live there, vie with one another. We have seen it all before.

For ordinary Ukrainians who have stayed, power cuts have become ever longer and they look anxiously at the destructive moving lights in the night skies and tremble. 1.8 million Ukrainian soldiers are dead or seriously wounded. Millions of young men and their families have fled abroad, 100,000 in the last month alone, in order to avoid the certain suicide of military service against a far stronger enemy. In his bunker in Kiev the actor President Zelensky himself now appears to be in a state of utter delusion, just like the artist Hitler in his bunker in Berlin just before his end, in denial, talking about moving non-existent armies and divisions, as bombed-out Berlin was surrounded by apocalyptic Soviet forces. We have seen it all before.

After taking back Russian Crimea (given to the Ukraine by the atheist monster Khrushchov in 1954) and then the four southern and eastern Russian provinces, given by the atheist monster Lenin to create the Soviet Ukraine in 1922, the Russian Federation may take back the next southern and eastern slice of the Soviet Ukraine. That consists of the other four Russian-speaking provinces (Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev and Odessa), also given to the Ukraine in 1922.

Russia may also give the bit that the other atheist monster Stalin stole in 1945 back to Romania (Romanians want Romanian North Bukovina/Chernivtsy back, just as they want Romanian ‘Moldova’, which Stalin also stole in 1945). Russia may also give the other Stalin-stolen bits (Zakarpattia) back to Hungary and (Catholic Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk) to Poland (if the Poles want them back). Then, what remains will basically be a mirror image of Belarus to the north, the New Ukraine (or whatever it will be called) resembling a Southern Belarus, the East Slav Russian Protectorate of Kievan Rus. As for the delusional Western European elite, it will brush off its defeat in the Ukraine with the fantasy narrative that the Ukrainians were corrupt and Trump did not send enough aid. It was certainly not their fault.

Russia

The corrupt oligarch-gangster and traitor Prigozhin died in 2023, when a grenade exploded in his business jet, ‘in mysterious circumstances’, as they say. Whenever Russia is in trouble, there always appears a traitor or a rebel, a ‘false Dmitry’ or a Pugachov, who always ends up badly. Meanwhile, loyal Russian oligarchs prosper, as they receive plentiful military contracts from the State. It appears that between 100,00 and 150,000 Russians soldiers are dead, perhaps some 250,000 are seriously wounded.  And though Russia has won the war in the Ukraine, crushing and demilitarising not just the Ukraine, but also NATO, and dividing it into coalitions of the willing and the unwilling, Russia must also win the peace. How will they deal with the hatred they have stirred up against themselves? The mourning widows, orphans, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, the survivors maimed in body and soul, the economy in tatters, the exiled in misery, the lives ruined. Russia continues with its own problems, almost the same as those as those in the Middle Ages, the rival princes of then have become the rival oligarchs of today. We have seen it all before.

President Putin, the once naïve Europhile lawyer from Saint Petersburg, a fluent German speaker, who knows English quite well and who wanted to join NATO, has closed the window on the West, opened by Peter I. He was forced to do so, astonished and hurt by the rejections and hostility of the West that he used to love. And instead he has opened a window on the East, which Tsar Nicholas II once tried to open, but was stopped from doing so by Western-armed and financed Japan in 1904. Now dewesternising Russia has the deep friendship of the East. This is a turning point not only in Russian history, but in Eurasian, and therefore World, history. For the only reason why Eurasia has never dominated the world has been its divisions; those divisions are no more. Western aggression and dishonesty have thrown them all together, Russia, China, India, Iran and North Korea, well over a third of humanity, and receiving all the sympathy of Africa and Latin America.

The greatest problems are faced by the Russian Orthodox Church. Once multinational, it has become national, indeed nationalist and centralised, clericalist, ritualist and militarist, a uniform army. The new quasi-Iranian fundamentalism there has cut the Russian Church off from the mainstream, from the Catholicity of the Orthodox Church. No-one is convinced by Russian Orthodoxy now, as it reels from the scandal of openly blessing weapons of war used to kill other Orthodox, from that of last year’s open adultery of its main ‘Orthodox’ TV oligarch, from the homosexual scandals of senior bishops from Budapest to Chicago, to the scandal of another who plays poker internationally for big money.

The main Patriarchal candidate actually dreams of anointing and crowning President Putin Tsar. As a result, far fewer Orthodox than before go to church. Many boycott it, not only outside the Russian Federation, but also inside it, repelled by the darkness of the new fundamentalism with its boorish and misogynistic attitudes, its ever-growing quasi-Old Ritualist isolation from the mainstream. Fr Ferapont of The Brothers Karamazov has won against Elder Zosima. Russian Church isolation is determined by the fact that it cuts itself off from any who disagree with it. This is a Soviet attitude, not a Christian one, just as parallel US Evangelism is a Zionist attitude, not a Christian one.

The USA

As usual, the USA just wants to double its dollars. After all, it has wasted some $350 billion of them in the Ukraine. It wants them back, with a return. However, the reason is not the usual profit-seeking greed, it is about astronomical US debt, which now amounts to $38.2 trillion. Deindustrialised, it faces economic crisis. The crisis is also moral, as the USA faces the problems engendered by the genocidal results of US Zionism, US-backed and US-armed Israel against Palestinians, and by the crisis of the Israel-linked Epstein scandal. We have seen it all before.

Western Europe

The Establishments of most of Western Europe, their lies backed to the hilt by their generously-funded and utterly mercenary media and academia, are indebted to the ultimate degree. Therefore, they have been busy fabricating provocations: Russian submarines off the coast of Sweden (in fact American ones), Russian missiles and drones flying over Poland (in fact Ukrainian ones), imaginary Russian drones flying over Germany and Denmark, imaginary Russian aircraft flying over Estonia, imaginary Russian arms on ships, leading to French piracy on the high seas, the sabotage of French hotels by ‘Russian’ bedbugs etc. Any fiction to scare the brainwashed sheeple, to justify absurd NATO and the huge expenses of the military-industrial complex, creating the long-desired Third World War. We have seen it all before.

France

President Macron, called Micron by his enemies, and his band of perverts, their popularity standing at 11%, appear to have halted democracy in France. The President himself is obsessed only by his overweening ambition of becoming a second Napoleon, the first President of Europe. His hubris will be followed by nemesis. We have seen it all before.

Germany

Germany is in recession, as it has suicidally destroyed its industrial might by cutting itself off from the cheap Russian gas and oil which once made it competitive and mighty. Fascistic green policies have helped its decline. Its ultra-militaristic Chancellor, amazingly still on 18% of popularity, together with many members of his government, appears to want revenge for 1945. They dream of surrounding Moscow and pounding it with NATO artillery. So far all they have seen is German tanks burning on the steppes near Kursk, in the same area as in 1943. We have seen it all before.

The UK

The Ukrainian armed forces have been provided with a great many British ‘military advisors’, ‘technicians’ and MI6 spies and bodyguards. All their terrorist operations have been run by the British. These are terrorist activities of the cinematic James Bond type, repeats of those between 1941 and 1944, like the disastrous Dieppe raid, which killed and wounded thousands of Canadians, or the futile Dambusters raid, which killed a thousand Ukrainian slave-workers, let alone the then terror bombings which killed half a million German civilians.

The present operations, based in Odessa, Ochakov and Nikolaev, have often been naval in type. Thus, they attacked the civilian Kerch Bridge, sent naval drones against ships, blew up a dam, planned a suicidal and very costly attack to break through strongly-protected Russian territory to the Sea of Azov, landed Ukrainian troops on an island in a suicidal attack, invaded a border region of the Kursk Region in Russia (70,000 Ukrainian dead or wounded), attacked a Russian train, set fire to Russian bombers, tried to assassinate President Putin, tried to bribe a pilot with $3,000,000 to fly his plane with a missile to the West. Since the bankrupt and deindustrialised British are so militarily weak, and their anti-democratic leader very unpopular at 16%, they can do nothing else except commit futile and suicidal acts of terrorism. The only thing they are good at is PR, confusing virtual reality with real reality, cinema fantasies with real war. We have seen it all before.

Poland

Some in ‘the hyena of Europe’, as Churchill called Poland, dreamed of restoring the past, a Greater Poland, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. It is all nonsense. Polish pragmatists, seeing the attitudes of nearly two million Ukrainians living freely among them and bankrupting them, are now turning towards an anti-Ukrainian attitude, remembering the Ukrainian Volyn massacres of the Poles over eighty years ago. The Poles will never forget. It is embarrassing for the Ukrainians, who would like them to forget.

Italy and the Others

It is said that no war in Europe can end until Italy has changed sides. This is because, sensibly, most Italians are not warlike. This change of sides will of course happen. Indeed, all the at present vassal states in Europe will do the same, according to how much good sense they have. Hungary and Slovakia have already done so. Croatia and Austria are slipping towards it, also passing from being pro-Kiev to being anti-Kiev, like Poland. Romania would do so, but Brussels forbids freedom and democracy there. Eventually even the Nordics and the other Baltics will go neutral again, once they have rid themselves of their American-imposed elites. We have seen it all before.

Conclusion

I love the stubborn design you hold,

And I agree to play my role.

Now another drama will unfold:

This time please, please let be my soul.

 

But the order of the acts is planned

The end of my path has been revealed.

I am quite alone; all drowns in the pharisees’ cant.

To live your life is no simple walk across a field.

Hamlet, Boris Pasternak, 1946

There is nothing new under the sun. An observer of this inanity and insanity, I will return to my Suffolk village, where the clocks go slow. Why adjust the clocks, when we are headed for eternity anyway? We have seen it all before.

 

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

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

Psalm 11, 2 (Septuagint) /12, 1

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

The Latest ROCOR Scandal – This Time in Australia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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