Category Archives: Schism

Looking Back on Old Sourozh

These are four interview answers given to a student who is at present working on a Ph D concerning the History of the Sourozh Diocese.

Q1) The Sourozh troubles (as they have been called) are regarded as a crisis almost entirely precipitated by the arrival in the diocese of large numbers of ethnic Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. How far is this really the case or did this event merely act as catalyst to previously existing tensions in the diocese?

A1) Sourozh troubles? At the time His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II called them a ‘schism’ in public pronouncements, which I translated as the official translator. True, the crisis was precipitated by the arrival of Russian Orthodox from the ex-Soviet Union, but this was only a catalyst – its cause lay far, far deeper and had been festering for decades. The recent arrivals merely lanced the deep boil.

Essentially the whole problem was a problem of insularity, of being cut off from Russian Orthodox reality, a problem which had historical roots in the general captivity of the Church authorities in Moscow and their inability to control their own tiny Diaspora, let alone the majority of the Russian Orthodox Diaspora which belonged and belongs to a completely autonomous ROCOR. However, there was the specific case of island Britain, which was even more cut off than the rest for the usual geographical reasons, and where a personality cult had developed. So when reality struck the cloud cuckoo land of the largely exclusive, upper class Anglican-style clique/club which the rulers of the ‘Sourozh Diocese’ by the early 2000s largely were, this was a long overdue encounter with reality.

What had happened until then had resulted in the exiling (in a typically hypocritical, racist, backbiting and sending to Coventry way) of all ‘dissidents’, i. e. of all those who knew what Russian Orthodoxy was actually about and would have nothing to do with insular fantasy and the personality cult which was at the heart of the so-called Sourozh ‘Diocese’. The problem came to a head because the dissidents were no longer a small minority who could be got rid of by making them leave (and sometimes find refuge in ROCOR), but were the vast majority, composed of all the new arrivals from the ex-Soviet Union who knew what Russian Orthodoxy was actually about and rightly ‘wanted the Church back’.

In this way those who had ruled the roost in Sourozh for decades before, oppressing the faithful Russian Orthodox minority and forcing them out, suddenly themselves became the minority – and a very small one at that. Realizing that they were now cornered and had lost power, they left, as they had forced so many into doing before them. What goes round, comes round. In this way they proved the ‘big fish in a small pond syndrome’ – anyone can remain a big fish as long as they make their pond very small. And that is what they did, made a very small pond for themselves.

Of course, the trouble was that the by then free Patriarchate had allowed such a situation to develop. With many others, I too made public several articles in the early 2000s, warning and pleading with the Moscow authorities to do something about their own Church locally. They did not do anything until it was too late. I doubt whether that was deliberate policy (waiting until the troublemakers had left of their own accord), as conspiracy theorists would have it, more it was a result of inertia and above all a lack of suitable individuals in Moscow to take over (see the answer to Question 2 below). This was why the new Sourozh bishop had to be nominated by the ROCOR Archbishop Mark, who was possibly the only Russian Orthodox bishop who knew the reality of the situation.

The ultimate historical roots of the Sourozh schism lay in the Diaspora schism between the minority of Russophobic, liberal, politicized elements in the Diaspora (in Europe called Evlogians and based in Paris) and the majority of the Diaspora in ROCOR. This schism took place in London in the 1920s, as elsewhere in Europe. (Though the roots of this schism lay in turn in the liberalism, modernism and fringe Orthodoxy of pro-Revolutionary intellectuals and aristocrats in Saint Petersburg before the Revolution. It was these individuals who emigrated to Paris after 1917). After 1945 the London Evlogians returned to the Patriarchate, but mainly without enthusiasm.

The situation was then saved, from the Patriarchate’s viewpoint, by sending a young priest, precisely from Paris (the heart of the Evlogian/Saint Petersburg schism) after World War II, who would be acceptable to the London ex-Evlogians and secure the situation, so that the ex-Evlogians would not return to the Paris schism. This priest was Fr Antony Bloom, around whom, especially after his mother’s death, there grew up a unique and utterly insular personality cult. This would inevitably result in clearly predictable difficulties after his death, since the death of the subjects of personality cults always results in difficulties, as it shows that they are not immortal.

Personally, I became fully aware of this situation (I had already been disturbed by several things I had seen) only in 1976, when during a six-week study visit to Russia I saw Russian Orthodox reality. The last scales fell from my eyes and I saw how peculiar and eccentric the Sourozh Diocese was. This was reinforced after 1976 when I had contacts with ROCOR – far bigger in Britain than the Sourozh ‘Diocese’ in terms of numbers of Russians, but not in terms of English people, because Metr Antony Bloom had created a mini-diocese (‘Sourozh’) largely through some 1,000 English converts, mainly of Anglican background, to his personal and peculiar brand of Orthodoxy, and by ordaining men whom other bishops would not touch for canonical reasons – and then by living in Greece and studying at St Serge in Paris. I realized that the Russian Orthodox reality inside Russia and ROCOR were identical; it was Sourozh that was out of kilter, just like the Evlogian group based in Paris.

The last straw came in 1982 when I and my wife had personal contact with Metr Antony and we clearly realised that he was a morally compromised individual and that the whole thing was a personality cult. At the same time in 1982 the then Fr Basil Osborne, whom I had first met when he was a young deacon in 1972, told me that the clear intention of the ruling clique of liberal academics in Sourozh (mainly convert clergy) was to ‘go over to the Greeks’ as soon as Metr Antony was dead. It was at that point that I left the Sourozh diocese, as so many others before me and after me, long before 2006. It was only in 2012 that I received an apology for my treatment thirty years before from His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill in Moscow. What a disaster – the Russian Orthodox Church authorities in England had been chasing Russian Orthodox away from them!

Q2) Several priests have told me that the arrival of Metropolitan Hilarion in the diocese was the main reason that events came to a climax when they did as his short but intense sojourn in the parish polarised the debate. Is this a fair assessment?

A2) Entirely true, but again he was only a catalyst. If it had not been him, it would have been someone or something else. The polarization had always been there. And we should remember that Bp Hilarion was made bishop and sent by Moscow at the specific request of Metr Antony. However, that does not excuse Moscow. You do not send a newly-baked, very naïve, very young and very inexperienced bishop into a hornets’ nest – which is exactly what they did.

Q3) In all the documents and interviews I’ve conducted both sides accuse the other of the same methods – i. e. it is seen as a coup by small (or even miniscule, four or five people) but highly influential group who ‘masterminded’ the activities. Is this a fair assessment? It seems to me that both can’t be right?

A3) The schism was fomented by a small clique of individuals. Bp Basil as a very weak individual was as much a victim as anything else of that very small group. He had been under control for as long as his very practical wife, whom I knew well and respected, had been alive. Once widowed, he began going off the rails. Altogether 300 people left in the Sourozh schism (the other 700 or so individual whom Metr Antony had converted had very quickly lapsed, often after only a few months), but only a few, four or five, led them; most, converts and often elderly, were unconscious of the game being played with them and were deluded and therefore deserve compassion. They had been hoodwinked all along.

It is true that on the ground in London and England in general, the other side, the pro-Russian Orthodox, was also led by a very small group of individuals. However, the latter were massively supported by the whole of the Church inside Russia, all those in ROCOR in England who were conscious of the situation and above all, by the vast mass of recent arrivals from the ex-Soviet Union in England. Whether Churched or unchurched, they instinctively knew, as we had known for decades, what was right and what was wrong.

Q4) The influence from the Motherland: This spectre rides high in the belief of many of the ‘anti-Moscow’ people – e g. the Russian State (FSB) seeks to control the Russian Diaspora though the Church. It seems to me that this can’t be discounted as fantasy as the Russian State and Foreign Office does seem more interested in ‘consolidation’ of the Diaspora – and it could be argued, why shouldn’t it? Diasporas are increasingly important to every motherland these days and the Russian Diaspora punches below its weight in terms of numbers (at least in the political sphere).

A4) This is without doubt paranoid fantasy and self-justification (‘we are leaving the Russian Church because it is not politically free’). Not in the sense that there must surely be Statist/nationalist, politically-minded individuals in the Russian State/FSB/Establishment who would like to control the Russian Diaspora, but it takes two to tango. They can fantasize, but if the Diaspora does not want to play ball, their fantasies are irrelevant. And the Russian Diaspora (as is proved by the history of ROCOR both before and since 2007) does not want to be embraced by such individuals. However, as I also know from contact as an official ROCOR representative in meetings with His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, Metr Hilarion and Archbp Innokenty (formerly in Paris) in Moscow, the Patriarchate is equally independent and utterly resistant to attempted encroachments by nationalistic individuals – it remembers the State protestantization of the Church before 1917 and does not want a repeat of that. The Church inside Russia much enjoys the freedom She has from State interference.

The people who make such fantastic statements about a Russian State ‘takeover’ are thinking in Anglican terms, in other words in terms of a State Church, founded by the State and directed by erastians. They are the ones who are not politically free and not culturally free. They are talking about themselves and indeed, such people are often Anglicans, who have little concept of how the Orthodox Church actually works. Interestingly, the Sourozh schism was taken up at the time by the British Establishment press, with newspapers like The Times and the Telegraph defending the Russophobes and making the whole story into base, simplistic tabloid-style propaganda of the cowboy sort. ‘Greek = good; Russian = bad’.

This is in tune with the whole Anglican, US and generally Western view of the Orthodox Church. In the 19th century, the Victorians already saw the Russian as bad, as propaganda for their imperialistic ‘great game’ (unheard of in Russia), of which the Western invasion of the Crimea was part. Between the 1920s and 1948 the Patriarchate of Constantinople was largely under the Anglican thumb, since 1948 and the US deposition of the legitimate Patriarch Maximos (abducted into exile in Truman’s personal presidential plane to Switzerland) and replacement by the US candidate (what better example of Western, not Orthodox, erastianism?), it has been CIA controlled. And it is to the Rue Daru branch of Constantinople that the schismatics went. The Western problem has always been that it does not control the Russian Church, hence the remarks by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Tony Blair that the Russian Church is the greatest enemy of the West. Anyone showing independence is an enemy!

Sourozh was a political plaything for the British media, just another opportunity for the British Establishment to justify its politically-motivated Russophobia. It is in the light that we should ultimately see the Sourozh schism, as playing into the hands of the Russophobic British Establishment. And it was basically carried out precisely by individuals whose sympathies were wholly with the British Establishment, including one who, to my knowledge, had worked for MI5. (I exclude the Russian paranoid fantasy that Bp Basil, as an American citizen, was a CIA agent – though you can see how some could end up thinking like that).

From Further Correspondence and Conversations

Following the questions and answers published on 23 November, we now publish further questions and answers resulting from them.

Q: Does anyone try and stop you from writing?

A: Oh yes, two or three anonymous individuals, probably from both extreme left and extreme right (interestingly, their views are identical – the extremes always meet) try censorship. The fact that, aggressively and dictatorially, they try to impose their censorship on free expression means that they are wrong. If they wish to read what they agree with, they can turn to any of the conformist, secularist media; why do they try and censor those who are Orthodox Christians and so think otherwise?

As they say of those on the extreme left: ‘There is no-one as intolerant as a liberal’. As regards those on the extreme right, they are by definition illiberal. I ignore extremists, especially anonymous ones, because they are motivated not by love but by hatred. Interestingly, earlier this month I met in London one who had not been anonymous and had tried to silence me some years ago. He has completely changed his life and apologized for what he had asked me to do six years ago. People change, people mature with experience. Give them time for repentance. We do not repeat their intolerance, but show patience.

Q: You said in the first questions and answers that some old calendarists are concerned by the possible 2016 All-Orthodox meeting. But when you compare the piety of old calendarists to new calendarists, can’t you support the former?

A: An example. Last month a Greek woman (dressed in jeans and of course without any head covering) came from London to visit our Church. The first question she asked me was: ‘Why aren’t there any pews?’ (!). Such is the result of decades of modernism in the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the diaspora. But why would I compare an unchurched person from a new calendar Church with an old calendarist convert? You cannot justify your schism by comparing yourself with someone who is unChurched and whose Church attendance consists of 20 minutes per year on Easter night.

I can remember in 1977 meeting an unChurched old calendarist from an old calendarist village in northern Greece. I was not impressed. Let us compare like with like. There are devout people who live on the new calendar (because they are forced to, definitely not new calendarists) and devout people who live on the old calendar (freely, but definitely not old calendarists). And there are non-devout people who live on both calendars too.

On the subject of that possible 2016 meeting, I should also have mentioned that, apart from the dispute between Constantinople with the Czechs and Slovaks, the dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem may also prevent it from taking place. And not only that. This week the US politician Joe Biden, whose son Hunter son has conveniently landed a very well-paid job in the energy sector in the Ukraine, was again in Istanbul, discussing the Ukraine – with a Patriarchate which has no jurisdiction whatsoever there. All the notorious CIA mouthpieces of the Phanar were present at the meeting, ready to take their orders from an organization that has a history of mass murder.

Q: What could happen as a result?

A: If Biden bribes the Phanar into setting up a pro-CIA schism in the Ukraine, as the Phanar did in Estonia, then there will be a major schism, with the elite of Constantinople falling away from the Church altogether, maybe its Patriarch becoming the irrelevant departmental head of the Uniats in an obscure bureau in the Vatican. However, if such a schism occurred, only the elite would fall away, as at the Council of Florence, a few faithful bishops, new St Marks of Ephesus, most monks, parish clergy and people would remain in the Church, perhaps going under the Church of Greece. As the proverb says; ‘A fish rots from the head’.

Q: Is bribery a realistic option?

A: Yes. Remember that the former US ambassador in Kiev, John Herbst, already set up the Agathangel schism in Odessa. Divide and rule is Washington’s motto and even if it costs a few tens of millions of dollars, they don’t care. They just print the money off in Washington and call it ‘quantitative easing’. Remember that it cost them $5 billion, as Victoria Nuland admitted, just to set up the current lame duck regime in Kiev. With $17 trillion dollars of debt (and that is how the Soviet Union was defeated – the US could go into massive debt, but the USSR could not), that is a drop in the ocean.

Q: What could happen if Constantinople fell away?

A: In such a case the remaining faithful Local Churches could hold a real and free Council in the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. This Monastery is almost ready for this. I have been there. From there the Orthodox Truth could be proclaimed in its integrity to the whole world, which would then see the essential, underlying unity of the Church, free of CIA manipulations. In such a case we could expect the Local Churches concerned to drop their compromises, such as the new calendar, and return to the fullness of Orthodoxy. Possibly the Patriarchate of Moscow could, as three-quarters of the Orthodox Church, become the first Patriarchate in the diptychs. That would be a necessary update to the reality of the Church today. Certainly, that would completely change the state of several Local Churches from CIA control and nationalist stagnation to missionary dynamism.

Q: How will Antichrist come to power?

A: There are two techniques for establishing Antichrist’s New World Order, that is, for obtaining the Global Dictatorship of the One World Government.

First of all, you can bribe naïve leaders and organize paid mobs of the unemployed and criminals to create riots in order to overthrow the legitimate government (called a ‘regime’ by the US-run Western media which duly demonize the legitimate government). This is politely known as ‘regime-change’, which is also the aim of Western sanctions. This is what has been tried unsuccessfully in Moscow and more recently in Hong Kong, but successfully in Kiev – a technique that had been well-practised in what the CIA-paid media dubbed ‘the Arab Spring’, a series of catastrophes which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives so far.

I think Washington may soon try the same technique of ‘regime-change’ in Kishinev (where it has banned all parties except pro-EU ones – the Kiev scenario again), Belgrade, Prague and Budapest – capitals of three countries whose leaders are now valiantly resisting US and EU bribery, bullying and threats for being independent. Of course, this does not happen in Tokyo, Berlin, Paris and London, because there the regimes (often elected with less than 30% of the popular vote) are only vassals, heads of US vassal states. Where the selected elite (who call us ‘plebs’) are already in your pocket, you do not have to unseat it – you already control the country

The second technique is to use the media, including the social media, to demonize a government and then to bomb its country back to the Stone Age. This is the Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya scenario. Once you have bombed the country to smithereens and unleashed interminable tribal infighting, you are then free to plunder its natural resources, so dividing and ruling, because, again, you already control the country.

Q: In the first questions and answers you mentioned the fact that there was support in the Russian Church for Kerensky after the 1917 Revolution. How do you explain that?

A: Apart from the naïve, ignorant and deluded, there were treacherous renovationists. They had been infiltrating the Russian Church since the early 1900s. Think of the twice married Fr George Gapon who led the 1905 protest and soon after hanged himself. These people wanted a socialist Orthodoxy! The 1920s renovationist schism under heretics like the renovationist Vvedensky and the Paris schism in the emigration did not come from nowhere – the highly politicized elements responsible for these schisms had long ago infiltrated the Church. Such self-deluded individuals call the Patriarch Antichrist or Judas and still dare to take communion. Such blasphemy burns them alive, as it did the Old Ritualists. Believe me, I have seen it happen. Such individuals always end up outside the Church, embittered through their self-delusion and hatred and often commit suicide.

Q: Are there still renovationists in the Russian Church?

A: There are still a few here and there, but very, very few and they are dying out. Most have left the Church, though some have joined Constantinople.

Q: You seem to overlook the role of Catholicism. Surely it, and not Orthodoxy, could save the West?

A: The West has categorically rejected Catholicism. And here I do not only mean the Protestant West, which has directly become atheist. I also mean the once Catholic countries of Europe. In Europe Catholicism is in freefall, even in a country like Poland, where the number of those practising Catholicism has halved in the last 25 years. Why?

It is because Catholicism is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Catholicism is the father of Protestantism, which is the father of the modern atheist West. No new pope, even if he is a master of PR, is thoroughly anti-Orthodox and pro-Uniat, was voted in by Washington and has the CIA-backed Western media behind him, can change anything. It is 1,000 years too late.

Q: What do you mean by Catholicism as part of the problem?

A: Historically, the West has degenerated from Christ (Orthodoxy) to Feudalism (Catholicism), then to Democracy (Protestantism) and so to Antichrist (Post-Protestantism). We can see this in many examples. For example, feudalism appeared in England very suddenly, in 1066. It simply did not exist here before. In other words, feudalism is the socio-political and economic result of Catholicism. Or, to take another example from today, the present genocide in Catholic Mexico (100,000 dead in the last twelve months, it is said) is being caused by feudal drug-traffickers, who are holed up on their castle-ranches, and pay serfs to work for them. (Of course, the drug-traffickers only exist because a section of the US population takes drugs. Otherwise they would go out of business).

As regards Russia, serfdom, that is feudalism, was only introduced in the 18th century by Western and Westernized rulers like Peter I and Catherine II. Significantly, they are praised to the skies and called ‘the Great’ by both Western and Soviet historians. Why? Because they both represented feudal empires. The West used feudalism to maintain its colonial empires and the Soviets reintroduced feudalism to maintain their empire. For what was Stalinist collectivization if not refeudalization? Take the land from the people and slaughter those who resist, that is refeudalization.

The West hates the fact that Western-introduced serfdom was abolished only after a century and a half in Russia, whereas in the West it lasted for centuries. In Russia, Orthodoxy defeated serfdom and Russian Orthodox have always opposed and destroyed slavery, freeing slaves. However, in the West the ruling Catholic ideology was inherently feudal so it could not be defeated, it could only degenerate into Protestantism, the next step to Antichrist.

Similarly, we can see the example of Western democracy in Russia, which only lasted for seven months in 1917. Why? Because for Western democracy, as it is called, to exist, you must have a Protestant mentality. This why it never worked elsewhere and cannot be imposed elsewhere, where it is always accompanied by massive corruption, as in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Latin America, South Vietnam, Japan, Thailand – or the Ukraine. From Western democracy in Russia, it was only one step to Antichrist, that is, to Bolshevism. True, this so-called Western democracy has lasted much longer in the West, where Protestantism existed, but even here we can see that today it too is degenerating, as Protestantism has been rejected. Even in the Estonian capital they are now selling off the main Lutheran church because it has gone bankrupt.

Western democracy has outlived its purpose, which was to overthrow Christian monarchs. With that done, Antichrist has been readying himself to take over from the secular presidents, prime ministers and chancellors who replaced the Christian monarchs. We saw this with Napoleon and Hitler, who replaced Christian leaders and were both prefigurations of Antichrist and both invaded Russia, just as the US is trying to invade Russia today.

We can see this today in the replacement of democracy and its degeneration in Western countries, which are quite freely introducing ever more Fascist legislation, with selective assassinations by the secret services, censorship of the media, militarization of the police, arrest without charge, deprivation of citizens of their passports, refusing them the right to live where they want, surveillance of their every movement through camera networks and State spying on e-mails and phone calls etc.

Q: Does Orthodox Russia have friends in the West?

A: Yes. Apart from the local Russian Orthodox and Orthodox allies of other nationalities, there are still minorities in the West who have a sense of national tradition, sovereignty and identity. All of them support Russia in some way. The enemy is the cosmopolitan Brussels/Berlin bureaucrat who takes his orders from Washington and has only contempt for real Europeans and our patriotism. There is in preparation an alliance between Orthodox Russia and healthy ‘sovereignist’ forces in at present enslaved Western Europe.

Q: What chance is there of the return of an Orthodox Emperor, a Tsar, who could protect all Orthodox worldwide from Western bullying and so delay the rule of Antichrist?

A: The Church can work in any political system and survive, as history proves, but our ideal is a Christian State, which incarnates the values of the Church, creating a Christian Civilization. If that exists, Antichrist cannot come. Our situation since 1917 has been abnormal; there has been no Christian Emperor, no Tsar, and so the Local Churches have been swayed this way and that way by secular political forces, whether Communist or Capitalist, Atheist or Mammonist, however the end has not yet come. The question is whether we are to return to normality, the Christian Empire, or whether we are to continue on the path towards Antichrist.

Thus, the last nearly 100 years have been quite exceptional, all should have ended in 1917, but we have been granted further time by the mercy of God. Nevertheless, it is still a stark case of the path to the Apocalypse or the path to the Restoration. But there are reasons for thinking that Restoration is still possible because of the sacrifices of the New Martyrs and Confessors during the first generation after 1917, on which the whole rebirth of the Russian Church has been founded.

Since the long and slow process of overthrowing Antichrist in Russia, which effectively began in 1941 with the first Nazi invasion (the second Nazi invasion being in the Ukraine in 2014) and the revival of the Church inside Russia, we have begun to see the three different stages in the restoration of the Church. These are: Orthodoxy; the People; Sovereignty. They come in the opposite order to what we would expect, Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People, because we are putting history into reverse.

First of all, we have seen the process of restoration of Orthodoxy, with the end of outward persecution by Communism and the end of inward persecution by renovationism. This first stage in this process is ongoing, but is almost at an end now. The outward persecution by the Communists has ended. And both the renovationists who were supported by the Phanar and the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and who were still active in the Diaspora until recently, and the neo-renovationists who came to prominence inside Russia in the 1990s and 2000s (with the support of the old Diaspora renovationists), have literally been dying out. The latter were rejected outright by Patriarch Alexei II and elders like Fr John Krestyankin and have been defeated. That is why the last ones are so aggressive. The re-establishment and reassertion of Orthodoxy inside the Russian Orthodox Church is clear. Only a few treacherous individuals inside Russia and in the Diaspora are still resisting – but they are living in the past, irrelevant.

The second stage in the process is the revival of the People as a believing force. This stage is ongoing, but has very far to go. The missionary witness of the Church to the masses has scarcely begun, but at least it has begun. Only when the Church has been allowed to go out into the whole world by Divine Providence and preach the authentic Gospel, which has been so compromised by Catholicism, Protestantism and Modernism, can we move on to the third stage. Already, however, there has been the first political emigration after 1917, which brought Orthodoxy to countries which previously knew nothing of it, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a second economic emigration, far larger than before. All this is the Providential opportunity to witness.

Only when people have been Churched, when they are ready for the new Orthodox Emperor, the Tsar, can that restoration occur. In other words, there can be no restoration of the Sovereign Christian Empire until the baptized masses want it, until they have repented in preparation for it. Only repentance can bring restoration. And we are still far from this – though I must say we are much closer than even five years ago, let alone twenty-five years ago, when all this was still only a dream.

For Russia has now begun to play the role of the country which restrains or withholds the movement towards Antichrist. That is why the forces of this world are so aggressively attacking Russia at the moment, trying through so-called sanctions to punish Her. The most ruthlessly logical and consistently anti-Christian Western elitists like Brzezinski in the US and Bildt in Sweden have publicly declared that the West must destroy the Russian Orthodox Church (in order to hasten the arrival of Antichrist – though they are so delusional that they do not even believe in Antichrist).

Q: If that repentance or process of Churching happens, who will the new Emperor be?

A: We do not and cannot know. That is in God’s hands or rather in the hands of the Mother of God, for since the forced and forged abdication of 1917 the Empire has been in the hands of the Sovereign Mother of God. Our task is to repent, not to argue about possible candidates. God will choose the right candidate for us and it will be plain to all Churched Orthodox that this is the right choice.

Resisting and Delaying Antichrist: The Prophetic Vision of the Russian Orthodox Church Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence and Conversations

Q: What do you think from an Orthodox viewpoint of the recent G-20 meeting in Brisbane, where much was made of the war in the Ukraine.

A: In Brisbane Western politicians – not world leaders, as they pretentiously call themselves – made much of the civil war in the Ukraine. This was because they caused it and are continuing it. At Brisbane a clear message was given to the Western bullies by the free world, led by Russia: If the West continues to destabilize, overthrow democracy by bribing mobs and destroy the sovereignty of the Ukraine, then Russia will extend its sanctions against the Western world, possibly closing Russian air space to it. The Obamas, Bidens, Camerons, Hollandes and Merkels of the West face self-imposed isolation.

The Russian Federation, the Eurasian Economic Union, China, India, much of Latin America, nearly one half of the world, are working towards a new world order and will not tolerate arrogant Western bullying. That has already caused so much bloodshed and chaos in genocidal bombing, invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan and in CIA-organized ‘coloured revolutions’ in Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. Libya was the last straw, but even now there are aggressive individuals in the US, whose minds are so power-crazed that they openly talk of starting a Third World War against Russia and China.

Q: Do you think there is any hope that heads of some countries in the European Union will speak out against this US-centred bullying?

A: The EU has more or less become an island off the western coast of the USA, in other words, a US colony or ‘protectorate’, in effect its next state, and is governed by puppets and economic thugs, as we saw in Greece and Spain. The US has isolated Europe from its own roots and its own interests. Until the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis is restored, as in the early 1900s, there is no hope for Europe. Remarkably, however, the leaders of some small countries in the EU have protested, notably the leaders of Hungary and the Czech Republic. They have of course been condemned for that by the US-run EU media.

Q: What about the leaders of once Orthodox countries like Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania and Non-EU Serbia and Montenegro?

A: Apart from Serbia, where Orthodoxy is still to some extent a political force, the elites of all those countries have betrayed the Orthodox Faith and their own peoples. We can expect nothing of such elites. They can only think of payments from Brussels into their Swiss bank accounts.

Q: When you say ‘the US has isolated Europe’, what do you mean by the US?

A: The US means the plutocratic financiers, industrialists and arms-merchants who saw their opportunity and immigrated to the US from Europe, from where they had already financed slavery, over 200 years ago and now run the US. I do not of course mean the American people. Until the end of the 1950s there was still among many ordinary Americans a small-town, Bible-based culture, however deficient and partial. That has been more or less destroyed by the plutocrats and is lamented by such popular American singers as Don McClean and Johnny Cash in nostalgic songs like American Pie and Family Bible. Americans were the first victims of the plutocrats, the first victims of the ‘US’, as we saw already in the US Civil War. There is nothing that Satan loves more than wars where brother kills brother, whether in the US or the Ukraine.

Q: Has not Russia suffered from the Western sanctions imposed because of the Ukraine?

A: There are naturally problems resulting from them, but the main result of Western bullying because of Russia’s protection of the Ukraine, so-called ‘sanctions’, has been for Russians to refind their identity. Providentially, the Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy, is preparing Russia for the future, preparing it to overcome the confusion and decadent westernization of the last 25 years, to realize that Russia has its own identity, path and role. If the Western elite really wants to start a Third World War, it must now realize that Russians will no longer simply lie down and agree to lose that War, their country and, above all, their Christian Faith to Mammon.

This is the same situation as in the thirteenth century when the Mongols invaded Russia. Until then Russians had been divided; everything changed afterwards as they found unity against the common enemy and petty squabbles were forgotten. So today Russia was divided before the Western invasion of the Ukraine, now it is finding unity once more. Today’s extraordinary consensus of national unity around President Putin has not existed in Russia for exactly 100 years, since the First World War, when Russia also united against aggressive Western enemies.

Q: To move on, there has been talk recently of the forthcoming All-Orthodox Council in 2016 and much worry has been expressed about it. Do you share in those worries?

A: No. To worry about this is really to show a lack of faith in Divine Providence and in the Church, which is not a mere human institution, but a Divino-human organism. First of all, nobody knows if there will be a Council, let alone whether one is forthcoming; remember that ‘man proposes but God disposes’. True, a meeting of several Orthodox bishops is planned in two years’ time, but a meeting is not in itself a Council. And no-one knows with the situation between Constantinople and the Czechs and Slovaks if even that meeting will take place. And who knows who the Patriarch of Constantinople will be in two years’ time.

Even if a meeting does take place and politics takes over, it will remain an ineffectual without any consensus. However, if a ‘Council’ takes place, why should that be bad? Surely a Council – rather than a mere meeting – will proclaim the Church and our Orthodox Faith to the whole world, anathematizing all isms, atheism, consumerism, ecumenism, globalism etc. How can that be bad? Remember that only canonical Orthodox will attend, those of disputed canonicity like the OCA, those in schisms, as in the Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro and Estonia, those in sects like the old calendarists, as well as heterodox, will not take part.

Q: So why do some worry?

A: I think that those who are worried, for example old calendarists, have a psychological and not theological motivation. They are really just seeking to justify their schisms. For example, they point to the decadence inside the Patriarchate of Constantinople but then forget that Mt Athos and many faithful clergy and people outside the convert fringes are under that Patriarchate. The old calendarists want a Pharisee-like, black and white world, in which they are white and everyone else is black. Such a world does not exist and has never existed. The wheat has always grown alongside the tares. Look at the twelve apostles: most of them betrayed Christ, one did not even repent, but still eleven of them became saints. Old calendarist criticisms are psychologically-motivated self-justification.

Q: But we know there are many real problems between the Local Churches, for example there is the problem of the new calendar.

A: I can recall reading the words of St Justin (Popovich) in the 1970s who denounced the concept of a Council then because the vast majority of Orthodox were living under the yoke of Communism. Then he was right of course, but now the situation is quite different. Today most Orthodox, some 85% of all, are free. True there are some 15% who are not free, who live under what may be called ‘CIA Churches’, but they are a small minority.
Who knows, if this meeting does take place and does become a Council, this may mean that the new calendar hierarchies will repent and return to the Orthodox calendar, giving up the Roman Catholic calendar. Mt Athos gave up that calendar decades ago and now the Polish Church has done so. Others will surely follow. And remember too that the CIA Churches, subject to all manner of Uniatizing and Protestantizing manipulations, are mainly small and their senior representatives elderly. Most of the free Local Churches are young and follow the Tradition. Time is on our side.

Q: What do you mean by ‘CIA Churches’?

A: Those whose leaders are appointed by the CIA, or bribed by the EU and masonic circles, which amounts to the same thing.

Q: What is the role of the Russian Church among the other Local Churches?

A: As three-quarters of the whole Church, we have a special responsibility: our vision, mission and task are prophetic. Our vision, mission and task are resistance and delaying tactics in order to oppose the coming of Antichrist, towards whom the world has been hurtling for the last hundred years and especially for the last fifty years. You remember how Reagan called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’? Well, where did the demons who had entered the Russian Empire by 1917, tipped the balance against it and created that evil empire go? They did not disappear back to hell, but, seeing their battle largely lost in Russia, they went to infest the West, where, tragedy of tragedies, they were shown no resistance and even made welcome.

Here is the message of Russia to the West: After 1917 demons took over in Russia but we eventually fought them off because of the prayers of the New Martyrs and Confessors, because of the strength of the Orthodox Faith and Orthodox culture. Russia says to the West: Follow our example, return to the Orthodox Christ and you too can shake off the demons. But of course the West is so blinded by its towering racial and nationalistic pride that it cannot even see that is being tormented by demons. Indeed, it does not even believe in demons and it rejects the sweetness of the Resurrection of Christ, Whom it considers to be an ‘uneducated Asiatic’.

Q: To say that the Russian Church’s role is to oppose the coming of Antichrist is a very serious statement, with many implications.

A: Yes, it is very serious because it means that the Russian Orthodox Church is a sort of litmus test. The world can be divided into two parts, on the one hand those who are with us, our friends, those who are also resisting and delaying the coming of Antichrist, and, on the other hand, those who resist the Russian Church and, consciously or, more usually, unconsciously, are working for Antichrist’s coming. Those who unconscious and naively think they are working for ‘freedom, democracy and humanity’ etc are pawns in Antichrist’s game. They would be shocked if they realized it and then they would repent.

In that respect the Pussy Riot incident, so completely and so obviously stage-managed by the West, was highly symbolic. There we clearly saw who is for Antichrist and who is against. Those who supported Pussy Riot, words which are simple code for the sex and violence of modern Western ‘culture’, including fifth columnist, nominally Orthodox intellectuals, some of them even clergy, modernist heterodox, the Western media and so-called human rights activists, are all working for Antichrist.

Q: You say that to resist and delay Antichrist is the task of the Russian Church. But what practically can the Russian Church do that the other Local Churches cannot?

A: The Russian Church alone is able, when the time is ripe, to set up the infrastructure for Metropolias in the Americas, Asia, Australasia and Western Europe and also help the Patriarchate of Alexandria to become the true Church of Africa and stop being a Greek colony run by the EU-controlled Greek Foreign Ministry in Athens. The other Local Churches are too small, too weak, too nationalistic and, in the cases of the CIA Churches, too unfree, to do this.

Q: This sounds like papism, setting up a worldwide Church?

A: Not at all. Papism is about empire-building and centralization, which, true, has become the ethos of many in the modern Patriarchate of Constantinople and also in its time affected careerist, nationalistic State appointees in the Russian Church before the Revolution. Today the Russian Church is about setting up Metropolias as foundations for new Local Churches, as has already happened in Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and as is under way in Japan and China. These countries are parts of its canonical territory, but will remain so only for as long as the Churches there are too small to gain autocephaly.

The aim is not empire-building, which is centralization, but decentralization, through laying the foundations for and then establishing new autocephalous Local Churches, as His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II said in 2003 when speaking of a future Metropolia in Western Europe. We have as our model not the manmade, papist, unionist, filioquist, rationalist god of Western philosophers, but the real Christian God of the Holy Trinity revealed in all Power and Glory in the New Testament, unity in diversity.

Q: Do you think that other territories will be added to the canonical territory of Rus apart from China and Japan?

A: Certainly. I think that eventually in Europe Hungary may be added, and outside Europe in South-East Asia, with the Russian Orthodox missions already there, Thailand and Laos, and I think perhaps one day Iran too.

Q: So the rest of the world, except for Africa and the other territories in the jurisdiction of the other 13 canonical Local Churches, can be covered by the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)?

A: Yes. The Church Outside Russia actually means the Church Outside Rus, outside the Russian lands. And Rus at present only covers lands of the former Soviet Union – except for Georgia – including the Ukraine, Estonia and so on, and, as we have said, China and Japan. ROCOR can cover the rest, except those countries that form the canonical territories of other Local Churches.

Q: But those countries ‘outside Rus’ often have Orthodox populations which are under other Local Churches. So how can they come under ROCOR?

A: They cannot ‘come under’ ROCOR, I said, ‘can be covered by ROCOR’, not ‘come under’. ROCOR is the Church Outside Rus. Unlike the Church inside Rus, which has a canonical territory, the Church Outside Rus has no canonical territory. However, we do have a shared territory, a territory which we can cover, and where we can have a canonical flock.

Q: What do you mean by canonical flock?

A: All those of all nationalities who live outside the canonical territory of Rus and freely belong to and confess the Russian Orthodox Church and Tradition. And at present nobody, including the US and EU elite, can stop us from belonging to ROCOR.

Q: With such a definition, where does the ‘Orthodox Church in America’, the OCA, come? That after all is in North America, on a territory covered by ROCOR, and the OCA was founded through the Russian Church.

A: I don’t know where the OCA comes. You must ask its members. The OCA was a temporary Cold War creation of Soviet times, largely made up not of descendants of subjects of the Russian Empire, but of descendants of subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For nearly 45 years now its canonicity has been disputed and it has been torn by internal dissensions. Like all conglomerates, its different parts are torn in different directions.

I think that instead of sitting between two (and sometimes more than two) chairs, one day it will split apart, with a small majority, especially but not only in Alaska, ‘Russian America’, returning to the Russian Church and spiritual freedom and integrity, and a large minority, under the influence of sectarian American nationalism and possibly under the direct influence of the US administration, going off to liberal, ecumenistic convert groups, the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople and some to the Uniats.

Q: And what about the Paris Jurisdiction? It claims to be ‘of the Russian Tradition’. Where does that fit into such a definition?

A: It too left the Russian Church and therefore our affairs do not concern it. As regards its claim, as someone in Paris said to me earlier this year, although the Paris Jurisdiction may claim to be ‘of the Russian Tradition’, the Russian Tradition has not even ‘stayed overnight’ in most of its communities. When you live, as some do, on the Roman Catholic calendar, want the Roman Catholic Easter, have no iconostasis, wear Greek vestments, abbreviate the Liturgy, give communion to Roman Catholics, write against and condemn the Russian Church, refuse to venerate Her martyrs and belong to Her, what sort of ‘Russian Tradition’ is that? That is Uniatism, not Orthodoxy. Apart from in a few last outposts, that claim is a fiction.

Thus, it is very interesting to think back before 2007, before ROCOR and the Church inside Russia entered into canonical communion with one another. Then the Paris Jurisdiction – and its members who colonized the OCA in North America – used to condemn ROCOR as ‘a sect’ for not concelebrating with the Church inside Russia because ROCOR considered that the bishops of the Church inside Russia were not free and therefore could not act canonically. However, as soon as freedom came and ROCOR and the Church inside Russia did start concelebrating, the masonic ethos of the propaganda of the Paris swung around 180 degrees. Then representatives of the Paris Jurisdiction started condemning ROCOR precisely for concelebrating with the Church inside Russia, which they then said was not free!

So they went from criticizing ROCOR for being anti-Moscow to criticizing ROCOR for being pro-Moscow, never recognizing the transformation and liberation of Moscow. It is clear that the point of view of those who control the Paris Jurisdiction is mere self-justification, which is the same psychology for all extremists, whether for the Paris new calendarists or for the Greek old calendarists. In other words, their views are a political manipulation, conditioned by anti-Russian Western political propaganda, whether sent out to manipulate weak hearts and irrational minds by the CIA or by the Vatican, and has nothing to do with spiritual values.

Q: What was it that brought ROCOR and the Church inside Russia into canonical communion?

A: The August 2000 Jubilee Council of the Church inside Russia, which met all three conditions of ROCOR, the canonization of the New Martyrs, the condemnation of collusion with the atheist State, known as sergianism, and the complete rejection of the branch theory, known as ecumenism.

Q: In that case why did ROCOR not enter into communion with the Church inside Russia straightaway in 2000?

A: Very simply because it is one thing to proclaim something at a Council, but quite another to put it into practice. For example, even after the Jubilee Council, at the London Cathedral belonging to the Church inside Russia they still refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs, on the pretext that they had no space on their bare white walls! They also forbade the sale of books written by Fr Seraphim Rose, which were at that time so popular inside Russia. In England ROCOR had to wait for the death of one individual in 2004 and then the departure of other modernists in 2006 to the Paris Jurisdiction before a new Orthodox bishop could be sent from Russia, a bishop chosen on ROCOR’s recommendation, and so we could have local unity.

Many representatives of the Church inside Russia but who lived in the West had been betraying the Russian Church and Tradition for decades, they were compromised. This is partly why ROCOR was so popular. I can remember nearly forty years ago when on a Sunday 600 Russian emigres would be standing in the ROCOR Cathedral in London and at the Patriarchal Cathedral there would be perhaps 200, over half of whom were naïve Non-Russians and visitors who knew no better. In Brussels and Paris the Patriarchal churches were also no more than house chapels. Russians and those who knew the Tradition did not go there.

Remember how, just before the Church Outside Russia and the Church inside Russia entered into communion with one another, in 2006 a small convert part of the foreign representation of the Church inside Russia in England and France abandoned Her. Why did this betrayal of the Church which, ironically, was just about to be reunited, take place? Because of two local personality cults, mainly among unintegrated converts, who placed those peculiar cults above the Russian Church and unity with Her. The individualistic mantra of cults and cultishness came before the Church of Christ.

The manipulative leaders of the naïve and misinformed who left had been doing a disservice to the Church inside Russia for decades while Moscow, paralysed by an illegitimate, militant atheist regime, had been able to do nothing about it. The lesson we learn from this is that those who are not integrated into Church life, but have their own agendas, always disintegrate. Interestingly, those who left in England were ardently supported by a rabidly Russophobic British press and, naturally, the State-run BBC.

In other words, locally, it took years for the decisions of the Jubilee Council to be implemented. There were similar situations in other parts of the Church inside Russia, where Soviet-minded individuals and their followers had to leave the scene for the decisions of that Council to be implemented. That is why fundamentally it took seven years for us to progress.

Q: But that was not the only reason for seven years’ delay. ROCOR too had committed faults on its part too, didn’t it?

A: Of course, individuals in ROCOR and in the ROCOR hierarchy had made their mistakes too. This mistake was the confusion between the Soviet Union and Russia. Emigres who had been mere children before the Revolution or who had been born outside Russia or who had been born inside the Soviet Union before 1945 and been cruelly persecuted for the Faith, often could not tell the difference between the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and Russia. In reality, despite the anti-Russian Bolshevik ideology, imported from the West, the Soviet Union had kept much of Orthodox culture.

1917 was not a light switch when the light went off – there was continuity. The victory over Fascism in the Second World War, the education and medical system, the reflexes of justice for the poor and for the Third World, the qualities of generosity, hospitality and mercifulness – they were not Soviet, they are Russian, and come from the Orthodox world view and Orthodox reflexes. On the other hand, the materialistic philosophy of the Soviet Union, the vicious persecution of the Church, the Gulag, all that was of course profoundly evil, satanic. Communism was Orthodoxy without God, just as Mammonism is Protestantism without God.

The mistakes made by some in ROCOR were why the ROCOR hierarchs and those of the Church inside Russia asked each other forgiveness before 2007. Being human, we all make mistakes. No-one is perfect. As a result of mutually asking one another for forgiveness, since 2007 the Church inside Russia has become ever more ‘de-Sovietized’ and ROCOR has become ever more ‘de-ghettoized’, more open and more international. Both parts have benefited enormously, making great strides forward. To ask for forgiveness is always beneficial, creative and dynamic. God gave us all grace for repentance.

The failure of the Paris Jurisdiction to admit its mistakes, unlike the two parts of the Russian Church inside and outside Russia which admitted theirs, is precisely the essential problem of those who control the Paris Jurisdiction. This is due to the unrepentant arrogance usual for intellectuals. In Paris the heirs of those who caused the Revolution through treachery in 1917 are still justifying themselves and their ancestors. For those who are in control in Paris are the heirs of the degradation of the Westernized Russian intelligentsia before the Revolution and their mercilessness. For example, the sins of individual representatives in the Church inside Russia were the sins of political hostages, not of free men. And if you refuse to recognize the repentance of such, you make yourself like the elder brother of the prodigal son, a merciless mountain of towering pride, refusing to take part in the banquet of the loving Father.

Q: So you distinguish between those who ‘control the Paris Jurisdiction’ and its members?

A: Of course. I have been an eyewitness of the process of return of many from the Paris Jurisdiction to both parts of the Russian Church since the 1980s. Sadly, the process of Uniatization that began there, above all from 1981 on, and which I personally tried to combat, has gone much further since then. I personally know of eight priests and deacons and four parishes which have returned from the Paris Jurisdiction since the late 1980s, when they saw through the betrayal of those in control and understood their underlying lack of love for the Russian Church.

Q: Why did Uniatization speed up there from 1981 on?

A: The disintegration of the Paris Jurisdiction began in 1981 after the repose of the ever-memorable Archbishop George (Tarasov), the last Archbishop who had been an adult before the Revolution, indeed a Russian pilot on the Western Front in the First World War. Those who returned after that to the Russian Church in order to keep their integrity, despite the slander that they faced, had realized that the Paris Jurisdiction would not return en masse as a group to the Russian Church, understanding that there were forces in it which were profoundly politicized and Russophobic, the very forces which proudly claim to be ‘apolitical!’ In fact, they are not apolitical, but simply disincarnate, ‘useful’ only to the enemies of the Church, such as the Vatican and Western spy agencies. Indeed, one of those who was in control in the Paris Jurisdiction in the 1980s has recently been proved to have been a senior agent of the French Secret Services. The exodus from there has been such that there are now only two ageing priests left in the Paris Jurisdiction who were brought up in ROCOR and so have a sense of the Tradition

Those of the Paris Jurisdiction who have now departed this life, Metr Evlogy and Vladimir, Archbishops George (Tarasov) and Sergiy (Konovalov), Bishops Methodius (Kulmann), Roman (Zolotov) and Alexander (Tian-Shansky), Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, Archpriests Alexander Rehbinder and Igor Vernik and a mass of others, clergy and people, would have returned to the Russian Church, if they were now alive. Some of these people I knew personally and I am convinced that they would be outraged by the attitude of those who refuse to return to the Russian Church today, 25 years on after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Q: Why?

A: Constantinople had for them only ever been a temporary refuge. It had always been their intention to return to the Russian Church, once She was free, just like us in ROCOR. Today there is no spiritual justification for staying in what is largely not just a Non-Russian, but an anti-Russian jurisdiction. And what is left of that jurisdiction? By and large, apart from a few unintegrated converts in each of a few dozen temporary premises and tiny chapels scattered across France and in neighbouring countries, there are only Rue Daru, mainly populated by those from the ex-Soviet Union, a tragically bankrupt St Sergius Institute, some four small Russian chapels in Paris, two convert groups in Paris, the crumbling church in Biarritz, which undemocratically has not been allowed to return to the Russian Church, and the convent in Bussy. Perhaps 5,000 people in all, and most of them arrivals from the former Soviet Union who have nowhere else to go. Since the 1980s the vital forces have left the Paris Jurisdiction. One priest who left, dear Fr Nikolai Soldatenkov, even took out Russian nationality, partly in order to be able to leave.

Q: Can you give other examples of those you mentioned above who you think would have returned to the Russian Church by now?

A: Yes. Take Metr Evlogy – he himself repented and returned, on paper, to the Russian Church twice, in 1934 and 1945, but was prevented by the freemasons in the Paris Jurisdiction from actually doing so. In the 1960s and 1970s both Bishop Methodius (Kulmann) and Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev actively tried to return to the Russian Church and suffered for their efforts. As for Bishop Roman (Zolotov), he was a Cossack by family – we had no doubts about him. As for dear Fr Igor Vernik I remember how he used to support the Russian football team against the French football team! And Archpriest Alexander Rehbinder refused to move to the USA in the 1950s because he knew that his many children would lose the Faith in the land of mammon. Archbishop Sergiy (Konovalov), whom I knew when he was a priest, was about to persuade the whole Paris Jurisdiction to move to the Church inside Russia when he died. His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II had hoped that his jurisdiction would become the foundation stone of an autonomous Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe.

Q: Let us get back to ROCOR. Why did only 95% of ROCOR enter into communion with the Church inside Russia in 2007? What about the other 5%?

A: When I left Moscow after my second visit to Soviet Russia in 1976, I promised myself as a Russian Orthodox layman that I would not return until the Russian Church was free from an atheist leader and regime. And indeed when I did return, thirty-one years later, in 2007, it was to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where I concelebrated as a priest of the Church Outside Russia, together with a great many others, with his Holiness Patriarch Alexei II and in the presence of the Orthodox President of the Russian Federation. When in 2007 some 95% of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the by then free Patriarchal Church inside Russia entered into communion with one another, true, some 5% of ROCOR did not follow precisely because they were in denial of the huge changes in Russia between 1976 and 2007. Some simply abandoned the Church, but others fell away into pro-CIA, schismatic sects based in the Ukraine, Russia and Greece. Why?

Firstly, there were the naïve idealists and the good-hearted but misinformed who were hoodwinked and have mainly since returned. Secondly, there were those who put personal grudges against individual ROCOR bishops, who had misunderstood their non-integrated convert ideas, above their own salvation. Thirdly, there were those who were on an ego trip, seeking a career. And finally, there was most of the 5% or so who left and have not since returned, who did so because they were politically-minded, as they were anti-Communist rather than pro-Orthodox. Among them were some extremists who had consciously and freely sided with Hitler in the 1940s.

It must be said that many of the ringleaders here were actually employees of the CIA or the Canadian Secret Service, just as there was at least one case of an employee of the French Secret Services in the Paris Jurisdiction. So politics and salaries paid by Western spy services, presented by the ringleaders as ‘freedom’ and an ‘apolitical stance’, were the real reason for their schisms. When Communism fell, such people had no further reason to frequent the Church, as for them the Church had mainly been only an expression of nationalistic anti-Communism. They ended up being anti-Russian, as they had not understood that anti-Soviet could also mean anti-Russian. They were unable to discern the Russian through the fog of the Soviet.

This was because fundamentally they had little loyalty to the real Russian Orthodox Church and her international ideal of Holy Rus, but rather to narrow-minded political nationalism. Their behaviour had always been the greatest discouragement to Non-Russians joining the Church. Many of us who came to the Church seeking bread were indeed actually told to go away by them and in no uncertain terms, in other words, we were given stones. As one ROCOR bishop, speaking of one well-known to me ROCOR parish in the 1980s, told me recently, ‘those people were not Christians’. As is usual, their lack of love towards others ended up by driving them themselves to leave the Church in 2007 and even before, starting in the 1990s. Today we are still here in the Church; they are the ones who have abandoned Her.

Q: To come back to the idea of a Metropolia for Western Europe that you mentioned above, how important is that concept for Western Europe itself?

A: It is vital. I know that I am about to give an absurd example because it touches such a tiny detail, but I have to tell you it because it is symbolic of the degeneration of Europe. Two weeks a Russian woman in Germany wrote to me and told me that for many Germans a woman wearing a skirt is seen either as a Russian or else as a prostitute. What I am saying through this perhaps ridiculous symbol is that even the culture of Christian vestiges that was alive in Europe 50 years ago in the normal way that people dressed then is now dead.

Young Western people whose souls are at least still alive today turn to strange subcultures or even Islam and even fight for Islamic State, since that counters the spiritually empty West of today. Their disaffection and alienation are so great that even such bizarre and lethal choices seem more logical to them than the deathly conformist consumerism, hellish vampires, aliens, monsters, drugs, drink, sex, obesity, depression, mental illness and suicide that is the modern West. Europe has zombified and infantilized itself by accepting Americanization, it has been robbed and stripped naked of its own culture and is on the point of spiritual death. Europe is the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho was robbed and left for dead. Only a Good Samaritan, one from outside the West but still linked with its roots and understanding it, can save Europe; no false priests can do anything for it, for they pass by on the other side.

How can Europe be regenerated without the Church and Her prophetic vision? It is not possible. Europe desperately needs to be raised up from the deathly spiritual filth of its vulgar, fleshly, bread and circuses consumerism, the tyranny of its Babylonian culture of death, the fruit of its thousand-year apostasy, to the vision of spiritual beauty, to spiritual purity and the culture of the soul, to the nobility of human destiny, to the heavenly Jerusalem, which are offered by the Russian Orthodox Church. We are talking here about salvation, about life and death.

Now I am reminded here of the events of 200 years ago, on 11 April 1814. This was when liberating Russian Orthodox troops celebrated Easter Night on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where a field church had been set up. Having defeated Napoleon, who had taken a burned-out Moscow only some 18 months before, Tsar Alexander I stood in that great square, where the King of France had been beheaded less than a generation before, in 1792, and where the crowned Napoleon had stood in 1804 in front of a five-pointed red star, and heard thousands of Russian troops answering the priests’ ‘Christ is Risen!’ with the words ‘Truly He is Risen!’ This was the spiritual victory over the degenerate heart of atheist Europe which followed the physical victory over atheist Europe. This spiritual victory needs to be repeated in today’s atheist Europe. Otherwise geriatric Europe will go under completely, swept away by its own atheism and the tide of Islamic immigration.

Q: Why instead of subcultures and Islam do Western young people not choose Orthodoxy, when Orthodoxy is at the roots of the West, in its first millennium?

A: Firstly, because modern Western people have been cut off from those roots, their own history has been concealed from them, they can often mentally go no further back than 1945, let alone 1,000 years. And secondly because it is so difficult to find authentic Orthodoxy in Western Europe.

Q: Which countries would a Metropolia in Europe consist of?

A: Only those in Western Europe. Slovenia and Croatia already come under the Serbian Church. The Baltic States already come under the Russian Church. Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia already have their own autocephalous Churches. As for Hungary, given the fact that its first faith came in the tenth century from the East and not from Rome, then to my mind it too should one day have its own Local Church, just like Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, which also originally received their faith from the East. Even today Hungarian Catholicism, as in certain neighbouring countries, is coloured by Orthodox values and, for example, the veneration of icons.

Twenty Western European countries are left, all post-Roman Catholic or post-Protestant, and where the Russian Church, in one or both its parts, is already present. They are: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland; Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria; Portugal, Spain, France, Italy. They, together with the tiny Andorra, Liechtenstein and San Marino, would form the territory of this Metropolia.

A: Why can’t those countries have individual Local Churches?

Q: That is a hopelessly insular, narrow and nationalistic idea. It is the sort of thing that narrow, nationalistic ex-Anglicans dream of. Western Europe is a whole and individual countries in it are far too small to have their own Local Churches. Western Europe was the territory of a single Orthodox Patriarchate. We will never divide it. A Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe is the foundation for the restoration of the single, historic Local Church on this territory. We wish to keep that historic unity. Here in Sweden, for instance, you have two great saints, St Olaf and St Anna, and they are precisely part of the whole history of Europe, not narrow, nationalistic symbols, cut off from the rest, but linked in their cases with England and Russia

Q: What is the realistic hope for the foundation of such a Metropolia?

A: Officially today there are said to be 7,000,000 Russian Orthodox in Western Europe. That is far more than the four ancient Greek Orthodox Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem combined, more than the Georgian, Polish, Cypriot and Czechoslovak Orthodox Churches put together, let alone the 30,000-100,000 who make up the OCA. Yet the infrastructure for us is pathetic. We still do not have the new Cathedral in Paris and we really need a large, purpose-built Cathedral in central London.

Altogether in Western Europe I doubt whether there are even 200 church buildings and 200 priests for these 7,000,000 Russian Orthodox. That is scandalous; at most one church and one priest for every 35,000 people! As I have said many times before, we need a huge church-building and infrastructure programme across a network of at least 500 cities and towns in Western Europe. Today, wherever you go in Western Europe, even in small towns, the flood of immigration has been such that you will meet at least one Russian Orthodox. Provision has to be made. Let every Western European town and city of over 100,000 have its own full-time bilingual Russian Orthodox church and let there be at least chapels elsewhere, so that nobody, whatever their origin and native language, is more than 50 kilometres from their own bilingual Russian Orthodox church and centre.

Q: Who is to blame for the present situation?

A: First and foremost, we are ourselves to blame for this situation. We have to make our own Church. The Church works from the grassroots. We should never blame others for this. However, it is true that if we can first show that we are motivated, then we can attract the attention of the hierarchy. Then we can attract help from above and, in terms of our Russian Orthodox world, that means help from Moscow. Economic refugees and their children, who make up the bulk of the 7,000,000, are by definition not the wealthiest people in the world. And how are Western Europeans, already Russian Orthodox or potentially Russian Orthodox, to be integrated into the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe, if there are so few churches, so few centres of Church culture?

Q: How do you see such a Metropolia?

A: For nearly a decade now I have belonged to an informal group of Russian Orthodox priests in some major towns and cities in Western Europe. We look at Western Europe as a whole, we want to draw the Orthodox Cross over Europe. We have a love of and an attachment to the Russian Orthodox Tradition but also a knowledge of local languages and local heterodox culture. We want to create bilingual oases of a Russian Orthodox Europe, where all can feel at home.

This is the opposite of the policy of the Paris Jurisdiction, which suffers from a lack of love of and a lack of knowledge of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, but instead an attachment to local languages and local heterodox culture. However, you cannot be Orthodox and at the same time have an attachment to heterodox culture. This is not Local Orthodoxy. Local Orthodoxy is created by integration into the Orthodox Faith, not by integration into heterodox culture, which disintegrates. The latter is salt that has lost its savour. Local Orthodoxy cannot grow by being attached to heterodoxy.

Q: What does this mean in practical terms?

A: All my adult life I have fought for the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church, Who is a mother gathering her chicks, like Jerusalem. I see a time, though it may still be far off, when there will be a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe, whose church buildings and infrastructure will initially be financed from Russia, but whose clergy will be paid entirely locally by the faithful, thus remaining free and independent. But we need to form a grassroots Europe-wide Russian Orthodox Brotherhood or Russian Orthodox Union, blessed by our local bishops, to advance this process.

Q: You still have not answered my question: what is the realistic hope for such a Metropolia?

A: I have answered it, but here is my answer more directly. It is in a new consciousness, both here Europe-wide and in Moscow, at the grassroots and at the level of the hierarchy, a consciousness of the international calling of the Russian Orthodox Church. Here our Europe-wide unity is vital. And what is that unity based on? Our unity is based on our love for the Russian Church, just as disunity is in a lack of love for Her. We should have a patriotism for the Church, which by principle of the Incarnation spreads to every country inasmuch as that country is part of the Church.

In other words, Holy Rus is to be made global. For this we need spiritual purity, the pre-revolutionary Church purified – we must not forget that the pre-revolutionary Church had careerist traitors in Her who supported Kerensky. We must not forget that disunity is always caused by narrowness, whether sectarian or nationalist, as today in the Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro and Estonia. Disunity is caused by the primacy of fallen, human, political concerns instead of the primacy of the Faith and the lack of a coherent Russian Orthodox world view. We need unity around the Church.

Q: Who are you grateful to for this vision of Europe-wide Russian Orthodox unity that you have?

A: Four people in particular have inspired me and to them I will always be grateful. Firstly, to the ever-memorable Archpriest Lev Lebedev, whom I first met in Krasnodar in Russia in 1976, and, despite his later illness and tragedy, was one of the finest thinkers in the Russian Church; secondly to the ever-memorable Baroness Maria Rehbinder (Cattoire) of the Paris Jurisdiction, a young woman before the Revolution, a daughter of a New Martyr and a fine Russian European, whom I first met in her little flat in Passy in Paris in 1983; thirdly to the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR, born in Kiev, a Belgrade disciple of the great Metr Antony of Kiev, once a priest of the Patriarchate and whom I first met in 1986 and who ordained me. And finally, to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, whom I met in Moscow in 2012 and who strengthened in me the understanding of the need for this Metropolia. Thank you to them all.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Representative of the ROCOR Missionary Department for Western Europe,
Halland, Sweden, November 2014

Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Available Again

This anthology of 100 essays, first published in 1995 and now with a new foreword, is at last available again from:

frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. 3rd Edition A5 495 pp.

Price: £15.00 + £2.80 p & p in the UK. Unfortunately, Air Mail to the USA is now £12.85 (surface post, which can take up to two months, is £8.00). Please make payments by Paypal button from the website: www.orthodoxengland.org.uk

From the Back Cover

Today many search for an Undivided Christendom and the traditional teachings of the Early Church, which go beyond the latter-day divisions and disputes of Roman-Catholic, Anglican and Protestant. And amid the chaos of recent years many have discovered the Orthodox Church and Her Faith, drawn from the first millennium of Christianity. In this book the author, an English Orthodox priest, looks at the authentic Orthodox Faith, beyond the historical and cultural vicissitudes surrounding it, and pinpoints its relevance to us. He writes: Orthodox Christianity is the Faith revealed to the repentant in their quest for the Holy Spirit. Should we accept it, we would thus accept the struggle for the Holy Spirit; and in so doing we would accept the struggle to build Jerusalem here, ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.

Foreword to the Third Edition

For we hope that the Lord will deliver Russia and the Russian people from the dread years of evil which have now lasted for 70 years. Russia can be reborn only through the repentance of the Russian people, through faith in God, through living the Divine commandments. Therefore the rebirth of the Russian people – the rebirth of personal, social and national life – must be founded on the Holy Orthodox Faith and their life must be built on this. And then once more, as of old, Russia will be Holy Rus, the House of the Most Holy Mother of God.

Prophecy of the Ever-Memorable Archbishop (later Metropolitan) Laurus (1987)

All my life I have been haunted by the European world that was lost by the consequences of the tragic events and sacrifices of August 1914, now exactly 100 years ago. Growing up with nineteenth-century grandparents and great-uncles who had fought in the First European War and with tragic maiden great-aunts, I knew that all of us had to live with those consequences. There has been no peace in the world since then, since the profound injustice of the victory so cruelly and ironically snatched from the Russian Empire in 1917 by Allied treachery and then the German treachery that made the slaying of the Russian Royal Family inevitable. And that, in turn, made the destruction of Germany in the Second European War inevitable, with Russian troops taking Vienna and Berlin. And that, in its turn, made the Cold War inevitable.

That War dragged on until 1991. Then the Slav, Romanian, Georgian and Albanian Churches all lived beneath the yoke of atheism and had virtually no free voices. As for the smaller and weaker Greek Churches, they were compromised by US control. Thus, the impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, at one time financed by Anglicanism, had come under US control in 1948, when Patriarch Maximos was deposed by the CIA with threats to his life and despatched into a generation of exile in Switzerland, uttering as he went the words, ‘The City is lost’.

Those were dark days of the betrayal of the Church and, virtually alone, the Church Outside Russia spoke on behalf of us all. For during the Cold War proud anti-Incarnational modernism and ecumenism (heresies, like sects and cults which are created by heresies, are always based on pride), in either their crass, pseudo-intellectual, humanist Protestant/Catholic form, as often in the US, or in their subtle, pseudo-spiritual, personalist Buddhist/Hindu form, as often in Europe, were everywhere. ‘Orthodox’ academic theology was then dominated by that spiritual decadence which may be called ‘captivity theology’. In its intellectualism that ‘theology’, ignorant of the Lives of the Saints, utterly failed to see that Orthodoxy is a striving for holiness, which is simply a life lived with prayer in conformity with the Tradition

This was the academic theology of ‘Orthodox’ intellectuals, who had studied either in Protestant centres (Oxford, Cambridge, Strasbourg, centres in Germany etc) or else in Roman Catholic centres (especially the Gregorian University in Rome, but also Paris, Louvain, Jesuit Fordham etc). The academics infected naturally reflected the proud cultural prejudices of those establishments where they had studied, resulting not in an Orthodox, but a ‘Halfodox’ vision of the world. An associated mixture of ecumenists, liberals and modernists, those intellectuals wished to reduce the Church to a mere religion, a theory and an institution, just like the Western denominations. This was, consciously or unconsciously, spiritual treachery.

Their ‘theology’, in fact philosophy, reflected the humanistic personalism and spiritually empty symbolism of that age. Most of those intellectuals have now died, if not, they are very elderly. The generation of disciple-imitators that succeeded them has even less conviction or talent. It is hardly surprising – modernism is incredibly old-fashioned in a post-modern world. With the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, that age of decadence seems increasingly distant. I remember at that time, and I mean nearly 40 years ago, being told by an ‘Orthodox’ academic at one of those above-mentioned universities that if I was not satisfied with their food that did not satisfy my soul, I should ‘go and live in Russia’. During the Cold War that was not possible; therefore I took the next best option, to frequent the last emigres of the first generation of the White emigration in Paris and the Church Outside Russia.

This anthology of essays was written between 1974 and 1995, precisely at that time when the Church Outside Russia was isolated, indeed virtually besieged, under attack from all sides and from inside, by the extremes of modernism and ‘traditionalism’ alike. Indeed, as I came to realize, the Church Outside Russia was then one of the few points of freedom anywhere in the Orthodox Church. Figures in it expressed words of truth similar only to those of the lone Serbian theologian St Justin of Chelije, canonized in 2010, and other figures on the Holy Mountain and in the monasteries of the Carpathians.

Rejoicing in the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors in New York in 1981, when the Orthodoxy hierarchy was still paralysed in the homelands, at that time we also tried to reclaim for the Church the ancient holiness of Western Europe. We knew that all holiness can only come from the Church, as we daily confess in the Creed. Our task was to help gather together the remaining living spiritual and cultural forces of the dying West and to call it back to its roots in its ancient holiness that it had for the most part renounced. This desire is very much reflected in this book. Sadly, since that time we have seen the final death-throes of once Christian-based Western civilization, witnessing the disappearance of the old culture.

For after 1991, and with great speed, the demons that had operated in the atheist Soviet Union migrated to the atheist European Union, whose spiritual deadweight has been reinforced by the atheism of North America. Only a few years ago President Putin of the Russian Federation, made wise by the failure and defeat of atheism, warned the then Prime Minister Blair that demon-inspired atheism was literally a dead end; naturally, he was ignored, for deluded arrogance never listens to wisdom. Indeed, ever since 1988 the Church that President Putin belongs to, the multicultural and multilingual Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Church of God, has been reviving, re-opening or building three churches every day somewhere on the planet.

Together with it there is reviving the social, political and economic life of the Russian Federation, the Russian Lands (Rus) and even other parts of the Orthosphere. In 2007 in Moscow we witnessed the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church and the re-establishment of canonical communion, a long-awaited miracle of our times. Our great hope of 20-40 years ago for the messianic restoration of Holy Rus, so great that it was a belief, has been coming true through repentance. We have no illusions that we may not see our hopes for the full restoration of the Sovereignty of the Tsar realized, or, much less likely, Europe liberated from its self-imposed ideological yoke, but at least we know that we are on the way. There is much to do, very far to go, but the direction is the right one.

Nearly twenty years on now since the first edition, this book is here reprinted, a few typographical errors corrected, spelling updated, long paragraphs divided and a few minor precisions and corrections made. May this third edition of these essays be a help to all those who seek. May it guide them to the spiritual awareness of the Church and Civilization of Holy Rus and that Orthodoxy is Christianity and that all else, whatever its legacy from ancient Orthodox times, is ultimately but an ism, a distortion and a compromise. ‘For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith’ (1 Jn. 5, 4).

Glory to Thee, O God, Glory to Thee!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

August 2014
St John’s Orthodox Church
Colchester, Essex, England

Answers to Questions from Letters

Below are some answers to questions in recent correspondence.

Q: In your recent article ‘Truth and Mercy’, were you expressing prophecy or just wishful thinking?

A: As usual, I wanted to make people think outside the restrictive box that the secular media offer and also to comfort the weaker from the despair that is offered by those media. In both these respects from feedback it is clear that the article was successful. That article describes a possible and spiritual outcome of present world events.

Obviously, I am not a prophet, but it is clear that what is being played out in the world today, in Gaza, with massacres by US-armed Zionists, in Iraq and Syria, with massacres of Christians by Qatari-financed terrorists, and in the Ukraine, with massacres of Ukrainians by CIA-organized terrorists and mercenaries (all these events are very closely interconnected) is of vital importance. This year we are reaching another huge turning point in history, as great as that of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

However, there is a prophetic element. That article, ‘Truth and Mercy’, was based on prophecies of several holy people, of St John of Shanghai, Schemamonk Aristocleus, Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan, Fr Paisios the Athonite, Elder Jonah of Odessa and others. However, we must remember that all prophecies, theirs too, are conditional on repentance – and repentance is not certain. What I am saying is that if we do not go in the direction of ‘Truth and Mercy’, then we will go in the direction of the end of the world. There is no middle way, no compromise, as people of fantastical Anglican culture always imagine that there is. Today, we are going either towards repentance, or else, to Sodom and Gomorrah and unspeakable catastrophes before Antichrist. I want to give people hope. Catastrophe is not inevitable.

Those who think with worldly criteria do not understand that article, they find it fantasy. This is because they think in secularist, political terms only, which by definition exclude Providence, the Divine and the miraculous, from their thought processes. This is because their thought processes are not Orthodox, not Christian, they are deceived, for processes in the real world are not directed by secular forces. In reality, human affairs are directed by spiritual forces, either Divine or else, as we can see around us and throughout the history of the last 100 years, Satanic. The Divine is possible, but the Satanic, what in the Old Testament is called ‘the wrath of God’, is also possible. It is our choice. Such is human freewill.

Q: You mentioned St John of Shanghai. Why does he stand out as THE saint of the emigration?

A: Firstly, because he was a saint. That in itself is exceptional, especially with all the pseudo-saints and pseudo-elders of the Russian emigration, with false claims and personality cults, developed by themselves and then, much worse, by their disciples after their deaths. Secondly, because he was universal. He affected all Continents and spoke to all nationalities, Eastern (Chinese, Japanese and Filippino) and Western (European and American). And thirdly, because he was a monarchist, a ‘Tsarist’ to the core.

Q: Why is that significant?

A: Because that is the litmus test for the understanding of Orthodoxy today. The restoration of the monarchy in Russia for the benefit of the whole Orthodox world and indeed for the benefit of the whole world is the only direction in which we can go. Those who have not understood this have not really become Orthodox. They are disincarnate, semi-Protestant, they do not understand that Orthodoxy is the religion of the Incarnation, of the last two fingers when we make the sign of the cross. They think that Orthodoxy, and religion in general, is just a private matter, a personal theory, without any practical and public ramifications. That is a heresy. I wonder if they know how to make the sign of the cross properly. They may be full of doctorates, but I am sure they do not hold the last two fingers, representing the Divine and human natures of Christ, together. They would do well to learn from the last illiterate village greybeard in Moldova, or for that matter in Galilee.

St John is the guide to this as he possessed the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. So many converts treat Orthodoxy as ‘comfort Orthodoxy’, a kind of part-time hobby or ego-trip. Christ, that is, Orthodoxy, is not that. A hobby or ego-trip is starters, comfort eating; what we have to do is to get to the main course, the meat dish, which is in the arena. Only when we have been in the arena with the wild beasts that attack us, as they do because they are our main course – can we get to the sweet, dessert, which is paradise. As they say, you cannot get to paradise in a Rolls-Royce.

Q: What is the situation among new Orthodox (those who have been baptized in the last 20 years or so) in the Church inside Russia? Have they come to what you have called ‘the arena’, ‘the main course’?

A: That is an interesting question and the answer varies. I can remember how in the 1990s, many newly-baptized in Russia (and they numbered tens of millions) read books by Metr Anthony of Sourozh and other Russian purely intellectual and theoretical writers who wrote for Non-Orthodox in the West. In other words, they read what was appropriate for outsiders and beginners, introductions. Fortunately, a great many in Russia now, especially because of the influence of authentic monasticism (that is so sorely and disastrously lacking in the West) have got past that stage. They are no longer outsiders, converts, but insiders, Orthodox. Now they read the lives of the saints and of elders like Fr Paisios, Fr John Krestiankin and Fr Nikolai Guryanov. In other words, they have indeed got to the main course. This is encouraging.

Q: A historical question regarding the Tsarism of St John: Why did the White Counter-movement fail after the Revolution?

A: It failed precisely because it was not White. It had no single and unitive leader (that could only have been a Romanov) and it was not even firmly monarchist behind Tsar Nicholas. Even individual Whites like Wrangel and Kolchak were compromised by people around them, who were not white. Few had a pure motivation and so the White movement failed. Archbishop Averky writes very clearly about this, as several other Church writers too.

Q: Some say that St John would have been against the Church inside Russia. What would you reply?

A: The Slavonic service book that I have always used is that published under Metr Anastasy, the second First Hierarch of ROCOR. According to it, in the great litany we pray for ‘all the Orthodox Patriarchs’ before we pray for our own ROCOR bishops. This was the real Church’s position before sectarianism started creeping in through US old calendarism in the 1960s (I strongly suspect that that old calendarism was financed by the CIA), which tried to surround, abduct and divert spiritually the noble and venerable Metr Philaret, before being partly rejected by Metr Vitaly (who was then surrounded, abducted and diverted literally by it), and then rejected completely by Metr Laurus.

This traditional ecclesiological position was also the position of St John. One whom I knew, Fr Vladimir Rodzianko (later Bishop Basil), recorded St John’s words: ‘Every day I pray for Patriarch Alexis at the proskomidia. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer is still the same. By force of circumstance we have been cut off from one another, but we are still one liturgically. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we are with Her and in Her. Administratively, for the sake of our flock and well-known principles, we have to take the way that we have taken, but this in no way breaks the sacramental unity of the whole Church’.

You see pre-2007 ROCOR had two parts – the main patriotic part (those who loved Russia because she is called to be Orthodox and to save the world) and a smaller, but powerful political/ideological part (nationalists who always put their personal advantage and interests, financial or political) above the Church. Remember how it was that political wing that actually put St John of Shanghai on trial in San Francisco in the early 60s.

As a result of the actions of this political, ideological wing, many left ROCOR in England, for example, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The sectarians tried to take over in London and elsewhere. We lost at least four priests at that time as a result of them – and that was just in one small diocese. The older generation were squeezed out; the situation by the mid-1980s was dire.

Q: Were you affected by that situation in England personally?

A: Very much so. We emigrated as a result of it. I came to ROCOR not through the situation in England, but through Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who had nothing to do with the old calendarist nonsense that had come over from America. He had remained faithful to the Tradition, to the ecclesiology of St John, who had preceded him in Western Europe. Like St John, he received by chrismation. Vladyka Anthony said that we must belong to a ROCOR that did not concelebrate with Moscow, but only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. But he and his clergy concelebrated with everyone else, with all other Local Churches. Before he died 20 years ago, I know that one priest from inside Russia had already concelebrated with him, while remaining in the Patriarchate. Vladyka Antony, like St John, was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev, whom both had known in Belgrade. They are my spiritual lineage, my spiritual ancestry, that of Universal, and not sectarian, Orthodoxy. Metr Laurus belonged to the same spiritual family.

Such were the views too of hierarchs like Bp Alexander (Mileant) and Bishop Mitrofan (Znosko-Borovsky) of the generation before, whom I met. They were ardent patriots, not of Russia, but of Orthodox Russia. And that was the reason why we could not be under what was then called the Moscow Patriarchate, which outside Russia was dominated by individuals who displayed Soviet patriotism, which came from fear, and so was alien to us. All of us thought like Dostoyevsky – that a Russian who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. So there was no indiscriminate nationalism for us.

Q: What happened to the political wing?

A: It left the Church over a period of 20 years, from 1986 on, mainly leaving for various sects, including various old calendarist sects. I would remind all that both St John and Archbishop Antony had parishes under them on the new calendar (for the fixed feasts). In St John’s case, they were Western rite parishes.

Q: What about St John and the Western rite? Surely his support of Western rite means that we too should support Western rite today?

A: People who say such things have completely forgotten the historical context. St John’s Western rite worked with former Catholics (not with Anglicans and other Protestants) and he did this before the revolution of the Second Vatican Council, before, in other words, before the Protestantization or rather Americanization of Catholicism. At that time, in the 1950s, there still was a Western rite. That is the fundamental difference between then and now. St John was striying to save those who were at the end of a culture and bring them to Orthodoxy. Today that culture is all but dead – it only exists among a few upper class people or the very elderly and dying. There is no future to it, which is why the Western rite is also elderly and dying, where it is not actually dead.

For fifty years there has not been a living Western rite and you cannot renew and then modify a rite that is no more. This is why all Western rite experiments, though motivated by pastoral concerns, the best of intentions, have ended in failure. There is only one living rite today and that is the Orthodox rite. I know. I have seen the Western rite failure in France.

Q: How and why does the Russian Orthodox view of Catholics and Protestants inside Russia differ from that in the Church Outside Russia?

A: There is not a great deal of difference, but there is a difference. I would say that the view inside Russia is more pro-Catholic, but more anti-Protestant (indeed Protestants there are called ‘sectarians’). The reasons for this are as follows.

The Russian (not Ukrainian) experience of Catholicism is that of a pre-Vatican II, Eastern European confession which has a hierarchy, monastic life and sacraments, clergy who dress as clergy, believes in the Mother of God and the saints and even venerates icons. It therefore sees in Catholicism an admittedly provincialized and primitivized but still potentially Orthodox Church. It has no experience of the reality of the protestantized and infantilized Catholicism of the post-Vatican II world, as it is in Western Europe. When it discovers that, it is in a state of culture shock.

On the other hand, the Russian experience of Protestantism is that of sects which are rabidly anti-Orthodox and can hardly be recognized as Christian at all. This experience was much reinforced by aggressive American evangelical preachers who came to Russia in the 1990s and tried to bribe Orthodox into joining them. Clearly, the experience was entirely negative and hence in Russia Protestants are called sectarians.

Q: So who is right?

A: The Church inside Russia is right in Eastern Europe. The Church Outside Russia is right in its domain, in Western countries, among Western people. Catholicism and Protestantism are so variable, they are not monolithic; we have to look at the local realities of both before we decide on our attitude and the use of economy or akrivia.

Q: In various Local Churches you can find heterodox customs. How can we tolerate them?

A: We can tolerate them because we are not sectarian, but tolerant! However, that does not mean that we observe such provincial customs ourselves. We do not cultivate the fringes, but the broad mainstream of the Church. For example, I remember an ex-Anglican Antiochian priest (in England they are all ex-Anglicans, virtually without training), wanting to introduce little girls to serve in the altar because he had seen a bishop in Syria doing this! I told him that just because others had adopted Uniat customs out of pan-Arab nationalism, that did not mean that we have to. The same goes for so many customs, from certain Carpatho-Russian chants preserved in their emigration in the US and which are pure old-fashioned Catholic chants (which the Catholics have now lost), or Bulgarian icons, which are not iconography, but folk art, or beardless Ukrainian clergy as in the OCA (another Uniat hangover) etc. In other words, we do not prolong decadence, but let it die out by itself.

The lack of discrimination is typically Anglican. It is the inability to distinguish between the essential Tradition and eccentric local customs which may have nothing at all to do with Orthodoxy. Thus, in one community of the Rue Daru group in England an ex-Charismatic, ex-Anglican priest, also untrained, has his converts calling out names for commemoration during the service! It would be better if he joined the Pentecostals, especially since he maintains that he is better off without a bishop (who is in distant Paris), so that ‘I can do whatever I want’.

In general, Rue Daru claims to be of the ‘Russian Tradition’, but that was thrown out of the window there 26 years ago in 1988. If you are of the Russian Tradition, then you must be part of the Russian Church, observe the Orthodox calendar, have confession before communion, wear Russian vestments, have women wear headscarves, keep the canons and traditions of the Russian Church. As one correspondent in France wrote to me, the Russian Tradition never stayed a single night in the vast majority of the tiny convert Rue Daru communities, which Russians simply boycott because there is no Orthodox Tradition there. Once you have seen and above all experienced the real thing, you know what is false as soon as you see it.

The Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

The title is an expression used in an inspiring conversation with the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus at the ROCOR Council of San Francisco in 2006. Below are a number of recent conversations, both actual and also from correspondence by e-mail, regarding current Church matters, all of which illustrate the search of all conscious Orthodox for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy in the Light of the Resurrection.

Q: What recent changes have marked the Church inside Russia?

A: A generation has now passed since the commemoration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988 and the world-changing events that followed it, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of the passing of that generation, in the last few months there have been major changes, with the retirement in Kiev and St Petersburg of both Metropolitans Vladimir and in Minsk that of Metr Philaret. Thus, all three most senior Metropolitans in the Russian Church inside Russia have retired through age and ill health. This is the end of the old generation of those who were connected with the highly controversial and politically-minded Metr Nikodim (Rotov) of the Soviet period.

Those of his disciples who are still alive have all had to adapt since the Jubilee Council of 2000 with its rejection of sergianism and ecumenism and canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs, and then the acceptance of the reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia in 2007. In other words we are now entering the second generation since the collapse of secularist-atheist ideology in the Russian Lands and so the resurrection by the purity of Holy Orthodoxy of the crucified Church inside Russia. These three senior posts that have changed hands are symbolic of a more general generational change, as Lazarus’ grave-clothes have fallen off.

Q: What do you mean by ‘Lazarus’ grave-clothes’?

A: I liken the resurrection of the Church inside Russia to the resurrection of Lazarus. This was an incredible and astounding miracle, but we should not forget that Lazarus’ grave-clothes did not smell good because the decomposition of his body had already begun. These grave-clothes are represented by the deathly, Soviet and post-Soviet (not yet Russian), phenomena and problems that have accompanied the resurrection of the Church inside Russia.

Q: What phenomena?

A: For example, inside Russia in the 1990s they were so short of priests that they ordained very easily. There were several disasters here with clearly unworthy ordinations and subsequent defrockings, sometimes for sexual misdemeanours, sometimes for financial misdemeanours. I have met such priests – I know what I speak of. Then there was the confusion between Stalinism and the Church and the total misunderstanding or even rejection of the Royal Martyrs – all as a result of the brainwashing from old Soviet propaganda and lies. Then there have been the phenomena of pro-Catholic clergy (like the assassinated Fr Alexander Men, a suspected Uniat) and the events surrounding Paris-style Russophobes, including the modernist, pro-Protestant Fr George Kochetkov, suspended at one point by Patriarch Alexis as a ‘neo-renovationist’, and the recent scandals concerning Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev and Professor Zubov (a close friend of the late Olivier Clement), who both had to be sacked. These are all people who to some extent still live in the Soviet thought world. They have never managed to shake off the spiritual and intellectual impurity of the past and so make the transition from that old-style Soviet conditioning, paradoxically mixed with a superficial Orthodoxy, to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

The same thing happened outside Russia, where the Church inside Russia had several unworthy and scandalous representatives, uncanonically ordained, or other representatives who are now very elderly as they were appointed in Soviet times. Fortunately, the unworthy ones have mostly died out or been moved, some very recently. According to the 2007 agreement the Church inside Russia has to prepare its parishes outside Russia (except in China and Japan, which is part of its canonical territory) for their canonical handover to ROCOR. His Holiness understandably wants this process to go smoothly, without hurting anyone’s feelings, especially those of the elderly. Therefore it will take a generation before it is completed and all moves to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Q: Surely there were impurities in ROCOR also?

A: ROCOR had from the start two wings. One was the political wing whose identity was nationalistic, cultural and anti-Communist rather than simply Orthodox; the other wing, which could be called the ‘Johannite wing’, as represented by St John of Shanghai, was the mainstream of ROCOR. Our view was and is Christian. I can remember how the political and nationalist wing dominated in certain parishes, for example at the former ROCOR chapel in Paris or at the old London Cathedral, as it used to be, when it had several members who worked for MI5. Significantly, those parishes have not survived, but died.

This was because the politically-minded elements refused reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007 or even before. As one of our archbishops said before 2007, reconciliation with the repentant Church inside Russia, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, would lead to a ‘purification’ of ROCOR. That is exactly what happened. Spiritual impurities such as extremism, phariseeism, sectarianism and fanaticism could not bear reality and love others or the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, and so that political wing left the Church for various sects. Several of the small communities concerned in North America were dominated by individuals who worked for the CIA or the Canadian Secret Services.

Q: What do you make of current political changes in the Ukraine?

A: Two weeks ago the US removed the gold reserves of the Ukraine. Then the CIA took over a floor in the offices of the Ukrainian Secret Police in Kiev and the head of the CIA, John Brennan, went to Kiev on Lazarus Saturday. The head of the CIA does not visit a foreign country without a very good reason. It was no doubt with the intention of hoping to further destabilise the Ukraine and then run it, just as it did countless Latin America banana republics and Italy and Greece after the Second World War.

Sure enough, just after that, the CIA began issuing black propaganda, sheer lies, for example about alleged persecution of the Jews in the eastern Ukraine or that President Putin had tens of billions of dollars in private bank accounts in the West, implying that he was a thief. Naturally the Western-media were fed those lies and naturally reported them. The Times of London (part of the Murdoch tabloid empire) was especially keen to report these slanders and lies.

For instance, as regards the Jews, everybody knows that the Jews were massacred by the Uniat Ukrainian SS in Galicia, the western Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler and where earlier anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place. These are facts of history. Many members of the Ukrainian (= Galician) SS, with Polish nationality, came to live in the UK and especially the US, after World War II. I know; I met some of them 30-40 years ago; some of them were frightening and admitted to killing Jews.

Today, at least 150 US mercenaries, probably being paid for by the CIA, are active against the people of the Ukraine, given that most Ukrainian soldiers and police refuse to use violence against their own people – indeed 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already asked for Russian nationality. Other soldiers in the eastern Ukraine have simply joined the insurrection of the Ukrainian people against the junta. We cannot see this crucifixion of the Ukraine, orchestrated in Washington and Brussels and carried out by their paid puppets in Kiev, as being successful.

Q: Why not?

A: First of all, the Ukraine is bankrupt, which is why the bankrupt US called on the world to ‘save the Ukrainian economy’. But it is too late. Prices are doubling. The poor people of the Ukraine, exploited and impoverished for 23 years by corrupt oligarchs, are spontaneously rising up against the unrepresentative, US-installed, separatist Kiev junta and its terror tactics. That regime seized power from the democratically-elected government in Kiev by violence and murder; now it is facing opposition from the Ukrainian people, who are using the same techniques as it did, in order to seize back power from it in turn. As it is written, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. But there is chaos.

Q: Does any of this have any significance in Orthodox terms? Is it not all political?

A: All of this is highly significant for us. Today’s Russia is at last just beginning to position itself as a spiritual power, opposing the secularist atheism of the Western elite. This was Russia’s traditional role – to protect Christian civilisation both from Western barbarians and from Eastern hordes. Thus, it repelled the Mongol-Tartar yoke, encouraged moderate Islam, repelled the Charleses, Napoleons and Hitlers, liberating both Paris and Berlin, and supported the Church in the Holy Land, the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Outside Eurasia Russia has always helped the peoples of the developing world, aiding them to throw off the yoke of colonialism, as did Tsar Nicholas II during the Boer War in South Africa and also in Tibet, Thailand and Ethiopia. Even the Soviet Union merely continued these policies in Africa (the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria), Asia and Latin America.

The Russian Orthodox civilisational model, the Christian one, is quite different from the Western Catholic/Protestant model, which calls itself ‘Judeo-Christian’. Thus, the ‘civilised’ Judeo-Christian West and ‘Western values’ destroyed the native peoples of the Americas and Africa, enslaving them, massacring them like wild animals, sending them into concentration camps (‘reservations’), as the British were still doing in Kenya and Malaysia in the 1950s. Christian Russia, on the other hand, spreading across Eurasia into Alaska, left the native peoples in peace, not enslaving them or systematically exploiting them, but making them into equal allies. Today Western ‘civilisation’, which has reached its final stage of degeneration in Europe and the USA, has come to a dead end by trying to subjugate the whole world to its ruling transnational atheist elite and its corrupt New World Order pseudo-democracy. That, in fact, only gives a false choice – between one atheist oligarch and another.

Only Russia can potentially deliver the world from this civilisational dead end by providing a Non-Western and spiritual alternative. This is a geopolitical challenge and a historic turning-point. The US military-industrial complex, to use Eisenhower’s terminology, has bankrupted itself with its lust for global hegemony and us finally meeting its match in the resurgent Russian Lands. The New World Order, the near-millennial and ever accelerating movement of the Western world to enthrone Antichrist in Jerusalem, has been stopped for the moment.

The Russian Lands (Rus) are, it seems, returning to fulfilling their destiny as the last restraining force in the world, the last bastion of True Christianity. The Ukraine is a litmus paper, an acid test of this. If the Ukraine were to fall, that is, to lose its Orthodoxy, that would lead to the enthronement of Antichrist. The situation is on a knife edge, which is why so many icons in Russia and the Ukraine are at this moment giving off myrrh. We have to understand that today’s division in the Ukraine exists as the result of two historic injustices, which have to be righted

Q: Which are these injustices?

A: These two historic injustices are the events of 1054 and 1917, which are interconnected. In 1054 semi-barbarian, provincial nationalists, filled with the pride, greed and ambition of Roman paganism, rose up in heresy against the Church of Christ, the Christian Roman Empire, and declared that they were the true Church! And persecution followed 1054, with 1204, the sack of New Rome by barbarian Catholics, which in turn led to 1453, the fall of New Rome, not to mention the Western Crusades against the Russian Lands (including today’s ‘Ukraine’), and all the anti-Church horrors that followed, including Uniatism.

The second historic injustice was in 1917 when the descendants of the same provincials performed a coup d’etat in St Petersburg, overthrowing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed on behalf of traitors, cowards and deceivers from inside the country who had lost their Faith. This atheist coup resulted in the martyrdom of the Christian Emperor and the destruction of his Empire, which had been about to end the First European War and liberate Constantinople (so preventing the Armenian genocide), Vienna and Berlin.

The atheist coup of 1917 also culminated in 1991 in the destruction of the legacy of the Christian Empire which had been built up over centuries by the Tsars and their peoples. That 1991 collapse of the legacy of the former Orthodox Empire, the Soviet Union, was inevitable because its atheism had denied the Faith of a Faith-based Empire. Today, in 2014, we are merely seeing the attempt to deepen that geopolitical fall, again using provincial nationalists, this time from the far west of the Ukraine, as its pawns. All that is happening now was prophesied by Solzhenitsyn in 1998. Thus, as he said then, the US and its EU colony want to dismember and separate the Ukrainian part of the remains of the Orthodox Empire, the Empire’s weakest link.

Q: Why is the Ukraine the weakest link of the former Orthodox Empire?

A: The word Ukraine is composed of two ancient Slavonic words meaning ‘at the border’ – though interestingly it could also be translated as ‘on the edge’. It was first recorded in the 12th century in this sense of a narrow strip of borderland and there exists an interesting academic article on its origins and uses for many geographical areas, including the area near Kazan. However, in its modern and non-historical sense – and so a sense completely unknown to the greatest ‘Ukrainian’ writer Gogol – the word ‘Ukraine’ was invented only in the late 19th century by the Hapsburgs. Then it was reused by the Soviets and the Nazis, and today by the US and the EU – by five empires all thoroughly hostile to the Orthodox Church. Indeed, decades ago I met old Ukrainian emigres, adults before the Revolution, who told me that they had never heard the word ‘Ukraine’ until the 1920s, when the atheists brought it in.

The contemporary Ukraine is the weakest link because at present it includes and is now run by never denazified, ultra-nationalist, Uniat Galicia, which until 1939 was part of eastern Poland. This is a schismatic, Catholicised area, which lived under foreign and anti-Orthodox – Polish and Austrian – rule for centuries. The majority of its population, just like that of the rest of Western Europe, now has no concept of uncompromised, unsecularised, non-1054 Christianity, that is, of Orthodox values. Until that area returns to Poland, or else becomes independent, it will continue to create chaos in the rest of the ‘Ukraine’, the 85% of it which is known to history not as ‘the Ukraine’, but significantly, going from east to west, as New Russia, Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia.

Q: So does this mean we should support President Putin?

A: He is only a politician and, like all politicians, he makes mistakes. The Ukraine, in some form or other, has a right to exist as an independent state, just like Belarus. It is an integral part of threefold Rus – Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus are the primary territory of Rus, the three Russias. I suspect that President Putin thinks the same thing. The last thing he wants to have to do is to send in tanks. However, he has to defend his country and Russian people against extreme Western aggression – which is what he did when he restored the Crimea to Russia amid the jubilation of its people. Otherwise the Crimea would have been invaded and occupied by the US military and its ports would have become NATO naval bases, closing off the Black Sea to Russia.

Our objection is not to an independent ‘Ukraine’, but to its domination and division by an anti-Orthodox and unrepresentative, US-installed, puppet clique in Kiev, which would mean that the Ukraine would become just another bankrupt and pillaged Western colony, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya etc. Divide and rule is ever the Western policy. Our support should go to the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, as he was the last ruler of All Rus, and not to politicians. We support the saints – politicians only count inasmuch as they support the saints. Again we fight for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, not for politicians.

Q: Why has the BBC been so incredibly biased in its reporting of events in the Ukraine?

A: Since the Second World War the UK Establishment elite has become the poodle or colony of the US ruling elite (a relationship that the UK Establishment has flattered itself into calling ‘the special relationship’!) and it has taken no account of the peoples of these islands. The BBC, even more than other Western media, is biased because it is an inherent part of that Establishment elite, in the pay of a secularist-atheist regime and its secret services. It is therefore hostile to Christianity, especially to uncompromised Christianity, that is, Orthodoxy, just as it is hostile to the people, from which it is ever more distant.

The BBC has become particularly subservient to the Establishment since it dared to criticise the Blair regime’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, for which the Blairites sacked the BBC Director General and intimidated BBC journalists. Now the BBC just seems to parrot whatever MI5 and MI6 tell it. I know two BBC journalists who have also worked for the secret services, which infiltrated the BBC from its inception in the 1920s; there must be many more of them.

Thus the BBC talks of the Neo-Nazi Uniat Galician terrorists in Kiev, who overthrew a democratically-elected government as ‘heroes’, but calls the Ukrainian citizens who are rising up against foreign oppression and US mercenaries in the south-west, south, east and north, ‘pro-Russian activists!’ Nor has the BBC reported on the wave of dissatisfaction in Kiev at the doubling of many prices and the very large anti-junta demonstrations in Kiev….

Q: Some would say that your views on the Ukraine are political and that Orthodoxy should be apolitical. What would you say to this?

A: Precisely by saying that they are ‘apolitical’, such people are making a political statement. For them Orthodoxy is, like Protestantism, just a personal belief, a private affair, a mere theory or hobby, which has no public and practical ramifications, no Incarnational consequences. This is a denial of the Incarnation of Christ. What they are saying is that Christianity should have no influence at all on society, including on economics and politics, and should just be a set of private opinions or personal fantasies for futile discussion and theoretical debate.

In the meantime, they say, we should just swim with the secularist-atheist tide of US/EU apostasy, to which such people, some of them nominally Orthodox, are spiritually enslaved. However, our Faith, if it is real, has practical consequences. This is what these secularists refuse. For those who are secular-minded, religion has no importance, but for us what counts is the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. The many icons now giving off myrrh in Russia and the Ukraine only prove the spiritual significance of these current events.

Q: With the events in the Ukraine and the new puritanism of political correctness, will there be a witch-hunt and persecution of Russian Orthodoxy in the West?

A: Not yet. We have not yet come to this point; that will come later. Then we may need Russian passports and in any case have to take refuge in Russia in order to get baptized and practise our Faith. But we are not there yet.

Q: So much for the contemporary situation of the Church inside Russia. What is the situation of the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR? Some say that it no longer has any reason to exist, since the Church inside Russia also has parishes outside Russia. What is the role of ROCOR in this new reality?

A: The Orthodox diaspora, whether in Europe, the Americas or Australia, and of all nationalities, has experienced two temptation or deviations in the last 100 years or so. The role of ROCOR is to avoid them. These are the deviations of the superiority complex and the inferiority complex.

The first deviation is that of the nationalist ghetto, of the superiority complex. This means that the Orthodox Faith is preserved as if in a museum, without any reference to the surrounding world (because of the superiority complex towards it), to the reality in which the children and grandchildren of the immigrants go to school and grow up. This ethos can be called the ‘three-generational syndrome’, since after three generations such a faith dies out, as it no longer even speaks in a language comprehensible to the descendants of the original immigrants. ‘Three generations and you are out’. I have seen countless Russian parishes in France and England disappear completely because of this mentality. It was the fate of the old London ROCOR Cathedral (but this will not at all be the case of the new parish that has risen phoenix-like from its ruins), exactly as was foreseen by many in the 1970s and 1980s, but also of many parishes abroad under the Church inside Russia, which are not independent of Russia, as is today’s ROCOR.

The second deviation is that of the conformist ghetto, of the inferiority complex. This means the ‘let’s swim with the tide’ mentality. Again I have seen countless examples in France and England. ‘Let’s give communion to Catholics, after all they are Christians’ (Paris jurisdiction). ‘Now we are in England, we baptize our children in the Church of England’ (as one well-known Russian academic in Cambridge did). ‘After all, we really do not want to be different from the others’. ‘The English do cremations, so we’ll do them as well’ (the old Sourozh jurisdiction). ‘The Protestants have pews in church, so shall we’ (Greeks and Antiochians). This is the deviation of those of weak faith, the ecumenists, liberals and modernists, who do not really believe in Orthodoxy, just like the Uniats. Indeed, the atmosphere in modernist churches (as sometimes in Finland, for example) is exactly that of Uniat churches.

It is to be noted, however, that, initially at least, both these deviations are psychological, and not at root theological, though in a second phase, they are then justified theologically, clearly by a false theology. ROCOR must avoid both these deviations.
Q: So what is the role of ROCOR? What is authentic Orthodoxy in the Western world?

A: Authenticity is faithfulness to the best, and not to the worst, in both attitudes. This means being both traditional and open, both strict and merciful, but without excesses and extremes, which would mean being unfaithful. We must be faithful to the incarnation and to the spiritual, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Our calling, the establishment of authentic European Orthodox culture, as also of authentic American and Australian Orthodox culture, means being both faithful and international = fruitful. ROCOR has an opportunity to do this, depending on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, that is, inasmuch as we can be both faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and also be incarnate, settled and permanent here (unlike most parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia). At least, this can be the case, for as long as our spiritual existence is tolerated in the increasingly intolerant West.

Q: Do you have examples of these deviations in the specific situation of Orthodoxy in the UK?

A: Here in the UK we have two ‘renewed’ jurisdictions, those of the Romanian and Russian Churches, which in recent years have increased in size from one parish or a few parishes to many parishes, simply by immigration. However, we also have the older jurisdictions like the Greek, which used to be the biggest but is now beginning to die out, just like the Russian in the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians immigrated in about 1920 and so after 50-60 years, in the third generation, began to die out. The Greeks (more precisely Cypriots) mainly immigrated here in the 1950s and 1960s – 50-60 years ago – and so too are now dying out. This is the ‘three generational syndrome’, which I mentioned above.

There are also two tiny ethnic English jurisdictions under the Patriarchate of Antioch (anti-Greek, anti-Russian, Antiochian’, as some Anglicans say) and the Paris Exarchate (the old Bloomite Sourozh jurisdiction). These are deaneries because they are both only a few hundred strong and mostly composed of ex-vicars and converts from Anglicanism. The Exarchate is particularly weak and small and is tending to die out. They failing to pass on their ‘Anglican-Orthodox’ Faith to children and grandchildren and so are dying. Their possible possible survival can only come from attracting Greeks, Romanians and others, not from attracting Anglicans.

Here I am much more optimistic about the future survival of the Antiochian Deanery, which is rapidly becoming Romanian. However, it still has to ordain clergy who are not ex-Anglican vicars. Here there is a very useful lesson to learn: all ethnic jurisdictions die out – including ethnic English jurisdictions. In other words, successful parishes – of all jurisdictions – are non-ethnic, that is, they live if they accept those whom God sends to them, without ethnic ghettoism, including Anglican or ex-Anglican clubbishness. In other words, they live only if they put the Faith above nationality, only if they put the Kingdom of God first.

Q: Does this mean that the convert movement in the UK has stopped?

A: The convert movement (I would prefer the word ‘trickle’) in the UK was only ever basically in England and it was always very small, concerning at most 2,000-3,000, many of whom were received by various jurisdictions without preparation and soon lapsed. There is still at least one ex-Anglican priest, like the late Metr Antony Bloom, who perhaps is his model, who receives within one week! You can imagine that his turnover is large. In 18 years he has not grown. It is true that the convert ‘movement’ has declined as the old generation of converts dies out, but it has not stopped. What it happening today is that Anglicans have largely stopped joining the Orthodox Church and trying to become Orthodox, which actually they often did not succeed in doing in any case.

Q: Why have they stopped?

Firstly, because Anglicanism is itself dying out, so there are even fewer Anglicans than before. Secondly, because those who are interested generally find Orthodoxy ‘too hard’ and either do not try to become Orthodox (if they try at all) or else give up very quickly, especially if they have been received prematurely by one of the ethnic English groups.

Q: So there are no more converts?

A: There are still converts, but they come more and more from the vast majority of English people who are not Anglicans. However, though there are fewer converts, they are now generally more serious. They are refreshing, blank sheets, without the cultural prejudices and baggage of Anglicanism. Here there is a future. English Orthodox culture could only be born when that prejudiced Establishment Anglican culture was dead. Authentic Orthodox culture could never be built on a compromised, semi-Orthodox, semi-Anglican faith.

Q: How are people being converted today?

A: There are two ways. One is through information about Orthodoxy which is today on the internet and then brings them to Church services. The other is through Orthodox wives whom they marry and who convert them. Orthodox wives are often very good missionaries.

Q: You have not mentioned those who did not support the reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church in 2007 and left to join various sects which existed already. How do they fit into the picture? Do they suffer from the superiority complex of the nationalist ghetto? Surely they do not suffer from the inferiority complex of the conformists?

A: They do not belong to nationalist ghettoes, as much as to ideological or psychological, sectarian, ghettoes, usually very Russophobic and very right-wing – such was the case even before they left ROCOR. In the USA, from what one of their bishops proudly writes and tells me, they seem to be linked to the CIA. There are among these people, and most are converts from Anglicanism or other forms of Protestantism, some very sincere and pious people, but also some with psychological problems. It is tragic. Sects are always based on hurt pride which then turns to hatred.

Such protest sects make themselves irrelevant, not only because they are tiny (often fewer than ten in number over the whole country), but also because they have played into the hands of this world by painting themselves into irrelevant corners. They have no influence because they focus so much on small and often ritualistic detail and individual opinions, with a negative, ‘anti-everything’ mentality. What they lack is a conscious, logically consistent and integral Orthodox world view, an overview. That is very important and all Orthodox need to develop such a world view.

Q: Do you think that the Inter-Orthodox Council will actually take place in 2016?

A: On paper, no, especially since the amazing, absurd and pretentious claims of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Ukraine, as described in the statement of Patriarch Bartholomew on Palm Sunday, which was surely written by the CIA. In the 1970s there could be no Council because the Russian Church inside Russia was controlled by the KGB; now we have Constantinople controlled by the CIA. That statement alone has surely set everything back until after the death of Patriarch Bartholomew.

However, everything is still possible – if the Greek Churches can overcome their vanity and inferiority complex, which the American State Department so plays on and exploits, and if they and the other Balkan Churches can overcome their phyletism (nationalism). Thus, at present three problems are outstanding and until they are solved they will stop this Council taking place.

Q: Which are?

A: Firstly, there is the territorial dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. Secondly, there is the dispute between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and, thirdly, that between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).

These three problems all have to be solved before even a proper agenda (rather than the old, secularist, Protestant-style 1970s one) can be agreed. So 2016 is possible, but the Patriarchate of Constantinople will first have to liberate itself from outside political interference from the US government, which is forcing it to interfere in the Ukraine and Mt Athos, and from the Vatican. So Constantinople must demonstrate that it is free and independent and can actually speak with an Orthodox voice and not a Greek nationalist and Uniat voice. Metropolitans Andrew and Seraphim of the Church of Greece have already warned it about this quite clearly in their 89-page letter asking for the repentance of Pope Francis.

Q: Do you think in this context that the Church inside Russia could take back the autocephaly of the OCA in order to ease negotiations with Constantinople?

A: I think that for the Church inside Russia the OCA is a bargaining counter. We all know that there is a problem with the autocephaly of the OCA, the brainchild (not heartchild) of the highly controversial Fr Alexander Schmemann. Firstly, it was granted during the Cold War by the self-same, highly controversial Metr Nikodim (Rotov), whom we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, and whom the Roman Catholics claim to have been one of their cardinals. So it was dubious from the start.

However, secondly and much more importantly, how can you give a jurisdiction autocephaly when it has been in schism from you for decades (as was the pre-OCA Metropolia) and, above all, when it only includes a minority of the Orthodox who live on the same geographical territory? However, the Church inside Russia will not cede these points if Constantinople does not first abandon its own anti-canonical errors elsewhere, for example on Mt Athos, in the Ukraine, Estonia, Finland and Paris, returning Russian Church property to the Russian Church.

Q: What could happen to the OCA, if Constantinople did stop such anti-canonical interventions?

That would be a miracle, so who knows? I suppose one solution would be to take back the OCA’s autocephaly and grant it autonomy instead. Alternatively, you could wait until the present generation of OCA bishops, many of them in difficult and compromised situations or retired, die out. Then, after that generational change, you could pick up the pieces and reincorporate the ex-OCA into the Russian Church in North America, though letting ultra-liberal, dissident pieces which are perhaps beyond redemption (St Vladimir’s Seminary?) join Constantinople or simply go back to the Episcopalians. The OCA too can only survive if it moves towards being a group based on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Bright Monday 2014

A Senior OCA Priest Remembers Aspects of Metr Anthony Bloom

Bishop Hilarion (Alfeyev) in England 2002

By Fr John A. Jillions, ONT

http://www.ocanews.org/news/Jillions11.7.08.html

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”–Albert Einstein

Now that an apparently “absurd” proposal about Bishop Hilarion as a potential metropolitan of the OCA has been floated, his six-month assignment in 2002 as an assistant bishop to the late Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) keeps being brought up as troubling evidence of his unsuitability by people with little or no direct knowledge of Bp Hilarion, Met Anthony or the Diocese of Sourozh. Since I do have such experience I feel it is my duty to comment to set the record straight, at least as I see it. This reflection is based on my own recollection and notes I kept at the time as well as letters and documents.

I lived in Cambridge for eight years, from 1995 until shortly after the death of Met Anthony in Aug 2003. I served as priest of St Ephraim’s parish in Cambridge (in addition to being Principal of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies until early 2002). Met Anthony was my diocesan bishop, but I worked closely with Bp Hilarion and Bp Basil.

I am intimately acquainted with the events surrounding Bp Hilarion’s recruitment, arrival in January and sad departure in July 2002. In that time I served at the altar with him regularly and shared many meals and conversations with him. I have also seen him in the midst of conflict, and can attest to his grace under pressure and in response to unjust attacks, especially painful when they come from those one loves, as Bishop Hilarion loved Met Anthony, his spiritual father, who had actively recruited him to come to England as a teacher and bishop. So first I need to put this controversy in the context of Met Anthony’s personality and its fifty year impact on the diocese.

Whether or not one considers Bp Hilarion a good candidate for metropolitan, the man’s reputation must not be slandered. Three factors, in my opinion, contributed to Bp Hilarion’s short tenure in England: Met Anthony himself, fears of Russian domination and the shock of Bp Hilarion’s episcopal energy. I will address each of these in turn and then look at events leading to his resignation and the re-assessment that took place in the diocese after his departure, when it could be acknowledged that the whole situation had been badly mishandled.

[This is a complicated mess, but Wikipedia’s entry for the “Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh” has a fairly balanced presentation, with supporting documents from all sides and brings events up to date, including the recent split led by Bp Basil (Osborne).]

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh.

Unfortunately, the lasting public image of the 2002 Sourozh events has thus far been shaped by Met Anthony, whose reputation as a living saint at age 82 was hard to argue with. But in my opinion his behavior toward Bp Hilarion was less than fully honorable. No one can take away from Met Anthony his profound legacy of teaching and pastoral direction. He had profound insights on the Gospel and human nature. To this day he is my image of serving the liturgy with simplicity (he hated the excesses of Russian hierarchical practice), as one engaged in conversation with God. “Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11).

But even his admirers admit that in personal relations, especially with perceived rivals, there could be a dark side. And, despite his rhetoric of episcopal service and sobornost, he could also be autocratic and unfair.

This is a constant theme in Gillian Crow’s biography of Met Anthony (“This Holy Man: Impressions of Metropolitan Anthony”, Gillian Crow, London: DLT, 2005). She is devoted to Met Anthony, but her work is not hagiography. And while she is critical of Bp Hilarion for being too attentive to grievances and thus encouraging factions, she leaves no doubt that Met Anthony could be harsh and even cruel.

However much he liked to speak of the difference between power and authority, as a bishop he was in a position of absolute power with regard to his own flock. This was on two levels: the personal one, towards individuals, and the public one, when he made official pronouncements. On both levels he had the power, if he wished, to crush people, and there were rare but unfortunate occasions when he used it. “From time to time he targeted people he saw as a threat and showed them the full force of his darker side.

Some people found the two sides of his personality impossible to reconcile, and left the church. Some suffered psychological damage from which they only slowly, or never, recovered. The result of this temperament was that, when because of his shortcomings he felt his authority or his personal wishes threatened, he was unable to discuss things reasonably. He would simply withdraw and refuse to shift his position, retreating into his room, staying silent for some time and, if the situation did not resolve itself, finally issuing despotic commands from a safe distance” (198-99).

Crow uses the words high-handed (228) ruthless, despotic and autocratic to describe him on such occasions (224). “Most people who crossed his path had occasion, sooner or later, to go home to lick the wounds inflicted by [this side] of his personality” (194). But those who stayed learned to live with this dimension of Met Anthony. She says that Deacon Peter Scorer summed up this enlightened attitude: “at a certain moment he stopped idolizing him and learned to love him in full awareness of his faults” (200). In my opinion Bp Hilarion was also caught in this inexplicable other side, this “mystery of lawlessness” as St Paul called it (2 The 2:7).

On Recovering the Lost Provinces of Western Europe

In the fifth century the westernmost provinces of Europe were lost by the Christian Empire to barbarian Germanic invaders. However, in the sixth century St Justinian the Great was Emperor in the Christian capital in New Rome from 527 to 565. The last Roman Emperor to speak Latin as a first language, Justinian sought ‘renovatio imperii’ or the restoration of the Empire by recovering the lost western provinces. This ambition was expressed by reconquering the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa as well as the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and restoring Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy and Rome to the Empire after more than half a century of barbarian control. His forces then reclaimed most of southern Iberia, establishing the province of Spania. Unfortunately, this recovery was to be all too short-lived

At the end of the sixth century, seeing that physical recovery was impossible, in Old Rome, itself provincialised, Pope Gregory the Great set about the spiritual recovery of the provinces, starting with Britain. This recovery succeeded and spread, but was fragile. Already towards the end of the eighth century the Germanic leader Charlemagne had changed the Creed and fallen into iconoclasm. Although he soon died, in the mid-eleventh century the Germanic iconoclasts not only returned to power, but took over the Roman see, creating the definitive Schism of 1054. No help could come from those who had remained faithful in New Rome, so oppressed were they, and indeed in 1204 the Christian capital was sacked by the barbarians, finally falling in 1453, its leaders having compromised themselves with the barbarians.

At this, the task of the spiritual recovery of the lost Western provinces fell to small and oppressed Russia as the only free country in the still Christian world. It, however, was faced with the hostility of the rulers of Western Europe and it was not until the nineteenth century that Russia was able to begin to preach the Christian Faith to the captive peoples of the Western provinces. However, the leaders of Western Europe became even more aggressive and invaded Russia in 1812, 1854 and again in 1914. This last invasion led to the fall of Christianity there in 1917, which came about through the treachery of the westernised upper classes, who betrayed their own ruler. In 1941 Western countries again invaded now fallen Russia, but with the sobering result that it began a fifty-year process of return to Christianity.

It is since 1991 then that Russia has been undergoing a long period of regeneration, painfully striving to re-establish at least something of Christianity. Although this process is far from complete, it provides hope that the spiritually sensitive in the lost Western provinces can return to the Church of Christ, especially if Russia is regenerated in full. This return can neither be on the basis of an uninteresting nationalistic form of Russian Christianity, nor on the basis of a minimal and opportunistically compromised form of Russian Christianity, as among some in North America, Paris, Finland and Estonia. It can only be on the basis of the maximal Christianity, the fullness of Orthodoxy. In this way, the lost provinces of Western Europe, including our own East of England province, can reintegrate the Church of God.

Regeneration or Degeneration

Spiritual nihilism is a major threat to European civilisation…yet not all values can ever be destroyed among mankind. There are still those who care who will kindle the flame and pass it from hand to hand until the country is flooded by a new wave of regeneration.

New Martyr Alexander of Munich (+ 1943)

Russia

The greatest geopolitical and human catastrophe and the cause of the worst genocide in the last century was undoubtedly the Russian Revolution. It led to the satanically-inspired murder of all that was best in the near-millennial Christian culture of Rus, East Slavdom; this was indeed ‘spiritual nihilism’. For without the Revolution there would have been a Russian victory in 1917 and Russian troops would have freed Prussianised Germany and the peoples of Austria-Hungary from the tyranny of their emperors and upper classes. There would have been no fateful Versailles Treaty and no unjust mistreatment of the German and Austrian peoples, no Lenin and no Stalin in the former Russian Empire, no Hitler and no Second World War. True, there would have been the terrible losses of a three-year First World War, but they could at least have been repented for by the instigators of that war throughout the 1920s. Instead, they were never repented for and so were never made up for.

The atheist Soviet Union was an interruption of all East Slav history, a break with the destiny of Rus. Although the Soviet Union is no more, its utterly mismanaged collapse was yet another disaster and so the paths of Russian destiny have still not been resumed in full, far from it, and the effects of discontinuity are still present. They can for example be seen in the self-defensive and ignorant Soviet nationalism of the brainwashed elderly, which admires the genocidal war-leader Stalin. But this is a generational phenomenon that is dying out, just as the admiration of brainwashed, elderly Britons for their compromised war-leader Churchill is also dying out. However, the break with the destiny of Rus can also be seen in the fact that the remains of Lenin have still not been disposed of, in atheist place-names that still abound everywhere, in still existing admiration for all those who so shamelessly co-operated with Stalin, not to mention in the luxurious wastefulness of today’s Russian elite.

In criticising the wastefulness of that elite, we should not forget that there were also abuses before the Revolution. Oligarch is only a new name for aristocrat. That Revolution was caused by the self-serving, decadent and corrupted upper class. On the other hand, we should not think that all was corrupted before the Revolution – the problem was in the wealthy, westernised classes. If all had been corrupted, then from what trees could the spiritual blossom of the New Martyrs have come? The modernist Russophobes who think that all was corrupted before the Revolution are those who do not venerate the New Martyrs, who ‘have no space for their icons’, as in the former Sourozh Diocese. And if all had been corrupted, where also could the best of the culture of émigré Russia have come from? From where could the heartfelt music of a Rakhmaninov, the lament of the emigration for what was and what might have been, the endless melody of nostalgia for a vanished civilisation, have come?

What is the situation today? President Putin has been admired by some for his foreign policies. That admiration may perhaps be justified. But his internal policies seem to be little more than empty words, promises without substance – as we can see from the present Muslim immigrant troubles in Moscow. There still hang over Russia the old and huge problems of ABC, alcoholism, abortion and corruption, the first two vestiges from the atheist period, the last mostly from the abysmal decadence of the Capitalist Yeltsin period. All these problems lie behind the unresolved and severe demographic crisis. However, critics of contemporary Russia, and we have no illusions that there is much to criticise there, for we have seen it ourselves, tend to forget that what survives in Russia today survives miraculously, after the worst persecution of Christ known to history. All of us who seek a Tsar restored must show patience, recognising that the processes of repentance and regeneration are painfully gradual.

Europe

Once Europe was strong, but today it is degenerating, which in many respects makes it even more fragile than regenerating Russia. Through the European Union Europe is entering a period which resembles in its tyranny the old Soviet Union. Europe’s future survival as a living, and not as a dead, culture is dependent on its willingness to overcome the cumulative degeneration of its spiritual nihilism. This is exactly what the still fragile process of spiritual regeneration in Russia has come from – the willingness of at least some there to overcome the spiritual nihilism of the past. And this is what Europe must learn from Russia – if it wants to survive. Europe is a poem – in its little, hidden, underground parts dating from before the Schism, in the beauty of its nature and culture, from the mountains of Norway to the fado songs of Portugal, from the shores of the Hebrides to the forests of the Tyrol, from the palaces of Paris to the fountains of Rome. But now the very existence of that poem is at risk.

This is because Europe is also a gigantic museum of the effects of the Schism. Having forsaken the Church, it declined into Catholicism and from there descended to Protestantism and so to atheist Secularism. Europe is littered with the remarkable monuments of its millennial Schism, its cathedrals and its churches, its castles and its fortifications, its museums and its galleries, its statues and its adornments. All this it can and should keep, as witnesses to its past culture, both good and bad. But Europe’s cultural evolution has come to a dead end because its spiritual evolution has reached a dead end, the end of the process of its Schism, which has descended during a millennium from total faithfulness to total faithlessness. So now Europe is at a turning-point and faces a choice between total self-destruction and the renunciation of its atheist Secularism and the millennial process behind it and so the return to the fullness of its founding Orthodoxy of a thousand years ago.

Nowhere today can the threat of atheist Secularist Europe be seen in more black and white terms than in the Ukraine. For, bribed by the EU, the Ukrainian puppet elite is now turning its back on 1025 years of East Slav history and its choice of civilisation – the choice for Christ – made in 988, and is instead choosing Eurosodom. For what was a vulgar commercial union forty and more years ago, at first tyrannically removing the freedom for Europeans to be themselves, is now altogether destroying fundamental Christian morality. The EU tyranny has never had any respect for local culture, as we know from the recent past of Western Europe, and as can be seen in its present manipulation of the Ukrainian media, similar to its past manipulation of the media of one victim country after another. The Ukraine and its Church also are heading for ‘Europeanisation’, ‘Hellenisation’, the same illusions as in bankrupt Greece, the Baltic States, Hungary, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania.

In the Ukraine, we see face to face the stark choice: Christ or Eurosodom. No group there faces a greater inner contradiction than the Uniats, with their hideous new Cathedral in Kiev. On the one hand, they claim to belong to Christ, but on the other hand, they support Eurosodom. If Stalin had left to Poland the largely Uniat, far-west Polonised provinces, the only ones which are truly ‘Ukrainian’, that is borderlands, none of this would have happened. If the European Union does invade the Ukraine, then the vast majority of the Ukraine may well join a regenerating Russian Federation, welcoming it as liberation. Then too, in the far south-west, faithful Carpatho-Russia, ‘Transcarpathia’, will at last be established as an Autonomous Republic of the Federation, righting Stalin’s historic injustice against it. The Ukraine may soon face a choice: Spiritual Regeneration with the Russian Federation or Spiritual Degeneration with the European Union. Whither goest thou, Ukraine?

On the Importance of Sobriety

Questions and answers compiled from recent conversations and correspondence

Q: In an article in ‘Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition’ entitled ‘The Present Situation of the Orthodox Church’ and written nearly 25 years ago in July 1989, you wrote about the two extremes to be found on the fringes of the Orthodox world, new calendarism and old calendarism, and the pressures they exerted on the free voice of the Church, the voice of the New Martyrs. You said that these New Martyrs would be canonised inside Russia, providing that the Church could free itself from the Communist government. This happened. So my question is if these two isms or extremes, which were then a considerable problem, are still a problem despite that canonisation?

A: Yes, they are definitely still present, though they are not as influential as they were. This is because the Centre of the Church, that which is outside the extremes, has been much strengthened through the prayers of the now universally canonised New Martyrs.

Q: But why do these isms still exist?

A: Both extremist isms still exist for historical reasons, appearing after the Centre fell, that is, after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Centre ‘did not hold’, ‘things fell apart’, that is, there was a polarisation. This became clearly and immediately visible in Russia in the 1920s with the renovationist new calendarism – although the renovationist temptation had existed for several years before the Revolution, certainly since Gapon in 1905. (Incidentally, Patriarch Kyrill’s grandfather, Fr Vasily Gundyaev, suffered much from that renovationism). And of course there were individuals who then went to the opposite extreme of renovationism, falling into a sort of old calendarist sectarianism.

At the same time Renovationism also became visible outside Russia in Constantinople, which had long been under British masonic influence. Thus, the renovationist Constantinople hierarchy actually recognised the renovationists in Russia, rejecting the saintly Patriarch Tikhon and the legitimate Church. Then, together with the Church of Greece, it introduced the secular (so-called ‘new’) calendar for the fixed feasts. Here a lot of Anglican money, £100,000 of that time, changed hands. Immediately, there was a reaction to all this and old calendarism began.

Q: What has your position been towards these two extremes?

A: It has always been to stand in the middle and support the Centre, even though it fell in 1917. My position has been a consistent straight line, from which I have never wavered, and this as early as 1973 in a booklet which I wrote then and which was published a few years ago in ‘Orthodox England’. My support has always been for a free Russian Orthodoxy, uncompromised by either extreme.

Q: Are you not criticised for this unwavering line?

A: Of course. But, in fact, pressure from the extremist margins only strengthens us. As an example of this, I would like to mention a fellow priest in Bulgaria who wrote to me a little while ago. He has one of the Church calendar parishes in Bulgaria which is under the new calendar Church. Thus he remains faithful to the Tradition, but does not participate in schism. And he receives as much criticism from new calendarism as from old calendarism. This is exactly our situation here, where both fringes criticise us. Interestingly, the fringes often work together and are friends. As they say, ‘extremes meet’. And when we are criticised by both extremes, it is a sure sign that we are doing something right, standing in the middle. Remember that the middle is where Christ was crucified, between the two thieves.

Q: You mentioned how it all began in 1917 with the fall of the Centre in Moscow. But did the extremist pressures get worse?

A: Yes, they did. The Cold War after 1945 definitely made it all worse. For example, in 1948 the USA installed a new Patriarch of Constantinople called Athenagoras. He was flown in by the CIA on Truman’s personal plane from America. When the legitimate Patriarch, Maximos, was deposed and exiled by the CIA, he was heard to say, ‘The City is lost’. This is a close parallel to the situation in the first millennium when a number of heretical patriarchs of Constantinople were installed by heretical emperors. Interestingly, the legitimate Patriarch Maximos V, supposedly ‘ill’, died three decades later in 1972, the same year as the illegitimate Patriarch. Since 1948 Constantinople, co-opted into the anti-Soviet and then anti-Russian war of the USA, has been the plaything of the ‘iconoclastic’ US State Department. The City is lost indeed – but the Church lives on outside the City. Fortunately, the Church does not depend on a geographical location – otherwise there would still be nothing outside Jerusalem.

The situation was no better in the Local Churches that survived under Communism during the Cold War. As regards the Russian Church, the situation worsened greatly under Khrushchev, a virulent and primitive atheist, not just because he persecuted the Church physically, but also because he and the Soviet Communist Party imposed ecumenism on the Church as a political tool in the early 1960s. The other Communist Parties in Eastern Europe did the same to their Local Churches. The idea was to make ecumenism and ecumenical organisations into tools for Soviet propaganda.

Q: What happened when the Cold War ended?

A: Just because the Cold War officially ended, that does not mean that persecution is over. Today the militant atheism of the Soviet Union is gone, but now we have the militant atheism of the European Union. The EU ideology is trying to destroy not only the Local Churches of EU member countries in Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Cyprus, but also the Churches of countries which the EU one day hopes to colonise: Serbia, Moldova, Georgia, even the Ukraine. The victims of such political pressures, some senior bishops, are hostages to this, so we do not listen to the things that their political masters force them to say, especially in Serbia.

Q: Do others listen to these bishop-hostages?

A: You should not listen to hostages. Unfortunately, old calendarists do listen to these bishop-hostages and, in search of self-justification for their schisms, quote them. Thus, they deliberately ignore the 99.999% of the Local Church which is solidly Orthodox and with whom they put themselves out of communion. They want black and white situations, everyone else must be black and therefore only they can be white. This is pride and it is also to fall into the divide and rule game of the powers of this world, which want to divide the Church in order to rule it. It is like refusing to be baptized by the disciples because Judas had been a disciple. And so you remain unbaptized, outside the Church, all because of someone else who put himself outside the Church. This is to cut off your nose to spite your face, to deprive yourself because another has deprived himself.

I would add that old calendarism itself is no better in terms of political dependence. I will always remember one of their bishops writing to me six year ago and complaining that I did not support the CIA. He actually said with great pride that some of his best parishioners in the USA work for the CIA! We also recall how the US ambassador in Kiev actually plotted a schism in the Ukraine. This we know because we stood in front of him as he plotted it with a bishop at the Russian Church’s San Francisco Council of 2006. And that is exactly what that bishop then did and he is now in communion with the CIA-supporting old calendarist bishop. It is a small world!

Q: Obviously, the liberal and modernist threat to the Church, with ecumenism, liturgical modernism, intercommunion and so on, is well-known. But is it still a reality?

A: It is a reality, but mainly for old people. Today, for instance, ecumenism is largely dead. This is why old calendarists are always quoting events from the 60s, 70s and 80s. They look to the past when ecumenism was active. Thus, a favourite hate figure of theirs is Patriarch Sergius – but he died in 1944! The dead present no threat. And most of the modernists I can think of are either dead or else in their 70s and 80s. They are very old-fashioned. All we can do is pray for them that they might repent before their end. But even if we see them as our enemies, the Gospel tells us to love our enemies. Here we see that old calendarism lacks love.

Q: Do the old calendarist fractions have points in common with the new calendarist fractions?

A: Yes, they do, and several things. For example, both are old-fashioned, many of their people are elderly. Both are extremely Russophobic. And both the new calendarist and old calendarist movements are utterly split. This is because they are concerned not with the unity of the Church, which comes from following Christ, but with following personal opinions, which are always divisive, precisely because they are personal. They do not understand the importance of the conciliar mind of the Church, which is above opinions, because it follows the Holy Spirit.

Old calendarism in particular wants dogmatic precision in every detail from every individual. This is not how the Church works, the Church is not a totalitarian monolith. For instance, I have been told that there are now 14 old calendarist synods in Greece, all, it seems, hating each other. Often when one of their metropolitans dies, they split again. Many of these synods only have a few dozen communities under them and often the communities themselves are tiny, at most a few dozen. The synods are often dominated by clericalism. And here we should remember the ordinary people who are hoodwinked into following them. These synods have a large turnover of sincere, but naïve neophytes. I am sometimes contacted by such people from this country. They want to leave the sects where they are and come to the Orthodox Church, which they have just discovered. Such ordinary people are not guilty. This is why they are received into the Church by confession and communion.

Q: Why are both new calendarism and old calendarism Russophobic?

A: Out of self-justification. Both denigrate the Russian Church especially because She is old calendar and therefore from their viewpoint a competitor. They need to justify their isolation from Her and desperately want to see scandals and corruption. Thus, they will repeat anti-Church Cold War propaganda against the Russian Church, whatever the origin, atheist or other. Thus, they seize on the most minor scandal, blow it up out of all proportion and generalise it, rather like the anti-clerical media. One priest is bad, therefore all are bad, therefore they cannot be in communion with a whole Local Church. This is self-justification and also Donatism, as the righteous Metr Philaret of New York described old calendarism.

However, the main impression is not so much of Russophobia, nor even of the rejection of episcopal authority, but of the rejection of the people of the Church, the unChurched but recently baptised masses both of the Russian Church and other Local Churches, who are not good enough for them. This is the contempt of the elder brother who rejected the Prodigal Son. It is the refusal to recognise repentance that is characteristic of old calendarism and also new calendarism. That is another thing they have in common – their elitist, esoteric disdain for the masses. It is just another sign of the pride that infects all schism.

Q: To what extent was the Church inside Russia affected by new calendarism, what Russians call renovationism?

A: There was a serious battle against renovationism inside Russia, but it was over by the 1930s. Renovationism simply died out there for lack of support. People knew that it was a Communist trick. However, it did survive far longer in the foreign parishes of the Church inside Russia and in the Paris Jurisdiction, where many of the renovationists went, so intense was their hatred of the Russian Church. Many of the old emigres brought this renovationism, in fact a sort of ‘art nouveau’ pre-Revolutionary decadence, into the emigration with them and preserved it abroad, long after it was dead inside the Soviet Union. So it survived as a curiosity. However, most of its last elderly supporters have died in the last twenty years.

Q: Wasn’t ROCOR, on the other hand, affected by the opposite extreme, old calendarism or traditionalism?

A: Yes. Communism inside Russia created renovationism which the Church there had to defeat. However, during the Cold War Capitalism created anti-Communism. In ROCOR in the USA this took the form of a nationalist right-wing movement. The supporters of this movement were the very ones who put St John on trial in San Francisco fifty years ago. In the 1960s they accepted a Greek old calendarist monastery into the Church. To their horror the old calendarists turned against the hand that had fed them and tried to take over ROCOR.

Realising that they had failed in their takeover bid, in 1986 many of the old calendarists left ROCOR, but their influence lingered on and the 1990s were a battle ground between that influence and the original ROCOR Tradition. The battle was between the Tradition, such as we knew it in the Western European Diocese of ROCOR, the Tradition which had come out of pre-Revolutionary Russia, and that new and alien old calendarist influence. As you know, in the end, the old ROCOR was triumphant. The alien influence reality affected very few, about 5% of the whole, but led them to leaving the Church in the early 2000s, which was tragic for them, but at the same time allowed the restoration of ROCOR’s old spiritual independence and integrity.

Q: How do you try and remain faithful in the middle?

A: Sobriety is the key to this. The left, or new calendarism, and the right, old calendarism, are equally self-exalted. The Centre is not self-exalted at all and remains sober. Both new calendarism (renovationism) and old calendarism (traditionalism) must be avoided because both equally lead to schism. Schism is always caused by a lack of sobriety. We steer our course by the star of Christ, the star of Bethlehem, in other words, by grace.

I remember in 2007, just after the concelebration between Patriarch Alexis and Metropolitan Laurus in Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow, in which we had all participated with great joy at our unity, two senior ROCOR priests were speaking. One said: ‘Well, we’ve done it’. The other answered, ‘No, father, the grace of God has done it’. And this is exactly the case. The grace of God brings unity in truth (and that is the only real unity, the only unity that exists); the devil brings disunity and untruth.

Q: How do such new calendarist and old calendarist schisms arise from inside the Church?

A: The leaders of the small groups that leave the Church for either extreme are people who have been in difficulty in Church life for decades. But they are tolerated because God tolerates them. Eventually, such people are either healed by the patience shown to them, or else they leave the Church of their own accord.

Q: What lies behind schisms? Why are theological and historical arguments not successful with those who leave? Why can’t the leaders of schism see their error?

A: It is not theology or history that lies behind most schisms, but psychology, that is, personality conflicts. And that is always irrational. Irrational psychology cuts off its nose to spite its face, it resists grace and grace is always rational. For example, seven years ago I predicted that few would return from the Sourozh schism in England, though we would remain open to their return. And, just as predicted, few did come back. Why? Why do tiny minorities, which will clearly die out, prefer occasional services in ‘voluntary catacombs’, in back rooms and sheds, temporary rented premises, to regular services in normal churches? It is because they do not want the Church, they want the inward-looking, sectarian atmosphere of cliques and clubs, of small ponds, where they can be ‘big fish’.

Q: What is the psychology of traditionalist and modernist schisms?

A: I will take one example which I know well – the Sourozh new calendarist schism. This came about from the convert desire to merge Orthodoxy with Anglicanism (the Establishment). This is why the schism was supported at the time by the Establishment Church of England, albeit discreetly, but quite openly by newspapers like The Times and The Daily Telegraph, which support the British Establishment and whose journalists are fed by MI5 and the CIA, just like BBC journalists. However, to wish to merge Orthodoxy with Anglicanism is in fact to state that you remain unconverted to Orthodoxy, under the cloak of culture, hiding behind cultural excuses.

To take a minor detail as an example, they said: ‘Orthodoxy will have to adapt to us because we are English and so, for example, we have milk in our tea even on fast days’. Although this is a very minor detail, it is symptomatic of a far more serious spiritual illness – cultural arrogance, worldliness and nationalism. Thus, I remember that I was contacted at the time by one who complained that I had written that her group practised intercommunion and that was quite untrue. However, I pointed out to her that I had only been quoting from her group’s website which openly boasted that it allowed intercommunion!

As regards traditionalist or old calendarist schisms, they come from convert insecurity, the neophyte’s need to be against other Christians (especially against other Orthodox), rather than for Christ. It is interesting that such groups pride themselves on being ‘converts’. It is strange because we stop being converts once we are integrated, which should happen, at most, within a few years of reception into the Church. For example, the apostles do not speak of themselves as converts. That is unthinkable because they are part of the Church. And this was the same throughout history. Those who are part of the Church are not converts.

Q: Why are so many Anglican converts involved in schisms and hardly any Russians, at least in England?

A: Interestingly, a few Russians are involved, but they are always highly anglicised and want to become part of the Establishment despite their origins. Anglicans are Protestants and they have a very weak sense of the Incarnation. Therefore, for them the Church is just an individual choice, a personal matter, a private opinion, without any collective or social repercussions and so the Church is just a club. In Protestantism individualism is so highly developed that if you do not like the Church where you are, you simply go off and start another one. There is an inability to get on with others, to adapt, to accept and tolerate other opinions in community. That is why there are thousands of Protestant denominations, which to us Orthodox all look the same and indeed are essentially the same.

So the collective, the community, the Church, suffers at the hands of individualism, sectarianism. That is why in England, for example, there are five different small groups of ex-Anglicans who have joined the local dioceses of Orthodox Churches, but they are all split up. They cannot get on with each other or with other Orthodox. The only ex-Anglicans who do get on with each other are those who get on with other Orthodox of other nationalities, who are already integrated into Local Churches and multinational parishes and have forgotten that they were once Anglicans. They are Orthodox.

Q: When will old calendarist and new calendarist schisms end?

A: Only when the Centre has been fully re-established, when we reverse all the decadence of the past 96 years, when we go back to the pre-1917 situation. Thus, old calendarist schisms will exist for as long as the Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian Churches remain officially on the secular calendar for the fixed feasts. Once those Churches have returned to the Church calendar, and they would never have dared leave it before 1917 because the Russian Church would not have allowed it, those schisms will fall apart, only clerical careerists or the ill will be left. As regards new calendarist schisms, they will last for as long as the Centre is not strong enough to quell them, as long as there are conformists whose faith is weak, who swim with the Western tide, who are too weak to stand up to the passing fashions of this world.

Q: If we can slightly move away from this theme, what can we say about the future of diaspora unity between the parishes of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the foreign parishes of the Church inside Russian, outside Russia but still not under ROCOR, as they logically and canonically should be?

A: As you say, logic and the canons say they should be, but there is such a thing as economy – a temporary dispensation for pastoral reasons, for the greater benefit. Much patience is needed to implement the 2007 agreement between the two parts of the Russian Church. We knew this at the time. As you know that agreement involved the Church Outside Russia giving up its representations inside Russia and the Church inside Russia giving up its representations outside Russia. However, as the Church Outside Russia had very few and only very recent representations inside Russia, it was easy to give them up. On the other hand, the Church inside Russia had a lot of longstanding representations and property outside Russia – as a result of the Cold War.

Wisely, no timetable was agreed on the issue of transfer of parishes to ROCOR because this is a pastoral issue. This should all happen calmly, as has happened in Australia, without anyone’s feelings being hurt. So what has been happening since the 2007 agreement is that the foreign parishes of the Church inside Russia are being readied for their transfer to the Church Outside Russia – but I would say that this process will take a generation. We are only at the beginning.

Q: How can such a transfer work in terms of practices? For example, ROCOR practises reception of heterodox by baptism, foreign parishes of the Church inside Russia practise reception of heterodox by chrismation?

A: That is untrue. Practices vary in both ROCOR and in the Church inside Russia. For example, in the Western European Diocese of ROCOR, we generally received by chrismation, as was the universal tradition of ROCOR until the 1970s. The priest would offer reception by baptism or chrismation, explaining why the choice was available. We always found that most chose to be received by chrismation. Practices in the Church inside Russia also vary. I think that once all the 825 or so parishes outside Russia are united under ROCOR, this mixed practice will continue according to the pastoral conscience of each priest. This is not a dogmatic issue, but a pastoral one. We all agree that there are no sacraments outside the Church, but approaches vary as regards the sacramental forms that have survived outside the Church and how we deal with them.

Q: You described how foreign parishes of the Church inside Russia were much affected by the renovationism or new calendarism that was brought out of Russia by certain emigres. Is this still a problem?

A: Much less of a problem every year. For instance, I remember someone telling me how when Bishop Elisey, the new Sourozh bishop appointed after the schism there in 2006, first came to England, he visited one of his communities in the provinces. The priest was an ex-Anglican and when Bishop Elisey got up on Sunday morning to serve the liturgy, he was asked by the priest’s wife whether he wanted a cooked breakfast, like her husband, or not. This came as a shock to him, but not to us, who knew exactly what had been going on in Sourozh for decades.

This was typical of the old Sourozh under Metr Antony Bloom and Bp Basil Osborne, where ‘English culture’ was more important than Church culture, where in fact phyletism reigned. They received Anglicans into the Church very quickly, never taught them much about Orthodoxy, ordained them and then never visited them or checked up on them. Cooked breakfasts before communion, just as in the Church of England, were the result. However, now that the Sourozh Diocese has been brought back to the normal practices of the Russian Church, such peculiar situations belong to the past.

Q: What is the main problem of doing missionary work in the West?

A: Most of our work is with immigrant Orthodox from Eastern Europe and it is a matter of Churching people who were baptised in the last few years. So our problems here are exactly the same as elsewhere in the post-Communist Orthodox world.

However, there is a second layer of work, which is with the mass of Western people who have no concept of what the Orthodox Church is. I would say that here our work is in overcoming a barrier of prejudices, what I call the ‘Dawkins Delusion’, which is the modern Western delusion. This is the problem of very primitive Neo-Darwinianism. This is actually irrelevant to those who have never held Protestant fundamentalist beliefs, like the Orthodox. So first of all you have to explain to these people that the Church has never held weird Protestant beliefs, which they are in revolt against, and then you have to explain that this is why we have no need to revolt against beliefs which we have never had anyway. This makes their Neo-Darwinianism irrelevant. In Catholic countries it is much the same story, but there they are in revolt against Papism. So the problem comes in explaining that we are not anti-Papist like them because we have never been Papist. It is irrelevant to us

Q: Do you not work to convert Anglicans, Protestants and Catholics?

A: First of all, in today’s West there are very few of those and they are mainly very elderly. We do not proselytise among them. We tend to find that those who have actually believed in Protestantism or Catholicism all their lives never become Orthodox. They are unable to learn to think and act as Orthodox. Of course, if they come to us, having understood the errors of what they have been taught, that is a different matter. But we do not proselytise. We wait for the grace of God to touch them. We do not work by human artifice. They must become natural, integrated Orthodox.