Category Archives: Sects and Cults

Half a Century in the Orthodox Church in Western Europe (2)

Fleeing the Extremes

The first Christian Emperor was called Constantine. The last Orthodox Emperor was called Nicholas. He was overthrown in the so-called 1917 Revolution, that is, in the palace coup of the aristocratic traitors to the Tsar, orchestrated by the British ruling class. As a result, all the Orthodox Churches, which the Tsar had protected when still in power lost their protector and were called either to martyrdom or else to confessordom. Once infiltrated, the Churches had to resist either the CIA, by confessordom, or else of the KGB, by martyrdom and their earlier equivalents. (Earlier they had had different names, but they were still engaged in the same intrigues). Our balancing act has meant avoiding both these extremes. In our context this has not yet meant becoming martyrs, but it has meant becoming confessors.

Combating the extremes has on the one hand meant avoiding and combating globalism, liberalism, modernism, freemasonry and Vatican-style perversions and, on the other hand, avoiding and combating sectarianism, phariseeism, hateful censoriousness, political ultra-conservatism and Old Ritualist style obscurantism. Both extremes are marked by anti-Christian ‘bishops’, who are in fact thieves, homosexuals and pedophiles. Thus, we fought against the influence of the liberal modernists in the Orthodox Churches in the 1970s and 1980s and then against the sectarian pharisees in the Orthodox Churches in the 1990s and 2000s, until Russian Church unity was achieved in 2007. This was a victory over both extremes, a miracle. But the devil does not like miracles and those who announce that God is Love.

The devil attacked the Greek Church of Constantinople through nationalist racism, called ‘phyletism’ in Greek. However, he attacked the Russian Church, replacing faith and piety with the negativity of nationalist politics, which led to State-orchestrated ritualism, rigid militarism with its blind obedience and harsh punishments, instead of integrity. Professional choirs assured that everything was provided and the people were made passive, without responsibility. From there it was only one step to anti-clericalism. As they say in Russian, ‘mnogo popov, malo batjushek’, ‘there are many fake priests, but few real ones’. And so in the Russian Church, persecution always comes from the bishops. Thus, the Russian Church isolated itself and fell out of communion and catholicity with the 15 other Local Orthodox Churches.

The USA

Thus, our 2007 victory was to give us only temporary respite, a decade of peace. The programme of Americanisation, or more precisely of Trumpisation, of the American Synod of the Russian Church, known as ROCOR, began in 2017. It sent out its US agents to the still ‘unreformed’ (= normal and traditional) parts of ROCOR in Western Europe and Australia to transform these too into ignorant and arrogant convert crazy zones, like themselves, who yearned to create a rigid and ritualistic sect. This all coincided, and not coincidentally, with President Trump’s first term of belligerent Americanism and also with the second phase of the infiltration of ROCOR by the CIA. The latter activated its sleeping agents in the American Synod and recruited new ones, sending them out worldwide to what is an ecclesiastical NGO.

The Age of Trump also coincided with the consequences of the earlier activities of the notorious Mossad agents, Maxwell and Epstein, who worked hand in hand for the greater glory of worldwide Zionism. Epstein was before his murder the model psychopath: charming, superficially brilliant, very manipulative, narcissistic, a pathological liar, with no sense of empathy, a ruthless pervert and a cynical egomaniac. His psychopathic spirit became the standard for the Age and for the CIA agents in question. So much for the psychopathic narcissists of the USA and its Epstein regime. What of the other half of the Western world, Europe and the UK? Here we have not narcissistic psychopathy, but the creeping power grab of centralising Sovietisation, the old megalomaniac temptations of power and money.

Europe and the UK

Immediately after the fall of the SU (Soviet Union) at the end of 1991, the EU (European Union) was founded. The demons behind the former Union had simply fled westwards to an easier prey, the new Gadarene swine of Western Europe. Russia was no longer attractive, as it cast off the yoke of compulsory atheism. Thus, with the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992, the EU became a geopolitical project. Instead of a trading community, it had become the political wing of militaristic NATO. The creeping centralising Sovietisation and Epsteinisation of the EU, obvious in its practices, was also clear in its vocabulary. Thus, the (European) Council is the translation of ‘Soviet’, the EU Commissioners mirror Soviet Commissars, the oligarchy mirrors the nomenklatura and the ‘narrative’ mirrors ‘the Party line’. SU = EU.

As for England, it continued on its historic cycle. In 597 it was converted to Christ from that Old Rome, which still openly condemned universal pretensions. In 1066 it was converted to barbarianism from Norman France, sponsored by the ideology of the new schismatic and ‘universal’ Rome, which stifled Christ with the Pope and England with Britain. In 1535 it was converted to anti-sacramentalism from Luther’s neo-pagan Germany. In 2004 it was converted to imperial delusions from Nazi Ukraine and its orange revolution. The cycle is repeated every 469 years. Today, the British Establishment is trying to revive its long-lost past glory, which was not glory, but shame. This imperialism is repeated all through the ex-imperialist Western European ruling class, nostalgic for its delusions of greatness.

The Collapse of Kiev Creates Regime Changes in the USA, Europe and the UK

What the ruling elites in both the EU and the UK have not understood is that all unions break up. The Soviet Union, the USSR, broke up. So did Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and now the Ukraine, so will Belgium, the EU, the UK, and quite possibly the US. The Four Nations of Britain and a reunited Ireland can work together, not in a Union or a Federation (which is a half-way house from a Union, as is the semi-Soviet Russian Federation), but in a Sovereign Confederation, the Ionan Confederation, IONA, the ‘Isles of the North Atlantic’. England must yet depose the British monarchs who have ruled it for so long, invited by the merchant-oligarchs of the City of London from Germany to become an Imperial House, but the Imperial Age is long over and so are they. A new Sovereign England must restore its own English Royal House.

As for the EU and the UK, they are entirely dependent on the black hole of the Kiev regime. They have bet everything on that loser, playing at the casino wheel of geopolitics, without knowledge and understanding, but with a fanatical and blinding, ever-expanding ideology of European unionism. But every time that Europe falls to union, and it is always a fall, whether under Napoleon, or Hitler, or the EU, it then sets about attacking Russia. ‘Europe’ always attacks European Russia, because Russia does not conform to the morally and financially bankrupt ideological narrative of the Eurocommissars. This is why they do not want peace. War is their self-justification, as only war gives them a unifying purpose. However, the Russian Federation frustrates them immensely, for it is playing the long game against the Kiev regime.

Moscow’s methodical advance by attrition, metre by metre, keeping its losses very low, is because it is awaiting the political collapse of Kiev, which will precede its military collapse. (This was why Germany, Britain and France, as Japan had tried in 1904-5, first brought about Russian political collapse in 1917, since political collapse always precedes military collapse). When political Kiev collapses, its army will have nothing left to fight for. Then, Russia will take over most of the old Soviet Ukraine at little cost, allowing Poland, Romania, Hungary and perhaps Slovakia to take back the far western fragments of Stalin’s Ukraine which used to belong to them, as they wish. And then there will be regime change, not in Moscow, but, ironically, in peace-hating Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and wherever Kiev Fascism was supported.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Triumph of Orthodoxy Over the Ten-Year Marketing Plan

You are new to the Church, very young, untrained and inexperienced, you know very little and you despise your fellow human-beings, because you consider yourself to be a ‘prince of the Church’. You are very vain, very ambitious, very manipulative and have a ruthless desire to make as much money as possible by first gaining as much power as possible. You have been put in control of some twenty scattered Orthodox churches, without any supervision. What do you do?

You have to make sure that no-one will stand in your way by expelling all opposition to your revolution. You must expel all those who predate you and hold the Tradition and whom you so despise. Then there will be ever fewer people of the nationality who used to attend those churches, as they feel that they are no longer catered for. As a result, those churches will empty. This suits you, since only once you have gained total control over them, can you asset-strip them. To do all this. you formulate a five-point, ten-year plan, backed up by a set of websites, which you control. The five points are:

  1. As you have no attachment to a root nationality, set yourself a sectarian and not national selling point, claiming that you exclusively represent the ‘One True Church’. All the others are worthy only of contempt and hatred because they have ‘compromised’ the Church, whereas you alone ‘have not’.
  2. Expel anyone of the nationality which those churches are supposed to cater for. They are too independent and despise your ignorance.
  3. Expel anyone who speaks the language or knows the history and culture of that nationality. They are too independent and despise your ignorance.
  4. Expel anyone with knowledge and experience of Orthodox Church life. They are too independent and despise your ignorance.
  5. Then you can replace them all by recruiting crazy newcomers, some of whom are perverts, who know even less than you and so can be manipulated easily. Ignorant, they will treat you as a guru, which is exactly what you need to assert in order to become an asset-stripping cult-leader.

You don’t care about the consequences of your marketing policy, the reduction of the Church to a sect and the human distress you cause to those who devoted their lives to the Church, of which you have deprived them. You don’t care because you will have returned abroad by the time others realise what you have done, taking your ‘winnings’ with you.

 

 

The Great Dictator (and the little dictator). Spoilt Child Syndrome: The Pathology of Trump and Trumpians

Foreword

Many are confused by President’s Trump erratic, ever-changing behaviour. I believe I understand his confusing behaviour very well. This is not because I know a lot, but because I had the same experience with another very similar narcissistic American, a ‘Trumpian’. He too was entrusted with an absurd title, though in his case he had a tiny amount of power, but he certainly suffered from exactly the same pathology of being spoilt by a parent.

Narcissism

First of all, we see that Trump is a narcissist. This is obvious – he lives in a bubble of vanity created by his father and preens and admires himself. His narcissism comes from the fact that he is a spoilt child. Spoilt children are always delusional narcissists. Hence his self-centred infantilism and tantrums, lashing out at others when he does not get what he wants. Spoilt children who are denied anything they want throw things out of their pushchair, threatening those who deny them what they want, blackmailing and bullying parents and others with ever more violent and noisy tantrums. Hence Trump’s threats of sanctions and tariffs, which are precisely the actions of a spoilt child. He finds issuing sanctions and tariffs ‘liberating’. For a spoilt child, revenge is indeed liberating.

The Weak Parent

If the parent is weak, then he will receive absolutely no respect and be subject to spectacular rudeness, tyranny and slander from the spoilt child. The spoilt brat demands total loyalty and total personal obedience because of his sense of entitlement and enablement. After all, he is the centre of the universe and must always be at the centre of attention, including at the centre of media attention. In other words, they demand exclusivity: ‘I am not like others, I am special and superior’. In the Trump case, this is clear, in the case of the other also, as he controlled ‘an exclusive church’. Jealousy rules these self-centred individuals and they feel obliged to try and destroy any possible rivals.

The Strong Parent

However, if the parent is strong and stands up to the emotional blackmail of the spoilt brat, the latter’s threats will turn into empty bluffs, his egomaniac bubble will burst. For the power of narcissists is only the power given to them by those who fawn on them and call them ‘Daddy’ or ‘Master’. Without the submissive fawning of the weak, they have nothing. Spoilt brats are extremely surprised and hurt when others refuse to fawn on them, to flatter their delusions, incompetence and ignorance, and turn away from them as a matter of conscience and integrity. ‘Conscience and integrity’ are words which spoilt brats do not understand. The spoilt brats’ surprise comes from the fact that they think that they are the centre of interest and that therefore there is no alternative to them.

Alternatives to the Spoilt Child Syndrome

Turning away from the spoilt brat is what Prime Minister Carney of Canada has done and now the Europeans too, as they kow-tow to China, a country which only a few weeks ago they were spitting at. There are alternatives. In our case, ‘the Pope’ (which is what his nickname in Europe is, since he proclaims his infallibility) did not think that there are other Orthodox Churches, far greater and far more powerful than his minute cultish sect of 19 little groups which he rules. Normal people walk away from spoilt brat bullying. Only the weak and sycophantic, like those whom Trump and the other one have surrounded themselves with, remain.

Backing Down

When Trump, or the other one, see people standing up to them, they first react badly and escalate against those who have resisted them, accusing them of ‘betrayal’ or ‘conspiring against them personally’. How can anyone resist them? They are always right and so refuse to accept that they have been mistaken. For that reason they can never take responsibility for their crass errors. There are no conspiracies against the Trumpians, just masses of people who have seen through their nonsense at the same time. Indeed, if you refuse to be bullied, blackmailed, intimidated and ignore their personal threats, they will back down, suddenly forgetting the claims they made and what they did yesterday.

Violence and Selective Amnesia

Their ‘amnesia’ includes forgetting their threats of physical violence towards other far more senior to them who have protected those they persecuted. And their behaviour then easily becomes thuggish, gangsterish, like that of mafiosi. This amnesia is not dementia, it is pathological denial – ‘it never happened’, ‘I never said that’, ‘you misunderstood me’. In their denial, they invent false narratives to justify their lies and refusal to take responsibility for them. Thus, Trump invents phone-calls with world leaders and invents peace ‘agreements’ or simply conversations which never took place. Only the foolish believe their lies. Sadly, there are foolish people who believe both the Great Dictator and the little one.

History Remembers

Whatever their denials of their lies and slanders, the rest of the world remembers them only too well. History does not forget. These narcissistic spoilt children always bully and betray and then are surprised when nobody trusts them any more. All they do is hasten the development of rivals, which soon become much more powerful than they are. This is how recent US Presidents have created a profound alliance between Russia, China and Iran, speeded up BRICS and the alternative to the dollar. In the Church context, his self-destructive persecutions of the faithful accelerate the development of other Churches, thus destroying his own tiny church.

Afterword

The consequences of spoilt child syndrome are always self-destructive. Thus, Trump is literally destroying the USA, both its industry, and in the ignoring of the Congress and Senate, and in the use of his murderous Gestapo ICE police. He does not want to ‘make America great again’ (the word ‘again’ is an admission that America is no longer great), he wants to make Trump great again. Similarly, in the other case, he is destroying church life and discrediting in ignominy his little group, which through his incompetence he is reducing to a weird sect. Elsewhere it is very troubled by homosexuality and pedophilia.

 

 

What Happens to Church Life When People Renounce the Living God?

Mercilessly exiling any bishop who displeased him and spreading Arianism, the Emperor Valens began persecuting in Cappadocia. His prefect Modestus went to St Basil and threatened to confiscate his property, to banish or beat him and even to kill him. St Basil staunchly rejected his blandishments to betray the Faith and his threats to punish him as a criminal, answering, ‘Death would be a kindness to me, for it will bring me all the sooner to God, for Whom I live and labour and to Whom I hasten’. The official was stunned by his answer. ‘No one has ever spoken with such boldness to me’, he said. The saint replied: ‘Perhaps that is because you have never spoken to a bishop before’.

Introduction: The Definition of the Church

The Church is the Risen Body of Christ, radiated by the Holy Spirit, that is, it is Divino-human. However, if a part of the Church is taken over by men, it loses its Divinity. Thus, it becomes a mere human organisation, a corporation, commercial, political or ethnic, or a sect and cult. And as it is no longer the Risen Body of Christ, it is at once subject to corruption, like a human body rotting and decaying in the grave. This means that its four theological defining signs are renounced. Those signs are, as we confess in the Creed, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. They mean:

The Church is One in Faith, whatever the outward administrative divisions. Whenever any group of human-beings changes the Creed or substitutes human values for Oneness of Faith, they fall away from the Unity of the Church.

The Church is Holy, in other words, the Church alone produces saints. When part of the Church persecutes saints or stops producing them, it is no longer the Church, it has fallen away from the Church and is spiritually impaired.

The Church is Catholic. This much misunderstood word means that, whatever ritual, outward or administrative variations, the Church always confesses the same inward Faith in all places and at all times.

The Church is Apostolic. This means that the history of the Church goes back directly to the apostles who, obeying the Holy Spirit at the Council of Jerusalem in 33 AD, began to organise the Church on earth.

From Church to Corporation, Ideology, Sect and Cult 

It is very sad to see part of the Church, however small, abandon these four qualities and thus become a sect and cult. This is especially so when you have dedicated decades to fighting against sectarianism and helping to implant the signs of the Church firmly (as we had thought) into the part that had been threatened by evil.

We can see that a part of the Church has renounced this Churchliness, when it ceases to be One and divides into many sects, each differing in the confession of the Faith and warring in hatred against one another. There is only one solution in this situation and that is flee to the uncontaminated Church which is in communion with all. Communion with all Orthodox is the guarantee of Unity.

We can see that a part has renounced Churchliness, when it ceases to be Holy, that is, when it ceases to produce saints and persecutes those who pursue Holiness. For example, there is a former part of the Church that finally produced its only saint 60 years ago, first having suspended him and put him on trial. We speak of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe (+ 1966).

We can see that a part has renounced Churchliness, when it ceases to be Catholic, part of the Catholic whole, and cuts off communion with other members of the Church. This is because its members declare like the pharisees their exclusiveness and superiority, that only they obey the canons and possess the truth.

We can see that a part has renounced Churchliness, when it ceases to be Apostolic, abandoning the practices of the apostles and inventing novel teachings, which are against the Creed, for example, rebaptising deluded Orthodox.

Church Life Degenerates as Sectarianism Takes Over

Once Love, which is the only message of Christ, the Head of the Church, is replaced by some secular ideology, for example, a commercial, political or ethnic ideology, Church life degenerates into purely secular modes of life. Thus, only careerists are left among the clergy and they bear no spiritual fruit, as they are opportunists. They are ‘flexible’ and will swim with the tide in return for tinsel awards. These careerists are used to ‘do the dirty work’, such as covering up the scandals, which occur at the decline and fall of all human organisations. The careerists are totally obedient to the heads of the totalitarian sect, for the heads insist on total and slavish obedience to themselves, as they have no spiritual or moral authority. And when they justify what they did wrong, ‘I was only following orders’, say the careerists. But that is too late.

At this point Church life is taken over by love of money. Those who have money, whether laypeople or clergy, take control and impose their perversions. All who do not ‘pay up’ are abused, bullied, intimidated, humiliated and slandered by the clerical extortioner. Money must belong to him and his total control.

Next come attempts at property grabs. All those who have built or restored Church properties, sacrificing themselves and their own money and time selflessly and resisting what is in fact attempted theft, are abused, bullied, intimidated, humiliated and slandered by the clerical extortioner. Property must belong to him and his total control.

Finally come the sexual perversions, homosexuality and pedophilia. These cases are duly covered up by the amoral careerists. See:

https://pokrovtruth.substack.com/p/explosive-new-audio-further-implicates

At this point, Love is replaced by their hatred, which becomes pathological because it is the end. The former part of the Church is controlled by the pathologically sick and has become a sect and cult.

Conclusion

It may sound obvious or naïve, but it is always best to make sure that candidates for the priesthood and the episcopate are both psychologically normal and are actually Christians, before ordaining and consecrating them. Not Christians in words (that can be forged), but in deeds. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’.

 

 

 

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

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

The Three Non-Russian Ethnic Divisions

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

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

The Three Russian Political Divisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Keeping to the Golden Mean: Avoiding both New Calendarism and Old Calendarism

Last week the Greek Patriarch once again compromised himself with the Pope of Rome, this time in Muslim Turkey. Many have been shocked by his ecumenism. It seems strange, since this Greek Patriarch has been doing such things for decades. And he is not the first Greek Patriarch to do such things. Many fail to understand that he has once again compromised only himself, not the Church. The Church is not some member of the clergy, a mere individual, whatever his title. Our salvation comes only through Divine Mercy following our repentance for our own sins, not through trying to save someone else. Only Christ saves.

Just because one of the Twelve was called Judas Iscariot, we do not reject the Eleven. Christ did not do so. Just because one of the apples in the basket is bad, we do not throw away all the others. To do so is puritanism, phariseeism, the heresy of the Donatists. As I remarked to a parishioner, at the Dread Last Judgement we shall have to answer for our own sins, not for the personal sins of someone else’s Patriarch. And even if he were our Patriarch, his personal sins would engage only himself, not us.

Here is the error of those who are scandalised by the deeds of such a Patriarch and join the old calendarists. Through not wishing to be in theoretical communion with such a Patriarch, they then put themselves out of actual communion with the whole Church! The old calendarists are not Orthodox, as they claim to be, since they are not in communion with the Orthodox Church, but only with a tiny sect, made up mostly of neophytes who are not rooted and grounded in the Faith.

Once again, the old calendarist group in question consists of members of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlTaXUfyL6U&ntb=1&msockid=c33b6ec0ce1e11f0b05ac565ade6baa5).

That small group which has been spawning and feeding multiple old calendarist groups ever since 1986. In 2007 the campaign, in which we played an active part, to reunite ROCOR, especially in the USA, with the Mother-Church in Moscow, so that it would never again entertain the temptation of falling away from the Orthodox mainstream, seemed to be successful. All went well for the first ten years after 2007 until about 2017. Then sectarian elements in the USA, basically Russian old calendarists, took over ROCOR.

Then ROCOR soon began to fall out of communion from the rest of the Church, most notably in December 2021 under pressure from a former old calendarist priest, from another part of the Russian Orthodox Church! To quote the Book of Proverbs and the Second Epistle of the Apostle Peter, the dog returned to its vomit. When this became known, six parishes, twelve clergy and some 5,000 people, well over half of the ROCOR Diocese in England, warned the governing body of ROCOR in New York. However, that body, the American Synod, backed the schism. Thus we left the newly schismatic ROCOR, so that we would be able to remain in communion with the mainstream, the Church of God.

The only confusing matter here is that the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow itself did not take any action against the uncanonical and schismatic actions of ROCOR. For ROCOR, by the Act of Canonical Communion signed by ROCOR in 2007 (I was present), was supposed to be in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. This was why in 2006 my friend, Fr Alexander Lebedev, had visited the tiny old calendarist groups in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania to make it clear to them that no part of ROCOR was any longer in communion with them (our Western European part of ROCOR had never been in communion with them anyway).

It has been suggested that the inconsistent policy of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow in this matter was connected with political affairs connected with the Ukraine. Once the military operations in the Ukraine have been concluded, we can only hope that Moscow will discipline ROCOR and bring it to obey the canons. However, much of ROCOR will refuse to do this and break away from the Church into full-blown old calendarist schism.

 

On the Present Splits in ROCOR

Introduction: The Historic Splits in the Russian Emigration

After the so-called ‘Russian Revolution’, or rather place coup d’etat, in 1917, the Russian Church in the Emigration split into three groups. These splits were purely political and based on differing attitudes to the Soviet State. However, once the Soviet Union had fallen in 1991, there was no longer any reason for those splits, except for inertia, the ‘enemy deprivation syndrome’, as it is called, the need to be ‘against’ anyone who resists global Western control (‘Globalism’). This is a phenomenon throughout the Western political elite, but also among westernised Russians. It resulted in their bloody and failed invasions of the Muslim world and in the present tragic conflict in Kiev. The latter has been used as a failed puppet and proxy to try and destroy the Russian Federation, breaking it into colonisable pieces, ready to be asset-stripped by Western mining and oil corporations, as it was in the 1990s.

The absurdity of these continuing Russian Church splits became especially obvious after the Jubilee Council in Moscow in the Year 2000, when the Church in Moscow at last openly condemned its former co-operation with the atheist State (‘Sergianism’), condemned ecumenist syncretism (‘Nikodimism’), and began the canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including that of the Imperial Family. (The number canonised is now over 30,000, and the process is continuing). Although only 57% of the small Russian émigré group in Paris returned to Moscow as late as 2018, 95% of the much larger ROCOR émigré group had formally returned in 2007. However, that was not the end of the ROCOR saga – the return was for many only formal. Since 2017, after ten years of relative stability since 2007, its bishops and 300 or so parishes, mainly very small, between 10 and 40 people in number, have been splintering into three groups.

Fragment One: The Vitalyites

We have named the first extreme after the ROCOR Metropolitan Vitaly (Ustinov) (1910-2006). He was the last pre-Revolutionary born ROCOR Metropolitan and a ferocious opponent of the Moscow Patriarchate. After agreeing to unity with Moscow in 2007, those in this extreme in fact ‘played’ the Moscow Patriarchate. Although they had signed up to unity in 2007, they simply used this canonical unity obtained for appearances. Behind the screen of canonical unity, they continued their uncanonical acts. Thus, though not concelebrating with Moscow, they can claim ‘to be in communion’ with Moscow and are therefore ‘canonical’. Though they kept a low profile at first, this became clear from 2017 on and their palace coup against the late Metr Hilarion (Kapral), whose documents they autopenned with impunity.

Composed largely of convert bishops and made up of crazy converts and CIA operatives, from 2017 on the Vitalyites, open fans of Trump, began to form yet another ‘One True Church’. They claimed to be ‘more Russian than the Russians’, (real Russians do not have to pretend) and worked to form yet another old calendarist-type, apocalyptic sect, just like the 5% who had refused to sign up to unity and left ROCOR in 2007 and immediately split into four tiny, warring groups. Vitalyite Orthodoxy is that of the ghetto and the museum and refuses to live in the real world, preferring a self-justifying, US theme-park ideal of ‘Holy Rus’. However, the present Vitalyites are unlike those far less subtle and ignorant groups who refused to sign up in 2007 and left ROCOR then, this group remained to sabotage ROCOR from inside through intrigue and deceit.

Thus, as soon as he had signed the Act of Canonical Communion in May 2007, which he had planned, the leader of this group was welcomed back from Moscow by the local Moscow Archbishop, who rejoiced and commented that ‘now we can do everything together’. That representative was shocked to hear the answer: ‘No, nothing has changed, we are not together’. This group displays the same harsh and sectarian fanaticism and cultish and judgemental phariseeism as those who had left in 2007, but works to corrupt and sectarianise the Church from inside, thinking they have outsmarted isolated Moscow, which is desperate for good PR.

These mainly Western converts display hatred for the present Russian Federation, its President, and those nostalgic for Stalin. They foolishly (or are they paid by the CIA for this stance?) also support Western propaganda efforts which call on Russian troops to leave the liberated Russian territories in the Ukraine, which had been genocided by the Kiev regime. In its hostility to the Russian Federation, this basically anti-Russian group is no different to the other Vitalyites who left ROCOR in 2007 and created similar apocalyptic ‘One True Church’ sects and rebaptise others, including Orthodox. They maintain that they are ‘the only canonical Orthodox in the world!’ This reveals their underlying, schismatic, Calvinist and Lutheran, mentality. This is not theology, it is pathology.

Fragment Two: The Neo-Sergianists

The second extreme, which is the one deliberately left in power by the bribing and flattering Vitalyites, is composed of Neo-Sergianists. They are named after Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow (1867-1944), who became Patriarch of the Russian Church for a few brief months at the end of his life by compromising with the militant atheists, receiving money and power in return. Although these ROCOR Neo-Sergianists mainly live in the USA, their view is that of Russian Federation loyalists and they have adopted the same Neo-Sergianist attitudes to wealth and centralising power as the worst elements in today’s Moscow Patriarchate. And they hold exactly the same centralist, nationalist, militarist, ritualist and clericalist attitudes which they had previously condemned, as does Moscow.

The temptations were too great for them and they succumbed. There is little spiritual and pastoral here, but, as in Moscow, much that is political. Their harsh censorship is exactly mirrored in Moscow, where, to the scandal of the faithful, the intellectuals, liberals, ecumenists and homosexuals have just censored one of the most popular akathists to the martyred Tsar. (They hate those loyal to the Tsar). The Budapest and other scandals have not yet brought them to sobriety and understanding, nor have the appalling scandals in ROCOR. Thus, Moscow is losing all Non-Russian Orthodox, in the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics, Belarus, Central Asia and Orthodox throughout the Diaspora, just as ROCOR is losing its Orthodox too – see below.

The Orthodox or Tikhonites

Finally, there are the rest of us, the Orthodox, who resist both extremist political factions, the Vitalyites and the Sergianists. We are also called Tikhonites. Unable to agree to uncanonical ROCOR schism, sect and self-isolation, some 10% of us former ROCOR members, all Tikhonites, have already joined other Local Churches, that is, we have joined the mainstream. However, most of the Tikhonite clergy and people, even if besieged by the Vitalyite and Neo-Sergianist bishops (the two sides of exactly the same coin – extremes always meet and collude), have so far been able to remain in ROCOR. Nevertheless, their situation is becoming more and more difficult, as all five remaining Tikhonite bishops have been ‘retired’ and the last active semi-Tikhonite (though he was coloured by Neo-Sergianism too), Archbishop Peter of Chicago, passed away.

We are called Tikhonites because we are devoted to the Russian-born American citizen, missionary to Alaska, and saint, Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow (+ 1925), previously Bishop of San Francisco and later of New York. He prophesied: ‘The night will come soon, dark and long’. Indeed, it has been. Following his arrival in New York from Le Havre in December 1898, the then Bp Tikhon gathered together Russians, Ukrainians, Carpatho-Russians, Greeks, Antiochians and Serbs and created Orthodox unity in North America, before going on to become Patriarch of Moscow and a saint. It is no surprise that the present leader of the international ‘Orthodox Church in America’ is also called Metr Tikhon. We Tikhonites also much venerate the international St John (Maximovich) (+ 1966), who was also slandered, suspended and put on trial by the then ROCOR episcopate.

We Orthodox, or Tikhonites, know that the post-1917 Russian Emigration, like the Soviet Union itself, has died out and that, living in Western countries and in post-Communist times, there is no reason for us to be separated from other Local Churches. It is our destiny to work together with other Orthodox, contributing our specific liturgical identity and our devotion to the martyred Tsar and all the other New Martyrs and Confessors. As regards the tragic conflict in the Ukraine, we are not naïve and have fully understood that this a geopolitical conflict between the aggressive and greedy atheist West and the Russian State. It has nothing to do with the Ukraine as such. That is just the battlefield. We are horrified by pictures of clergy blessing weapons of war, on both sides.

As regards President Putin, we know that he is a powerful and admired Russian nationalist politician, a very cautious lawyer and a diplomat. But clearly he is not at all our long-awaited Tsar. As the contemporary Russian historian, Peter Multatuli, great-grandson of a New Martyr faithful to the Tsar, has put it: The great mission was given to us, not by rebellious human desire, but by the will of God. Our mission has nothing to do with….so-called ‘Russian nationalism’. Our mission is the rebirth of Russian Civilisation, in which all nationalities who wish so are united for life in God and with God, in the world of Goodness and Justice, in which we can stand up to the atheistic and anti-human Western ‘New Order’, whose aim is to annihilate man as God’s creation.

France, 25 October 2025

 

Q and A: 7 September-7 October 2025

Contemporary Life

Q: What do you think of the assassination of Charlie Kirk?

A: To tell you the truth, I had never heard of Mr Kirk until he had been assassinated, apparently by Ukrainian terrorists, since he was on their death-list.

Of course, it is appalling that anyone can be assassinated, though it happens every day. Mr Trump has assassinated Iranians with pleasure, and supports the assassinations of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and tens of thousands of Russians every year.

I think this assassination typifies this intolerance which the whole Western world is now subject to, both in the US and Western Europe. In the US it is cowboy gun violence, here it is ‘cancelling’ people, creating in ex-Catholic Europe a kind of New Inquisition of censorship, just as frightening as that of the Middle Ages, or else, in ex-Protestant Europe, creating witch-hunts of those who tell the truth.

The Western world has become the new Soviet Union, as had been predicted for over 30 years. It hates the Truth. This hatred of the Truth can only be, as Christ says, because ‘the Truth will set you free’. That is why any tyranny hates the Truth.  People say: ‘I don’t agree with you, therefore I can murder you or ‘cancel’ you’.

Some people want to make Mr Kirk into a martyr. You can only be a martyr if you die for Christ. That is not Mr Kirk’s case. As far as I know, he was an Evangelical, with all the deviations that that entails. Read the lives of the saints rather than spend hours youtubing Mr Kirk. There is a big difference. The martyrs showed humility, patience and the joyful readiness to die for their Faith. People should not be bringing politics, either left-wing or right-wing, into the Church. Our belief is the Gospel, the words of Christ.

Q: What is your view of Jordan Peterson? And Paul Kingsnorth?

A: I don’t know much about Jordan Peterson, but as far as I can see he is an excellent psychologist, a thorough observer of human nature and makes many good suggestions and gives good advice to young people. It is a pity that he has not formally become a Christian and so remains an outsider.

Paul Kingsnorth belongs to the Romanian Orthodox Church, like us. Clearly, he is new to the Faith and says many of the things that recent converts say (I can remember thinking and saying the same things fifty years ago). However, because he is a writer and a speaker, he has a gift and can explain his approach to the Faith to those outside the Church. So he is a very good missionary and avoids excesses, like some misguided converts.

Q: What happens to those who get rebaptised?

A: I know one young man, who had never been baptised and then was baptised into the Orthodox Church. Unsatisfied, despite the warning words of the Creed, he then got rebaptised by an ‘Orthodox’ sect. Six months later he got rebaptised by yet another ‘Orthodox’ sect (total worldwide membership – six). Two years on, he now never goes to church. It is clear that his approach to baptism was ‘magical’, and the need to get baptised came from his pathological state, not from any spiritual reason. In fact, the priest who baptised him the first time, warned him that if he got rebaptised, he would lapse from the Church. So it always is.

Q: What do you think of the fact that the new Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman?

A: It is nothing to do with us. We have never been members of that religious group and, like 95% of English people, know little about it. All we can see is that it was founded by the murderous Henry VIII, so he could give himself a divorce, and that today it is an overpaid woke laughing-stock. What I do know and care about is that that there are Orthodox bishops who are not women, but who are either financially corrupt, or else sexual perverts, who form ‘lavender mafias’, or else they are both.

Q: Would you take part in anti-abortion marches?

A: I am of course opposed to abortion, as are all Orthodox Christians. Ten years ago, we had a Russian ROCOR parishioner who wanted to abort a child – she already had two children. Although it took some effort, I persuaded her to keep the child and the Church gave her £2,000 to help her with costs. Today she has a lovely little girl, now ten years old, and her parents are very happy with their decision. This is being anti-abortion practically, and not demonstrating politically in the street.

That only has negative effects, which is why I am opposed to political activism. First of all, it is a waste of time and has no effect. Secondly, it is part of a political ideology (right-wing in this case), encouraged by some clerics who are sexual perverts. Thirdly, it seems to be prevalent among converts from Catholicism and Protestantism. When not naïve, they can at times be immature, self-admiring, self-satisfied, self-important, self-righteous, middle-class, priggish, who want to advertise themselves. Others are sometimes closet homosexuals, misogynists because they are unhappy alone, and can be extremist and hateful. I would not encourage them.

Q: I have heard the statement that ‘the similarity between the bodies of apes and human-beings shows that they have a common ancestor’. What would you reply?

A: The similarity between the human body and the bodies of most animals, two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth, four limbs and similar internal organs, proves only that we were all made by the same God.

Church Life

Q: Are there different types of priest?

A: Most definitely. There are three types of priest. The first is the careerist, an ‘apparatchik’, as the Russians call him, they are the yesmen who climb the rungs of the clerical ladder and are desperate for awards. The second type are kindly and moderate, good and popular priests.

Finally, there is the third type, those who are touched by the Holy Spirit and the spirit of prophecy. It is best not to touch them and try and make them fit into some religious system or careerism. You cannot control them. The Holy Spirit does not fit into manmade religious systems. Bishops rise and fall according to how they treat such priests.

Such was the case with St John of Kronstadt, who did not receive any priestly awards for decades and only became rector of his huge church after forty years because of the jealousy of his bureaucrat-metropolitan! Such was the case also with the future St John of Shanghai, who was also persecuted by similar bishops. There are ignorant bishops who persecute and despise the saints. We know who they are.

Q: Which Local Church is going to be at the root of founding the new Autocephalous Church of Western Europe?

A: Between 1985 and 1988, I had briefly thought that Constantinople could perhaps do it, as the Russian Church was still divided and enslaved to the Communist regime. Then, in summer 1988, I clearly saw official Greek nationalism and corruption.

After 2003 and the words of Patriarch Alexei II promising such a new Local Church – and he grew up in Estonia – I thought it would be the Russian Church that could do it. After many doubts and setbacks after 2016 especially, by 2021 I saw that this was definitively not going to happen, as the Russian Church had fallen into Non-Christian centralism with its virulent nationalism and ghetto mentality, clearly refusing to give any other nationality autocephaly.

The Russian Church clearly and openly turned its back on Orthodox England and Orthodox Europe, precisely on 4 February 2022. That was a historic moment. Now it is isolated and is losing the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltics, as well as the Diaspora, all because of its centralist refusal to grant anyone autocephaly, which is its refusal for nationalist reasons to do missionary work. It is the path it has chosen, to its loss.

Today we have a situation where, with rare exceptions, the Greek Church is only for Greeks, the Russian only for Russians, the Serbian only for Serbs, the tiny numbers of Bulgarians and Georgians are also nationally exclusive, Antioch is only for the tiny numbers of disappointed Anglicans, Protestants and Evangelicals, and the new ROCOR is only for the few pathological convert fanatics. Only the Romanians are left.

I look back with gratitude to the moment when all our parishes were forced to join the Romanian Church by the ROCOR schism (and real schisms are always preceded by heresy, which in their case was the Donatism of the past. You should never return to your first errors, but learn from them). That was a time above all of liberation and relief, not of abandonment and treachery. Our local Archbishop, who is Moldovan, has as his main interest precisely Autocephaly, the theme of his doctorate. This is Providence. In the future, Russians will look back on this moment with horrified regret at their historic error.

Britain

Q: Iranians call the USA ‘the Great Satan’ and England ‘the Little Satan’. What would you say about that?

A: I would make a correction: ‘The Little Satan’ is not England, but Norman England, which is usually called ‘Britain’.

Q: Should Britain have taken part in World War One?

A: Definitely not! Though too late, that huge error was made. I blame Sir Edward Grey for his warmongering and secret promises. If it had not been done, we may not have seen either Hitler or Stalin, let alone all the rest.

Q: Should we pay other countries compensation for the crimes of the British Empire?

A: Who is we? We, the people, never had any idea what was being done abroad by the elites. It is only today when the old, load-bearing, national propaganda myths are collapsing that the people are discovering to their horror what had been done for centuries behind their backs. The asset-stripping both inside the country and abroad were acts of London merchants/businessmen soon after the Reformation. That asset-stripping was reinforced after the merchants took full power through Cromwell and the Dutch and German rulers whom they brought in after Cromwell. The only case for compensation that can be made is for the descendants of those elites to be forced to pay some sort of compensation, provided that they are still benefiting from the criminal acts of their ancestors.

Chisinau, 7 October 2025

 

Winner Takes All: The Self-Destruction of the Church of the Russian Emigration

In the years following the so-called Russian Revolution in 1917, the Church of the resulting Russian Emigration split into three parts. A few, very few, remained under the Church centred in Moscow, which eventually became known as the Moscow Patriarchate. Most of the emigres considered that that was a ‘Soviet Church’, a Communist-controlled organisation and, since members of their families had died fighting against Communism and they had been exiled by it, they would have nothing to do with its Church. This vast majority of emigres themselves split into two, a smaller group and a larger group.

The smaller group, centred at its Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and existing mainly in France, was founded and led by Saint Petersburg aristocrats who had overthrown the Tsar in order to introduce a pro-Western regime, either a Constitutional Monarchy or else a masonic Republic. The larger group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), centred at first in Germany and then in New York, and with parishes above all in Germany, the Americas and Australia, was founded and led by emigres who, whatever their politics, were united by a profound hatred of Communists, who had stolen their land and wealth.

Obviously, now 108 years on after 1917, both groups are dying out, even though the New York group was much reinforced by the anti-Communist Russian emigration of 1945. As a result, the last pre-Revolutionary Archbishop of the Paris group died in 1981, and the last pre-Revolutionary Metropolitan of the reinforced New York group was deposed by his fellow-bishops in 2001 and died in 2006. Since then both groups have staggered on, declining in every way.

Both groups have since then much contracted, largely having failed to pass on the Faith to the descendants of the emigres, who are now in their fifth generation. Those born in the Diaspora have overwhelmingly been assimilated and lost all their Russian heritage. All that has survived is the political liberalism of the Paris group and the political conservatism (sometimes extreme conservatism) of the New York group. In other words, despite their radical contraction and the radical changes in their composition, their political identities have survived. However, their spiritual identity has been greatly weakened.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, these political identities have largely become irrelevant, mere history. Moreover, both the ageing and ever-smaller groups were dwarfed by the post-1991 emigration of young people from the former Soviet Union, who automatically became part of the much-expanded Moscow Patriarchate. These young people found the two old émigré groups to be museum pieces and so irrelevant. As a result, both émigré groups had to join the Moscow Patriarchate, though keeping a measure of internal independence.

Today, both groups are being dismantled, or rather, are dismantling themselves, as both suffer from the same suicidal disease: a lack of bishops who know the canonical Russian Tradition and, as a result of this total lack of leadership and Christian example, a lack of money. The flock will not follow wolves. For example, after 1917 both groups built some churches, or much more often, converted buildings for Orthodox use, the majority of them very small, built for fewer than a hundred parishioners. However, they also inherited some splendid pre-Revolutionary church buildings, such as:

In Italy the two churches in Florence and San Remo, currently under ROCOR, but formerly under the Paris Archdiocese.

In Paris the Cathedral of the Paris Archdiocese.

In France the ruinous churches in Cannes, Biarritz and Pau. Although it is forbidden to enter the Cannes church, as it is too dangerous, the increasingly aggressive and increasingly small and impoverished ROCOR is paradoxically engaged in a court action against its own Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, in order to obtain property rights over this ruin.

In Switzerland the ROCOR churches in Geneva, Lausanne and Vevey.

In Germany, several ROCOR churches, such as those in Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Baden-Baden.

The two ROCOR convents in Jerusalem.

Most of these churches suffer from dwindling congregations and so dwindling income. Some are going to fall down, if they do not soon receive tens of millions of euros for repair and restoration. Clearly, in order to avoid this, only direct transfers of the buildings to the cash-rich Moscow Patriarchate can, as happened to the two former Paris Archdiocese churches in Nice and the former ROCOR church in Bari in Italy, solve the problem. In the matter of restoring historic buildings, the Moscow Patriarchate will be much aided by the Russian State, which is keen to recover pre-Revolutionary Russian historic monuments, even if they are in a ruinous state.

In this long game of chess between the 99%, the very large Mother-Church, and the 1%, the two tiny émigré fragments, there can only be one winner, the Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate. It will take it all. As we said, this has already taken place in Nice and Bari, but also in Indonesia, where in 2016 ROCOR voluntarily handed over all its sixteen mission parishes to the Moscow Patriarchate, admitting that it could not cope with them. Once one of the last old, Russian-speaking ROCOR bishops has left the stage, many of the churches in Germany will certainly transfer to the Moscow Patriarchate, as their clergy and people come almost all from the ex-Soviet Union.

As one Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan told me recently: ‘Their churches are like ripe fruit hanging from a tree which will fall into our hands’. In other words, the Patriarchate does not have to do anything, except to wait patiently for the Church of the Emigration to dismantle itself, as the Emigration self-destructs after the deaths of educated, Russian-speaking bishops, who are faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and not to weird old calendarist or new calendarist pseudo-theologies, or rather fantasies.

We have descended a long, long way from the hopes expressed by the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexei II in 2003 (yes, already nearly a generation ago!) that the Western European Metropolia of the Moscow Patriarchate would become the foundation of a future Western European Local Church. That is now a mere daydream to be forgotten in the cold light of reality, the incompetence, corruption and immorality of various bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate, the liberalism of a large minority in the Paris Archdiocese, who then left it, and the schismatic and sectarian isolation of the ROCOR bishops, who still have not left it and officially founded some weird pseudo-Russian old calendarist sect, which is what they are.

Anyone has the right to leave a Church which has broken communion with another Church. That is what was done when ROCOR broke communion with part of the Moscow Patriarchate. For anyone and everyone can leave a group which enters into schism. The floodgates are opened. Moscow went to the casino, bet all its money on the wrong number and the wheel has spun and chosen another. Russia has always been betrayed by the traitors of the fifth column. In the early 17th century, boyars betrayed it to the Poles, 1917 aristocrat-traitors destroyed the Russian Empire, in 1991 oligarch-traitors destroyed the Soviet Union, and today wealthy traitors have been allowed to undermine the Russian Church.

The results are the anti-Ukrainian, anti-Moldovan and anti-English actions of Moscow and its increasing centralisation, ritualisation, nationalisation and militarisation, as it has cut itself off from communion with other Local Churches. To return to even the situation of hope of 2003 will take decades. Just like the Patriarchate of Constantinople before it, Moscow has hit the ball into the court of others, who are busy constructing what Moscow failed to do. God gave Moscow an opportunity on a silver plate; it rejected it. Now it will have to deal with the suicidal consequences, exactly as we have been warning ever since 2003. The opportunity has been presented to others.

For the Orthodox Diaspora, does this matter? Probably not, because the policy of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Diaspora has increasingly become that of a nationalist ghetto. It lives in isolation from, and so is irrelevant to, the vast majority of Diaspora Orthodox, who are not Russian. The only hope is that the Moscow Patriarchate will cast off its present nationalist and racist isolationism, returning to communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church.

Only then will Moscow return to the glorious heritage of the two great Russian saints of the Diaspora, in the USA St Tikhon of New York and Moscow, and in Europe, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, the latter the greatest man of the Russian emigration. They did not listen to St John, they persecuted him, suspended him, put him on trial and have done exactly the same to his disciples. The price they are having to pay for that is already very heavy indeed. God is not mocked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Convert or Converted? The Psychodrama of the Unconverted

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long, and is kind; love envies not; love vaunts not itself, is not puffed up.

1 Cor 13, 1-4

Religious psychosis, my ‘magical Orthodox thinking’, inspired by my obsession with listening to pseudo-elders on the internet, destroyed my life…I was living in fantasies that allowed me to escape reality and totally neglect my real responsibilities because I was setting myself an impossibly high standard of Christian probity and constantly failing.

Letter from a convert in the USA

Foreword

The worst case of a convert I have come across was in 1997, a young woman who had spent twelve years as a nun living in a cave in a Greek Old Calendarist sect in Greece and had come to realise that she had wasted her life. The only parallel I know of is that of that scandalous convent in the Urals led by the now fortunately defrocked Sergei Romanov, and which I visited in 2018. Time and again I return to the same conclusion: Keep to the mainstream, where there are families and children and flee from those who boast that they are not in communion with others. The Orthodox Church is the Catholic Church, that is the Church of Catholicity, of Conciliarity, and not of a lack of communion and so sectarianism, where there is no Church, only psychological manipulation.

Converts and Converted

The Apostles were all converts. How Christ gathered them together is recalled in the Gospels, for example the callings of Andrew and Peter the fishermen and Matthew the tax-collector. Then in the Acts of the Apostles we read about Saul the Persecutor who became Paul the Apostle on the Road to Damascus. However, we never think of the Apostles as ‘converts.’ Why? For the simple reason that they were converted and so their status as ‘converts’ ceased – they had become Orthodox Christians, like the rest of us. Although we were all once ‘converts’, even when we were children, we were then converted. For to remain a ‘convert’ means to remain in an infantile state. Those who think of themselves as converts need to grow up, to become adults and cease the things of children.

Pathology and the Convert

And now we come to the tragedy of ‘converts’ in contemporary Orthodox Christian life, and not only in the Diaspora, understanding that there is no theology here, only psychology, and often pathology, the manipulation of the vulnerable. For many of them do not want to know about the reality of Orthodox life and the services in Orthodox parishes and Orthodox families and how we live. Having listened to various fantasists and misguided idealists on the internet, often they straightaway want to become monks, which is impossible because to be a monk, obedience is essential. But Orthodoxy as monastic life is not accessible to them. For that would be to run before learning to walk. And that means falling. We have to start at the beginning, not to start at the end.

Pride at the Root

This is pride and it is pride that always goes before the fall. The problem with such converts is that they have entirely missed the point. They may join the Church, but this is not the same as ‘becoming Orthodox’, that is, being converted. To ‘become Orthodox’ does not mean keeping certain external monastic observances, such as growing long hair and (if a man) a long beard, (if a woman, wearing floor-length skirts and covering her hair with what looks like a table-cloth), dressing in black or talking with exotic words and incessantly and very boringly about the Typicon, ritual regulations, the canons, ‘the Fathers,’ or individual clerics. All this is irrelevant and ordinary Orthodox parishioners do not do such things, it is boring. Just look at them! Love is the sign of Orthodoxy.

Love at the Root

The essence of Orthodox Christianity is to acquire love for God, for others as for oneself. All external observances and long and boring issues about clerical personalities are irrelevant. Otherwise. it is all ‘sounding brass or a clanging cymbal’, because they have no love, as the Apostle Paul wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. And tragically there are ‘converts’ who even after fifty and sixty years have remained ‘converts.’ This is because they have no love, for love is the fruit of maturity, which is what they do not have, precisely because they have remained ‘converts’, infantiles, for they have never become Orthodox Christians. As Fr Seraphim (Rose) quoted an elderly Russian woman saying about a ’convert’ some fifty years ago: ‘He is certainly Orthodox, but is he a Christian?’

Afterword

Indeed, this disease of ‘convertitis’ has nothing to do with Christianity. It is always characterised by negativity, hypercriticism and interference in the lives of others. This dissatisfaction with others (real Orthodox are dissatisfied only with themselves and are generous and indulgent towards others) always results in the abandonment of Orthodoxy and schism, even if it takes them 50 or 60 years. There have been many contemporary examples, in the Old Calendarist schisms, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian (ROCOR). The convert disease of ‘illusionment’ always ends up in disillusionment, which, by definition, can only come from ‘illusionment’, which is called in Greek ‘plani’, in Russian ‘prelest’, in Romanian ‘inselare’, and in Latin ‘illusio’. Such a waste of life.