Category Archives: Sects and Cults

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.

 

 

 

 

 

The Liberation, Demilitarisation and DeNazification of the Ukraine, the Russian Federation and the Émigré Church

Introduction: National Demons

Just like every person, so every country also has its demons. France has its absurd narcissistic vanity (Louis XIV, Napoleon, Mitterrand, Macron), Britain has its overweening delusional arrogance (Churchill, Thatcher), surrounded Germany has its crazed bouts of bipolarity (Kaiser Wilhem, Hitler), the USA has its freakish urge for global domination (Clinton and Biden), and Russia has its fits of suicide, heightened by the host of totalitarian demons of its great suicide from 1917 on, when even the name ‘Russia’ disappeared until Hitler restored it.

On the other hand, the Ukraine has its ever-grasping and outrageous sense of entitlement, heightened by the injustices of Soviet persecutions, especially of the territory Stalin stole from Poland, directed from Moscow from 1939 on. Tragically, these old demons of the post-Soviet and atheised Ukraine and of the post-Soviet and atheised Russian Federation brought the two countries to war with each other in 2014. That war worsened in February 2022, after the Western sponsors of the Kiev regime had refused peace talks for eight years.

The Atheist Tragedy in the Ukraine

The demons love and laugh at human bloodshed and suffering, which they create, and have especially been mocking fallen Orthodox since 1917, toying with the Church of God through the passions of certain bishops of various nationalities. The demons gloat at human misery and the despairing souls they capture as a result. And the demons continue to mock today. The conflict in the Ukraine is a geopolitical struggle which pits US-led Globalism, parasitically feeding off Ukrainian nationalism, against Russian-led Nationalism.

The latter treats all Non-Russians as second-class citizens. The conflict in the Ukraine is catastrophic, for it is a civil war, a war between former brothers. It was made possible because the mass of both Russians and Ukrainians have lost their faith, the result of the demons that entered the Russian Empire in 1917 and which have still not been exorcised. Real Orthodox Christians do not kill one another. Now the tragic conflict in the Ukraine is in its fourth, probably final, year. Over 1.2 million Ukrainian soldiers and 100,000 Russian soldiers are dead.

Communists and Nationalists

The three Russian aims were stated very clearly from the very outset, as the Liberation from Neo-Nazi Kiev of the purely Russian Donbass in eastern Ukraine (still not achieved after over three years, though this aim has had to be extended to other provinces), and the Demilitarisation and DeNazification of the Ukraine. After all, the war was caused by the categorical refusal of the Nazi Kiev puppet regime, installed by frightening violence in 2014 against the democratically-elected government, to allow the Federalisation of the multiethnic Ukraine.

Instead, the regime imposed a centralised NATO system, just like that of the Communists before it. They no longer call themselves Communists, but instead Nationalists, but spiritually those are still Communists. Clearly, as a result of that refusal to decentralise, the Ukraine would fragment and fall apart, as is always the result of Stalinist centralisation, whether in the Ukraine or in the Russian Federation. There the new militaristic and clericalist trend of erecting statues of Stalin is growing, a clear sign of its reviving nationalist centralisation.

The Atheist Tragedy in ROCOR

The situation in the Ukraine is mirrored in other Stalinist-style centralising organisations all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and even outside it, in, for example, in the Russian Church and even in its New-York based émigré fragment, the so-called Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). It is known as the American Synod, for today it is Russian only in history and name. In reality, its main language is American English, and its ideology is right-wing Protestant Americanism, a Disneyfied Russian Orthodox fairy-tale.

With large chunks of hellfire Lutheranism of the convert type thrown in, this ideology is appropriate for ‘the Republican Party at prayer’, but not for the Orthodox Church. The old ROCOR of Russian emigres has been substituted by the new ROCOR, a process which can be dated back to its internal coup d’etat, which took place approximately in 2017. In the case of the new ROCOR too, Orthodox aims should be Liberation, Demilitarisation and DeNazification. For like the Kiev regime, it too has replaced Faith with a political ideology.

Liberation in the USA and England

First of all, there must be liberation from the ‘Persecuting ROCOR’, the mentality of pharisaic sectarianisation, which led directly to its schism from the fullness of the Russian Church as well as from the rest of the Orthodox Church, and its rejection of the Local Orthodox Churches, which ended in a ghetto of self-isolation and the Donatist heresy of rebaptism. This we have seen in the USA, with the escape from ROCOR of Fr Alexander Belya, who is now in charge of a Vicariate of over twenty Slav clergy and parishes in the Greek Archdiocese.

That situation was mirrored in England with the planned escape of over 90% of the ROCOR diocese to the Romanian/Moldovan Orthodox Church, since well over three-quarters of its 5,000 parishioners were Romanians and Moldovans. It was there received without hesitation on 16 February 2022. The fake Russian nationalism of the new ROCOR (fake because it is in fact American!), its insatiable greed for money, its heresy of rebaptism, its hatred for all Orthodox of the Tradition and outright, shameless lies, define the new American ROCOR.

Liberation Elsewhere

There are also the many clergy and people who have left ROCOR in France and Germany, profoundly unhappy with the anti-Russian, American mentality of the new ROCOR. That unhappiness is almost certain to spread throughout the remaining ROCOR parishes in Western Europe over the next few years, as the clergy and people refuse to become Americans. Now there is also the sad case of Sister Vassa Larina, herself an American-Russian, but in Europe, who rejected the new arch-Republican American Synod, which she calls ‘disgraceful’.

However, rather than returning to the Tradition of the old ROCOR of her father (whom I knew well), she made the strange choice of a liberal ideology, leaving ROCOR for the schismatic Ukrainian nationalist sect, known as ‘The Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’ (OCU). Instead of simply letting her go to such liberals, whom she has always so admired as a liberal feminist academic, the American Synod punished her. In all these cases, it is freedom and respect for other opinions that are missing in the new ROCOR – just as it is in the former USSR.

Demilitarisation and Denazification

The best of the old ROCOR was always politically neutral, not partisan. Now we have ROCOR bishops who are openly anti-Russian, pro-NATO, or belong to the CIA or work for its anti-Orthodox front organisations. True, this process began in the 1960s with the then Fr George Grabbe, but he was a one-off. The new ROCOR explains the decision of the American Synod to get rid of all those of the Tradition, who knew the old Russian clergy and laity born before the Revolution or in the two first generations of the emigration between 1917 and 1967.

They are being replaced with new and idealistic converts, who do not know the Tradition, do not speak Russian, and have little to do with the realities, both positive and negative, of the Church inside Russia today. They can therefore be easily manipulated with fairy-tales and myths of ‘Holy Rus’. As for Nazification in ROCOR, that began in Germany in the 1930s and continued with its support of the Russian Nazis under Vlasov. The survivors of Stalin’s barbarism emigrated to the USA and South America, especially to Argentina, after 1945.

In the New ROCOR

However, they were opposed by the old pre-Revolutionary Western European ROCOR and the Chinese-Australian ROCOR, as well as the minority who had kept the authentic Orthodox Tradition in North America. After the Second World War Nazification was tempered to some extent, but from time to time its authoritarianism came to the fore again. Since the takeover of the old ROCOR by the American Synod in 2017, it has deliberately sent out its new convert-bishops to Australia and Western Europe to entirely dismantle the old ROCOR.

Thus, they tried to retire or force out faithful clergy and people. This substitution is now all but complete. Implementing schism from the Russian Orthodox Church, it has now begun rebaptising other Orthodox, denigrating other Local Churches and telling public and private lies about them, for ‘ROCOR is the only True Church’. This OneTrueChurch Protestantisation has made the American Synod into a sect, which refuses to concelebrate with other Orthodox, except in rare cases where it has self-interest to do so, to try and show that it is not a sect.

Conclusion: Waiting for Repentance

We will continue to pray for them and wait for their repentance, in the hope that they will return to the legacy of the old ROCOR of St John of Shanghai. Their ancestors suspended him and put him on trial, but like the Righteous Job he was in the end justified and glorified by God. Perhaps once this nightmare of the Ukraine is over, there will be great changes and reforms in the Russian Church, based on decentralisation, that is, deSovietisation. A Church which is opposed to LGBT, but which is filled with homosexual bishops is only hypocritical.

Moreover, the Russian Church operates inside a society undermined by abortion and divorce and, as a result, suffers from a demographic crisis. This cannot go on. Perhaps when it has at last dealt with its own deep problems, the Russian Church can draw back the oppressed half of ROCOR which still wants to be part of the wider Orthodox Church and world, and not be part of a hate-filled sect, which condemns all others. Then they will say with other Orthodox ‘Our Father’ and mean it, participating positively in the construction of new Local Churches.

 

High Noon and the Judgement of ROCOR

In 1976 in Oxford I met Lord Michael Ramsey, the by then retired Archbishop of Canterbury (+ 1988). I was impressed by him and his sense of tradition. He had both presence and knowledge. Therefore, in conversation I asked him what he thought of the then situation of the Orthodox Church. He answered that he found the Orthodox world torn by politically-motivated tensions.

These tensions were between the extremes of liberalism and conservatism, provoking either old calendarist or else political schisms. This happened to be exactly my own view, which I had developed over the five years I had been in direct contact with the Orthodox Church at that time. What impressed me was that he, a Non-Orthodox outsider, had also understood this.

In fact, he was voicing my destiny, my ‘High Noon’, which has been to fight against those extremes. In the last century, this meant the struggle against secularism, modernism, liberalism and ecumenist syncretism and in this century the struggle against the opposite extremism of so-called ‘traditionalism’, phariseeism, judgementalism and sectarian fanaticism.

The latter is nothing but primitive pride: ‘Only I am right, everyone else is wrong, therefore I am not in communion with you’. The reason for opposing these extremes is that we are called on to love God and love our neighbour. For the first extreme does not love God but idolises man in all his sin (humanism), but the second extreme does not love man and has no sense of justice.

The voices of the prophets tell us that we must avoid idolatry, but seek righteousness in life. This twofold struggle against the left and the right had to be led by mercy and truth. This was the sense of my speech at the All-Diaspora Russian Church Council in San Francisco in 2006. Here, as one of the ten speakers, I said (http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/atcouncil.htm):

Orthodoxy without Warm-Heartedness becomes a mere rite, rite-belief, an outward show; Tradition without Humility becomes hypocrisy and phariseeism, for only living the God-inspired Tradition brings humility; Independence without Compassion becomes haughty pride, sectarian Donatism, the condemnation of our unfree brothers.

Sadly, such words were heeded for only a few years. Within ten years, with the beloved Metropolitan Hilarion of the Church Outside Russia starting to suffer from dementia, a clique formed from those from the past as well as newcomers who had not been at the Council, intent on ‘saving the Church’, pushed him aside and took over. It was the end – unless the swamp can be drained.

The latest scandal of their ‘disgraceful Synod’ is that of Sister Vassa, the daughter of my old friend, the late Fr George Larin, who was a typical old school ROCOR priest (altar boy of St John of Shanghai) who would have had nothing to do with the present Stalinist nonsense. I disagree with Sister Vassa, that is not the point. You do not use the canons to punish for having different opinions to yourself!

For only repentance can overcome the scandals that have taken hold of that invalid ghetto since and it is unrecognised by the Orthodox world. As for us and all our parishes, we remain unbowed, for we followed our conscience, keeping the spiritual purity and canonicity of Holy Orthodoxy in the fullness of the Church, as Metropolitan Lavr ordained for us, and so keeping our integrity.

It will not be long before Moscow dissolves the American Synod, known as ‘ROCOR’. It is an international embarrassment, not just that they are ill-educated, but they actually profess the heresy of rebaptising Orthodox. Moscow has had enough. Rumours from episcopal sources in Moscow indicate that it is going to absorb those in ROCOR who support it and suspend the others.

The others can start their own Russian Old Calendarist Outside Russia (ROCOR) sect. We warned Moscow that it had to drain the ROCOR swamp. For years they did not listen and now they have a scandal that is far worse than it was before. Too bad for them. Meanwhile we go on in the mainstream, with our 14 bishops of four nationalities with our Autonomous Romanian Church of Western Europe.

 

 

Chanting not Singing: Nationalist Convert Pathology versus Mainstream Orthodox Christianity

‘Faith without love is fanaticism’.

From a Russian Prayerbook

‘The Greek Patriarch is possessed by demons, as for the Romanians, I don’t like them, the Moldovans I only half like and the Russians annoy me’.

A ROCOR bishop, 2021

Speaking as a politician, yesterday President Putin made some very generous comments about the late Pope Francis of Rome. Who is shocked by that? Certainly not mainstream Orthodox with our broad acceptance of other human-beings, even if we do not agree with their views. Non-sectarian Orthodoxy is that of all who accept the Orthodox Creed. Outside sects and cults, we in the mainstream respect others with their different experiences of life. We do not practise intolerance or dogmatise personal opinions about, for example, the late Pope of Rome, who, frankly, is nothing to do with us, though he was of interest to Roman Catholics and politicians. However, the extremists, who love the sect and the cult, who ‘chant, but do not sing’, are shocked. These are the people who for all practical purposes are out of communion with the mainstream, out of communion with the Orthodox Church, who, in reality, are not practising members of the Orthodox Church.

Centred in the USA, they spread their poison to lonely young men, ‘Orthobros’ and ‘incels’, via internet podcasts of such personalities as Jordan Peterson and Jay Dyer. These are the ‘Youtube Orthodox’, the theoretical Orthodox, who have never been inside an Orthodox church, but want to ‘become Orthodox’. I am contacted by several of them every month. They never appear. I never see them, because I tell them that they first have to come to church in order to join the Orthodox Church, let alone ‘become Orthodox’. The only exception was a very strange-looking young man, with a long beard and hair, dressed in black, with prayer beads around his wrist (the usual convert uniform), who informed me that he was so Orthodox that he ate glass. Literally. Apparently, he thought this was ‘ascetic’. After I told him to stop it, he never appeared again. In any case, he did not like our church, as it is full of families and children – definitely not for incels – and they all dressed normally and the men did not have beards.

The converts persecute those whose culture does not use American English, as they live in a US sociological ghetto or greenhouse, with an intolerant sectarian ideology. They dogmatise extreme opinions to the point of bigotry and the pharisaic condemnation of others. Visitors to their tiny churches and chapels are interrogated, betraying the innate Calvinism and Lutheranism of the converts. They promote the Victorian English of Hapgood, as they are more English than the English. We are reminded that the ancestors of these people were so intolerant that they had to leave England, and, arriving in the future USA, slaughtered the natives and witch-hunted each other. We do not want them back here in Europe, thank you! US Fascist colonialism and persecution, which says that we must change our language and culture. They, people, clergy and at least one narcissistic bishop among them, are in reality white supremacists, with profound hatred for real Orthodox, Russian, Greek, Romanian or any others.