Category Archives: Sects and Cults

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.

On the Third Anniversary of our Freedom from Persecution 2022-2025: The Thirteen Reasons Why We Took Canonical Refuge in the Romanian Orthodox Church after Nearly Fifty Years of Faithfulness to the Russian Orthodox Church

Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake (Matthew 5,11)

Foreword

Although the statement below concerns the 5,000 of us directly, it could also be used as part of a more general study in order to understand the process of how a Persecuted Church became a Persecuting Church, how an organism for Love became a narrow and judgemental sect which professed Hatred which enjoys trying to close churches. It is a psychiatric tragedy.

Some Recent History

https://roarch.org.uk/parishes-england/

The Romanian Orthodox Church is not much bothered by PR and websites. It updates its website once every ten years. For some reason, this cyberworld information is highly important to newcomers, whereas the well-circulated photographs of our letter of acceptance of 16 February 2022, issued by the Chancellery of our Metropolia on 18 February 2022, and of our antimension, signed by Metropolitan Joseph and issued to our parish on 27 February 2022, and our belonging to the Romanian Orthodox Church, witnessed to by the multinational crowds following the litanies and the Great Entrance at every Divine Liturgy, are not adequate evidence of which Local Church we belong to!

The fact that a certain bishop broke his promise to a Metropolitan that he would issue letters of release and then told people publicly that we had not been received into the Romanian Orthodox Church, when we clearly had been, despite that bishop’s clerical maladministration, is on his conscience, not on ours. Similarly, the mistake of those who believed that ‘error’, without checking to find out the truth, and then supported and repeated that ‘error’, is also on their conscience, not on ours. Shall we be kind and just say that they had been misinformed? This is why we have had so many instances of myrrh-giving icons in our main church since the Feast of the Ascension in 2022, as has been recorded in our monthly newsletters. Our God is the God of Mercy and Justice.

Thus, at one fell swoop, a newcomer to ROCOR hounded out of it one of its largest families, 28 people of four generations, who had devoted their lives to ROCOR. The scandal became international, discrediting ROCOR. Among those expelled was one of the ten speakers of the 2006 Fourth All-Diaspora Council in San Francisco, whose speech had been so warmly greeted then and who had belonged to the Church before that newcomer was even born. However, since the newcomer had not belonged to ROCOR in 2006, but instead was then actively supporting a move by the Russian Church to join Constantinople, he would not know that.

None of this should be a surprise, since the New ROCOR had already excommunicated another of the ten speakers and yet another had left to join the Moscow Patriarchate. Seven to go. Who is next? How many more of the remaining faithful will be expelled by the New ROCOR for the ‘crime’ (that is what they called it) of remaining faithful to the Old ROCOR? They persecuted St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, suspended him and put him on trial. Why not do the same to his spiritual grandchildren as well?

It seems as though the New ROCOR is reneging on our long and hard-fought fight to enter back into canonical communion with the rest of the Russian Church, which culminated in our victory of 2007. With its history of support for Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, support for the Vlasovtsy, those Russians who fought with Hitler against Russia, with its CIA bishops and priests, and now with their support for the CIA-orchestrated Kiev regime, which so persecutes Metr Onufry, should we be surprised? I am sometimes asked if I support Moscow or Kiev in the conflict in the Ukraine. I always answer the same thing: I support Metr Onufry and the Ukrainian and Russian peoples and always have done.

The Thirteen Reasons

The principal reason why we were forced to leave and take refuge in the Romanian Orthodox Church, is simply so that we would no longer be in an unthinkable schism from the Russian Church, specifically from the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Russian Tradition, in which we have had so many close family and friends in Paris for many decades. (It is also true that in the Romanian Church, we are no longer in schism with the Greek Churches either. We shall probably never recover from the shock of that bishop’s accusation that Patriarch Bartholomew is ‘possessed by demons’ Was he talking about himself?). His schism from the Russian Church, is exactly what we wanted to escape by taking canonical refuge in the Romanian Orthodox Church.

For nearly fifty years we had fought for the unity of the Russian Church, very actively and very successfully and were thanked personally by the Russian Patriarch for doing so. And then we saw it all destroyed by a very young and inexperienced convert newcomer from far away, who, a creator of schism, accused us of being schismatic and then of being senile! We have once more been able to live canonically, following the theological royal way and the canonical golden mean, away from all extremes.

For three years we have been in communion with and concelebrated with all Orthodox, including with the Russian Church, except for the tiny ROCOR, now reduced to a handful of miniscule communities here. Communion is the sign and guarantee that we are inside the Church and not outside the Church, inside some pathological, Protestant-style, convert sect and cult. For some reason this sect has been protected by ‘misinformed’, but still unrepentant and unapologetic individuals above it. That too is on their conscience, not on ours.

In the Romanian Orthodox Church we do not rebaptise other Orthodox, which is a heresy.
The Romanian Orthodox Church does not ‘defrock’ the clergy of other Local Churches.
In the Romanian Orthodox Church we can love everyone, specifically we do not have to hate Greeks, refusing to recognise their saints because they are in ‘the wrong jurisdiction’!, ‘hate’ Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians and ‘half-hate’ Moldovans, as we were strongly recommended, but categorically refused, to do, for we strive to obey the Gospel commandments of Christ and not obey a schismatic.
In the Romanian Orthodox Church over the last three years we have been able to keep all our churches open and serve our multinational parishioners in our missions at our own cost, just as we had done for decades before.
For the last three years we have been allowed to speak and use in services our own childhood English language and do not have to pretend to be Americans in our speech, as we were bullied and pressured, but categorically refused, to do.
For the last three years our websites have no longer been subject to rigid, word-for-word censorship and micromanagement, as we have had the wonderful basic human right to free speech, of which we had been punitively deprived for four months under a Calvinistically jealous dictatorship.
For the last three years we have not had to participate in slandering faithful clergy and laypeople of other Local Churches, which we categorically refused to do.
We have no longer had to deal with one who suffered in his spoilt child syndrome from violent bouts of temper and jealousy and wanted to divide and destroy solid families, setting generation against generation and hating women and children, upsetting many women with his ugly remarks.
We have no longer had to pay 10% of our income and be subjected to fits of rage, shouting that we must pay even more and also hear slanders that we are thieves, all so that someone could live like a mini-oligarch. Membership of our self-governing Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe and its local Archdiocese is free.
We have no longer belonged to a small, out-of-control group, which is faced with having to pay millions of dollars in court cases which it is losing to individuals whom it has slandered, and which is also sundered by multiple scandals concerning rebaptism of other Orthodox, ‘defrocking’ clergy of other Local Churches, lack of financial transparency, the use of electronic signatures without authorisation, alcoholism and homosexuality.
We have no longer had to live under an oppressive system where priestly awards are deliberately withheld from the most senior clergy for many, many years, for reasons of sadistic hatred and bullying jealousy, as though we were donkeys who wanted to follow decorative carrots.
We have been allowed to be Christians, free to keep our integrity and obey our conscience. We have been able to act according to our Orthodox Christian principles, as for nearly fifty years before, in the old and noble Western European ROCOR Tradition of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, which they have all but destroyed, except inside the Romanian Orthodox Church, where we faithfully conserve it. This freedom comes from the fact that our Romanian bishops are, like us, also Christians, and do not punish or persecute us.

Why to the Romanian Orthodox Church?

Some people ask us, all the 15 clergy and 5,000 people in our six parishes who left ROCOR because it refused to listen to us about its schism, punished us for telling them the truth about it, and refused to listen to us who endured this shameful betrayal of the best friends that the Russian Church has ever had, why we joined the Romanian Church specifically. The answer to this is simple:

The Greek Church of the Patriarchate of Constantinople was for us not an option, despite some wonderful clergy and people there, not least on Mt Athos, as certain members of its episcopate had compromised themselves through their uncanonical actions in the Ukraine and through their ecumenism. Joining the Greek Church would therefore have been very divisive among our flock. As for the Serbian Church, we greatly respect it, as we do all other Local Churches, but we did not think of joining any of them, as we could have done, because we do not have any direct connections with their bishops, only with their priests.

There was only one obvious solution, the Romanian Church. We have always valued our contacts with the Romanian Tradition of Life via Fr Raphael Noica and others. Since 2001 we have had Romanian parishioners and these have increased in number since. As a result, we had a Romanian parishioner ordained priest and a Moldovan parishioner ordained deacon some years ago. We are pastors, not nationalists, and are here to serve the Orthodox people, whatever their nationality, English, Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Romanian or other.

We do not conduct passport checks at the door. Perhaps that is why the number of our parishioners of all nationalities has doubled in the last three years since we left ROCOR. Nor are we capitalists, who sell vastly overpriced candles, icons, prayer books and other Church items to their own, often poor, people. We run the cheapest Church shop in the country. It is a service, not a source of excessive profit. We do not exploit the Orthodox people.

In the last 12 years 1 million Romanians have come to live in this country. Today at least 70% of all Orthodox in this country are Romanians. Go to any church in this country and the children are almost certain to be Romanian. Children are our future. And young priests have been temporarily loaned by the Romanian Church to the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Antioch, which are both desperately short of young clergy.

Moreover, the Romanian bishops have a clear pastoral sense of how important it is to keep the children in the Church and are very happy to use the local languages to do so. All our bishops speak Western European languages fluently – unlike most Russian bishops. Clearly, if we believe in a future Local Church, as we always have done, it makes sense to be part of by far the largest group of Orthodox, as long as it is politically free, which was the case of very few Local Churches 35 years ago, but which is no longer the case today, except for two of them.

It also makes sense to belong to a Local Church which allows us to conserve the Tradition and calendar of the Old Western European ROCOR, as we are able. The view of the late Metr Kallistos (Ware) ten years ago was quite rightly that ROCOR’s ascetic and liturgical heritage should be valued. Sadly, it has been ignored by them and taken over by ritualism and the pharisaical condemnation of others, turning this heritage into an opportunity for even further spiritual pride and censoriousness. As for us, we keep to the saints of the Old ROCOR of the Confessors, like St John of Shanghai, whom they now condemn, as he did not dress in expensive clothing and footwear and did not live in an elite apartment.

In 2022 we left the Russian Church to its nationalism, where the earthly kingdom is higher than the heavenly kingdom and Caesar’s is tragically confused with God’s. It has indeed renounced the multinational ethos which it had in the past. Too bad for it. We pray that Moscow, like Constantinople, will recover. Providentially we were integrated into the Romanian Orthodox Church exactly eight days before the longstanding Ukrainian-Russian conflict reached a new level of militancy on 24 February 2022. Thus, we avoided the Russian-Ukrainian division and so were able to answer all the threats of violence and hatred that were sent to us after that date, as well as the unnecessary offer of police protection, as well as invitations to support the Nazis in Kiev, by simply answering that we in the Romanian Orthodox Church have nothing to do with internal conflicts and politics inside the Russian Church.

With the result that our many Russian and Ukrainian parishioners can and do pray for one another side by side. Precisely from within the Romanian Orthodox Church, the second largest Local Church and which speaks a Latin language and uses the Latin alphabet, we can perhaps play a role in healing the schism between Russians and Greeks, which stems from the fact that neither is politically free. We are neutral. For we are pastors, not politicians.

We recall how the Greeks started the schism in the Ukraine by opening churches on Russian canonical territory. Then the Russians made it worse, firstly by cutting off communion, a very radical act which made the Russian Church look schismatic, then by poaching churches, priests and people from the Greek jurisdiction without letters of release, and then, in revenge, by opening churches on Greek canonical territory in Africa. This is like two little boys fighting. When will this end?

Afterword

Can we, in concert with the other politically free Local Churches, be intermediaries and help to bring sense and peace, in the spirit of the catholicity of the whole Orthodox Church? We pray so, through the prayers of all the New Martyrs and Confessors, of the Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian and Greek Lands and of all the Lands of the Earth.

16 February 2025

On Whistle-Blowing: For the Freedom of the Church, We are Fearless Against the American Schism

If we live a life for Christ, we strive to do what He would have done.

Thus, when an MI5 spotter showed interest in me in Oxford in 1977, I replied by blowing the whistle.

Thus, when homosexual bureaucrat-bishops representing the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the sort who, once bribed, recently founded a fake church of atheist thugs in the Ukraine (the OCU), showed interest in me, I replied by blowing the whistle.

Thus, when Moscow bureaucrat-bishops, homosexuals, secretly married, alcoholics, sectarians who rebaptise one another, and, worst of all, politicians who manifestly profess atheist values, tried to recruit me, I replied by blowing the whistle.

In my lifetime, I have seen the Greeks lose it and then the Russians. The Greeks were only interested in Hellenism. The Russians, at that time, were only interested in Soviet politics. Russia, as I continually repeated ever since my return there after de-Sovietisation, in 2007, could go one way or the other, towards the whole Church or towards racial and nationalist introversion, it was on a knife-edge. Sadly, it went the other way, towards nationalist schism, and cut off from communion and concelebration with the mainstream. We can only pray and hope that that tragedy will be overcome. At present the Russian Church is out of communion even with itself in Western Europe. As for the Church in the Ukraine, it must receive independence, or else it will be boycotted. The people will not go to churches under Moscow, just as they do not go to fake churches.

The mantle has passed on our long and thorny path of building our new Local Church of Western Europe. I have no interest in those who have no openness and want to form nationalist ghettoes. There is no future with them, as they are absorbed by internal, racial questions which are spiritually irrelevant. As a result, they disobey the canons and use canonical discipline to apply purely political decisions. Those who live according to nationalistic criteria have no interest in Local Churches. Therefore, they have committed suicide in Western Europe.

When the bureaucrats obeyed the State and tried to close down our churches because of ‘covid’, I replied by blowing the whistle.

We are not afraid of death because God protects. When sociopaths become psychopaths, they turn violent. So what? Salvation lies in the path of Confession or Martyrdom.

If you have a conscience, honour and integrity, you must act against schism, whoever is creating it. At such moments you are not concerned by slanders and personal attacks, because you are taken up by the protective grace of God and you must follow that grace. Grace is irresistible. You must resist schism, because it always turns into heresy, as our Metropolitan Joseph very precisely predicted in February 2022.

Thus, the refusal to concelebrate with another part of the Church, because it receives Orthodox in the customary way of the Church, indeed soon turned into heresy. This heresy is that of the rebaptism of Orthodox who have long been receiving the sacraments of the Church. The rejection of the sacraments of the Church by such typically Protestant, anti-sacramental schismatics is a heresy. Like the proselytising pharisees, recruiting and rebaptising Christians in the freezing cold sea is not a solution to increasing the tiny numbers in your tiny schismatic and sectarian communities.

Two liturgies and five baptisms this weekend and, much as usual, some 200 communions from three chalices. And a certain ‘bishop’ wanted to close our church and even told people that we are ‘closed’! He is ignored. As with the fake Church in the Ukraine, it is the same persecution here. But here the law and the canons are on our side. Western Europe is different from the USA. Europe belongs to Europeans, not to Americans. We are not bossed about and do not speak American. We have our own culture.

How ROCOR Double-Crossed the Moscow Patriarchate

Some years ago a Russian Metropolitan and personal friend told me that Patriarch Kyrill had always considered that the interest of the 2007 reconciliation between the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) and the New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) was political, rather than spiritual. In order to assert that the MP is the Mother Church, émigré churches had to be reconciled, proving that the MP was no longer a Soviet organisation, thus reconciling the divide between ‘Red and White’. This was the historic, political importance of the event for the MP, which even then was a hundred times larger than ROCOR.

For us, then in the old European ROCOR, the reconciliation was also vital, not for political, but for spiritual reasons. In order to ensure that the sectarian tendencies which had been developing in American ROCOR since the 1960s and had already resulted in the schism in 1986 would not take over, ROCOR would be brought back, even in the USA, and anchored in the Russian Orthodox mainstream. If the reconciliation had not occurred, we, like many others, would at once have left for the MP, deserting ROCOR as a sect behind us. Indeed, it was the pressure from us that helped the bishops to make the right decision in 2007 and become part of the MP.

I can still remember how after the historic concelebration and reconciliation between Patriarch Alexis and Metropolitan Laurus in the Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in May 2007, a very senior and well-known mitred Russian archpriest from ROCOR said to me: ‘We’ve done it!’ And that is how we all felt – relief and joy. The sectarians had lost. Moscow had given victory to the Orthodox majority in ROCOR and now we could look forward to building a united Diaspora together with Russian and other Orthodox, the sectarian elements leaving for various tiny old calendarist groups, each even stranger than the other. Sadly, this was not to be.

Within ten years of that triumph, the sectarians started coming to the fore into ROCOR again, effectively double-crossing Moscow. A turning-point came in 2017 when ROCOR bishops refused the Patriarch’s request to establish three regional Metropolias within ROCOR. This would have led to metropolitanisation or decentralisation, mirroring the same processes inside the Russian Federation, as implemented by Patriarch Kyrill. After this came the americanisation of European ROCOR, persecuting and spiritually destroying, a situation reflected also in Australian ROCOR. In other words, ROCOR had fallen into centralisation and uncanonical extremism.

This refusal meant the outright rejection of our helping towards the creation of new regional Local Churches, contributing ROCOR’s legacy to them. However, the situation grew even worse. At the very end of 2020 a young and untutored American ROCOR bishop created a schism with another part of the MP on account of the canonical reception of Non-Orthodox, rejecting the age-old Russian Orthodox and European ROCOR conciliar way. In so doing he lost half his diocese, but. amazingly, received the backing of his fellow-bishops amid silence from the MP. The slippery slope was there and soon ROCOR bishops began rebaptising Orthodox.

The MP was quiet, obsessed by the politics of the 2007 ROCOR reconciliation and not by the dogmatics of baptism and pastoral practice. Then all its attention was distracted by the conflict in the Ukraine, with the resulting chaos in all its dioceses outside the Russian Federation and Belarus, not least in the Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova and Western Europe. Essentially, this heresy of the new ROCOR is Neo-Donatist Anabaptism (the Donatists were the first rebaptisers), that is to say, repeating baptism, contrary to the Creed of the Church, ‘I believe in one baptism…’. We can see how the new ROCOR is founded on American Protestant sectarianism.

As one American friend said to me: ‘The new ROCOR are really Orthodox Amish’. For the Amish like other sects are of course issued from Donatist Anabaptism. After 50 years inside the Russian Church and despite constantly being so often treated as third-class citizens, we are all very sad to see what ROCOR has become and how it has fallen away from the Orthodox Church. What saddens us the most is that though the old European ROCOR had nothing in common with the new ROCOR, it has now been taken over by it. The legacy of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe is being persecuted again, just as he was persecuted by US ROCOR in 1963.

The fragments of the old European ROCOR are being americanised, all who resist after lifetimes of service are expelled. And all this is encouraged in New York! Will Moscow wake up to what it has brought into the world? It thought it had gained canonical Russian Orthodox representatives in the Western world, but in fact it has been double-crossed and is represented by a sect of extremists and bullying pharisees and hypocrites, not by the Church. The new ROCOR ideology is playing no role in witness to the authentic Orthodox Faith, rather it is discouraging and delaying it. Here is the tragedy that distracted Moscow will one day have to address.

The Struggle for Catholicity Against Papist Centralisation and for Unity Against the New American Heresy of ‘Corrective Baptism.’

Introduction: Centralisation and Decentralisation: Unity in Diversity

The Church is an image of the Holy Trinity, a Unity of Three Persons in One Essence, of Diversity and Unity, a subtle balance between centralising and decentralising forces. If centralising forces take over, legitimate diversity in Church life can be threatened, as we see outside the Church, in Roman Catholicism. This results in the boycott of the Church, which is no longer seen as being ‘our Church’, but the ‘Church’ of an irrelevant, distant, alien and foreign clerical elite. If decentralising forces take over, Church unity can be threatened by divisions and sects, as we see in Protestantism. This results in the dissolution of the Church into secular fragments, which are irrelevant to spiritual resistance and incapable of ascetic struggle for the Truth of Christ.

The Two Struggles of My Life

Personally, my life can be divided into two halves. The first half was spent in apprehending and comprehending God’s presence in the world, in learning and in serving in the Church in Europe. The struggle then was for the teachings of the Church against ideological compromises, being forced onto the Church by the anti-Christian Western world. That US-led world was trying to impose on all others its One World Government under the name of ‘Globalism’. This meant trying to deform the integrity of the Orthodox Church by imposing syncretistic modernism and ecumenism and corrupting its clerical elite, as Globalism had already done with Protestantism and Roman Catholicism and was then trying to do with Orthodoxy too. This was an attack on the integrity of the Church.

The second half of my life is being spent in England, building towards the inevitable Local Church of Western Europe. This ongoing struggle now takes place from within the largest part of the Orthodox Church here, the millions of the Romanian Metropolias of Western and Southern, Central and Northern Europe. This struggle is for the Catholicity of the Church through the concord of fourteen of the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches. This is because the two remaining Local Churches, Moscow and Constantinople, have tragically fallen into schism with one another because of their rival nationalist centralisations. Through their Papist-style centralisation of finance, power and control they are trying and failing to divide and share out the Orthodox world between them.

The Struggle for Catholicity Against the Papism of Constantinople and Moscow

Thus, the fourteen other Churches, the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, the Churches of Georgia, Cyprus, Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, America, Albania and Macedonia, are fixed between the two extremes of Constantinople and Moscow. True, some are much closer to one or the other, but still they say to Constantinople: Yes, you were once the Patriarchate of the Imperial City, but that was nearly 600 years ago and even then you had no right to interfere in the internal affairs of others. And to Moscow they say: Yes, you are by far the largest in number, but you are still only one among sixteen, so do not try and tell us how we must live and think. The Soviet age is over, so stop denying the diversity and Catholicity of the Church.

The friction can most clearly be seen in the Ukraine. Thus, most, if not all, of the fourteen Local Churches know that what Constantinople did there in setting up a fake Church outside its own territory was wrong, against the canons of the Church. This is very clear, especially through the statements of the heads of the Churches of Albania, Poland and Bulgaria. As for Muscovite centralisation, so reminiscent of the Soviets, it is rejected not only by all others (though in the case of Constantinople, the rejection is clearly politically dictated by the US and so has no spiritual authority), but also in the Moscow Patriarchate, in the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Metr Onufry and wherever decentralisation and new autocephalous Churches are for pastoral reasons urgently required.

We can see all this visibly, if we simply compare photographs of bishops. The photo of the average Constantinople Metropolitan appears to show a bureaucrat with a thin black veil and a carefully trimmed beard, like that of a married priest whose wife dislikes beards. Only the metropolitans are not married, supposedly monks. The photo of the average Moscow Metropolitan appears to show a richly-decorated and rigidly-uniformed military man, at the service of a State army, not of the Word of God. Both show careerists, ‘Princes of the Church’, to use the Roman Catholic term for cardinals. My favourite photo of a metropolitan from one of the fourteen Churches shows a man in a dusty old cassock hauling a bag of cement in a wheelbarrow to build a new monastery.

The Novel and Aggressive American Heresy of Rebaptism

Orthodox Unity is now being challenged by the novel and highly aggressive American heresy of rebaptism. This sectarian heresy of rebaptising Orthodox is known as ‘corrective baptism’, a term quite unknown to the Fathers of the Church and the Saints, because it has been brought into the Church from the sectarian Lutheran world outside. Contradicting the Creed of the Church ‘I believe in one baptism…’, it means rebaptising those who have been canonically received into the Church by the established authority of its thousand canonical bishops. Although the Orthodox in question may have been receiving the sacraments of the Church for years, the schismatics are rebaptising them. This revolt against Church practice is uncanonical, heretical and sectarian.

The practice was condemned by all as long ago as 1976, when the Syshchenko scandal in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) broke in London. Then this same practice, implemented by an uncanonically ordained and very poorly-trained Ukrainian priest, was thoroughly rejected by the ever-memorable Metropolitan Philaret and the then still Orthodox ROCOR Synod as the heresy of Donatism. Sadly, this view is no longer held by some of today’s ROCOR bishops who do not know the Church Tradition. Thus, apart from ‘bishops’ in old calendarist sects, there are now those in ROCOR who have also turned aggressively schismatic, imposing their pseudo-Russian, American old calendarism, which is in fact nothing more than a sectarian Protestant revolt, a new outburst of Anabaptism, the bullying and hypocritical pharisaic rebaptism for ‘the pure’.

This is the first heresy of converts, neophytes who want to be ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’. Such converts do not remain Orthodox because they have not yet cleansed themselves of the post-Schism Western mentality, they still do not know the Pre-Schism Western mentality. For them Orthodoxy is not existential, it is just a decoration added on top of what they do not want to renounce, a cherry on top of the Western cake. Their mentality therefore remains fundamentally anti-Orthodox. And they can go to one extreme or the other. Being anti-Orthodox is not only being pro-ecumenist, pro-modernist, pro-reformist, it is also to be filled with hatred for Roman Catholics and Protestants. Both extremes are equally anti-Orthodox, equally opposed to Truth and Love.

Conclusion: The Dangers of Centralisation and Sectarianism

With their natural Russian flock dying out or leaving them, these bishops are desperate to make up falling numbers by recruiting disgruntled ex-Protestants. These often psychologically unstable extremists have no spiritual roots in the Church. To my knowledge, so far two American ROCOR bishops in different continents are publicly boasting of rebaptising other Orthodox, though others may be involved. Once this news reaches the for now politically unfree Moscow and it has the time to act, there will be trouble for the ROCOR schismatics. So continues our struggle for the Catholicity of the Church against anti-missionary and secular-inspired centralisation, and for the Unity of the Church against sectarian attacks, always towards the new Local Church of Western Europe to be established through a Council.

The Art of Schism or How to Make Part of the Orthodox Church into Your Personal Sect

First find a small part of the Church with naïve and uneducated people in charge, who will not want to obstruct your highly-developed personal ambitions, as they think that you can be useful to them and they are desperate to recruit.
Tell them that you are highly educated and hoodwink, charm and impress them, exaggerating and lying about your credentials and titles, relying on their ignorance. They will not care to know the difference, as they only look at external appearances.
Engage in a full-scale PR operation among others, which with your natural acting talents, smile, gift with words, command of the internet, support from the sponsors and minders behind you and your overriding ambition, you should find very easy.
Proceed to isolate your little part of the Church by expressing contempt and hatred for every other part of the Church, calling all others ‘satanic’, ‘heretical’, ‘schismatic’ or ‘uncanonical’ and presenting yourself as ‘spiritual’, ‘holy’, ‘pure’, ‘canonical’, with exclusive and superior truths and call all others in some way ‘tainted’. (You will find something).
In order to present yourself as the infallible Pope of your domain, a Prince of the Church and Prince of the Pharisees, cultivate your appearance. Your natural preening narcissism will help you in this.
Ensure that you have total and totalitarian control over everything that the naïve entrust you with, sending out your personal network of spies and agents to find out exactly what your victims are doing and saying and to police them.
In order to implement full control, make certain that all who are much older and far more experienced than you, contradict you or challenge you, know the truth about you and know better than you because they are actually educated and saw through you from the start, abandon you by witch-hunting them and demanding their property and money. Then you can obtain your desired absolute power over the select few of the ignorant and hoodwinked who remain.
Make any who resist you feel guilty by using the techniques of exceeding your authority, falsely claiming that they owe you absolute obedience, belittling, intimidating and humiliating them, further developing your personality cult.
Eliminate and blacken any who resist you by slandering them and insulting them in front of everyone.
Claim that only your group has like the pharisees the exclusive possession of the truth and that all others are somehow inferior and defective. All members of your sect are to be exploited by you as they are naive. You will of course practise ‘corrective baptism’, that is, the rebaptism of Orthodox, which is expressly forbidden by the Creed.
Brainwash any who are young and naïve so that you can control their minds. You will find podcasts and zooms very useful here. Remember the manipulative practices (and the riches) of tele-evangelists.
Ensure that you enslave any whom you give presents to and retain well-deserved presents from them. Hang the presents over them like carrots hang over donkeys. They must feel that they are in debt to you and be dependent on you for ever.
Check the social media of all and censor and correct any opinions that are not perfectly in line with your own. Use your network of admiring slaves to malign and try and discredit those who have different views to you. This is your cult.
Prey on the single, lonely and woman-disliking, like yourself. Find psychologically and pathologically vulnerable, naïve, weak and ignorant young men through your powers of manipulation and make them feel indebted to you.
Recruit those who have money, especially naïve and conservative-minded women who have never met any other Orthodox. They will be very useful to you in your quest to obtain property and income to finance your superior lifestyle.
Always lie whenever you have to justify yourself.
Micro-manage all situations. Your control and power must be absolute in all circumstances.
Always remember the five-word golden rule: Bully, Intimidate, Manipulate, Betray, Orchestrate (BIMBO).
If you are found out through your psychological, spiritual and other abuses, have your Plan B ready.
When you need to implement Plan B, take as much money with you to feather your nest in the next country you flee to. Remember the example of your predecessor Antony Grabbe, the six-million dollar man.

Now It Can Be Told: Reminiscences II: The ROCOR Tragedy: How It Entered into Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate and Then De Facto Left It

Introduction: The Background

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, large numbers of ex-Soviet citizens settled in the West. The Orthodox among them, then about 1% of the total, went to wherever there was a Russian-speaking church. By 1990 the parishes of the old and dying ROCOR were almost empty, as the emigres had almost totally failed to pass on the Faith to their descendants. In 1992 I even had to set up a completely new parish in Lisbon for the new ex-Soviet emigres, though still under ROCOR. By 2000 all ROCOR parishes had been revitalised, but with ex-Soviet Russians. Moreover, the ROCOR bishops at the top, now almost all of the second generation or converts, had to ordain many of the ‘Soviets’ priests – there was nobody else left to ordain.

As a result, it gradually dawned even on the strongly anti-Soviet, often rather dry and cold, ROCOR bishops that there would have to be a reconciliation with Moscow. Moscow was, after all, 99% of the whole Russian Orthodox Church, and, by then, ex-Soviet Russians already formed 90% of their tiny émigré Church. Ex-Soviet clergy and parishioners understood nothing of the hair-splitting arguments against Moscow of the old émigrés and their descendants and converts.

They simply concelebrated with Moscow whenever they wanted and the people took communion freely in Moscow churches. Clearly, ROCOR bishops were losing control. The split between Moscow and the ROCOR group had been outlived. It was totally irrelevant to the post-Soviet masses, ‘the mob’, as one aristocratic and monocled (!) ROCOR bishop insultingly called them on the Russian Church website pravoslavie.ru, to the scandal of all!

To Moscow

Thus, the bishops were gradually forced by weight of numbers to lead the few remaining children of ROCOR emigres to concelebrate with Moscow. Having usurped the very elderly Metropolitan Vitaly in New York, who for them had outlived his age and who anyway had dementia, in 2001, ambitious bishops began to move towards talks with Moscow. These talks finally resulted in the historic Patriarchal and émigré concelebration in Moscow in 2007, where I was, I believe, the only Non-Russian priest present. However, even this reconciliation did not stop the bullying and intimidation of the non-aristocratic, not to say peasant, bishop-victims inside the Synod by the ‘princes of the Church’, the political wing of the utterly divided ROCOR Synod.

Their victims ranged from the meek and saintly Slovak Metr Laurus to the equally meek and mild Ukrainian Metr Hilarion, who feared the ‘politicos’, as he openly told us, almost trembling, and to Patriarch Kyrill himself. The latter was astonished and very, very upset by the categorical refusal of the politico bishops to accept the Patriarch’s very generous, canonical and utterly logical suggestion (it was in 2012 or soon after) to restructure ROCOR into Metropolia, in the USA, in Oceania and in Western Europe.

They even rejected his generous offer for a ROCOR bishop to become Metropolitan of a united Russian Orthodox Church of Western Europe, the foundation of the future Local Church. Rarely has there been such a tragic rejection of Divine destiny towards forming new Local Churches. This rejection, some ten years ago now, was in fact the turning-point for ROCOR. From that moment on, it reverted to control by its ‘princes of the Church’ political wing, concerned only with money and property, abandoning its spiritual, ‘Johannite’ (St John of Shanghai) tradition. Their predecessors had persecuted St John, now they would continue, persecuting St John’s spiritual descendants.

Underlying Sectarianism Returns

With this tragic refusal to accept its destiny, ROCOR had preferred suicidal, elitist, exclusivist isolation to playing the leading role in forming future Local Churches in Western Europe and elsewhere. The offer had been made on a golden plate and been rejected. The offer would not be made by offended Moscow again. It was clear that others would now have to play that role. ROCOR had sidelined itself, making itself irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, due to its nationalist exclusivism and pharisaic superiority complex, much, much developed by recent and unintegrated fanatical converts of a Protestant background. Moscow was at a loss, since it simply did not have the candidates with the linguistic, administrative and moral ability to lead its Churches outside Russia.

Thus, ROCOR lost the opportunity to head the establishment of three Metropolias: one to lead to the long-overdue Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Western Europe; in North America to merge positively with the OCA; finally, to set up a new Metropolia for the Continent of Oceania. The task of establishing just a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Western Europe now went to Moscow, eventually through the efficient Metropolitan Nestor, supported by the very small, Paris-based Archdiocese of Western Europe, led by its Metropolitan Jean (Renneteau).

In 2021, ROCOR decided to take part in the American-led schism against the Moscow Metropolitan Jean, leading the emigres to split from that part of Moscow and so even further into self-isolation. The only occasional concelebrations would now be with highly conservative Antiochian, ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’, converts. The rest of the Orthodox Church was rejected. Moscow was secretly, and increasingly openly, despised; Greeks, Romanians and Moldovans openly hated; and in 2024, when the Serbian Orthodox Church invited a delegation from New York to try and bring ROCOR back from the brink, it also failed. No Church can be founded on hatred.

Conclusion: The Future

As one Russian Orthodox Metropolitan said to me of one ROCOR hierarch in 2012: ‘His Russian is superb, better than that of Russians, his liturgical knowledge second to none, but where is his love’? Thanks to sectarianism, ROCOR is rapidly losing its jurisdiction in Western Europe, just as it lost that in Vlasovite ROCOR South America. Now that Moscow is at last starting to send out competent, non-corrupt and non-homosexual bishops to Western Europe, ROCOR is increasingly looking like a small, right-wing American sect, with little influence outside its sectarian converts and their ghettoes.

Today, with the tragic conflict in the Ukraine ongoing, Moscow is isolated by Russian nationalism, but the emigres are isolated by convert exclusivism. The pro-Zelensky attitude of ROCOR since 2022, even demanding that Russian troops stop liberating the Donbass from Kiev-led genocide (!), is not in fact pro-Ukrainian, but pro-CIA. Unsurprisingly, ROCOR is now seen as treasonous by Moscow, but with its Russian-ness it is also seen as totally unacceptable by the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Metr Onufry, just as it was by post-1945 Ukrainian (and Belarussian) emigres.

As a result, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has over the last two years opened up a hundred parishes in Western Europe, which have nothing to do with ROCOR. As for Moldovans, they have been leaving the Russian Church for the Romanian Church, offended by Russian racism, just like the Ukrainians and so nearly all other Non-Russians. It is clear that other Local Churches will have to take on the mantle of establishing a multinational Local Church of Western Europe. Tragically, the dream of the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II of Moscow of forming a Local Church in Western Europe is for now dead. In the future only a radical change of policy and repentance could bring the constituent parts of the Russian Church in the Diaspora, now in schism, back to contributing to that great project, which others have now been put in charge of.

Why American ‘Orthodox’ Missionaries Are Unsuccessful

For many years we in England have been subject to the aggressive missionaries of two Non-Christian American sects, the Jehovahs’ Witnesses (Russellites) and the Mormons. They have yet to understand that we are not interested. We have our own history and traditions which predate 19^th century New World sects. The only ones they can recruit are the disinherited (immigrants and socially abandoned), the uneducated in history, or the pathologically unstable and insecure. Even among them the turnover is huge. Sadly, in recent years, we have also been subject to the missionary activities of pathological neophytes who claim to belong not to Non-Christian sects, but to fringe parts of the Orthodox Church.

In fact, although nominally members of the Orthodox Church, these neophytes share in exactly the same Calvinistic/Lutheran mentality as the others. First of all, they share in the sectarian American culture of exclusivism: ‘only we are right, all others are beyond salvation, join us or be damned, either you are with us or else you are against us’. Secondly, in their arrogance they impose their language and culture on all others, who are rooted in the local culture. They meddle in and lack all respect for the local language, local culture and local traditions, which are all far older than they are. Thirdly, they express the same very proud, Calvinistic mentality of punishment, cursing with hellfire all those who do not share in their deviations and perversions.

I remember how in the 1970s three American men, claiming to be ‘novices’, all dressed up as Orthodox monastics and in long beards were sent over from California (from where else? – as East Coast Americans know) to Oxford Street in London. The ‘mission’ of these who had been ‘saved’ – to convert shoppers to Orthodoxy. Apparently, it had never occurred to them that there were already plenty of Orthodox churches for local people in London, where those who wished to go could go and that shoppers might be intent on shopping, not on a bunch of black-robed Hari Krishna-type weirdos. Naturally, the shoppers either ignored or rejected the fruitcakes of the latest US sect, who were preventing people from shopping.

Naturally, the three ‘novices’ totally failed in their ‘mission’, and returned to California, condemning people in Oxford Street to hell, as not one of them had been converted to their pharisaic pride. Thank God for that. If you want to convert people, first live among them, help them and show that you are a kind person. Set an example. Instead, the ‘novices’ could not even provide a church or any infrastructure, where those interested could have gone. And do not think that you have the right to interfere in their lives, just because you imagine that you are superior to them, especially when you are novices. Sort out your own house first and see what you are made of before you speak to others. Stop being meddling Methodists.

The American pseudo-religious mentality is only a reflection of the American secular mentality. They are the same because they are both born of the same arrogance and pride. We have seen it in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Ukraine. First, they eliminate the local individuals, presidents, kings, dictators, or even priests, who understand and so are in control of the situation. Then, having lost the controllers who understand and created destruction and chaos, they appoint their own puppets and control-freaks, but are surprised that the local people do not like them and reject them. When they discover that, they proceed to condemn to hellfire all who resist their overweening pride and then run away, as in Saigon, Kabul and soon in Kiev.

To see genuine Orthodox missionary work, read the lives of saints, such as St Herman of Alaska and St Nicholas of Japan. The results of their work is long-lasting, enduring, they do not condemn, nor do they run away. Those who come here, pretending to have a native accent and pretending to be Orthodox but in fact know very little and do not consort with lifelong Orthodox, are fakes. We saw through them almost immediately. They will not last, they never do – we have seen it all before. Here today, gone tomorrow. Their coming departure, after their proclamation that they will never be nice and that those who resist them are evil, will be no loss. The Church ignores them and goes on without them. We do not need fakes.

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