Category Archives: Sects and Cults

On St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and the Old ROCOR

Introduction

Faithfulness to the beliefs and practices of St John and the Old ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), to which he belonged, is vital for us his spiritual children, for he is a saint. The Old ROCOR of St John greatly venerated the martyred Tsar, who so loved and supported Orthodox of all nationalities, However, this heritage has largely been lost among the politicised bishops of today’s North America, who have adopted the practice of rebaptising other Orthodox into the Church, contrary to the Creed. Ironically, concelebration there with other Local Churches is rarer now than before the Act of Canonical Communion.

That was signed in Moscow in 2007, and we had fought for it for decades. This isolation is especially so in various dioceses, which today are virtually becoming a de facto American Russian Old Calendarist Church Outside Russia. All in St John’s life and writings contradicts the sectarian-minded, old calendarist bishops of today. Whether it is his attitude to the Catholicity of all the Orthodox Churches, his attitude to the Russian Church inside Russia, to the Tsar, to missionary work, and to money, all is different. To throw away his attitudes has been an act of spiritual suicide.

The Catholicity of the Church

In St John’s time, as in my time in the generation after him, the time of our beloved Abba Vladyka Antony of Geneva, the successor to St John in the see of Western Europe, our Archdiocese was in communion with all, whether the Churches of Constantinople, Serbia and Jerusalem or, already from 1991 on, with the Russian Church inside Russia, known as the Moscow Patriarchate. And ROCOR’s new calendar Romanian parish in Paris, with three priests, was the Archdiocese’s largest. There were no connections between him and old calendarist sectarians.

As St John said at the ROCOR Council in 1938: ROCOR must not cut off communion with other Local Churches (1). And in 1960 he preached that: We in ROCOR keep our unity, in communion with all the Churches, with whom it is possible to be in communion with (2). He concelebrated with all he could concelebrate with, just like Vladyka Antony and all of our generation. This is quite unlike today’s proud schismatics, who consider that communion with others would dirty them, for only they are ‘the One True Church’.

In St John’s time, ROCOR never declared that it was a separate Church or the whole Church, but simply an inseparable part of the Russian Church, temporarily working on a self-governing Synodal basis, until such time as the atheist regime in Russia has been abolished. St John wrote that each Local Church has a significance of its own…all together make up the one Universal Church and contribute to it their own specialities and gifts…Our ROCOR is the free part of the Russian Church…Spiritually the Russian Church is indivisible…

The Russian Church Inside Russia

You ask why I commemorate Patriarch Aleksei of Moscow. You say, ‘He’s a Soviet!’ I tell you, ‘Inside Soviet Rus is Holy Rus! God hasn’t abandoned our people. The Soviet Union is still Holy Russia’.

St John was clear that ROCOR was only part of the Local Russian Church and that it maintained spiritual unity with the other part, but it had been only temporarily forced to reject its administration. Just like us today. In 1960 he wrote that ROCOR is not spiritually divided from its suffering Mother, It prays for Her and at the same time is united with Her, until such time as the reasons for disunity have vanished (3).

In other words, just as in our case, corrupt administration did not mean spiritual division, only administrative separation and so freedom from its hatred, corruption and decay. Therefore, we live within a canonical Church, even if not in the Russian Church, which today is no longer captive to Communist atheism, but which is captive to Capitalist mammonism, the dollar, with all its forces of self-interested schism.

St John added that: ROCOR, no longer administratively submitted to Metropolitan Sergius and his Synod, remains as before, feeling spiritually one with the suffering Mother Church (4). Naturally, at that time the Synod never declared that the Church inside Russia was without grace. Indeed, Vladyka John said that the official Church in Russia does of course have grace, even if individual bishops behave unworthily (5). Moreover, in 1945 in Shanghai St John restored the commemoration of Patriarch Alexei II in his diocese and encouraged others to do so.

On 31 July 1945 he wrote to Archbishop Viktor of Beijing:  In view of the lack of information about the Synod Abroad for several years, any other decision of our diocese would make it completely independent, autocephalous. There are no canonical reasons for such independence…and would not be recognised by the Patriarch. Relations with the administration of the Church are now possible (6).

In his Epistle to his flock in Shanghai, written on 2 August 1946, he said: The information that canonical communion with the Moscow Patriarchate has been restored without hindrance has brought us sincere joy…We pray to the Lord, that he will hasten that desired and awaited moment when the First Hierarch of All Rus, going up to his Patriarchal place in the Church of the Dormition in Moscow will gather around himself all the Russian hierarchs who have come from all the Russia land and all foreign lands (7). This prophecy was realised in 2007.

True, in obedience to Metr Anastasy, St John later ceased publicly commemorating the Patriarch in the litanies, but he still commemorated him at the Great Entrance and the Proskomidia. Indeed, he continued to commemorate the Patriarch every day when he was in Paris. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer for him remains…liturgically we are one. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we with it and in it (8). When he was in Western Europe, for almost four times longer than he was in America, St John continued to correspond with Patriarch Alexei II and blessed parishioners to go to Patriarchal churches.

He certainly never accused the Moscow Patriarchate of heresy. Fr Peter Perekrestov pointed out that: ‘St John never in a single piece of writing, sermon or letter used the term ‘Sergianist’’. This was of course the purely political accusation, a pseudo-heresy invented for political reasons by the CIA and its asset Count Grabbe and their others. And they themselves later did fall away from the Church in the first manifestation of the ROCOR rebaptism heresy in the 1970s, so resisted by Vladyka Antony of Geneva (9). This was followed by the second manifestation of this same heresy in 2021.

The Tsar

The greatest crime committed with regard to the family of the martyred Tsar must be erased by ardent veneration for them and glorification of their spiritual feat.

The Russian Imperial Family in exile stayed in Tobolsk, the city of St John’s 18th century ancestor and patron saint, also called St John (Maximovich). Here too is another spiritual link. Increasingly, especially in Russia, St John the Wonderworker (another of his titles) is venerated as a second St Nicholas the Wonderworker, as he helps travellers. He is after all ‘Wonderworker of the latter times’, as we sing to him in his Akathist, composed by one of his spiritual children, who also later composed an Akathist to the martyred Tsar.

In his preaching St John rejected the lies of both liberals and conservatives about the Tsar and always sought the truth. The cosmopolitan, anti-patriotic bourgeois liberals, who helped depose the Tsar in February 1917, openly mocked and slandered him. They called him reactionary, corrupt and bloody, and most of them wanted to adopt an atheist Republican or possibly agnostic Constitutional (as in the UK) political system. Thus, they naively led the country into the bloody tyrannical yoke of the Communist atheists, who followed a German rabbi’s grandson, Marx.

The Western-loving conservatives, who also helped depose the Tsar in February 1917, bishops among them, lost their careers, money or estates and were bitter for this reason. They called the Tsar weak, indecisive, stupid, a religious fanatic and they murdered the slandered, pious family man Gregory Rasputin. Some of them said that the peace-loving Tsar should have murdered all his opponents (as they did under the White flag – it is little known that most so-called Whites were anti-Tsar) and especially hated anyone who reminded them of the state of the poor in Russia. Having sold out to Western countries in 1919, most went to live in Western Europe and some of them later even fought for Hitler.

St John considered that the Emperor Nicholas II had always been a model of piety and total dedication to God’s will, showing the patience of the Righteous Job, on whose day Tsar Nicholas had been born. St John deemed that the crime against the Tsar and his Tsarina was made all the worse by the murder of their innocent children. He said that such crimes do not go unpunished. They cry to heaven and bring down the wrath of God onto the earth. And so he called all in the Russian Lands to repentance:

Rus’ must bow down before the humiliated, slandered and martyred Passion-Bearer Tsar. Only then will he will have that daring before God, and his prayer will save the Russian Land from the misfortunes that it has had to bear. St John constantly repeated to others that only in such a case would the martyred Tsar and his Holy Family become new heavenly defenders of Holy Rus’ and that their innocently spilled blood would regenerate Russia.

Missionary Work

Orthodoxy in the West will revive. There will be Orthodoxy in Britain and Ireland, in France and Germany, in Holland and Spain and in America, too. Every language and nation will have Holy Orthodoxy. This is the charge laid on our Russian immigration for our repentance.

St John converted people to the faith wherever he lived, in Serbia, in Macedonia, in China, in the countries of Western Europe and in the USA. And he also united people. In Shanghai, he brought warring, nationalistic Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs and Chinese together. Later he did the same in San Francisco. For he was no Russian nationalist and imperialist, unlike the ROCOR bishops who put him on trial in America.

This openness to all nationalities, which he took from the Tsar, who had wanted to establish an Orthodox church in every European capital, is why St John was much criticised for his pastoral concern that brought him to allow a Western rite. Unlike Western Europe, where he lived for nearly twelve years, he lasted only three years among the Russian nationalists in the USA. What the critics of the Western rite at that time do not understand is that in the 1950s and early 60s there was a real Western liturgical rite, a living tradition. It then existed, just as St Tikhon had understood fifty years before St John.

All the rite then needed was modifying, returning to Orthodoxy. This is quite unlike today’s situation, when fantasy Western rites are developed. Since there is no living Western rite, all was tragically done away with in the 1960s, today’s ‘Western rites’ are artificial, inorganic restorations, resurrected museum pieces. They attract and live very few, they are not passed down organically from generation to generation. This is unlike the Orthodox rite which is organic, living, is passed down, and for which people know how to sing and read and feel the spontaneous gestures that go with it.

Love of Money

America is a great country, but greed and sensuality will be its downfall.

Here is the prophecy which says everything and for which some so much hate him. For they suffer precisely from these two passions – love of money and perversion. This is why they proclaim that St John did not wear shoes and gave them away to the poor, only because he found them uncomfortable! They need the very expensive vestments from Belarus, gold and diamonds.

For the new, dollar-driven Americanised bishops in their very expensive black leather shoes and with the obsessive personal cleanliness of the sensual, to dress barefoot and in an old cassock and vestments like St John (or St Seraphim) is unthinkable. They need silk and velvet. The most terrifying thing is that in the sixty years since St John was tormented to death, we have seen his above prophecy come true.

Notes: 

[1] Acts of the Second ROCOR Council, Belgrade 1939, P. 402

[2] St John Maximovich. On the Spiritual and Moral Significance of ROCOR, Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, No 6 (2007)

[3] Archbishop John (Maximovich), Brussels 1960, P. 13

[4] Ibid. P. 9.

[5] Letters of Archbp Antony of Geneva to Fr Dimitry Dudko (Posev, 1979 No 12

[6] Decree No 650 of 6 September 1945. Priest Dionysy Pozdnyayev, The Acceptance of the Jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Church Schism in Shanghai. Alfa and Omega No 2 (13) 1997, Pp. 150-151

[7] Ibid. Pp.153, 158.

[8] Bishop Basil Rodzyanko, On Vladyka John. http://www.episkopvasily.ru/ru/works/

[9] Archpriest Peter Perekrestov. The Helmsman of the Church, then and now – the All-Powerful Spirit.  http://www.pravos.org/docs/doc466.htm

 

 

 

Q and A: On the Suicidal Path Taken by ROCOR since 2007

Nobody goes to heaven by sending others to hell.

Q: Looking back twenty years after the 2006 Church Council on the relics of St John of Shanghai, what do you think that the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) should have done after its reconciliation with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007?

A: ROCOR played a very important role in the last half of the last century. Do not forget that from 1950 until 1966, it had a saint in its midst, Archbishop John of Shanghai and Western Europe. Then it witnessed to the Western world of the persecution of the Church by the Soviet atheist State, the inherent worldliness of KGB-manipulated ecumenism and modernism, it spoke in spiritual freedom in the place of its brothers and sisters in the Patriarchal Church, who were enslaved as hostages inside Russia. Having sent representatives to the Second Vatican Council, ROCOR’S greatest moment came in 1981, when, although sixty-four years late, it began the work of canonising the New Martyrs and Confessors. This work is not complete, as archives open, as we see from the July 2026 Synod in Moscow, where new names of New Martyrs and Confessors have entered the Church calendar.

Indeed, from the Year 2000 on, ROCOR no longer served a purpose, since the Church inside Russia had been freed from the State, as proved by the fact that it too had at last begun to canonise even more New Martyrs and Confessors. Since the generation of those who had been adults before the Revolution of 1917 had all but died out by 2000, ROCOR’s destiny was to become four autonomous Metropolias, part of the Mother Church, taking over its Diaspora, as its title of ‘Russian’ was already becoming mythical. If it had joined in with Moscow, it could have spearheaded Russian Orthodox missionary work and witness in the Diaspora, co-operating with others, separating out into four regional Diaspora Metropolias. It would not have become the Moscow Patriarchate, but simply the Russian Orthodox Metropolias of Northern America, Latin America, Western Europe and Oceania.

This is exactly what I worked for after 2007, the event of unity for which we had patiently been waiting since the repentance of Moscow at its Jubilee Council in August 2000. But ROCOR did not work for this after 2007. In May 2006, standing at the Fourth ROCOR Council in San Francisco, where I was one of the ten speakers, I heard the former US ambassador to Kiev, John Herbst, whispering behind me to the then Bishop Agafangel from Odessa, saying: ‘This looks bad. We shall have to work against it from inside’. He was talking about ROCOR’s Conciliar decision (by over 95% to under 5%) to merge with Moscow. He meant that since the decision had been taken, ROCOR would have to be sabotaged from inside, its infiltrated key assets, jealous narcissistic psychopaths, would be activated. And that is exactly what they did, using their agents, who had long ago been planted inside ROCOR for future promotion.

The Moscow Patriarchate? How naïve they are, just like the Russian State, outwitted, as usual, by the infiltration of the CIA! The first indication came immediately in May 2007, when directly after the service in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, where I had concelebrated, one of the most senior CIA-asset priests in ROCOR (he is still alive) turned to me and said in English: ‘We’ve done it’. I knew what he meant by that, though he thought that I did not. I was not a recruit. In May 2007, after the Act had been signed, one ROCOR bishop returned to his country to be greeted by his colleague, the local Moscow bishop, with a smile and the words: ‘Now we are one, we can work together as one’. The ROCOR bishop, a CIA asset since the 1960s, answered him shockingly, that nothing of the sort was going to happen. And herein lies the sin of ROCOR – it did not merge and so lead the way in the Diaspora.

At best it became a museum Church, a relic of the past, turning in on itself, and claiming exclusivity before the outside world as an ideological ghetto, all financed by you know who. Incredibly enough, some extreme right-wingers, later schismatics, in ROCOR before 2007 had actually predicted that Moscow would take over and destroy ROCOR, once the Act of Canonical Communion had been signed in 2007. This was a lie born of the paranoia of elderly pharisees, who were afraid of losing power. In fact, as we have said, it was just the opposite, it was ROCOR which deceived naïve Moscow, using its newly-obtained paper unity with Moscow in order to claim canonicity and so destroy itself. In reality, the small but poisonous American faction gradually destroyed the ROCOR of St John of Shanghai, whom it had already persecuted, suspended and effectively killed in 1966, now hypocritically claiming him as their own!

It denied that he had ever given his shoes away to the barefoot poor, saying that he did not wear shoes because he found them uncomfortable! (I quote a ROCOR bishop). ROCOR sent its control freaks outside the USA to impose its unexportable, Protestant-based, US imperialism on other countries, so ‘draining the swamp’, in fact, however, creating the swamp. It set up the new ROCOR as a sect, that was de facto in communion with no-one, because it considered that all other Orthodox were hated heretics and needed rebaptising. This was to reject the Catholicity and communion of the Church, as is typical of all sects. All it could do from this moment on, as the Russians and Russophiles of the Tradition left ROCOR or were even openly expelled from it, as we were, was to recruit young, naïve, male Protestant converts of the Zionist Evangelical type to replace the people and refill their ranks.

The old ROCOR was killed and the new ROCOR of ignorance of history and Russia, pharisaic condemnation and right-wing fanaticism (the same playbook as had been tried by the Grabbe faction in the 1960s and 1970s) and podcasts for incels, was substituted for it. The new ROCOR flattered their pride, telling neophytes that they had at last found ‘the One True Church’, hypnotising them into spiritual illusion (in Russian ‘prelest’). It was spiritual corn syrup for naïve Americans and a pool of votes for the desperate Republican Party, openly and naively supported by the then ROCOR Metropolitan. ‘You see’, he said, ‘we must vote Trump, as he took part in the anti-abortion march for life in Washington’. Astounded by his naivety, I thought, does he not understand that some politicians will do anything for votes? Does he not know about the misogyny of this man? Does he not know about his Epstein connections?

One day, after this nightmare is over, Moscow will wake up, ceasing to be distracted by the tragedy in the Ukraine, by the Greek invasion of its canonical territory there and in the Baltics, by nationalist centralisation, by the error in Africa, the distressing episcopal scandals of careerism, corruption and depravity, and behave as pastors and not as politicians. Then it will at last deal with ROCOR’s rebellion against the Orthodox Tradition and communion, and apostasy from it, too late realising the huge self-imposed losses of pastors, people and international credibility. Meanwhile, the other fifteen Local Orthodox Churches continue to witness, and we continue in them and with them. Moscow will have to catch us, through overcoming its schisms, restoring communion and concelebration, decentralising its Non-Russian parts, returning to the canonicity/conciliarity/catholicity of the Church.

 

 

Their Name is Spiritual Death: Unconverted Converts as Clergy of the Orthodox Church

The (administrators of the) Church would sooner renounce nine tenths of its teachings than one tenth of its property.

Karl Marx

Foreword

Today’s Western world lives without Faith. Its last variant, Protestantism, was discredited for its spiritual emptiness and delusions. Devoid of spirituality, it was left only with sectarian moralism, which was focused on sexual puritanism, never getting to the source of sin, and making it rejected by hundreds of millions. As for Roman Catholicism, it survived longer, but has also been discredited by its State ideology, absurd dogma of Papal infallibility and pedophilia. ‘Are any of its clergy normal’?, as one Irish Roman Catholic asked me. This leaves only the Orthodox Church. However, the devil is doing his best here to wreck our presence and mission by inspiring certain Orthodox clergy to behave like Popes of Rome and certain others to behave like moralising Protestant sectarians, who have only hatred for real Orthodox.

Introduction: False Conversion

Protestants have been joining the Orthodox Church for well over sixty years, especially in the USA. The last thirty years have seen relatively large numbers, especially in the USA. And many of them have come from strict, ultra-conservative Evangelical backgrounds, especially in the USA. And quite a few of them have become members of the clergy, especially in the USA. Here they have been joining two small jurisdictions in particular: the small Antioch and ROCOR, which both desperately lack clergy. (Those from moderate backgrounds have joined the much bigger Greek Archdiocese, OCA and Serbs. They generally do become Orthodox). The problem here is that those from such ultra-conservative Lutheran/Calvinist backgrounds are tainted by them.

Such extreme Protestantism hardly exists in any Western country outside the USA. After all, the extremist Puritans emigrated to the USA precisely because of their intolerance of others and there they started witch-hunts. It is this intolerance which they also bring with them when they ‘join the Orthodox Church’ – notice we do not say that they ‘become Orthodox’ in their case. These are the individuals who believe that being as conservative and fundamentalist as possible is somehow Orthodox. So far are they from the truth, for they clearly have no idea whatever of the realities of the Orthodox Church and Faith. This trend had already become apparent among converts, especially in California, in the 1970s, in their ‘supercorrectness’.

However, today, in this rootless, internet age, this fake Orthodoxy has become a veritable epidemic. What are the symptoms of this sick pseudo-Orthodoxy, which began in the USA, especially among the oddballs of California, though it has affected a few others, especially from a Protestant background, especially in English-speaking countries? Such converts may enter the Orthodox Church sacramentally; but if left unhealed by obedience to Tradition and the mind of the Church, the Evangelical imagination simply reappears under icons, cassocks, mispronounced Russian or Greek titles, and misunderstood and distorted quotations of the canons, instead of from the Gospels. Below are twelve characteristics of these unconverted converts:

Twelve Characteristics

  1. These individuals have never lived for any time in any Orthodox country or spent years in an ‘ethnic’ Orthodox monastery or parish. Such they despise. This is why they do not speak or read any Orthodox language with any fluency and do not wish to. Indeed, they scorn Orthodox languages and immigrants. Everything must be in American, including in England!
  2. The life of ancient, suffering and often very poor peoples, who have preserved the faith through centuries of prayer, liturgy, exile and martyrdom and handed it down through the generations, remain foreign to them. Indeed, they despise and even hate them. They do not turn to the ancient, deeply rooted Orthodox countries. The historical ethnic Churches have preserved an unbroken heritage, born of centuries of profound sacrifice, exile, and martyrdom and have handed down the faith rooted in their ancestral soil of humility. But the unconverted converts want an abstract (the Protestant manner) Anglo-American product, stripped of memory, language and people, constructed as a Neo-Protestant revisionism. They want the Disney fake.
  3. They demand total loyalty and cult-like obedience in an ultra-rigid, high-demand environment. This is marked by intense expectations of personal compliance in a high-control system of psychological pressure and discipline. This is the suffocating pressure of guru-style control freakery and emphasis on purification (they are after all Puritans) in their tightly-governed religious ghetto.
  4. They speak with ‘authority’ and confidence about tradition, obedience, order, and duty. This message is especially used to manipulate and prey on insecure and lonely young men, who are disoriented and confused by the modern world. Such young men may never have had a father, may suffer from autism, may be awkward with girls, may be victims of the covid period and seek certainty of any sort.
  5. Imbued with Old Testament phariseeism, domination and conservatism (which is quite different from the living Tradition of the Holy Spirit), they know nothing of Orthodox spiritual fatherhood, self-sacrificial love, patience, gentleness and the bearing of shame for the sake of the sinner. In Orthodoxy, spiritual fathers are called to take up the Cross first, to protect and repent for others. They do not place the burden of shame on spiritual children. Orthodox spiritual fathers bear the burdens of their flock with tears, patience and unconditional love. Imported Protestant administrators impose only bullying and threats. Clinging to the works of the law divorced from mercy, they remain under the curse of the very law they mistake for righteousness, substituting self-sacrificial love with rigid, self-righteous pharisaic control. Intoxicated by self-righteousness, they never cease to fashion weapons out of holy things. The whole Church, Scripture and Tradition are cudgels for them. For the betrayal of Judas does not always come with a kiss. Sometimes it comes through ‘protocols’, calculation and signatures, and above all through intense jealousy of real Orthodox and through taking money and ‘subscriptions’ off the naïve and deluded.
  6. Ascetic life, fasting and abstention are viewed by them as parts of a punitive authoritarian regime of control freakery and abusive discipline, and not as the free offering of the heart to God for the acquisition of mercy.
  7. All who quickly see through their fakery and hypocrisy and whistle blow are put under intense pressure, fear of permanent exclusion and swift retaliation, as their ‘authority’ has been challenged by those who actually know the Tradition. All this comes from their harsh and punitive Lutheran/Calvinist mentality. Those who resist these bullies and do not give them obedience and personal loyalty (and their cash) will disappear as ‘non-people’ – they never existed.
  8. Any objection to their fake Orthodoxy is for them a source of hurt pride, wounded reputation, embarrassment, emotional distress (which causes them to turn to drink, among other things), business harm, loss of professional standing and of future economic advantage. They are money-obsessed narcissists.
  9. Such unconverted Protestants justify their pride by referring to the ‘Ancient Faith’, which is selectively borrowed and deployed to create an artificial authority, which is in fact only Neo-Evangelical fundamentalism, not the ascetic, eucharistic, conciliar Orthodox Faith. Orthodoxy for them is just an excuse for personal spiritual reinvention, renewed fakery and a very profitable personality cult. How they love raking in the dollars, just like any Protestant tele-evangelist!
  10. Their theatricality does not stop with legalistic honorifics and borrowed academic or ecclesiastical titles. They teach themselves to speak with a foreign cadence, stylised, Old World delivery, ‘an Oxford accent’ (which is in fact nothing of the sort, but could sound like one in crazy California), or Eastern European vocal inflections. These are all simply part of their brand: an artificial pose intended to project frowning severity, antiquity and the pseudo-exotic spiritual authority of the guru. Their deliberate adoption of affected speech patterns and foreign cadences to command an audience is not the sound of Tradition, it is the fake theatrical vanity of the preening narcissist. When the theatre of their legalism replaces the Church, the letter is weaponised against the Spirit and a fake juridical process is mistaken for the life of the Church. This only works among naïve and uneducated American neophytes, who know no better. It does not export. We saw through him in five minutes, but then we have been around for a long time, since before any of them were born.
  11. Tradition and the canons are not respected with humility and prayer. They are selectively ‘harvested’, weaponised and then discarded. They are only observed when they appear to justify their crazy punishments. Orthodoxy is kept only to elevate personal status, command obedience and play at being Orthodox, in order to increase their beloved income, power and prestige. The Orthodox ethos, accountability before the Tradition, spiritual fatherhood, humility and compassionate love for the sinner are discarded. Orthodox symbols on the outside, Evangelical content on the inside. Patristic language on the surface, legalistic and bullying control beneath. Tradition for them is mere conservatism a la Trump, not the Holy Spirit and repentance. For them it is all just a clerical costume, an exotic credential, a borrowed title and weaponised obedience for income for their guru selves.
  12. These unconverted converts make of the Orthodox Church a platform for their own pseudo-charismatic self-construction. They build a personality cult, used as authority, it is the Evangelical will-to-rule in outward Orthodox forms, the Protestant fundamentalist world of misogynistic patriarchal authority (how they hate women!), puritanism and punitive control. Orthodoxy is merely symbolic, it is only there to provide them with self-justification for their proud egomania and narcissism, it is only the personality-driven religious performance of Evangelical show.

Conclusion: Bringing Spiritual Death

When the Protestant cultural framework is not healed and transfigured by repentance and the sacraments, it survives. Byzantine furniture is only added to their extremist Protestantism. Their literalism (The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life, 2 Corinthians 3, 6) and Puritanical instinct to ‘purify’ (‘drain the swamp’) and witch-hunt survives. Those of Protestant background can become Orthodox. However, the old Protestant mentality, severity, control and legalism to repress what they see as impurity by enforced discipline, loyalty and ‘spiritualised’ obedience to their personality cult may remain. If so, this means spiritual abuse, exclusion and erasure, demands for submission, rigidity and a carefully curated image of self-righteousness, which also fool uninformed American bishops in the USA.

Reception into Orthodoxy requires more than changing outward jurisdiction, vocabulary, ancestry and dress. It requires inward repentance, the death of the religious ego, humility and not pride. It requires obedience to the Catholicity of the Church, not the conquest of the Church by the inherited bad habits of domination and personal ambition a la tele-evangelist. Like all Protestants, these individuals are possessed by Judeo-Christianism, a term invented only a hundred years ago. It is not in the language of the liturgy, in the Philokalia, in the Fathers, saints and ascetics. It is only in the Old Testament political language of American conservatism and Protestant fundamentalism, part of the legalistic, punitive, authoritarian, Evangelical heresy of Christian Zionism.

This is why their missionary endeavours always fail. They understand nothing of the people they are trying to convert and have no compassion for them. They are spiritually suffocating, which is why they are sooner or later thrown off. Their emphasis is not on repentance, mercy, joy, healing, the gentle restoration of sinners, but on the arrogance of puritanical moralising and hate-filled condemnation. This is why so many such bullies end up in old calendarist sects a la Boston. Bostonitis does not need theology, it needs psychiatry, for it is a pathology. Their faces express disapproval, but that is all theatre. Subjugation to them is ‘spiritualised’. Resistance to their heresy is framed as ‘rebellion’. Disclosure is disloyalty and betrayal. They kill the Church. Their name is spiritual death.

Acknowledgement: We thank Fr Emmanuel Lemelson for bringing this pathology, unique to the USA, to our attention in his blog. He deserves many more readers and much support for denouncing the systematic secularisation by ‘Orthodox’ Evangelical Zionists of parts of the Orthodox world in the USA and the obvious Deep State financial backing for it as part of its process of extreme right-wing ideologisation.

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

Fleeing the Extremes

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

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

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

The USA

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

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

Europe and the UK

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Triumph of Orthodoxy Over the Ten-Year Marketing Plan

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Foreword

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

Narcissism

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

The Weak Parent

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

The Strong Parent

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

Alternatives to the Spoilt Child Syndrome

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

Backing Down

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

Violence and Selective Amnesia

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

History Remembers

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

Afterword

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

 

 

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

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

Introduction: The Definition of the Church

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

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

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

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

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

From Church to Corporation, Ideology, Sect and Cult 

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

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

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

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

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

Church Life Degenerates as Sectarianism Takes Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

 

 

 

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

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

The Three Non-Russian Ethnic Divisions

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

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

The Three Russian Political Divisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

On the Present Splits in ROCOR

Introduction: The Historic Splits in the Russian Emigration

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

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

Fragment One: The Vitalyites

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

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

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

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

Fragment Two: The Neo-Sergianists

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

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

The Orthodox or Tikhonites

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

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

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

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

France, 25 October 2025