Category Archives: Secularism

What Went Wrong With the West?

Introduction

For 45 years it has been clear to me that the end of the world, preceded by the coming of Antichrist, will come about through Western ‘know-how’. To many who were born and lived before me, this was of course clear long before this. With my own realization came the desire to help gather together those whom Providence brought me into contact with into the Church before the end.

In the Western context into which I was born this has meant in particular being able to explain how the Western world came to give rise to its civilization of Armageddon and the Apocalypse. After all, in the first century the first Christians in the Western world, in Rome, were largely Greek-speaking of Jewish origin, no different from those in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria or elsewhere in the Orthodox Christian world. And yet it was so-called Western Christianity that gave rise to the apostasy of today.

Now although the Western ideological world covers only a small part of the Earth’s surface, Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and US colonies and protectorates in Latin America, Japan, Israel, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, these countries are the most wealthy and powerful. Moreover, they are influential all over the world through their cultural imperialism (‘soft power’) in a gradual process once called Westernization, then Americanization, and now known by the code-name of globalization.

The First Millennium

It is clear that the apostasy did not begin with the Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians in Rome, nor with the Latin-speaking Orthodox Christians whom they evolved into from the end of the second century on, whether in Rome or in the other Western provinces of the Roman Empire at that time. The first signs that all might not be well appear to have come after the fall to the barbarians of those Western provinces of the by then Christianizing Roman Empire. This was in the fifth century.

At that time those who were closer to the pagan culture of the old pre-Christian Roman Empire than to the Christian culture of the new Christian Roman Empire began to yearn nostalgically for that past with the absolute power of Old Rome. For example, some senior clergy from upper-class families would shave their Christian beards, just like the old pagan Roman leaders. They read pagan Latin literature and, remarkably, passed their nostalgia for pagan Rome on to the Frankish barbarian invaders.

In their turn, these provincials also began to covet the same absolute power as the pagan Romans, ignoring the existence of the new Christian Roman Emperor and Empire, founded by St Constantine in the early fourth century in Christian New Rome, the replacement of pagan Old Rome. As a result, real difficulties began to emerge at the end of the eighth century after the Germanic Merovingian dynasty had been usurped by the Carolingian dynasty in what is now Western Germany. Ambitious, violent, aggressive and led by their ruthless heretical king-iconoclast, Karl the Tall (Charlemagne), these barbarian Franks began to unite parts of Western Europe by fire and sword into what they pretentiously called the ‘First Reich’ or ‘First Empire’.

His courtiers, largely educated by Jewish intellectuals in Spain who had deformed the Christian teaching of the Holy Trinity, revealed in the New Testament and to the saints, reduced the Christian God into a kind of unity as in Jewish monotheism, which led to what in the 20th century was called ‘Judeo-Christianity’. Although the little ‘Empire’ of Karl soon collapsed, its inspiration did not and its ideology continued more or less underground until the 11th century, when it finally emerged and was adopted in Rome itself. Thus was created a new religion called ‘Roman Catholicism’, a substitute for Christianity.

The Second Millennium

By making themselves substitutes (‘vicars’) for Christ (before this they had always been known as ‘the vicars of St Peter’) and accepting Karl’s novel filioque fantasy which implied all power and authority came from themselves as substitutes for Christ, the leaders of the Western provinces, calling themselves Popes of Rome, made a power grab for the Church. This was a dismal failure, as many, even in the Western provinces, let alone in the Christian Roman Capital and in the heartlands of the Church in Jerusalem, Antioch, Jerusalem and elsewhere, rejected this crude pseudo-theological primitivism.

The Popes were therefore obliged to use force to impose their control, inventing the full-blooded ‘feudal’ system for dominance. Thus, their shock troops invaded the Iberian Peninsula, southern Italy, England (under ‘the Conqueror’ in 1066, 950 years ago this year) and the Holy Land in the so-called ‘First Crusade’. The semi-barbarian ‘Frankish’ soldiery sent by the Popes, causing mayhem and committing genocide as they went, filling Jerusalem with blood, were the only way in which the Popes could achieve any measure of control.

It was from this point on that the Western lands began their continuous millennial attempt to conquer the world, leaving hundreds of millions of native peoples dead in their wake. As the new 11th century religion degenerated further into ever less Christian isms, like Scholasticism, Protestantism and its myriad of sects, and so into modern secularism, the Western world expanded. Eventually it tried to attain full control over the whole world, even creating ‘World Wars’ and the ability to destroy the world several times over with thermonuclear and bacteriological devices, inspired by Satan.

Notably it tried to destroy any rival civilization, whether in the Americas (through conquistadors and cowboys), in Africa (through slavery and enslavement, as in the Congo), in Asia (especially in India, in China through the opium trade, and in Japan), and in Australasia (through the massacre of aboriginal inhabitants), as well as in Christian Europe. Western aggression in the sole part of Europe that was still free, free also of Ottoman Muslim occupation and oppression, is of particular interest. For that part of Europe was the Russian Lands.

The Assault on the Third Rome

Bloodthirsty attacks on the Russian Lands go back to the 13th century ‘crusades’ by the Teutonic Knights (a stab in the back while the Russian Lands were fighting off the Mongol-Tartar yoke), to the Swedes, Poles and Lithuanians in the 17th century, to the British-organized assassination of the Emperor Paul, to the united European invasion under Napoleon in 1812, to the Anglo-Franco-Muslim invasion of 1854, to the Austro-German invasion of 1914, to the British-organized coup d’etat and the German despatch of the murderous Lenin (Blank) Bolshevik bacterium in 1917 in order to eradicate all Russian Christians, to the united European invasion under Hitler in 1941.

The Western world was silent about the genocide committed by Lenin and Stalin (until 1945), both of whom it supported. It sponsored the evil Ukrainian peasant Khrushchov, the traitor Gorbachov and the drunkard clown Yeltsin in extraordinary and continual aggression. This continued right up to the massacre in Kiev in 2014, when NATO-trained snipers fired at the forces of law and order from the US embassy. In all this the West always imposed its elitist system of greedy and selfish oligarchy against Christian sovereignty (which it contemptuously called ‘autocracy’). Oligarchy means the dictatorial rule of the rich few of the elite over the masses, hoodwinked by the myth of ‘democracy’.

Indeed, it is reckoned that in reality the whole Western and Westernized world is ruled over by a few hundred individuals, who continually exchange places with one another and install their compliant puppets through ‘coloured’ revolutions in provincial positions from Saigon to Santiago, from Kabul to Kiev. This was the system that they have tried to spread to Eastern Europe. In Protestant and modernist Catholic (= Protestantized) countries, this was easy, though there is opposition from traditional Catholics, who have at heart never accepted the Protestantizing Second Vatican Council.

In Orthodox countries which had been protected from the 1960s, ironically, by Communism, it was much more difficult. So they sent thousands of Protestant ‘missionaries’ (mainly Americans and many linked with the CIA) to soften Christian resistance. They met with more or less total failure, indeed the non-mercenary, sincere missionaries were converted from their Protestant errors and fables to the real Christianity of the Orthodox Church. As for the bandit-oligarchs, mainly Non-Russians, they had to flee the anger of the people, whose assets they had stripped, and went into hiding in London, New York, Tel Aviv and on the French Riviera. Here they were sheltered by Western bandit governments, their fellow-oligarchs.

Analysis

What went wrong with the West? To go from a Christ-loving to a Christ-hating elite, it had to deceive itself with its own lies through a thousand year-long process of self-flattery, self-justification and intolerance, camouflaged by words like ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’, ‘democratic’ and ‘modern’. Substituting its own manmade words for the God-given words of the Gospel of Christ, it invented a new religion which is essentially based on the concept that the Western world is the only world and that all others must fall under its destructive hegemony, at best to be preserved as folklore for Western tourists, at worst to be annihilated.

The last 1,000 years are the history of the destruction of all Non-Western civilizations, the pre-eleventh-century Christian Western, the ‘Byzantine’, the Inca, the Aztec, the Maya, the Native American, the African, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Muslim and the pillaging of their artefacts which today fill the museums of the Western world. Today the only civilization that remains to contest the anti-Christian pretensions of the West is that of the Church, Orthodox Civilization.

Though cruelly ravaged by Western materialism, Orthodox Civilization can today be seen in the resurgent, multinational Russian Orthodox Church, ‘the greatest enemy of the West’ according to the American ideologue Brezinski. The faithful of this Church are at this moment fighting for freedom in two wars. Firstly, in the Ukraine, fighting against the Western-financed Godless Galician Uniats and their brutal mercenary allies, sent by the genocidal puppet junta in Kiev. Secondly, in Syria, fighting against the brutal atheist guerrillas of US-invented Islamism, financed by the Western protectorates of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

By 2016 the attempt to destroy the Church of God, which is centred in Moscow, had caused chaos in Eastern Europe, throughout the Middle East as far as the Himalayas, throughout North Africa as far west as Morocco and as far south as Kenya, creating risks of war with Iran and China, and throughout the mainland of Western Europe, with the invasion of millions of wretched Muslim immigrants, especially to Germany, Scandinavia, France and Italy. Having destroyed the Middle East, the anti-Christian elite is set on destroying Europe.

Conclusion

In this vital opening year of 2016 we pray that we shall see a turning-point in the affairs of men, both in the Ukraine and Syria, against the forces of Satan. The Resurrection of the Church, after Her 20th century Golgotha, has begun. It is our earnest hope and ardent prayer that, through the Russian Orthodox Church, the partially compromised, Western-controlled Local Churches will yet turn back to the Faith. Repentance is always possible, all the more so as a result of a genuine Church Council.

A true Church Council can reiterate every article of the Creed, affirming the Persons of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and all the eternal truths of the Seven Universal Councils, rejecting pseudo-Orthodoxy and anathematizing all the false teachings that faithless people have devised. Gathering around the Russian Orthodox Church and the to-be-restored, multinational, sacral, sovereign Christian Empire, centred in a Moscow purified like the rest of the Empire of Bolshevik and other impurities, it may be that God in His mercy will yet give us more time before the end to cleanse ourselves.

A new Christian Emperor can help gather together all men and women of goodwill everywhere into the Church of God, through cleansing and a huge programme of church-building worldwide. This is to prepare us before the end, when Christ will return in glory and His enemies will be laid low in Gehenna, but the repentant will find salvation. For before Antichrist comes we have to prepare, so that we shall not be compromised and weakened by the worldly ways of the guileful, so that we shall bow down before the Son of God Alone.

2016 Words for 2016: On New Year’s Eve Our Future Hope is Imperial

The Romans…the bandits of the whole world…their greed is excited by an enemy’s wealth, their lust for power by his poverty…robbery, butchery, rape…they create devastation and call it peace.

Words attributed by Tacitus to the British leader Calcagus, after his defeat by the Romans at the Battle of Mons Graupius in AD 84

Introduction: The Last Twenty-Five Years

Many were deluded by the collapse of Communism twenty-five years ago, indeed so blinded that they could not see the ensuing and still impending chaos caused by the hubristic attempt of the USA to rule the world. Their Western vanity flattered, the deluded actually still believe in the myth of American Imperialism, ‘the New World Order’, that ‘liberal-democratic’ secularism has triumphed over all other ideologies and faiths. They actually believe that history has ended, that the global future is with the Imperialism of Washington and its absurd materialist ideology – ‘The West is Best over the Rest’. They have failed to revise their views and still now actually believe that there is no alternative to their primitive, spiteful, soul-destroying and world-destroying fantasy.

In reality, the anti-Christian Zionist elite which bankrupted Communism, through its ability to indebt and so enslave to bankers the peoples that it oppresses, failed many years ago. Its New World Order has become the New World Disorder, in North Africa, the Middle East and now Europe. As Russian aeroplanes and Chinese troops enter Syria, it is already dead. Although that Imperialist elite still governs the US and its bloc of vassal-states, it is utterly discredited. It is not only utterly immoral through its Mammonism, but its global power-grab has visibly ended in catastrophe. Instead of peace and prosperity, it has brought to the world unspeakable wars and misery, exploitation and environmental destruction, chaos and spiritual poverty, as well as uprooting hundreds of millions of families from their ancestral homes worldwide. And this devastation they do indeed call peace. The Imperialist elite has brought not life but death, with the apocalyptic threat of Armageddon in the background.

However, there are those who have not been deluded by the toys and baubles, bread and circuses, of globalist Consumerism and have not given up the struggle to find an alternative. They have sought a way out – though often by violent reaction to Western genocide some of them have also made the most appalling errors. For example, by reaction to global Western Imperialism, fanatical Islamists have turned to the horrors and abominations of terrorism. Nobody in their right mind admires or follows such Satanized individuals. They do not understand that further destruction is no response to destruction, that only construction is positive. Others, also by reaction to the selfsame globalism, have turned to narrow and provincial nationalism, failing to realize that in a globalized world, no small or even large nation can stand alone against the powers that be. United we stand, divided we fall.

Such is the fate of those in European countries who want to reclaim their sovereignty, resisting and abandoning the death-giving embrace of the Imperialist EU beast. For example, there are now strong nationalist political movements in the UK, France, Greece, Hungary, Poland and in many other countries on other continents, as in India and China. In Europe they do not understand that standing alone they will be crushed by the EU tyranny, behind which stands its parent, the Washington elite. In India and China they do not understand that, despite their size, they are still provincial, lacking global reach. However, if the ‘liberal-democratic’ myth of the West can be rejected as the failure that it is, together with the horrors of Islamist terrorism and the provinciality of narrow nationalism, even if that nationalism is on a sub-continental scale like the Hindu or the Chinese, what hope then is left?

The Alternative

Clearly, any hope that is left can only be something that is not immoral like Western Imperialism, that is not violent like Islamism, and that is not provincial like European nationalism, anti-Christian Hinduism or Chinese Communism. We would suggest that what is left can be summed up not by the word ‘Imperialism’, but by its opposite, the word ‘Imperial’. This may seem mystifying, since for many the two words mean the same thing and in any case ‘all empires are destined to fail’. History indeed tends to confirm the latter statement: the Persian, the Egyptian, the Macedonian, the pagan Roman, the ‘Holy Roman’, the Ottoman, the French, the British, the Soviet and many another Empire all rose and then fell.

However, the fact is that all who were not part of such passing Empires had to become their vassals or allies and were obliged to accept their policies. Such is the case today with the EU Fourth Reich (Reich = Empire), which crushes national sovereignty and obliges its members to do whatever its Imperialist US designers order it to do. Today’s ‘democracies’ in Western Europe are so weak that they must obey their Imperialist masters in Berlin and Washington. In the same way Hitler’s Third Reich smashed all the European ‘democracies’ and only another Empire, the Soviet, was able to overcome it, in the same way as only the Russian Empire had been able to overcome Hitler’s predecessor, Napoleon’s Empire.

In other words, only a powerful Empire can withstand another powerful Empire. We can see this today; no European ‘democracy’ has been able to withstand the Globalist Empire of Washington, they have all fallen to it one by one. Today, for instance, once Orthodox Christian but now apostatic Greece has allowed homosexual ‘marriage’, just as Montenegro is being forced by violence to join NATO and the occupied Ukraine is being tempted by its temporary government into the vulgar consumerism and profoundly ungay ‘gay’ parades of American Imperialism. Other countries, like India and China, merely resist that Imperialism in nationalistic words, but in fact imitate it from inside.

In fact, only one country, and one which does indeed have an Imperial, that is, multinational, profile resists and refuses to become a US vassal, and that is the Russian Federation, one eighth of the world. It alone has been strong enough to rebuff without either fanaticism or provincial nationalism. Western Imperialist meddling, which destroys national traditions and identities, local cultures and family life, provoking chaotic conflicts and bloody wars with its attempted imposition of the global MacWorld ‘culture’ of the ‘New World Order’ or ‘New World War’. It has done this on the basis of Christianity. Only that Christianity, restored as a Christian Empire, based in Russia, can resist – on condition, however, that its Imperial Empire does not fall into Imperialism, as it tended to do before the Revolution. Let us explain.

The globalist ‘New World Order’ is not democratic at all, that is a myth. It is in fact the dictatorship of an oligarchic elite, artificially divided into two parts, so providing the myth of democratic choice. It runs political parties, industries, banks, the media, the whole Establishment, and threatens those who counter it. Founded on the genocide of millions of Native Americans, the abhorrent slave trade in millions of Native Africans, a genocidal civil war, the bloodshed of two World Wars and the countless local wars of the twentieth century, it is trying to control the world. It subjugates peoples and countries by military aggression, colour revolutions, juntas and propaganda lies, ‘banana republicanizing’ by using local mafia networks to support itself and living off the resulting chaos. This is Imperialist – not Imperial.

For the mark of Imperialism, colonial or neo-colonial, is the suppression of local cultures and the genocide of peoples who resist the monoculture that it imposes. However, the one Empire that has lasted by far the longest has been Imperial, that is multinational and indeed multi-religious, accepting diversity. Quite different from the pagan Roman Empire, this is the Christian Roman Empire. Founded in the early fourth century in New Rome, it continued until it was interrupted by decadent Greek nationalism in 1453, then soon after restored in the Third Rome until it was interrupted by decadent Russian nationalism in the early twentieth century. Its restoration is now under way. It has survived interruptions precisely because, despite deviations in periods of decadence, it has not been based on Imperialism, but has been Imperial, that is, it has been founded on the Christian revelation of the Holy Trinity, unity in diversity.

Conclusion: The Next Twenty-Five Years?

Only in the framework of the Imperial and Trinitarian concept can sovereignty and ethnic differences be combined and the identity of diverse peoples be protected from corrosive, centralizing Imperialist globalism, terrorism and provincial nationalism. Such globalism was precisely the error of the neo-Khazar Bolshevik Empire, which lasted scarcely three generations because it was based on genocide as it imposed a single centralized model on Central Asians, Eastern Europeans, Baltic peoples, Finns and Ukrainians alike. The question of the restoration of the Russian Empire is vital to preserving the national identities of a hundred and more peoples, not least that of Little Russians. The alternative is that they all become second-class citizens, cannon fodder and pawns in the game of chaos of American Imperialism, as we can see is happening to Ukrainians, Syrians, Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans, Mexicans and many other peoples worldwide.

The fact is that the Russian Federation is today the only country in the world which is defending Christian values. And this despite, or rather because of, the fact that twenty-five years ago it lived under the oppression of an imported atheist regime which was responsible for the multi-millioned martyrdom of Christians, by far the greatest known to history, and despite the fact that it is still suffering from the dreadful though now dying hangover of that atheism. This miracle has always been ignored by the Western world. Why? Because that world is in fact by ideology anti-Christian, having violently quit the Church 1,000 years ago. That is why all surviving remnants of authentic Christianity among the non-deluded peoples of the Western world look to the Russian Orthodox Church with hope. That is also why Russia is hated by the Trostskist post-modernist ideology of the Western liberal-neocon elite and is slandered by its closely-controlled media. For them ugliness has become beauty, noise has become music, discord has become harmony and lies have become truth.

An Imperialist Empire, in words first uttered by the Victorian Imperialist Palmerston, has ‘no permanent friends, only permanent interests’. However, an Imperial Empire does have friends, for it is a symphony of peoples, cultures and beliefs; but it needs an Emperor and that is what is lacking in the still post-Soviet Russian Federation today. Why? Firstly, because only an Emperor can act as the unique focus of belief and so channel his subjects, elite and people alike, into the service of the Empire. Secondly, because only an Emperor can control and limit the oligarchs or aristocrats and stop them becoming too powerful and so tyrannizing and exploiting the people. And thirdly, because only an Emperor can act as the unique commander-in-chief in the event of war.

As to who will become the Emperor of the restored Christian Empire that alone can restrain growing evil worldwide, we do not know. Only Providence can reveal him after repentance of the whole people. What we know is that only an Emperor, in the name of his repentant Orthodox people, can prove the Imperial truth that ‘Right is Might’ and disprove the Imperialist lie that ‘Might is Right’. The peoples of the Russian Federation, like all other peoples all over the world, have a choice to make: to subject themselves to barbaric Imperialism and accept the same fate as Yugoslavs, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians, or else to unite and repent. If so, then we can await with hope the Emperor who will restore and defend Imperial Christianity, authentic Christianity, soaring like the double-headed eagle above East and West alike. And that is why, unlike unfaithful, compromised, Establishment Halfodox, all faithful Orthodox, wherever we live scattered across the face of the earth, are Imperial.

One Thousand Words on 2016

As 2015, with its interminable wars, terrorist horrors and torrents of wretched refugees, the results of rapacious Western invasions of countries which the West itself created by its abandonment of Christ’s commandment to love our neighbour, draws to an end, what hopes are there for 2016? Many are downcast and have little hope in the darkness, fearing yet another worldwide conflagration through the apostasy expressed in the anti-Christian New World Order imposed by genocide a generation ago. However, for those of us who are Christians, there is always hope in the darkness, for we know that if we pray and do our best, the rest is in God’s hands. And with Him what is impossible for mankind can become possible.

In Muslim countries where disastrous chaos and rage for revenge have been generated by the injustices of the Western Powers, there seems to be little cause for hope. In Iraq and Afghanistan the chaos-creating forces of NATO were routed by the Taliban and had to abandon their lost wars. They were evacuated to their distant homelands, having in vain sacrificed thousands of lives and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, leaving only darkness. In Libya, its government overthrown by Western greed and injustice under the cloak of ‘humanitarian intervention’, there reigns chaos and bloodshed. In Turkey, its authoritarian and warlike regime being provoked to war by NATO, but also threatened by Russian sanctions and full-scale civil war with the Kurds, the future seems bleak. But this darkness is only part of the story.

In Syria, the government of President Assad has invited Russian support to defeat the Muslim terrorists, founded and until recently fully supported by the Western Powers. There is now cause for hope as the first areas have been liberated and refugees are returning. In the Ukraine, with the Fascist regime in Kiev bankrupt and unable to pay its international debts, there is hope that freedom will come to that sorry land, perhaps within only a few months, and millions of refugees will be able to return home. Meanwhile, spiritually healthy forces in Serbia, Montenegro and Moldova are fighting off quisling governments and NATO and EU colonialism. Much the same is happening in Central Asia, Georgia and Armenia.

‘Defend yourself in the West and find friends in the East’, said St Alexander Nevsky over 750 years ago. Thus, China and Russia have allied themselves after both became the victims of wild US aggression. Both countries are resisting the New World Order of the Zionist neocons and, together with them are allied India, much of the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America, all the former Western colonies. These are all rejecting the US dollar as a currency. Only the crazed apostate leaders of the Western world, with their Israeli and Sunni vassals in Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, are still fully enslaved to the Machiavellian Prince of this world.

Throughout Eastern Europe, in the Baltic States, the Czech Lands, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, the peoples with the free governments, though not with corrupt puppet governments, are resisting EU tyranny and the Muslim invasion. Even in Western Europe, in France, Spain, Italy, the UK and Denmark, there are everywhere forces for national sovereignty and restoration that are at last waking up and wanting to return to their cultural roots. They say, ‘Enough, we want our countries back’. Such national liberation and globalist resistance movements, wishing to restore their countries’ sovereignty, look to Sovereign Russia for support.

Spiritually there are small numbers of heterodox in Western Europe who are at last awakening to Orthodoxy. They are finally realizing that the remnants of Orthodoxy in the West, in the form of Catholicism, have been so debilitated by filioquization (which makes the Church into a purely thisworldly institution, subjecting God to fallen human nature) and then by the virus of Protestantism and its Old Testament moneymasters, that they cannot return to the Church en masse. They must now make their path to the Church and so national restoration through personal repentance.

In the Church world, we prepare for the 2016 ‘Council’, much-feared since Washington has been trying to impose its agenda through its pawns, the State Department-appointed bishops and their paid hirelings. Here too there is good news. On 21 December Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church, three-quarters of the Church and the only part that is completely free, stated categorically that our Church will hearken to the voice of the people, the guardians of the Faith, and will resist any attempt at apostasy from the Christian Faith.

If this so-called Council does take place (no-one is yet sure exactly where or when), this guarantees that it will be the opposite of the Vatican’s masonic Council over fifty years ago, it will be the affirmation of the Faith, not its rejection. And in that case it will be a real Council, a Council of St John the Baptist, a last rallying call to the whole world to enter the Church to fight against the world’s preparations for Antichrist. And if the secular-minded do attempt to corrupt the Faith, then either no ‘Council’ will take place or else this second ‘Council of Florence’ will be rejected by the boycott of the faithful clergy and people.

Thus, although there is much darkness in the world, there are also glimmers of light, indeed, the promise of brightness for ‘those that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death’. For now we repeat the words of the Prophet and Forerunner: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’ and we say to the Pharisees and Saducees: ‘O generation of vipers, who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ Unlike the renovationist ‘infil-traitors’ of the fifth column, there are those of us who fear nothing and will resist to the end in faithfulness to Christ and His Church, whatever the cost. For we shall win in the end, make no mistake.

A Story of Failure and a Story of Success

Introduction

For well over fifty years now, and in virtually every country in Western Europe, that is in countries with a millennium of Catholic-Protestant culture, small numbers of Western Europeans have been joining one or other of the local dioceses of the Orthodox Church. In general it can be said that the numbers joining have been higher in the less traditional and more Protestant countries and lower in traditional Catholic countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal. And numbers have been much higher among more uprooted and cosmopolitan city-dwellers than among more traditional country-dwellers. Here there is something to do with spiritual degeneration. Though there is a detailed thesis here, the full story of this Europe-wide movement has yet to be written – probably because it has so far been very marginal.

In some countries, especially small ones like Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Austria and Luxembourg, where also there has been relatively little immigration from ‘Orthodox countries’ until recent years, numbers of native Orthodox are tiny, often a few dozen at most. In other countries, especially larger ones like Germany, France and Great Britain, which have also received more immigrants from ‘Orthodox countries’ in Eastern Europe, numbers of native Orthodox rise into the low thousands. Indeed, the process has been under way for so long that in all these countries we can find adults who are second and third generation Orthodox of purely Western European origin.

Some of the first generation are now elderly and have been members of the Orthodox Church for between forty years and seventy years. Some have been present for between twenty and forty years. Others are newcomers who have entered into communion with the Church more recently, only over the last twenty years. On the surface, it might seem that there are today anything between 10,000 and 20,000 native Orthodox living in Western Europe. (Here we exclude those who have already passed on). However, such a high figure is very misleading because in order to understand real numbers we have to look at the motivations of those who have joined the Orthodox Church in Western Europe, sociological and not spiritual motivations which sadly have resulted in a majority of those received and their descendants lapsing from the Faith.

Marriage

Firstly, there are those who have had to join the Orthodox Church because they have married an Orthodox. It is true that some of these individuals have come to appreciate the Church and play a part in parish life. In other words, they have not only joined the Orthodox Church, they have actually become Orthodox and spontaneously and naturally have Orthodox values, think in an Orthodox way and live an Orthodox life. However, for the majority that is not the case. Their membership of the Church is purely nominal, often because the membership of the Church of the Orthodox whom they have married is also nominal.

Without an example of Church life, spouses will not take up Church life. Moreover, if their spouses belong to parishes where the whole service is in an inaccessible foreign language (often also largely inaccessible to the second-generation Orthodox spouse), clearly the possibility of their interest is greatly lessened. We doubt if there are more than a few hundred Western Europeans who, though they have joined the Orthodox Church because they have married Orthodox, have actually become Orthodox. The rest, the vast majority, have to all intents and purposes lapsed (though arguably it could be said they never lapsed because they were never part of the Church anyway).

Converts

Secondly, there are those who previously practised Catholicism or Protestantism (including its Anglican variant). They have often been disillusioned by the denomination in which they have grown up and left it for Orthodoxy. These people really are converts. Here we have to look very closely at motivation. Some have left their original denomination disgruntled and angry and then joined the Orthodox Church for negative, purely psychological, occasionally psychopathic, reasons. These people never become Orthodox, for they spend their time looking backwards, either nostalgically and investing themselves heavily in ecumenism and the past, or else in anger, raging against ecumenism and their original denomination. Neither group ever looks forward to the Church and living in Her, but lives off the baggage of the past which they attempt to impose on the Church by trying to ‘reform’ Her! I have met so many like this, who, even after twenty, forty and sixty years, have still never become Orthodox. These are the eternal converts who love being converts and, in one way or another, always lapse from the mainstream, or rather have never been part of the mainstream, blinded by psychological deformations in egomania, producing psychobabble. Needless to say, they do not hand on Orthodoxy to their descendants because they have no Orthodoxy to hand on.

On the other hand, there are those who, with an open mind and without psychological hang-ups or ‘baggage’, have naturally evolved through repentance from some sort of Protestantism or Catholicism (it is much the same thing) and become Orthodox, ever deepening their Faith. They realize that Orthodoxy is simply Christianity and that, before, they were simply not Christians in the fullness of the word, they both had too much of something (phariseeism, moralism, guilt etc) or lacked something (sacramental life, spiritual understanding, simplicity etc). They understand that previously they had been conditioned by deformations of Christianity and that now, at last, they understand what the Church is. Although this group are a minority amongst converts, they are the positive ones because they not only join the Church, but with time actually become Orthodox, ridding themselves of the deformed cultural reflexes of their past. There may be 2-3,000 such Orthodox Western Europeans.

Fantasy

Thirdly, there have been those who have been brought into the Church under false pretences by fantasist proselytists, false ‘elders’, people who love giving themselves titles (‘spiritual fathers’) and exude the desire to be admired. For example we well remember one bishop who, desperate to fill his tiny parish, which most serious Orthodox did not attend once they had discovered what it was about, probably brought in 2,000 people over his lifetime; they mainly lapsed very swiftly. His technique was to attract people, mainly wealthy people from the upper-class Establishment, through his undoubted personal charm and, under the influence of almost semi-hypnosis, he would receive them within a few days or weeks at most. Few lasted more than six months; some only lasted days. I have come across many of his victims (I use the word with reason). Some have never been back to Church since the day he received them; many have returned to various cliques of Anglicanism, where he found them, or invented their own. Since he died, all his fantasies have come to grief and a new generation is growing up, never having heard of him.

Another priest, an ex-Anglican vicar, has been desperate to ‘recruit’ to his tiny community. His technique, sadly common among many of his background who seem not to have any time for the vast majority of Non-Anglican English people, is to receive anyone who shows the slightest interest in the Church. The result is an incredibly high turnover. His tiny flock changes almost completely every six months. A high lapse rate is certain. Outside England old calendarists and others of a sectarian mentality in France (both perennialist Kovalevskians and old calendarists), Italy and Portugal, without any base of faithful, have recruited heavily among traditional Catholics. In Portugal these old calendarists used to include Catholic saints in their calendar! Again turnover, that is, the lapse rate, has been very high. Why remain in a group that is a sect and is not in communion with the Orthodox Church? There have been many pastoral disasters in such groups. Stability is definitely not a word that belongs to the vocabulary of such sectarians, for, once more, they too have built on sand. Nevertheless, there are some issued from false missionaries who have seen through the charlatans and moved on to stable Church life elsewhere.

Descendants

Fourthly, there are those who have so far lost any identity inherited from their parents that, although they are technically not Western Europeans, they are so Westernized that they might as well be. These are the descendants of immigrants from ‘Orthodox countries’., children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren right up to the sixth generation and more. Sadly, it has to be said that, once children lose the Orthodox culture of their parents (often fairly minimal anyway), the assimilation rate is very high. Conditioned by the acid bath of Western schools with their intense secularist propaganda, not to mention television and social media, Orthodox cultural reflexes tend to be quickly worn down, especially as the generations pass. We know of such Orthodox who still occasionally go to church, but they will not attend if it is not on the new or Western calendar and if they cannot sit down at services and they will not take communion if they have to have confess first. Clearly, nothing can be built on such semi-Orthodox.

On the other hand, there are Orthodox of later generations, perhaps especially of the third generation, who have lost the conformist and integrationist inferiority complex and reflexes of the second (‘Schmemannite’) generation and want to return to and understand their roots as well as the first millennium roots of the countries where they live. Obviously their knowledge of their ancestors’ language may be negligible, but this is not a problem in itself. If they have zeal for the Faith and want to go to the roots of the Faith, then such Orthodox, of any generation, including those issued from mixed marriages, can bring a great deal to Church life. There are several thousand such Orthodox in Western Europe and they, together with the first generation of immigrants, are the backbone of the Church, even though they are not, even in part, native Western Europeans.

Conclusion

There are Orthodox in the above categories, admittedly in some more than others, who play a role in Church life in Western Europe, and not just an academic or titular one, but a real one. Whether people have come to the Church of God by marriage and avoided the temptation of nominalism, whether they are converts from one of the heterodox denominations and avoided the temptation of living with the baggage of the past and overcome psychology in favour of theology, whether they have been brought into the Church by false missionaries but seen through them to the real Church, whether they are of ‘Orthodox’ origin, but have resisted the temptations of assimilation and minimalism, there are in all these groups several thousand genuine Western European Orthodox. To them we can add others, also repentant.

For we have not yet mentioned those who simply come to the Church because the Church is their spiritual home. We are not converts, we do not have any baggage with us, we simply want to join the Church in order to be what in our souls we always have been: Orthodox. We enter the Church and are at once at home in Her and cannot live and have never been able to live without Her. We cannot be anything other than Orthodox. We have no desire to ‘reform’ the Church, but are happy with Her as She is. We are the people who simply want spiritual food and have no cultural hang-ups and no heterodox culture with which to create some sort of Halfodoxy, half-Protestant/half-Orthodox’, ‘Anglo-Catholicism with icons’, the Tridentine Mass with icons etc. I can remember how shocked I was over 40 years ago when I was asked by a Greek priest: ‘Who brought you to the Church?’, obviously expecting the name of a bishop or priest in answer. When I answered truthfully: ‘God’, he seemed shocked. I thought how utterly deformed his expectation had been. He could only see an Orthodoxy dependent on some personality cult.

The fact is, whatever our path to the Church anywhere, Church life can only be built on the Rock of Tradition, not on the sand of the compromises of negative traits, of nominalism, pathology, fantasy or minimalism. Though you may be very zealous, you cannot be missionaries if you have nothing of spiritual value to give, your zeal is purely psychological, not of the heart, not repentant. The Church lives by the Holy Spirit, not by fallen human psychology and ideology. Sadly, we have seen many cases where individuals have tried to build the Church in Western Europe on the sand of compromise, without repentance, without leaving false cultural values behind them. All such attempts, and we have seen a great many of them, have ended in failure, they are fantasy swept away by reality, as a result there are well over ten thousand native Western Europeans who have lapsed from a corrupted form of Orthodoxy. Such have been and will continue to be washed away, like so much sand when the tide comes in. That is failure. On the other hand, there are those who are building the real and future Church in Western Europe on the Rock of the fullness of the Orthodox Tradition that no tide can ever wash away. That is success.

The Russian Orthodox Church: Yesterday and Tomorrow

The Emperor and the Empress thought that they were dying for their homeland. But in fact they died for all mankind.

Pierre Gilliard, Swiss tutor to the Tsar’s children.

Foreword

Ten years ago, in 2005, debate raged in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) about our relations with the Church inside Russia. Was it at last free and so could we enter into canonical communion and work together, building the future? Such was the debate that a Pan-Diaspora Church Council was called in San Francisco in 2006 in order to answer the questions posed. At that time we had to counter some very false arguments which were advanced in favour of sectarian self-isolation, arguments that were shaped by the impurity of politics and psychology, and not by the purity of theology. Below are examples.

Yesterday

The human weakness of Metropolitan (later Patriarch) Sergius (+ 1944) and his followers, as revealed in compromises with the atheist persecutor Stalin, known as ‘sergianism’, was erected by some into a ‘theological’ heresy. In fact, it was just another form of erastianism, of placing the State above the Church, of which there had already been so many examples in other forms in the Old Testament and in 1900 years of Church history. There was nothing theological in this, for it was only human weakness on the part of one who had found himself under huge pressure from a militant atheist State. No-one is to judge him for his weakness, there is no place for phariseeism here, for God is the Judge of all.

Though there was nothing of a dogmatic or theological nature in such compromises, certain individuals, partly under the influence of North American political puritanism, even concluded that the present-day sacraments of the Church inside Russia had somehow mysteriously ‘lost grace’ on account of this compromise of three generations before. As a ROCOR priest, I first came across this astonishing piece of politics masquerading as theology in 1992 from someone who was under the influence of this North American error. In fact, of course, sergianism is not a heresy, whereas puritanism, with its inherent impurity of Novatianism, Donatism and Eustathianism, as seen in the light of the canons of the Council of Gangra of 340, most certainly is.

The political and diplomatic support which a few in the Church inside Russia sought from Roman Catholics and Protestants, and called ecumenism, was also condemned. However, it was a very curious idea that the opinions or actions of a handful of individuals could be held up as a sign that the whole of the Church inside Russia, 160,000,000 people, was therefore somehow tainted by the heresy of ecumenism! In reality, most of the faithful inside Russia had never heard of ecumenism and those who had were utterly opposed to it. This was all the stranger, in that by 2005 ecumenism had in any case come to mean something very different from in its political heyday between the 60s and 80s. Instead of concerning itself with politically-enforced syncretistic compromise, in fact heresy, it had turned to having good-neighbourly relations with heterodox, something that ROCOR, with the many mixed marriages among parishioners and regular need to use heterodox premises for services, had always cultivated.

The strangest argument heard at that time was that we could not associate ourselves with the Church inside Russia in any way because of the compromises of a few individuals in it. This was an appalling error, for it would have meant that we could not associate ourselves with the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors. True, we, in freedom, had canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors first, in 1981, 19 years before the Church inside Russia had been able to do so by freeing itself. However, many, including myself, had wondered why we in the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), living in freedom, had so scandalously not canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors long before, from the 1920s on. We felt shame for ourselves.

The sad reason for the delay had been because elements in ROCOR were themselves contaminated with politics. Indeed, I well remember how in 1981 certain parishioners at the ROCOR Cathedral in London, as also elsewhere, had actually been opposed to the canonization. And in any case, the ROCOR canonization had only ever been a first step, a beginning. As I wrote at the time: What has begun in New York must come to completion in Moscow. Moreover, for lack of trustworthy information we had canonized only some 8,000; the Church inside Russia, with greater access to archives, has canonized well over 30,000 and that number is increasing.

Others said that we in ROCOR could have nothing to do with a Church whose bishops belonged to the KGB. I would have agreed with this – if any had belonged to the KGB, such as, we suspect, the defrocked schismatic Filaret Denisenko, now the darling of the CIA. In fact, they did not. The senior bishops inside Russia merely had KGB code names – in the same way as Western secular leaders, whom we prayed for in our services as civil leaders, had KGB code-names. The Church inside Russia could just as well have said: ‘We will have nothing to do with ROCOR because you pray for individuals who have KGB code-names’. It would have been just as false an argument.

Some in ROCOR admitted that there were members of our Church, in good standing, who worked or had worked for the CIA and other Western spy services. They countered this by saying that there were members of the KGB in churches inside Russia. This was totally false: the only KGB members who attended churches there were those who went there to spy, to note down names of priests or young people and create problems for them.

Sectarian elements in ROCOR objected that if we entered into canonical communion with the Church inside Russia, we would then be in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church! I first heard this incredible argument, I think, in about 1999, when a ROCOR priest from London concelebrated with a priest of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This had raised an objection from a sectarian priest trained in North America. In the Western European Diocese of ROCOR, where I had been ordained and celebrated until 1997, such concelebrations were perfectly normal and happened regularly. As a ROCOR priest, I was amazed at this sectarian spirit, which I had hardly met before. The logic of this argument would be that we in ROCOR were no longer in communion with Mt Athos, which is in the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Absolutely unthinkable! (Naturally, such sectarians later left ROCOR).

On a much more serious and practical level, there were those who pointed out that among representatives of the Church inside Russia in the Diaspora there were still corrupt and renovationist clergy at even the highest level, even though several had by then died out. This was a problem. Although these renovationists called us slanderers for telling the Truth and so shaming their false idols (as renovationists elsewhere still do), the problem was largely overcome in 2006, when most such clergy in England and France left the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia in a schism which they created; since then, two or three other such individuals have simply been removed, so they can no longer cause scandal and can at last learn the basics of the Faith.

Finally, there were those who said that we could not work together with the Church inside Russia because the situation in Russia was not as it had been before the Revolution. Soviet practices had infiltrated Russian society, alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce were rife, the mummy of the Russophobic murderer Lenin still lay on Red Square, and the squares and streets of Russia were littered with his statues or named after his henchmen. They demandingly demanded in fact that the post-Soviet Russian State (in charge of such matters) behave as though it were part of the Russian Church! In the face of this argument we pointed out that pre-Revolutionary Russia had not been ideal either (otherwise there would never have been a Revolution), we asked for compassion for a people deprived for three generations of a free Church, asked for patience and said that with time the Church will influence the State, since repentance, which we too are in need of, changes people.

Victory

The above arguments were rejected, with repentance for ever having entertained them, by well over 95% of ROCOR, dismissed as the arguments of schismatic impurity, of a tiny, sectarian, inward-looking and politicized minority, which had been trying to take over ROCOR, holding us back and impeding us from fulfilling our universal calling together with the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church, the great majority. As we know, in 2007 the vast majority of the hierarchy, clergy and people of our little ROCOR were happy to enter at last into canonical communion with the vast majority of the rest of the Church, of which we had always spiritually been a part. The separation, caused purely by political events exterior to the Church, was over. We were sure that the Church inside Russia had freed itself, as had already been made evident by the Jubilee Council of 2000. At long last, our inward unity could become outwardly apparent and, impediments removed, we could progress together towards our common destiny and ever more urgent mission.

Tomorrow

A generation after the fall of State atheism in the Russian Federation, we see in Russia today most interesting developments, promising for the future. After the awful period of ‘law of the jungle’ capitalism in the 1990s, with its rule of seven bankers, ‘Wild East’ bandit privatizations and the appearance of pro-Western criminal oligarchs and liberals, Russia has largely seen through that alternative to Communism that was offered it by the consumerist Western world, which we too, living in the Western world itself, had already seen through.

Thanks largely to the chaos and misery that the Western Powers have been causing in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, Syria and above all in the Ukraine, Russian society has seen through Eurosodom and Gomorrhica. If the CIA-installed Poroshenko junta, set up in Kiev, the Mother of Russian cities, wants the suicide of ‘European values’, it can have them. We will remain faithful to the values of St Vladimir and St Olga of Holy Kiev. Believing in Christ, Who trampled down death by death, we choose life. Believing in satan who tramples down life by death, they choose death. That is the difference between us.

Providentially, through the Western attacks on Holy Rus, Russian society has for the most part now come to understand that the West is not the solution. Russia must follow its own, historic, God-given way, the way that our saints and other lucid elements in ROCOR have always preached. As for Russia, it must heal itself and restore Holy Rus. Outside Russia, we can only pray and encourage, learning as we go, for our main task is to spread Orthodoxy outside the Russian Lands in faithfulness to Holy Rus. We are only humble disciples who follow the precepts of Holy Rus.

Interestingly, voices have been saying that Russian society today resembles 1917 Russia. However, unlike in 1917 the direction of today’s Russia is not 1918, but 1916. In other words, although the situation is delicate, Russia is not heading towards catastrophe as it was in 1917, but is heading back from it. Here is the difference. If, God willing, we continue on this God-given path, the Church of Russia will lead us to our destiny. What is this?

On account of the utter failure of imposed Western ideas there, we can say that Russia has seen the future and knows from bitter experience that it does not work. Today it is struggling its way back up from the pit, at the same time as the Western world, led by the United States, is hurtling headlong into it. Today, some of the more aware Western politicians and thinkers are going to Russia or following events in Russia in order to learn. Gerhard Schroeder, Nicolas Sarkozy, Phillippe de Villiers, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Paul Craig Roberts, Franklin Graham and others all follow events in Russia closely or visit.

Russia’s mystical and historic role now is to act as an intermediary between East and West, between China and Western Europe. For the spiritual destiny of China is to enter the authentic Orthodox Christian world, becoming the Eastern provinces of Holy Rus, just as the spiritual destiny of Western Europe, with its roots in Orthodox Christianity, is to return to it, with the help of its ancient saints, by becoming the Western provinces of Holy Rus. True, the towering national pride of Europeans largely prevents this, for where there is no humility, there is no salvation. Indeed, Russia’s task is now not to save Europe from the USA, as some have put it, but to save Europe from itself. Just as Russia, and not the West, was to blame for choosing the Western ideology that created the Russian Revolution in February 1917, we do not blame others for the present misfortune that Europeans have chosen for themselves.

The key to universal salvation in these last times is atonement, in the restoration of Holy Rus and in Holy Rus becoming universal. Following the Holy Trinity, we are called on not only to be Guardians and Gatherers of Holy Rus, following the Father and the Son, but also Spreaders of Holy Rus, following the Holy Spirit. Those, in East and West, who want to work with the Russian Orthodox Church and so, by following the Tradition, build up new Local Churches are welcome to do so. If some do not wish to do so and set themselves against the prophetic and mystical Church Tradition in tired, old, secularist and humanist neo-renovationism, then God be with them. We shall do God’s Will without them. We force no-one to follow the Church; the Church sails ahead without those who reject Her.

In 1917 the last Christian Emperor, the Tsar, did not abdicate. In 1917 Russia and the whole world abdicated from him, from the Christian Emperor and Christian Empire, and so from Christ. Since then there has been no peace on earth so that we have all had to atone, each receiving our penance in order to learn humility. Inside Russia the people faced the penances of persecution and Nazi invasion, outside Russia those in the emigration faced the penances of exile and isolation. As for Europe, like today’s USA also, it has faced the penance of war and humiliating loss of power and greatness. As for the rest of the world, it has faced constant strife and war, ever since ‘he who restrains’ (2 Thess 2, 7) was in 1917 removed. All the suffering of the world since 1917 has been the opportunity of all to learn humility.

Our destiny, mystical and prophetical, is to preach Holy Rus, the message of the last Christian Emperor, to the whole world for repentance before the end. The time is coming when the world will at last be ready to hear of Holy Rus, of the universality of the Incarnate Christ, authentic Christianity, and not the two diluted isms shaped by Western heathenism, pagan Romanism and northern barbarianism, that is, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

Afterword

My great-grandfather was born in the same year as Nicholas II, the last Christian Emperor who was martyred in Ekaterinburg in 1918. One hundred years after the Emperor’s birth and fifty years after his martyrdom, I, born on the anniversary of the day when the remains of the Imperial family were finally destroyed, received the message from the east that I was to learn and then go and speak of Holy Rus, Christ Incarnate, to those whom I met. This is not only my personal destiny, but also that of many others, as described so well in the poem ‘The Apostles’, written in exile in 1928 by the bard of the Tsar, Sergey Bekhteev:

Amid the darkness of the slavish world
We bear the spirit’s torch in victory
And we call loud to those chosen by God
To enter the hall where the Orthodox feast.

We walk along a road of thorns,
We soar above worldly vanity,
We are the apostles of Christ’s Faith,
We are the heralds of holy truth.

We call the races and the peoples,
Made scarlet with their brothers’ blood,
To the kingdom of true, eternal freedom,
To the kingdom of goodness, light and love.

The hopes and prayers for the future turn to Ekaterinburg, to restoration and coronation.

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (October 2015)

Q: What is happening in the Serbian Orthodox Church at present?

A: As far as I can see, the Western neocon elite, which has been trying to manipulate the Serbian government ever since it bombed Serbia, is continuing the same old Communist policy of divide and rule. Just as the Communists separated Macedonia and set up an ‘Orthodox’ nationalist sect there in the 1960s, so Washington and its allies have since separated Montenegro and Kosovo from Serbia and are trying to set up nationalist sects there through their local puppets. Opposition is coming from the people. In Montenegro the people do not want to become another NATO base and in Macedonia they do not want to become another Muslim republic like Kosovo. This political opposition creates opposition to the nationalist and schismatic sects, as people realize that is what they are.

This is the very policy that the US is trying to implement in the Ukraine also. There, three different small, foreign, politically-concocted sects, one of which has a very aggressive leader, Denisenko, who has visited the State Department in Washington as an honoured guest, are trying to undermine the vast majority. They belong to the only Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is led by Metropolitan Onuphry.

Q: Isn’t it strange that the Yugoslav Communists fifty years ago under the Croat Tito and today’s neocons follow the same policy?

A: Not at all. The Yugoslav Communists were put into place by the Western Powers during World War II, with Churchill switching sides to them from the Orthodox Serbs and supporting them. The Communists and the neocons share the same basic materialistic ideology. The only difference is that the Communists promoted the materialistic concept of amassing State wealth, the neocons of amassing personal wealth. State Capitalism or individualist Capitalism, Mammon is the same everywhere.

Q: What can be done?

A: I am an outsider, so it is difficult for me to say anything about the Serbian Church. That is an internal matter. However, it does seem vital to me that in general all of us, whatever Local Church we belong to, must keep to Orthodox canonical principles and resist US/EU, or any other, political interference and, at the same time, we must advance non-nationalist, confederal structures. This is what the Russian Church did over 20 years ago, granting extensive autonomy to its local parts, for example to the Ukrainian Church, the Moldovan Church, the Latvian Church and the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). If this is not done, there will be new schisms or else old schisms will continue.

Q: On the subject of schisms, who were the small groups of dissidents who went into schism from the two parts of the Russian Church at their reconciliation in 2007?

A: As I have said before, there were two groups. The first left English and French communities officially dependent on the Church inside Russia. Their leaders (and their naïve followers who knew no better) were renovationists, who had been poisoning Church life in the Diaspora for decades, in obedience to their by then mainly dead Paris-School ideologues. They left for the US-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople, where freemasons, semi-Uniats and anti-Russian political or nationalist dissidents seem to be made welcome. The second group left ROCOR and were a strange mixture of operatives of the CIA and other Western spy services, right-wingers of the Peronista type in South America and ideologically-minded old calendarist converts who did not love the Russian Church and persecuted those of us who do.

Q: Looking back on your own life in the Church, do you regret the things that happened to you in the 70s and 80s?

A: If the things that happened to me had not happened, I would not know now what I have learned from bitter experience, however painful. So, in a sense how can I regret anything? Everything was necessary to learn a little wisdom and see through the myths of the ‘Orthodox’ Establishment. However, if we are to daydream (!) and I had known then what I know now, I would in 1971 have joined the London ROCOR parish. Then, having finished studies at University in London in 1977, I would have asked to go to Jordanville in 1977.

I greatly regret not only that in those pre-internet days I was given no facts, no guidance, but instead was given active misinformation and misdirection. Such was the spiritual corruption and prejudice against the Russian Church at that time. The scribes and pharisees of the Establishment did not want a Church outside its control, a free, uncompromised and spiritually independent Russian Orthodox Church, free of both left-wing renovationism and right-wing politicking. They wanted an impure, spiritually degutted and compromised Establishment organization. This is why they did their best to undermine us from both outside and, through their agents of both left and right, from inside.

Q: How do you see the future for the Russian Church in the East of England?

A: In recent years we have encouraged the establishment of both what became the little rural mission with Fr Anthony in Mettingham in Suffolk and of St Panteleimon’s skete outside Clacton in Essex. This latter is under Fr Sergei, whose simplicity is an example to us all. Now, with God’s help and that of many kind and generous benefactors, we are buying property for a church in the city of Norwich and hope to have a man ordained for the new parish in God’s good time. Perhaps this is all we can do; certainly we need more clergy in order to expand. One or two candidates now seem to be appearing at last, but we need more.

We can dream of parishes in the county centres elsewhere in the east: a church building for Suffolk in the county centre of Bury St Edmunds, a church dedicated to Sts Peter and Paul in Peterborough for Cambridgeshire, a church of the Resurrection in Bedford for Bedfordshire, a church dedicated to St Alban in St Albans for Hertfordshire, a church dedicated to St Nicholas in east London, a church dedicated to Sts Constantine and Helen in York for Yorkshire and a church dedicated to All the Saints in Canterbury as the centre for Kent. However, realistically, if that is not God’s will, none of this will happen.

Q: Why is it important to have property in central and populated places?

A: Because if we do not, the communities will die out as property promotes continuity. This is a law. When you have your own property, then you also have spiritual freedom. I have seen dozens of parishes closing in England and France over the last forty years. Why? Because they had no property. It is just a fact of life. And communities must always be in centres, in cities and large towns, where the people are. You do not open a church where no-one lives. Church buildings follow the people, for they are the Church. It is not the other way round. That is common sense.

Q: Some people fear the coming Pan-Orthodox Council in 2016, calling it the ‘Eighth Oecumenical Council’ that was denounced in the prophecies. What would you say?

A: There is a certain hysteria and paranoia among some who seem to know very little of Church history with respect to this meeting, which is most certainly not the ‘Eighth Oecumenical Council’. It is pure fantasy to call it that. The Inter-Orthodox meeting next year is not a Council, but a meeting of a minority of Orthodox bishops, about 25% of the total. It will discuss administrative and canonical issues; all the dogmatic issues have already been decided for all time by the Seven Universal (‘Oecumenical’ is a misleading translation) Councils.

No meeting can become a Council if its resolutions are not received by the faithful, but sadly we the faithful have never been consulted about the discussions leading to this present meeting. The whole thing is happening behind closed doors in Calvinist Geneva (of all places), a situation unheard of in Orthodox practice, and I think this is why a certain hysteria and paranoia is growing up in some circles. They are inevitable, given the near-total lack of transparency.

The faithful are the guardians of the Faith, which is why a meeting can only become a Council if its decisions are received by the faithful. If a meeting is a Council, then it means that the Holy Spirit is present there, as He is among the faithful. At present it seems that some of the 1960s-style liberal Protestant agenda being promoted by the Phanariots and which frightened us in the 1970s, has already had to be dropped at the preparatory meetings. That is good. We do not need any more old-fashioned modernism. However, there is no agreement among representatives of the Local Churches who are preparing this meeting on several important issues. Moreover, with the latest condemnation by Constantinople of Metr Rostislav of the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, this meeting may never even take place, for it cannot if one of the fourteen Local Churches is absent. So Greek nationalism may yet put an end to the meeting altogether.

More generally, the situation is so highly politicized that one wonders if anything meaningful can take place even if these bishops do meet. Let us recall that no fewer than three patriarchs of Local Churches are now US appointees (against the canons of the Church) and they repeat the policies of the State Department, that is, of Obama, who may be an atheist or may be a Muslim (no-one is sure), of the abortionist Biden and of the warmonger Kerry. Parts of the Church are simply not free to meet. Just as St Justin of Chelije called for a boycott of any such Inter-Orthodox meeting in the 1970s because so many Local Churches, notably the Russian, were then enslaved by the atheist SU, so today other Local Churches are enslaved by the atheist US.

Q: So can any meaningful meeting take place?

A: I think that in the longer term it may be irrelevant whether a meeting takes place or not. I see a different outcome. As the number of bishops in the Russian Church climbs inexorably to 400 and more, and the total will soon exceed 50% of the total number of Orthodox bishops, the meeting in Constantinople is becoming irrelevant. It may be that the Russian Orthodox Church, as the one and only obvious Centre of Orthodox Civilization, may soon hold an episcopal meeting together with the other free Local Churches, Antioch, Georgia, Poland, Czechoslovakia etc.

Such a meeting of over 500 bishops would be far more representative that that the Geneva-prepared one in the Phanar, and would be more likely to become a Council. It could take place at the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, which is now nearly fully restored. This is what the Russian Church intended the Monastery for in the seventeenth century, as a centre of World Orthodoxy, but was prevented from becoming by the interference of the Russian State both then and since. Such a Council could speak freely, without reserve ‘for fear of the Jews’, that is, unintimidated by the Soviet-style censorship of political correctness.

Such a situation would reflect the reality of the Church today, not the situation of a thousand years ago when Greek ruled the roost. It is time to catch up with reality. The Greek-ruled Churches, mostly with flocks of scarcely a million and nationalist outlooks, are simply unable to cope with the reality of today’s global world. In order to respond, the Church today must also be global. Only the Russian Church is that.

Q: Some would call that ‘Russian Imperialism’.

A: Imperialism of any sort is to be condemned because it is nationalism. What we are talking about is an Imperial Church, the Church of the Christian Empire. Imperial means multinational unity in diversity, with new autocephalous Local Churches being born through missionary activity, whereas Imperialism means nationalism, central control and the ‘one size fits all’ mentality of the papist model, which, sadly, now exists in Istanbul.

Q: What is the situation after the latest round of episcopal consecrations announced by the Russian Church on 23 October?

A: The news that Fr Tikhon (Shevkunov) is now a bishop is most welcome, and the news that Italy now has for the first time ever a resident Russian Orthodox bishop in Bishop Antony (Sevryuk) is historic. It seems that we are at last seeing the appearance of a young generation of bishops, all at least trilingual (the local language, English and Russian), resident in the country, with an understanding of the local culture and politically free. We also noted that Fr Gennady Andreyev of the Sourozh Diocese in Manchester has been nominated bishop.

But there are other welcome events. Despite vigorous French political opposition which much delayed the project, the cupolas are now on the new Russian Cathedral in Paris and all should be finished within twelve months. We are moving ahead at last.

And as regards the veneration of the local Western saints, 60 years after St John, we are now moving forward to their inclusion in the Russian calendar inside Russia and perhaps even elsewhere. It is not just a case of better late than never, this represents real repentance on the part of those who resisted, reproached and actively persecuted us for venerating them for over 40 years. It is sad that several of the persecutors are now dead and therefore cannot repent, so we will have to pray for them, for Christ calls us to pray for our enemies, regardless of whether they are dead or alive. It is the same situation as with those who refused to venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors and put icons of them in their churches. They have all been proved wrong as well.

Q: Many people are very pessimistic about the situation in Russia and criticize it. What would you answer them?

A: There is a huge amount to criticize in post-Soviet Russia, the old classic of ABC – Alcoholism (nearly as high as in Finland), ‘Bortion (abortion) (near Asian levels) and Corruption (about the same as in Italy), to which could be added D for both Divorce (nearly as high as in the USA) and Drug-taking (not yet at the levels of Western Europe). However, the Russophobes and their propaganda deliberately omit the vital fact: the direction Russia is going in is right, whereas the direction that the West is going in is wrong. It is a huge historical irony that in proportion as Russia is deSovietized (a process well under way despite the propaganda, opposition and fear of the West), the West is being Sovietized.

Q: Who are these Russophobes who criticize?

A: There are two groups. Firstly, there are the neo-colonial Western ideologues who, still living in the imperialist arrogance of the nineteenth century, are convinced that ‘West is best’ and as for ‘the rest’, they can go to hell. These people are in reality mere primitive racists and extremists, like the Russophobe Senator John McCain who has now been photographed at a meeting with Islamic State, so anxious is he to be anti-Russian! (Here is the proof that the Westernists are at one with Islamists, whose movement they founded in Afghanistan in the 1980s and who have always supported the murderous regime in Saudi Arabia with its beheadings, crucifixions and massive bombings, with US warplanes and British bombs, of civilians in the Yemen. The extremes always meet, in the same way that the British imperialist and Jewish convert Disraeli backed the Ottoman massacres of Bulgarian Christians in the 19th century).

Secondly, there are the Russian Westernizers, many of them oligarchs, Jews or homosexuals. They are often to be seen at the US embassy in Moscow. They represent the same aristocratic, military and industrialist class (senior Romanovs among them), and also renovationist career clergy in the Church, that betrayed Russia in 1917 (when they were to be seen at the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg), overthrowing the Tsar because they wanted power (and even more money) for themselves.

They have their exact parallel in the Ukraine today, where the legitimate and democratically elected Yanukovich government (whatever its many shortcomings) was overthrown by the nationalist Galician Uniat minority, led by oligarchs like the Jewish Poroshenko and other billionaire industrialists who sold their souls to the CIA in exchange for its backing. Elected by 25% of the people, and that was only achieved with harsh Secret Police repression and US PR propaganda, these people are ruthless because they are completely without principle. That is why they hate the Ukrainian people and Orthodoxy. Unlike them, we Christians have principles.

In fact, it would be more exact to call such individuals Orthodoxophobes than Russophobes and Ukrainophobes, because that is the essence of their hatred, hatred for Christ, however deludedly they may claim that they are for Christ. As with the Bolsheviks in Alexander Blok’s revolutionary poem, ‘The Twelve’, they think that they are following Christ, but in reality they are following Antichrist. And he will lead them to the perdition of their souls in Gehenna. That is how serious their situation is.

Q: What is happening to the ‘British Orthodox Church’?

A: The so-called ‘British Orthodox Church’, in fact neither British, nor Orthodox, was a tiny group of vagantes and other eccentric Anglo-Catholics, whose leader used to call himself ‘the Patriarch of Glastonbury’(!). However, they were received and ordained by the Coptic Church some 20 years ago. In 1999 they had one bishop, 18 vicars (clergy) and 72 faithful! In early October this year they left the Miaphysite Church and, apparently, have now gone back to being vagantes. The problem was that the ex-Anglicans in question could not accept the inherent anti-Chalcedonianism which is now once more coming to the fore among the Copts in what I think is an outburst of nationalism. (Anti-Chalcedonianism goes hand in hand with local nationalism, which to a great extent caused it).

I am told that the group now has one bishop, 2 priests and about 100 faithful, mainly Establishment ex-Anglicans, mainly, I am told, elderly, though I am not sure if that is true. What the group will do now is unclear. Sadly, I doubt that they will wish to join the Orthodox Church because that would mean accepting catechism and being received as laypeople. I very much hope that I am wrong in this pessimistic view of their clericalism. There is one ex-Anglican group which they might join; it ordains ex-Anglican vicars almost immediately and virtually without training. Who knows? I think it will make little difference because it is such a tiny group, not even one normal parish.

Q: Given its critical situation, it has been suggested that the Rue Daru jurisdiction be directly governed by the Patriarchate of Constantinople and join the local Constantinople dioceses, like that of Metropolitan Emmanuel in Paris. What do you think of that?

A: I agree. I think that this is so logical that it is inevitable. Once all those who love the Russian Tradition have left Rue Daru, as they have been doing over the last thirty and more years since the repose of the saintly Archbishop George (Tarasov) and the fall into decadence after him, what will be left? Freemasons and naïve converts, new calendarist modernists and ecumenists. Obviously, they should all be together in Constantinople’s local diocesan structures and lodges. On the other hand, they should first have the honesty to hand back Russian Church property, which they are effectively occupying.

Q: What do you make of the recent Roman Catholic Synod in Rome?

A: Catholicism is now at a turning point. Will it keep the remnants of Catholicism (which date back in one form or another to Orthodoxy), or will it become completely Protestantized, a process that was initiated by wealthy US, German and other liberal cardinals over fifty years ago at the Second Vatican Council. With the present Jesuit Pope, for whom the means seem to justify the ends and who seems to agree with everyone and no-one, it is impossible to say what will happen, but that is what is at stake. This is important because Roman Catholicism is the very last Western European institution with an Orthodox past to survive. However, today Roman Catholicism, Uniatism included, looks so weak, so Americanized, that is, so Protestantized, that there seems little hope for it. I have always believed that only Orthodoxy can fill the spiritual abyss left by it.

Its situation is symbolic of Western Europe in general, whose cities now seem to be on the verge of disappearing beneath the tidal wave of the Muslim invasion. This was brought about by Western interference in the Middle East and North Africa, the notorious CIA-orchestrated ‘Arab spring’, which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands. Will Western Europe survive at all? That is now the question. However, I would like to disagree with the Western xenophobes, who blame ‘Arabs’ or ‘Muslims’. These wretched people are not the cause of the problem. The cause of the problem is Western apostasy, the fact that Western people have abandoned Christ. As nature abhors a vacuum, so it is being filled – and by Islam. If Western people had not abandoned Christ and Christian culture, there would be no spiritual vacuum and no Muslims here to fill it.

Q: How should we look at the situation in Syria?

A: We live in times when the prophecies are being accomplished before our very eyes – in Iraq, in Syria and in Turkey. The present catastrophe began in 1991 with the beginning of the fall of Babylon (Iraq) in the first Gulf War. This was accomplished in 2003. In 2000 Iraq had nearly 2,000,000 Christians, now there are fewer than 200,000. Even someone as obtuse and deluded as Blair is just now beginning to admit that he is partly responsible. As for Syria, it is next to Armageddon. The third player is Turkey, whose fall is also prophesied. Then will come the drying up of the Euphrates. Before that I think we shall also see changes in the Ukraine next year.

Following Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya have all called for Russian help. It is difficult to know whether Russia will be able to put out all the conflagrations started by incredible Western hubris, but we shall see. It is not easy to be the world’s fireman when you face American arsonists.

Q: What lies behind this hubris which is inherent in the West?

A: Historically, it is a mixture of the imperialist superiority of the pagan Romans mixed with the ruthless plundering of the barbarian Germanic peoples being harnessed by Satanic powers. Thus, what is at the origin of the British Establishment? It is the Norman mentality, in other words, the mentality of a Viking warband, which is what the Normans were. When they came to England in 1066, having already destroyed the older Christian traditions of pre-Norman Normandy, they came to plunder the gold and riches of a Christian kingdom and destroy its half-millennial Church.

The gleam in Norman eyes then was the same as that in the eyes of the gold-hungry Spanish conquistadors five centuries later, and the same as that in the eyes of Texan oilmen when they got their greedy hands on Iraqi oil five centuries after that. Even modern Western science fiction talks of asset-stripping and strip-mining other planets in exactly the same way. Exploit the mineral resources of a country until they are exhausted and then move on to the next country, or planet, and strip it bare too, plunder and pillage ruthlessly – all under the pretext of freedom and democracy. As the imperialist British Prime Minister Palmerston said 150 years ago, Britain has ‘no friends and no enemies, only interests’. In other words, the Western Establishment is nothing but a Viking warband intent on plunder and pillage, intent on its own interests, and without any principles whatsoever.

Q: What would you say of the general situation? Doesn’t it make you despair?

A: No. The world, as ever, is divided into three groups: God’s, Satan’s and the undecided. This means: the real Orthodox (those who are willing to die for Orthodoxy); Satan’s people (including so-called ‘Orthodox’ apostates); and the rest, including many nominal Orthodox, who have not made up their mind whose they are. Some among the rest are two-faced and agree with everyone, but among the rest there are also those who one day will be willing to die for Orthodoxy. It is in the hope of the repentance of all that the world continues through the mercy of God.

I think in dealing with the things of the world (political events etc), we have to be in the know, but not despair. Be as gentle as doves and wise as serpents, says Christ. We must always remember that though man proposes, God disposes. Satan’s forces do what they want, but it does not mean that they will win. They will not. We know that for a fact. The scheme of the prince of this world and his over-educated minions is obvious – their great plan is to restore the Temple in Jerusalem so that they can enthrone Antichrist there. But it may be hundreds of years till they achieve that, even though there are days when it seems that it is going to happen within just a few years.

God, not man, disposes. Do not despair. We have already seen one miracle – the fall of militant atheism in the old Soviet Unionand the beginning of the restoration of the Christian Empire there. Other miracles are possible. Never underestimate either the wisdom of God or the foolishness of man. Never doubt God’s power.

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (September 2015)

Q: Are you surprised by the election of the new leader of the Labour Party?

A: Frankly, no. For 35 years neocons have in effect been in power in the UK, ever since the old Tories lost power to Thatcherite monetarists, the ancestors of the neocons, and the Labour Party has essentially been run by neocon Tories. The election of a primitive, old-fashioned socialist as leader of the Labour Party is a reaction to all this. The Labour Party leadership has now returned to its grassroots membership, whom it had betrayed by becoming Washington’s poodles. The Labour Party now has a leader who actually believes in something, other than himself and his own bank account, unlike its previous leaders. The only surprise is that the reaction has taken so long. Extremes breed extremes – the neocons have produced old-fashioned, atheist socialism – that was quite predictable.

This is all part of the process of the election of socialists elsewhere in the EU, for example in Greece and Spain. However, it is difficult to see what will come of it. The new Labour leader seems to have very little understanding of reality and it is difficult to see him lasting very long. Others, nationalists and sovereignists, have also been elected throughout the EU, for example, UKIP in the UK and the National Front in France. All these movements, whether of left or of right, are reactions to the rule over the EU of the neocons in Washington. That is why in the UK the Establishment-run BBC and Press character-assassinate them all. Whether they are the UKIP leader or the new Labour leader, they are both anti-Establishment, driven by sincerely-held beliefs rather than by their own careers and bank accounts. Mammon that rules the modern world dislikes such people because they put their values, whatever we may think of them, right or wrong, above money.

Q: How do you see the consequences of the present chaos caused by mass Muslim immigration into Western Europe?

A: First of all, mass immigration has been rejected by Central and Eastern Europe, not just by Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Lands, but also by the Baltics, Slovenia and Poland, which has had to face mass emigration from Ukrainians fleeing the US and EU-instigated war in the Ukraine. EU-Croatia does not want the refugees either, it is simply allowing them to pass through, not to stay. As for Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, none of the refugees wants to settle in these countries that are poverty-stricken by the EU, let alone in Non-EU Macedonia, which is already being torn apart by the Muslim invasion from Albania, and NATO-bombed Serbia with all its Serbian refugees from Croatia and Kosovo.

All these former Communist-bloc countries are quite right to hand on the refugees – their countries have not been responsible for this new Muslim invasion – Western Europe has been responsible. Who is paying for the billions of dollars of arms with which the war in Syria is being fought? Who is paying for this murderous conflict that is being played out on the borders of Armageddon? Who is making and supplying the arms for these fanatics to murder with? Who bombed Yugoslavia? Who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq? Who bombed Libya? It is not Eastern and Central Europe, it is the Western world that is responsible. At this moment US aircraft and British bombs are slaughtering the people of Yemen. The West always has money for bombs to destroy, but not to feed poor refugees from Western-instigated wars.

Now Germany has to pay the price for its co-destruction of Yugoslavia and the foundation of Muslim states there. If Yugoslavia still existed, the refugees would not be able to pass through its former territory and head for Germany. War in Yugoslavia happened twenty years ago – but the consequences are now. Sooner or later you have to pay for your errors – the chickens always come home to roost. It is called responsibility, responsibility for the injustices that you have committed in the past.

Mass immigration is causing division in the EU – already the Schengen agreement is in tatters. This could be the moment when parts of Eastern Europe, especially Hungary and Slovakia, finally turn their backs on the disastrous EU and join the EEU, the Eurasian Economic Union, together with Serbia, Montenegro and Moldova – if those countries can find the courage to overturn their home-grown traitors who are willing to hand over their countries to NATO tyranny. Thanks to Communism, ironically, these countries had kept their national identity and sovereignty; under EU tyranny they have to lose them. The time for them to choose is coming – to surrender your national identity to so-called ‘multiculturalism’, as have Western European countries, or to keep it by turning to the protection of Sovereign Russia.

The Western part of the EU now has a choice: to accept mass Islamization and so complete the renunciation of its Christian history, as its atheists have already mentally done, or to bring back peace to Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and resettle the Muslim millions back in their homes, which is what they want. But this would be to admit that the West caused the problems in those countries in the first place. This would be a noble act of repentance, but the Western elite is too proud to carry it out. The Western elite is always capable of making war – but quite unable to make peace. This is because of its essentially anti-Christian, aggressive and destructive nature. Only a rising of ordinary Western people, crushed for so long by its elite, and aided from outside, can make a difference now.

Q: After the September Local Synod in Istanbul, Patriarch Bartholomew denounced the co-operation of Church and State in Russia, though without mentioning the word ‘Russia’ by name. What do you make of this?

A: Patriarch Bartholomew is merely a US-installed mouthpiece of the State Department, so he is irrelevant to the real Orthodox world, just as KGB-installed Russian bishops were irrelevant to the real Orthodox world in their time. For example he has just granted the highest award of his Patriarchate to the abortionist Joe Biden. In other words, nobody is listening to him because his words of propaganda are dictated to him by neocon politicians, not by the Holy Spirit.

What is the reality of the situation in Russia, beyond such neocon propaganda? It is that the Russian Church is trying to reChristianize the Russian State. The attempt to Christianize the State is very frightening for the neocons. This is the Incarnational role of the Church, they hate that because for them religion must only be a private matter, which should have no practical consequences and social ramifications. To renounce this role is to renounce Orthodoxy – which is what the anti-Christian US State Department does every single day of its existence. It is interesting for me to see in the words of Patriarch Bartholomew exactly the same editorial policy as that of the BBC, where I took part in two radio programmes a couple of years ago. It was clear then and it is clear now that the powers that be long ago sent out a message to all their vassal Western media – to try and discredit the Russian Orthodox Church by making out that it is a puppet of the Russian State.

In transmitting this message in the UK they are utterly hypocritical – it is the Church of England that is a puppet of the British State – all the C of E bishops are nominated by an agnostic/atheist Prime Minister, most are freemasons. This is quite different from the situation in Russia where the Church is separated from the State and independent of it. Whenever the Russian State agrees with the Church, it is a triumph of reChristianization for the Church, it is not that the State has conquered the Church, but just the opposite. Soviet times are over. The Western elite and its arms merchants want them to return – by creating another Cold War.

Q: If, as you say, Constantinople is a puppet of US neocons, what hope is there for the Orthodox ‘Council’, to be held in the Phanar next year?

A: That Conference, which is what it is at the moment, may well turn out to be a mere meeting with a final statement couched in meaningless ‘Chancellery-speak’. If so, it will be forgotten very quickly, as were many politically-organized ‘councils’ under heretical emperors of Constantinople. However, a destiny much more interesting than the dustbin of history is possible.

If the Phanar is tempted to take the thirty pieces of silver offered it by Washington and the Vatican and so completely discredit itself in the eyes of the Orthodox world and openly fall away from it, the Conference will become a Council, for it will at last be free to speak the Orthodox Truth. Then will follow the official transfer of the Centre of the Orthodox Church to Moscow, where in reality it has already been for centuries. This will be the end of the 562-year old myth of the Phanar (and the other fallen fragments of the Greek Empire) as the centre of Orthodoxy, a myth that US propagandists have assiduously used since 1948 to flatter Constantinople’s inherent ethnophyletist vanity.

Q: But would you not agree that there are still many problems within the Russian Orthodox Church?

A: Yes, of course there are indeed many problems. These are the result of the Soviet-period ‘legacy’. Only when the Church has been purified from this legacy will complete unity and so full strength come. Beware of the word ‘legacy’, when it is used by pseudo-Russian Orthodox, what they mean by it is apostasy.

Q: What in concrete terms do the words ‘Soviet-period legacy’ mean?

A: I mean all the political and spiritual compromises that ‘representatives’ of the Russian Church made through human weakness during the Soviet period, both inside Russia and outside Russia – ritualism, phariseeism, careerism, corruption, lying, renovationism. We were victims of that awful corruption outside Russia, so we know clearly and exactly what we are talking about.

Q: What can be done to destroy that legacy?

A: Re-Churching. And today Russia is being re-Churched. True, the Soviet diseases of alcoholism, abortion and corruption are still rife in the Russian Federation, but they are nonetheless declining because of this re-Churching. It is a privilege to take part in this process of re-Churching, even outside Russia, alongside tens of thousands of others who work in this field, but the process is only just beginning. We have very far to go. The ‘legacy’ must be destroyed, so that it can be replaced by the Tradition, so that human failings can be transfigured by the Holy Spirit, so that multinational Russian Orthodoxy can be rebuilt.

Q: If the ‘Conference’, as you call it, does turn into a Council and the Church is at last cleansed of the spiritually compromised representatives of the Patriarchate of Constantinople who have lapsed from Orthodoxy, where would they go?

A: They could go wherever they want, to whomever would take them. I think, for example, that its lapsed representatives would be welcome in the Vatican or in the post-Protestant US, whose mouthpieces they are; as for all those in the Patriarchate of Constantinople who are faithful Orthodox, the many on Mt Athos and in the parishes, they could join the Church of Greece, whose Archbishop could take the title of Patriarch of Constantinople. At the same time Orthodox-leaning Catholics in today’s Muslim and atheist-dominated Europe, who have been rejected by the present Patriarchate of Constantinople because of its apostasy and ecumenist agreement with the Vatican not to accept them, could freely join the Russian Orthodox Church. Turkey would then become a missionary territory for the Russian Church; there are tens of thousands of Russians living there already. There will be much to do; the Greek prophecies say that a third of Turks will be baptized as Orthodox.

This process of Russian missionary work is already happening outside Europe. Just recently hundreds of Filipinos have chosen to join the Russian Orthodox Church. They chose true Christianity, that is, Russian Orthodoxy, to the alternatives to IS or Maoist terrorism on the one hand and to Western secularist atheism (economic terrorism) on the other hand. This is the same situation as before the Revolution, when Tsar Nicholas II provided the sole alternative to rival secularist and imperialist Western ideologies, the Anglo-French and the Austro-German. He alone provided uncompromised Orthodoxy, the Christian Empire, Christian values. That of course is why the West crucified him and his family, like St Job.

Q: What is the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in this missionary light?

A: Rather than role I would say responsibility. As the heir to the Christian Empire, of St Constantine, the responsibility of what remains of Holy Russia and the Russian Empire is to be the last bastion of Christianity in the world. Today, after the failed imposition of the destructive Western ideology of Communism by the Western Powers against the will of the people through financing the 1905 and 1917 revolutions and through it the slaughter of the last Christian Emperor, Nicholas II (the order for whose martyrdom went out from New York, as the historian Petr V. Multatuli has made clear in recent years), the Christian Empire is beginning to revive and the Russian Church is playing the essential role in this process. Some prophesy the full restoration of the Empire and an Emperor Nicholas III, the final rampart of Christianity against Eurosodom and Gommorhica, which is what the Western elite wants to create against the will of the Western peoples (See what we have said above about the need for the people to rise against this imposition). This is why the West hates Russia – Russia is the only rival to its decadence. Only Russia contradicts it. Only anti-Christians can be against the restoration of the Christian Empire, whatever they may call themselves and however pharisaically they may conduct themselves. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, friends of the pagan Romans, of both yesterday’s and today’s enemies of Christ.

Very sadly, the September communication of Patriarch Bartholomew seems to show that he has accepted the anti-Incarnational secularist ideology of the Vatican and of Washington, the rejection of the role of the Incarnation in the life of the State. Why? Because only the restoration of the Orthodox State, the Christian Empire, can restrain the growth of so-called ‘globalization’, which the US masters of the Phanar are entirely in charge of. Even the remnants of the Third Rome, the Christian Empire, stand as a living witness to the fall, decadence and perjury of both the First Rome and of the Second Rome – that is why their masters deny it, envy it, fear it and fight against it. Their greatest enemy is the Russian Orthodox Church, the last bastion of Christ, which is why they work together against us.

Q: But is there not a danger of Russian nationalism in trying to Christianize the Russian State?

A: Yes, of course there is. In history the word ‘nationalism’ was not used because it is simply a modern word for ‘worldliness’. Nationalism destroyed the first two Romes: Pagan Roman nationalism destroyed the First Rome when it was adopted and made into an ideology by the Germanic peoples; Greek nationalism destroyed New Rome and the Third Rome was for three generations brought down by the nationalism of the anti-Russian aristocracy who wanted power for themselves against the Tsar and against the people.

Thus the first two Romes fell hundreds of years ago on account of worldliness and there is no chance that they will ever be restored. However, this is not the case with the Third and last Rome, Moscow. True, it was brought down in 1917 and suffered immensely for many years, but since the Western invasion of the former Russian Empire in 1941 restoration by the blood and tears of the New Martyrs and Confessors has been under way. This has happened amidst the hatred and envy of the Western world, which is why it is ringing Russia with NATO bases, trying to take over the Ukraine and developing plans for the dismemberment of the Russian Federation and of the Russian Orthodox Church, primarily through US-encouraged schisms in the Ukraine and Moldova.

Q: If the Western world is successful in dismembering the Russian Federation and the Russian Orthodox Church, is that the end?

A: Yes, that is the end – of the world, since salvation will become impossible so the world will no longer have any reason to exist.

Q: Do you think that nationalist temptations can be overcome so that the Christian Empire will be restored in Russia and in the rest of the Orthodox world together with it?

A: Yes, they can, though ‘can’ does not mean ‘will be’. Nevertheless, today there is reason for hope because there is a difference with the past. Before the Russian Revolution nationalism was alive, as was witnessed to by the worldly nationalism in the Russian emigration which stopped Church life from being as missionary as it should have been, persecuted missionaries like St John of Shanghai and rejected its messianic mission to preach Orthodoxy to the world, to make the world part of Holy Russia and so save it. Many emigres, especially among the intellectuals and aristocrats, were selfish and inward-looking, turning away the people whom God sent them. That was to be expected because they had already betrayed the Tsar.

The difference with the past is that Russia is now an international country. Today’s real International Community, led by Russia, includes much of Eastern Europe, Asia (including China and India, the Middle East and Iran), Africa and Latin America. The Western world is a small minority, fewer than a billion people, including only North America (except for Mexico), Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, and perhaps South Korea and Taiwan. Six-sevenths of the world stands against Western exploitation. As such the West is isolated.

Look at the great military victory parade in Beijing that took place two weeks ago in front of the Chinese and Russian leaders in celebration of the liberation of China from the Japanese by the Soviet Army. That parade was totally ignored and despised by the Western media, as China and Russia sealed their bonds. A new bloc has been formed. The West did not want to know because it is in denial that it has once again created its own enemies. Today there is a consciousness of Russia’s spiritual importance internationally. Before the Revolution only Tsar Nicholas and a very few in the elite had that consciousness; today many share in it.

Q: What practically does this consciousness mean to you?

A: For instance, every year I travel 17,000 miles around Eastern England visiting Orthodox. As I travel, I am conscious that I am perhaps the first Russian Orthodox priest to be on a given road and in a given place, the first to bless a place with icons, the first to bless a particular house. In doing this, I am therefore in fact travelling around a new province of Holy Russia.

However, I need help. We are together in the Church. The Church is not about individuals. I need at least one Russian-speaking priest here to help. We must encourage young people to take up the priesthood. When I was young, I was strongly discouraged from becoming a priest, not by this world, but by so-called ‘Orthodox’ priests and bishops – those of ‘the legacy’. I was incredibly badly advised and indeed deliberately. This was scandalously sad. Zeal was crushed quite ruthlessly and cruelly by the unworthy then in power. This must not happen to the young generation now, they must not be discouraged as I was.

We are building a new Holy Rus. The Church urgently needs a new generation of priests who are not afraid to use the Word of Christ to fight against aggressive Western secularism (including when so-called Orthodox confess it) on the one hand and Islamic terrorism on the other. We are Christ’s Army. For that we have the example of St Alexander Nevsky who resisted the traitors and the extremes of east and west, soaring above them on the wings of the double-headed Orthodox eagle.

To young people, I say: Do not be afraid! The reviving Christian Empire needs you to restore and rebuild! Join and be active in the Russian Orthodox Church! Belong to Christ, not to Antichrist!

Afterword: The Euro-Orthodox Alternative to an Orthodox Europe

Following the recent trilogy of articles on gathering together Russian Orthodox of all nationalities and languages in Western Europe into a Metropolia, the first of which was posted on 25 July and the last, the article ’The Path to Unity’, on 5 August, a member of the Paris Exarchate (Patriarchate of Constantinople) has written to reject this vision for an Orthodox Europe, or a ‘Russian Europe’ as he strangely calls it. Since he is not Russian Orthodox and, according to his very undiplomatic words, never will be, his rejection of something which does not concern him seems not relevant. However, if he is interested in one day seeing a Local Church of Europe, we must recall that the only Local Church which is proposing an Orthodox Metropolia in Europe, precisely the basis for a future Local Church of Europe, is the Russian Orthodox Church. In other words, the offer by Patriarch Alexis II over ten years ago is the only offer on the table.

The only purely theoretical alternative consists of a now very old-fashioned, autocephalist, that is, nationalist, ideology. This was once again put forward by the Greek Orthodox ‘Fraternite Orthodoxe in Western Europe’ at its Fifteenth Congress in Bordeaux in Spring 2015. With absolutely no offer of autocephaly (canonical independence) made at any point over the fifty years of its existence to this small, mainly French group by the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople (to which virtually all its members belong), doubts were long ago raised about its practicality. No autocephaly can ever be given to this small group because it is on a shared canonical territory.

No-one would want to repeat the error that the Soviet-epoch Patriarchate of Moscow made in the USA nearly fifty years ago, giving a canonically disputed autocephaly to a small and rather nationalistic American group, led by Parisian intellectuals, now called the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). One does have the impression of leaders blinded by their autocephalist ideology misleading sincere and idealistic but also blind converts, who have no concept of the practical problems and realities of the Local Orthodox Churches and Diasporas outside their own narrow, intellectual horizons.

A French TV film of their recent Congress shows members of the Paris-based Brotherhood singing in French at a meeting or service (it was unclear what it was) in a modern conference hall in Bordeaux. There were virtually no icons, no iconostasis, no candles and no-one at the meeting or service, standing in lines in front of rows of chairs, appeared to make the sign of the cross. The atmosphere presented was that of a ‘charismatic’ event, common to Catholic modernism (or Protestant modernism – it is the same thing). Present were two Greek bishops, one of them the controversial leader of the schismatic ‘Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church’, and a Catholic bishop. The impression was that many of those present were either Catholics or else ex-Catholics. The meeting was certainly highly ecumenical and also political.

The atmosphere of exaltation, of a lack of sobriety and prayer, and the absence of any Orthodox dress code indeed gave the impression of a political meeting, rather than of a Church service. Most of those shown in the film looked to be middle class people, mostly of the same older generation, aged between 60 and 75. Could this be because they joined the Fraternite in its heyday in the late 60s, 70s and 80s, after the French social revolt of 1968? Enclosed and isolated in the same intellectual ghetto for so many years, without exposure to the realities of the contemporary Diasporas of the Local Orthodox Churches in Europe or in their homelands, members have had no opportunity to evolve. In this way they have not adapted to reality and the generation which has grown up in the Orthodox Churches since the fall of Communism and the liberation of the Local Churches in former Communist countries. Could this be why ‘passeiste’ (living in the past) members still insist that ‘nothing has changed’ in Russia and Eastern Europe and still appear to be living in the Cold War?

Of course, a film can give a false impression. Unfortunately, it is exactly the same impression that was given to us by Fraternite members in the 70s and 80s and also that given to Orthodox from other Local Churches who have visited their Congresses in recent years. They have all said the same thing: that this is a divisive group driven not by spiritual concerns but by political concerns. Its spirit, different and alien to that in the vast majority of Orthodox monasteries and parish churches in Western Europe, gives the impression of a New Age cult or sect. There is a ‘pick and mix’ mentality, for example, you fast and confess only if you really want to, taking communion freely, as in modern Catholicism. It takes what it likes from the Russian Church and the Greek Church, but rejects the disciplines of both the Russian Church, both inside Russia and outside Russia, and of the Greek Church in Greece. (It should be noted that this group is quite outside the discipline of the diocesan jurisdictions of Greek bishops in Europe).

A great many contemporary Protestants will tell you that the empty moralism of their ahistorical and now dying denominations has been suicidal for them. A great many contemporary Catholics will tell you that they do not believe in the Pope and think that compulsory clerical celibacy is wrong. In other words they agree with us. And some look to the Orthodox Church for sustenance. The one thing that the Orthodox Church can offer those who live in the contemporary spiritual desert of the desacralized Western world, whether of Catholic or Protestant origin, is spiritual food. This is the food of faithfulness to the discipline of the Church Tradition that alone unlocks the door to the Holy Spirit, that alone gives spiritual beauty, spiritual nobility and spiritual elegance, the food that feeds the soul. This means not transmitting our little selves, but transmitting that which is far greater than ourselves, that which is both collective (cat-holic) and eternal. This is that which only the Church can give and provide the sense of the sacred, a sacralized faith that brings heaven down to earth and so makes the earthly spiritual.

The impression given, and not only by this film, is the opposite. What appears to be on offer here is a desacralized cult, worship made comfortable for the Western consumer, a castrated and rationalized piece of theatre that makes the spiritual earthly. Nowhere was there any mention of the glorious European heritage of the saints, those who had been earthly but became spiritual, neither of the ancient saints of Europe, like St Irinaeus of Lyon, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Martin of Tours, St John Cassian and others who combated heresies and died for the Faith, or of the new saints of Europe, like the Russian New Martyrs, St Nicholas of Zhicha, St Justin of Chelije and St Paisius the Athonite. This is the result of doing away with the ‘sanctoral’ and applying the other decrees of the Second Vatican Council to the Orthodox Church, as was the heartfelt desire of Fraternite lovers like Fr Elie Melia, the teacher of Pastoral Theology at the St Sergius Institute of Theology in Paris in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

The overall impression of the Fraternite is of a disincarnate form of faith invented in the past, of a rather late and old-fashioned monogenerational offshoot of the ‘charismatic movement’ of the late twentieth century, unknown to the Orthodox Church. Theirs appears to be a phyletistic or nationalistic ideology, a Euro-Orthodoxy, that puts modern Europe first and Orthodoxy second, exactly the opposite to what the Russian Orthodox Church is proposing in its forward-looking vision of an ‘Orthodox Europe’. New Local Churches have always been built on strict adherence to the Church Tradition and had a heavily ascetic, monastic and episcopal foundation, for example among all the Slavs, the Alaskans and the Japanese. Unlike their examples, the intellectuals of the Fraternite, stuck in the 1960s, seem to be proposing building a Church on the basis of an ideology that is anti-ascetic, anti-monastic, anti-episcopal, anti-Tradition and therefore in effect anti-Orthodox. Needless to say, this cannot succeed.

The Path to Unity

The Path to Unity

Woe unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord…And I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries where I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase.

Jeremiah 23, 1 and 3

The Path to Disunity

Since 1917 and the Western-organized fall of the Christian Empire, the Third Rome, the forces of this world have contrived to divide the Confederation of Local Churches which forms the Orthodox Church. This they have done in three stages.

Their first aim was to attack, paralyse, dupe and so divide those in the key Church, by far the biggest, the most multinational and missionary-minded and that on which the others largely depended, the Russian Orthodox Church. If extremists of any sort, whether modernists, nationalists or sectarians, could be brought to divide this Church, its territory being one sixth of the planet, then its influence there and all over the world could be destroyed. Thus, the forces of this world provoked Protestant-minded, renovationist modernists, both inside Russia (the Communist-sponsored Vvedensky and those with him, including the present neo-renovationists) and outside Russia (the Protestant-sponsored YMCA Paris Schism), nationalist groups (Ukrainians – Galician autocephalists and the present careerist Philaretists, Belarussians – autocephalists, misled Carpatho-Russian Americans – autocephalists) and tiny right-wing sects (Suzdalites, Agathangelites, Tikhonites (from Tikhon Paseka), Diomidites etc). It did not matter to them what ism they used in order to attack, paralyse, dupe and so divide, whether Marxist Communism, Hitlerite Fascism or liberal-consumerist Capitalism. More directly they also used other isms, Catholicism and Protestantism, sending in the 1920s Catholics (D’Herbigny) and in the 1990s more Uniats and US Protestant sectarians to try and divide the Russian Church.

Although the struggle continues, against all that the forces of this world planned, the Russian Church and so Orthodox Russia are gradually being restored. The forces of this world have largely failed and will fail, as long as the blood and seed of the New Martyrs and the tears and sweat of the Confessors who are rebuilding the Russian Church oppose them.

The forces of this world then set out on the second part of their campaign. This was to attack, paralyse, dupe and so divide those in the other, smaller Local Churches by introducing modernism and its symbol, the Catholic-Protestant calendar. They started in the weakest link in the chain, Turkish-occupied Constantinople, and began replacing its Patriarchs with Western puppets. This of course created schism. The forces of this world expanded their activities, interfering in the other four Greek Churches (the Church of Greece, its autocephalous offshoot in Greek Albania, the Church of Cyprus and the Patriarchate of Alexandria) as well as in the Latin Church (Romania, where they have yet again recently meddled in the appointment of a Patriarch), in the weakest of the Slav Churches (Bulgaria) and in the Arab Patriarchate of Antioch (where they have created a terrorist war), as well as trying to subjugate the Czechoslovak and Polish Churches. Everywhere they tried to introduce the Catholic-Protestant calendar and other modernist practices. Thus, altogether 20% of the Church was contaminated.

They have succeeded only in part and only temporarily.

The 20% contamination by modernism left the other 80% of the Church, in the Russian Lands, Serbia, Georgia and Jerusalem, all but uncontaminated. As they could not be allowed to remain intact, the forces of this world proceeded to the third and most recent part of their campaign. They have attacked the Serbian Church (dividing its territory, handing over some to Catholic control, some to Muslim control, some to Macedonian and Montenegrin nationalist schismatic control, and then trying to divide its episcopate), the Georgian Church (supporting a pro-modernist and anti-patriotic coup d’etat, calling it ‘regime change’ and trying to introduce consumerist sodomy), the Patriarchate of Jerusalem (where the previous Patriarch strangely languishes in prison and a schism has been established via the former US ambassador in Qatar, who allowed US premises to be used for services outside the canonical territory of Jerusalem on that of the Patriarchate of Antioch) and again in Russia (a coup d’etat by Western-backed Catholic nationalists from Galicia who have started massacring the Ukrainian Orthodox people. Everywhere they have also used the tiny, US-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople to sow discord and division against the Russian Church, whether in Finland and Estonia (age-old territories of the Russian Church), using dissidents in the Russian emigration in France, North America and England, or more recently in Czechoslovakia (refusing to recognize its autocephaly and dividing its episcopate) and the Ukraine (where the Patriarchate’s US masters are tempting it to recognize politically-backed, uncanonical schismatics, as they have already done in Estonia)).

Here too, in this still continuing third part of their campaign, what the forces of this world have forgotten is that though they propose, God disposes. For only He lives in eternity and shows His loving and visionful Providence, whereas they live in their visionless spiral of infernal hatred, which they are trying to establish as an earthly kingdom.

The Path to Unity?

We do not know the future, how God will dispose. That is in His hands. But we can already see where the forces of this world may lose their way:

In Syria, as a result of the US-fomented war, contrary to what was proposed, the Patriarchate of Antioch has recognized who its friends are. Recognizing that it has no support from Constantinople, which is in the hands of the US-backed, anti-Syrian Turks, the Patriarchate of Antioch is now looking to the Russian Church.

In Africa, the Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa, once run as a colonial department of the Greek Foreign Ministry, is too poor to expand very much. It needs Russian help and such help would inevitably be anti-phyletist. In such a case the Patriarchate could be taken over, as would only be just, by native African bishops, just as the once-Greek colony of Antioch was taken over by native Arab bishops with anti-phyletist Russian help.

In another Greek colony, Jerusalem (as also in Constantinople), most of the faithful are now Russian. And in Jerusalem Russians support, as is only just, native Arab candidates as future bishops.

Many in the Churches of Greece (and so also in the Church of Greek Albania) and Cyprus (here the US-backed Turks were allowed to invade and occupy the island, which made anti-US feeling even stronger), their economies brought low and their peoples impoverished by joining the neo-feudal EU vassal of the US, are now looking to Russia for help.

The Church of Serbia still looks to Russia and adheres to the Orthodox calendar despite EU-backed political interference in its internal affairs and the now US-owned media.

The Churches of Romania and Bulgaria, in difficulty as the old generation of monastic elders has died out and members of the spiritually impoverished and so pro-Uniat middle generation, which grew up in the simoniac Communist period, has come to power, still have spiritual power in the monasteries and among many in the younger generation.

The Church of Georgia still has excellent relations with the Russian Church, despite US attempts to destroy them by encouraging the 2008 Georgian invasion of Russia-protected territory, where the US-run regime slaughtered 2,000 civilians in half an hour in an unprovoked and compassionless attack by its puppet government.

The Churches of Poland and Czechoslovakia are allied to Russia, the latter all the more so after recent US-backed Greek meddling there.

The Church of Constantinople looks ever weaker, as the rest of the world begins to recognize that it has since 1453, quite literally, been wearing the Emperor’s (new) clothes, that the real leader of the Orthodox world is the Russian Patriarch and that they have to talk to him if they want to talk about serious problems. More and more members of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and not only on Mt Athos, can see this themselves. The illusion of the absurd but vanity-consoling US interpretation of Canon 28 of Chalcedon is transparent to nearly all. Even some in the US are wondering whether it is worth spending more money that they do not have in Istanbul in order to maintain the vain illusion.

In the Diaspora, the Russian Church, recovering from paralysis, has begun to take responsibility and bring unity. And in the Ukraine itself, where the forces of this world thought they could destroy the Russian Church, their plans are backfiring. Most are now talking about the disintegration and dissolution of the purely artificial Ukrainian ‘State’, a conglomerate creation of four imperialist tyrannies, the Habsburg, the Leninist, the Stalinist and that of Washington. Its collapse is for many now just a question of time (according to some, months, though others reckon a few years). 84% of the Ukrainian people are now publically asking for their country to be run by President Putin – far better than continuing under the tyranny and poverty of the corrupt and unrepresentative Kiev puppet junta. This is completely reliant on US subsidies for survival, at great expense to the EU, whose members are suffering bitterly from its anti-Russian, or rather anti-European, sanctions.

Some 55% of the Ukraine, the east and the south, together with Transdnestria, may well return after nearly 95 years to Russia (some of it, the Crimea, already has done so by democratic referendum). 25% of it, centred around Kiev, may become once more the ancient Malorossiya, a southern variant of Belarus. The only part, some 15%, that is really Ukrainian and where the various dialects of Ukrainian are spoken, the largely Catholic Galician borderland, which is what the word ‘Ukraine’ means, may mostly return to Poland. It was from here that the Georgian tyrant Stalin tore it away in 1939, earning the undying and understandable hatred of its people. The two small remaining parts of the present Ukraine, some 5%, may return to Romania (the Orthodox calendar intact, so again helping the Romanian Church to return to the Tradition) and Hungary. And the part that may return to Hungary, that which the Kiev bureaucrats still call ‘Transcarpathia’, even though they are the only Transcarpathians, as they are the ones who live across the Carpathians, could become the kernel of a fifteenth Local Church, a Hungarian Orthodox Church.

Given the excellent relations between Hungary, which has a democratically-elected anti-EU government, and the Russian Federation, which supports all National Resistance and Sovereignist movements against the tyrannical EU, this could happen. Only a few years ago the Russian Church won its legal battle for control of the Budapest Orthodox Cathedral – all is set for a new Local Church to be born. Thus the 500 parishes of ‘Transcarpathians’, that is Carpatho-Russians (or Ruthenians = Latin for Russians), would be at the heart of another Local Church. For it is they who are at the heart of the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, they who have contributed to the Polish Church, one of whose constituent peoples is the Lemkos (north-western Carpatho-Russians), and it is they who through their noble and illustrious son from Presov Rus, Metr Lavr (Skhkurla), contributed to Diaspora unity between the Russian Church and one of its constituent parts, the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). The vast majority in the latter had only been waiting for freedom at the Centre of the Church to be reconciled with Her.

Of course, nothing is certain; the above are all possible scenarios, only some of which may actually happen. Nevertheless, they are possible, whereas only a few decades ago, when we lived oppressed and isolated by all the forces of this world, they seemed impossible. The visionless who thought short-term, unlike St John of Shanghai and those like him, whose world-view they should have been trying to live by instead of studying philosophy, failed to see that the world would change. Today, we live in a different world from the past. Now a small minority of countries that have stopped being Christian huddle together in a bankrupt union of less than a billion, a union of Eurosodom and Gomorrhica. And the three largest Christian countries, Brazil, Russia and China, are bound together in a union with others, covering half the world’s population.

What the forces of this world were proposing only three or four decades ago, and which made those who had no faith in the Holy Spirit despair, today seems ever less probable. Then the Establishment-compromised, who had in their youth taken the easy, Establishment-approved path and refused to take up the Cross of the Russian Church, mocked us, denounced us and despised us. Now, older, they have only to take up the Cross and they too will walk. Unlike the Donatists and Neo-Donatists, we will welcome them back with open arms, as the loving Father did the Prodigal Son of old.

The Situation of English Orthodoxy and a Vision for the Future of Russian Orthodoxy in Europe

God is not in Might, but in Right.

St Alexander of the Neva

Introduction

I have been told that, ‘I tell it as it is’. Perhaps as a result, I have been asked to write of the contemporary situation of English Orthodoxy, with particular emphasis on the tragic legacy of the late Metr Antony (Bloom) and the resulting Sourozh schism. This I will do, as I knew the Metropolitan well, some forty years ago between 1974 and 1982, and in January 1981 he tonsured me reader. I also think it is worthwhile because the past and present situation in England reflects much that is true in the broader European picture. However, I still do this reluctantly as I dislike talking about the sad past and would much prefer to talk about the future. On the other hand, how can we have a vision of the future, if we do not first understand the past and the present?

True, I have few good memories of the past. However, apart from hundreds of young parishioners, of whose children I baptize up to fifty a year, I have six adult children as well as grandchildren and it is for their future, not for my past, that I live. This is why I think we should put the situation of English Orthodoxy into the general situation of all us Russian Orthodox in Western Europe. In so doing I also wish to avoid the common English (and not so English) disease of parochialism and insularity. The past is a dead country, all we can and must do is pray with compassion for those weak human beings like us who took part in it. One day we shall all stand side by side at the Dread Judgement. Let us look to the future, where all is possible. However, before we can do this I must do my duty and start at the beginning.

Part One: The Past and Present: English Orthodoxy

Today, around two thousand English Orthodox (the numbers of Scottish, Irish and Welsh Orthodox are even tinier – there being only a few dozen of each at most) and some seventy English clergy are divided among three main jurisdictions or dioceses. The other four jurisdictions present in England, as elsewhere, the Romanian, Serbian and tiny Bulgarian and Georgian Orthodox jurisdictions, are almost wholly mononational and have hardly any English members. The three jurisdictions or dioceses with English members are: the Patriarchate of Antioch, the Patriarchate of Constantinople (two groups) and the Russian Orthodox Church (two groups).

1. The Patriarchate of Antioch

Some twenty years ago about 300 dissatisfied Anglicans were received with their own agenda into this Patriarchate. They had previously been turned away by the Patriarchate of Constantinople and by the Sourozh Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, which were both bound by their ecumenical ties with Canterbury. As Antioch had hardly existed in England until then, basically a new jurisdiction and so a further division were born. All the priests except for one now in this group were once Anglican priests, ordained as Orthodox priests with little training. One now suspended man was ordained within three days of being received.

Given this history, today the group seems to form a rather isolated ex-Anglican club, holding less attraction to the vast majority of English people. Indeed, some in the group seem to reject Non-Anglicans, one parish even banning the use of any language except English, and some call this group ‘Anglioch’. These ex-Anglican parishes appear to have little to do with Arab Orthodox and seem to avoid concelebrating with other jurisdictions, though they dress as Russian clergy. One person, perhaps unfairly, put it to me that: ‘Anti-Russian and Anti-Greek = Anti-och’.

Such a view represents only the negative half of the reality. On a positive side, this group is very dynamic, some parishes have their own properties and there are some younger clergy, over fifteen altogether now. Its larger parishes attract mainly Eastern Europeans, who are deprived of services in their own languages, or of once lapsed Greeks. Some of these people know their Faith and are able to educate the Antiochian clergy. The recent appointment for them, 20 years late, of an Antiochian bishop, who may get a visa to come to England this November, could at last mean the introduction of liturgical discipline and an entry into the mainstream of the Church from the margins. This should include teaching clergy how to serve, teaching people how to sing (at present Anglicanized ‘Russian-style’ singing is used), as well as stopping intercommunion, ‘charismatic’ and other alien practices, such as the commemoration of the Armenians and Ethiopians as Orthodox, using girl acolytes or making communion compulsory for all, as does happen in some parishes.

Antiochian services I have attended resemble a mixture of Anglicanism and a very confused knowledge of the Orthodox typicon with invented services, a kind of ‘make it up as you go’ approach. This style has discredited the Antiochian group. In conclusion, the Antiochians have zeal, which is admirable, but not knowledge, which is not admirable. The question is if they want the knowledge and have the humility to accept the discipline and traditions of the Orthodox Church and an Orthodox bishop, instead of imposing Anglican agendas on the faithful. Retired Anglican priests whose hobby is the ‘Eastern rite’ are one thing, the Orthodox Church is another.

2. The Patriarchate of Constantinople

a. The Archdiocese of Thyateira

This is a large and mostly Greek Cypriot Diocese, whose ruling hierarch must have either a Greek or Cypriot or Turkish passport. However, as the Greek Cypriots mainly moved to England from Commonwealth Cyprus between 1945 and 1975, they are now dying out. Nationalism is rife and English enquirers into Orthodoxy (as well as Romanians and others) are typically turned away from parishes and told to go and join the Anglican Church because they ‘are not Greeks’. The loss of young Cypriots is such that no fewer than six ethnic Cypriots are priests in the Anglican Diocese of London. At least there they can understand the services.

The hellenization of the few Anglicans who have been received and ordained is obligatory. Ultra-Greek names like Kallistos, Meliton, Aristobulos, Athanasios, Eleutherios, Dionysios, Christodoulos, Pankratios, Ephraim, Panteleimon, Palamas, Kosmas etc are placed on ex-Anglican vicars with perfectly good Orthodox names and they are ordained as cheap (unpaid) Greek Orthodox clergy. One of them is so hellenized that he even changed his surname to a Greek name. The best-known example of this group is the former Oxford academic, Timothy (Metr Kallistos) Ware, who lives very much as a retired parish priest and has never been a diocesan bishop, but rather a ‘conference bishop’. These hellenized ex-Anglicans use Russian-style singing in their services, probably because of the difficulty of using foreign-sounding Greek chant in any language other than Greek.

b. The Deanery of the Exarchate

As elsewhere in the world, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has for political reasons also taken into its jurisdiction dissidents such as Ukrainian nationalists and the Paris Exarchate. The latter group has again been present in England since 2006, refounded by 300 mainly ex-Anglican ‘Bloomites’, including over ten clergy. In other words, these were dissidents from the Sourozh Diocese of the then Moscow Patriarchate (MP), previously run by Metr Antony Bloom (see below, Paragraph 3b). After the death in 2004 of Metr Antony, their leader and protector, these did not want to adhere to the discipline and traditions of the real Russian Orthodox Church, which were then being reintroduced into their Diocese. Thus, they left for the Paris Exarchate, at first under the controversial Bishop Basil (Osborne), then after his defrocking becoming a small Deanery.

Here, under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, they would be allowed to do anything they wanted, including keeping the personal practices of Metr Antony (Bloom), without interference from either Constantinople or Thyateira or Paris, as one of their clergy proudly told me. For example, they could have communion without confession, give intercommunion (as their Amphipolis website used to proclaim, though now they tell me that intercommunion is limited to Monophysites), use the new calendar, celebrate the Proskomidia in the middle of the Church, wear Greek vestments (strange when you claim to be of the Russian Tradition) or shout out names during the service in Anglican ‘charismatic’ style, or make communion compulsory for all.

This group is very small, with several communities of ten or fewer people. Where it is bigger, it is because of the presence of Eastern Europeans, for example Church-deprived Romanians, who have no loyalty to or knowledge of Bloomite ideology. The Deanery has virtually no property of its own and although it has in recent years ordained several retired Anglican clergy virtually without any training, it seems to be dying out. The average age of its clergy is about 70 and many of the original laypeople are of the same generation.

It seems difficult to understand, if they wish to survive at all, why they do not simply join the ex-Anglican Antiochian group or at least join the ex-Anglicans in the mainstream Thyateira Diocese. Some have suggested that their isolation is to do with their ferocious Russophobia, which Antioch does not share. Indeed, some of their statements about other Christians makes it difficult to believe that they are Christians. Interestingly, their cause was backed to the hilt at the time by the Establishment Times and the MI5-fed Daily Telegraph. Others have suggested that there is a class reason, that it is because the Exarchate is largely composed of upper-class Anglicans, whereas the other ex-Anglicans are middle-class. Some call this group, like the Antiochian group, ‘Anglicans with icons’ or ‘Anglodox’, rather than Orthodox.

3. The Russian Church

a. The ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland

Having established the first ROCOR parish in England in 1919, ROCOR established a diocese in England in 1929 under Bishop Nicholas (Karpov), who uniquely was not given a fictitious title like ‘of Thyateira’ or ‘of Sourozh’, as given to other dioceses, but the real title ‘of London’. It was also the first Orthodox diocese to have any monastic life in England and the first diocese to use English, from the 1930s on. The diocese expanded after 1945 with a wave of new immigrants. However, after the departure of Archbishop John (Maksimovich) (now St John of Shanghai) in 1962, the diocese fell into nationalistic and sectarian currents and for a time became isolated.

From the 1970s on, a small group of unintegrated Anglo-Catholic converts began to impose old calendarism, imported from the USA under the influence of Bishop Gregory (Grabbe) in New York. Their views were marked by anti-Anglicanism rather than Orthodoxy, a negativity that came from spiritual pride. Given the failure of nationalistic Russians to pass on the Faith to their children and grandchildren and these sectarian trends, once far larger than the new Diocese of Sourozh, in the 70s and 80s the ROCOR Diocese began to die out. In the late 1970s and 1980s, in quick succession it lost its last two elderly and ill bishops, its London priest and its London church building. English people were turned away from the Russian parishes or were deterred by the sectarian old calendarism trying to take over diocesan life. It seemed as though the ROCOR Diocese would disappear altogether.

This period must be understood in the context of the then general internal battle in ROCOR between New York and Jordanville, that is, between the political, nationalist and sectarian wing of ROCOR and the spiritual wing, which saw in St John of Shanghai its figurehead. (Sadly, it is also true that when St John was in England, he was never frequented by personalities such as Metr Antony (Bloom) or Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), by both of whom he was at best ignored). In his later life in San Francisco, St John was much persecuted by this political wing of ROCOR because he was a missionary to Non-Russians, because he prayed for the captive Patriarchs of Moscow and because, like the mainstream in ROCOR, he knew that Church unity would come as soon as the Church inside Russia was free from atheist tyranny. This was denied by the political sectarians, who from the 1970s began to assert in justification for their sectarianism that the MP was ‘without grace’ and that somehow ROCOR was the last True Church on earth!

As the elderly Russians died out in the ROCOR British Diocese, in the 1990s it was providentially renewed by new arrivals from Russia, who found the same underlying ethos in it as in the MP inside Russia (unlike in the Sourozh Diocese, which, ironically, was officially part of the MP!). These new arrivals paid for the building of the small, Russian-style ROCOR Cathedral in London. As unity between ROCOR, under the ever-memorable Metr Laurus, and the MP, under the former émigré Patriarch Alexis II, approached in 2007, the long predicted schism occurred. Some forty mainly Anglo-Catholic converts and a few very right-wing individuals of Russian extraction (including even pro-Nazis) lapsed from ROCOR. This mirrored exactly the Sourozh schism (see Paragraph 3b below).

This was a spiritual tragedy for them but the relief felt by the faithful was palpable – the abscess which had been growing since the infiltration of sectarianism from the USA in the 1970s had at last burst. Peripheral and other problems also solved themselves as a few other individuals left and by 2009 all the extremes had fallen away, normal Church life could continue from a now healthy centre and the Church was ready to grow again. ROCOR was able to return to its destiny and pioneering historic path of being the integrated and bilingual Russian Orthodox Diocese, faithful to the Tradition, culturally at ease in the British Isles, and without fear of interference from outside forces. Having been through its adolescent growing pains, the ROCOR Diocese had overcome the crisis and become much stronger and adult.

What is the situation today? Today most members of ROCOR are people who have settled in England (and also in Wales and Ireland) from the ex-Soviet Union. In other words, the flock is virtually identical to the flock of the new Sourozh Diocese (see Paragraph 3b below). However, eight of the clergy are English, though there is also a Romanian deacon and two excellent Russian clergy from the ex-Soviet Union. In 2006 the future Archbishop Elisei of Sourozh was actually nominated to the Patriarchate in Moscow (then faced with the Sourozh schism) by the ROCOR ruling bishop, Archbishop Mark of Berlin.

Although most members of ROCOR come from the ex-Soviet Union, unlike Sourozh, the ROCOR Diocese has a long history, with memories going back before the Second World War and the Revolution to the time of the Tsar, a long and deep pastoral experience, including the use of English, its own church buildings and therefore a voice independent of heterodox organizations. In other words, ROCOR could certainly never be accused of being dependent on one personality or being ‘Soviet’, as the Sourozh Diocese sometimes is, and it is much better established than that Diocese. However, the weakness of the ROCOR Diocese is definitely its shortage of priests, especially in Wales and Ireland, and its lack of a resident ruling bishop. The main issue now is further growth.

b. The Diocese of Sourozh – the former Moscow Patriarchate (MP)

Several hundred English Orthodox find themselves in the Sourozh Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, which used to be known as the MP. Some go back to the time when that Diocese was ruled by Metr Antony (Bloom) (+ 2004), others have come more recently. I have been asked to set down a record of Metr Antony’s tragic legacy. This will be long, as it is complex.

When the small Paris Exarchate parish in London returned to the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) jurisdiction after the Second World War (following its leader in Paris, Metr Eulogius), Fr Antony (Bloom), a beardless hieromonk without theological education, was sent by Moscow from Paris to look after the group in question. The vast majority of Russian emigres in England, whether arrivals after 1917 or after 1945, would have nothing to do with the Moscow Patriarchate or the modernist-looking Fr Antony, and continued to belong to the far larger parishes of the Diocese of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR).

Therefore, virtually without a flock, the very talented Fr Antony learned English and began to do missionary work among Anglicans, attracting several hundred into the former Anglican church he used in London. Over the years, their numbers swelled, perhaps to over 2,000, and he was able to form a tiny diocese which was given the title of Sourozh. This looked good in theory; the reality was quite different. The Sourozh Diocese was a paper diocese, an empire of the imagination. There were three reasons for this.

Firstly, Metr Antony, as he had become by the early 60s, anxious to create a diocese, would take people without preparation, that is, without relieving them of their Anglican baggage and so spiritual impurity first. As they had little idea of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, most of them lapsed very quickly, often within a few weeks or months. As an example of this, I will relate what five years ago one of the new Russian subdeacons from the Sourozh Cathedral in London told me about a weekend visit of the new ruling hierarch, Archbishop Elisei of Sourozh, to a provincial community.

When Archbishop Elisei got up on the Sunday morning, the priest’s wife asked him whether he would like bacon and eggs for breakfast. Now that is a normal question in the Church of England (or even in parts of the Catholic Church today), where communion, if it is given at all, is simply a memorial of bread and wine and there is no fasting before it. For an Orthodox of course it is shocking that an Orthodox priest would have bacon and eggs before the Liturgy and communion. In fact, I was shocked by the subdeacon and said: ‘You mean to say that you did not know that that was how the whole Sourozh Diocese was run for decades?’ I was amazed by his naivety and told him: ‘Now you understand why serious Orthodox joined ROCOR’.

In 1976, falling foul of the Soviet government’s anti-Solzhenitsyn line (which it also forced onto the MP) and looking for political freedom from Soviet political pressure (especially distasteful to the upper-class Establishment Anglicans in his London Cathedral), Metr Antony asked to join ROCOR. As a result of his unOrthodox attitudes, illustrated above, he was refused. ROCOR did not want a bishop with unOrthodox practices; if ROCOR had accepted him, it would all have resulted in scandals.

Secondly, Metr Antony never reached out to the mass of English people, to whom he remained completely unknown despite his TV appearances (at a time when only the wealthier half of society had TV) and radio interviews. He concentrated on the upper class, especially wealthy academics, artists, novelists, musicians and poets, many of whom lived around his former Anglican Cathedral in the richest part of London. Metr Antony seemed to have little time for ordinary English people, if ever he knew we existed.

He was also notorious for never visiting his parishes and flock. Most of these had never seen him there and had no idea what an episcopal visit or service was. (Metr Antony usually served as a priest, refusing to celebrate episcopal services, if he knew how to do them). He was not a liturgist and did not teach anyone how to celebrate the services. His was a religion of the elite and it was often difficult to know exactly what he said – it all seemed to be the French philosophical style and not substance. In the 1970s and early 1980s, as I know only too well from personal experience, he had no time at all for the veneration of local saints, though he was later forced to change this attitude. And he also had no space in his Cathedral for icons of the New Martyrs, even after their later canonization in Moscow in 2000.

We should not forget that Metr Antony was himself from the Russian upper class and, partly as a result, his convert group seemed to be an upper-class Anglican club or clique. Conversations that I heard at his Cathedral revolved around villas in Tuscany and on Patmos which belonged to these people: hardly typical English people, who felt excluded by such snobbery. All this was combined with Metr Antony’s marked emotionalism, his strong psychic abilities and affectations, which lacked the sobriety of the Orthodox Tradition. Some middle-aged women fell in love with him and, with his good looks and exotic and exaggerated Russian-Parisian accent, by the 1970s his nicknames included ‘the guru’ and ‘the romantic bishop’. I remember one such tragic case very clearly. For us who came from solid and pragmatic English backgrounds, this was all nonsense. We would see through this act from miles away.

This brings us to the problem of Metr Antony’s personality cult. As we have said, he was an immensely talented man with a very strong personality. Indeed, his father, Boris Bloom (buried in Meudon outside Paris), a Tsarist diplomat who was well-known in Paris, had delved into the occult and taught his son how to hypnotize. I knew two women whom Metr Antony tried to hypnotize in the 1970s. For what reason I do not know. In such a Diocese there could be room for only one personality. This is why in 1965 an equally unusual Parisian personality, the former Hindu, Art Nouveau painter, personalist philosopher and one-time monk of Mt Athos, where he had met a saint, Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), left the Diocese of Sourozh. With his three monks. he switched back to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the new calendar and introduced some very unusual and indeed unique practices. The fact that Metr Antony was notoriously anti-monastic did not help.

The cult of Metr Antony was also why his ordinations were generally controversial, often being those of men who for canonical reasons would never have been ordained by another bishop. This created a dependency of such clergy on Metr Antony, a misplaced sense of gratitude and idolization among weak personalities. This was also why Metr Antony strongly discouraged English people from visiting other parishes and travelling to Orthodox countries, especially Russia and Mt Athos; he did not want them to be exposed to the broader reality, which would raise awkward questions about his peculiar style and values.

Here I do not wish to go into the painful details and I would rather quote the Establishment figure of Metr Kallistos (Ware), who is now in his eighties. Known as ‘o anglikanos’ (the Anglican) by certain of his Greek brother bishops, Metr Kallistos is known for his caution in speaking. Although he has very curious and Phanariot views of the Diaspora, he is well-known for this Anglican-style diplomacy. In an interview with the liberal ‘Pravmir’ site, he has expressed the situation around Metr Antony as mildly as is possible:

‘Now the main criticism that I would make of Bishop (sic) Antony is that he would allow people to become colossally dependent upon him. They would idolize him. Perhaps that was not entirely his fault that they came to feel such ardent devotion towards him. But I felt there was something unhealthy here. It was too personal in the wrong sense, that they saw him almost as a god on earth. And he would allow people, particularly women, to become very closely dependent upon him. And then he would suddenly abandon them. I don’t think I am indulging here in malicious gossip, but I know a number of cases where he had spent a lot of time with people, particular people, and then suddenly he would cut off, not see them any more, not respond to their letters or telephone calls. Now I don’t know why he allowed such a close relationship to be built up and then abandoned them. But if I was to criticize his work, I would think there was the weakest point’.

In other words, it could be said that Metr Antony was the London equivalent of Bishop Jean (Evgraf) (Kovalevsky) in Paris, a bishop who set up a kind of fringe diocese on the edge of the Church and which also collapsed after his death. (However, many clergy and laity also left the Sourozh Diocese during Metr Antony’s lifetime, having seen through it). True, Bishop Jean attracted guenonists, occultists, freemasons and other marginals, ordaining them within days, whereas Metr Antony attracted those who fell in love with his personality and pseudo-mysticism. Sadly, Metr Antony’s existentialist personalism (mid-twentieth century French intellectual philosophy rather than the Church Fathers, whom Metr Antony hardly ever mentioned) had led to the construction of a mini-diocese ‘centred on his personality and not on the Church’. These are the exact words used to me by the present ruling bishop of Sourozh, Archbishop Elisei, soon after his appointment in 2006.

Now anything built on a personality, even more on a dead personality, is extremely fragile. People who idolize a personality are unable to pass on anything to their children, who cannot get to know the personality because he is dead, and so the members simply get old and die out, becoming historical sidelines, alienated from the mainstream. A diocese centred on a personality is a paper diocese. Thus, Sourozh still has hardly any Church property because everyone, as I was told in 1981, was expected to go to London and worship at the feet of the personality. So, nothing got built up. Tragically, the Sourozh Diocese still only has a fairly small Cathedral in west London (far too small for the flock) and four chapels in Oxford, Nottingham, Manchester and London, which can only contain a few dozen Orthodox. For the rest, the Sourozh Diocese is still dependent on borrowing mainly Anglican churches which it can occasionally use, often only once a month on a Saturday.

On top of this it suffers from a chronic shortage of priests with training. The average age is about 63. The disastrous personality cult in other words completely failed to set up the infrastructure necessary for a real diocese, however small. Everything had to be centred around the Cathedral in London because that is where ‘the personality’ was. This is the tragic legacy of Metr Antony, an utter lack of vision because there was no Tradition, only a personality. It contrasts very sadly with the radiant legacy of a saint in another island archipelago on the other side of Eurasia, St Nicholas of Japan, who built on the Tradition.

In 1982, a senior priest, the American Fr (later as Metr Antony’s successor, Bishop) Basil Osborne told me that ‘as soon as Metr Antony is dead, we’ll go to the Greeks’. This statement as well as the personality cult and renovationist practices (no confession before communion – as in Anglicanism – , the introduction of the new calendar, no Third and Sixth Hours before the Liturgy, no attempt to ask women to dress as Russian Orthodox etc.), caused us to leave the Diocese of Sourozh for good. I had wanted to be part of the Russian Orthodox Church, not of an émigré cocktail of modernist practices and fantasies, which had nothing to do with the Russian Orthodox Tradition. In such a way the Sourozh Diocese chased away those who were the most devoted to the Russian Orthodox Church. People were ready to die for the Church, for ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’, but in Sourozh the seed of the faithful was rejected – and so the Church did not grow. This was no way to treat the faithful.

In response to my view that the Church was failing to preach the Gospel to ordinary English people and was not providing food for the soul, but only intellectual philosophy, Fr Basil also told me that ‘there is no such thing as ordinary people’. Clearly, this said a great deal about him who became Metr Antony’s successor. Living in the ivory towers of Oxford, Fr Basil simply had no contact with the vast masses of English people. Later, an aristocratic priest-colleague of his, also ordained by Metr Antony, told me exactly the same thing. In 2005 it was Bishop Basil who provocatively invited the notorious neo-renovationist, Fr George Kochetkov, once suspended by Patriarch Alexis II, to come from Moscow and become the main priest at the London Sourozh Cathedral. This makes clear that the Sourozh schism was indeed a renovationist schism and it is indeed renovationists who revere Metr Antony’s memory.

Apart from his English convert adepts, it is true that Metr Antony was also idolized by some naïve Soviet convert dissidents, mainly of Jewish origin. These ‘intelligenty’ of the third wave started to arrive in London in the 1970s and fell in love with Metr Antony. I remember one of them telling me how he had first seen the Metropolitan cleaning the Cathedral floor, dressed in a simple undercassock. The dissident at once took him for a saint! I told him that all bishops and priests in the Diaspora lived like this and that if that was a criterion of sainthood, then we were all saints. Conditioned by Soviet practices of distant and unknown bishops sweeping past the people in big black cars under KGB surveillance, he could not make the cultural jump to Diaspora reality. Culture shock totally distorted his judgement.

From the 1990s, in the last years of Metr Antony’s life, as immigrants flooded in from the ex-Soviet Union, a virtual civil war began in his London Cathedral. The immigrants expected Russian Orthodoxy, not some pseudo-mystical convert personality cult. Apart from the small ROCOR Cathedral, there was no other church they could go to in London. Inevitably, only two years after Metr Antony’s death, with the young Bishop Hilarion expelled, the Sourozh Diocese collapsed. The bubble had finally burst. Metr Antony’s divisiveness and pastoral failure had led in turn to the divisiveness and pastoral failure of his pupil, Bishop Basil (Osborne).

Just as the Paris Exarchate’s modernist experiment failed (and Metr Antony was 100% Parisian), Metr Antony’s experiment failed because he had tried to build a Diocese on the divisive sand of a personality cult instead of on the collective rock of Russian Orthodox Tradition. This all came as no surprise to us who had known how it would all end since 1982 and had been pleading with the Moscow Patriarchate since 2000 to do something about the catastrophic pastoral situation in London. Nevertheless, we can at least learn from such failures.

Part Two: The Future: European Orthodoxy

I have done my duty in answering questions about the past and present situation of English Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy in England. I hope that this will help us to avoid repeating the errors and extremes of the past and will also help us to pray for those involved, whether living or departed. That is our duty, for we are no better than they. I would now like to speak of something much more positive, much closer to my heart, the future.

1. The European Dimension of the Orthodox Church

In this context of the future people ask me about the possibility of there one day being a ‘British’ Orthodox Church. Since the 1990s I have written about such a possibility – and always negatively, even though I have since 1975 championed the use of local languages in services, whether English or French, and at great personal cost from hostile clergy. Why, this refusal of even the concept of a ‘British Orthodox Church’?

Firstly, it is because there is no such thing as ‘British’. Just as we do not talk about a ‘Soviet’ Orthodox Church, so we do not talk about a ‘British’ Orthodox Church. The word ‘British’ has only been used on three occasions in history and always by foreign invaders. Once by the Romans, then by the Normans and lastly by the Hanoverians and their Germanic followers among the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Victorians and those nostalgic for their imperialism like Thatcher, Blair and Cameron. In other words, ‘British’ is a word for an artificial, colonial conglomerate of countries and as such is used by London imperialists; the Irish rightly long ago rejected it as a dirty word and the Scots are now in open revolt against it. Personally, like everyone I grew up with in the English countryside, I have never recognized myself as ‘British’, but as English, and I hope that the Irish, Scots, Welsh and we English will soon gain complete freedom from the ‘British’ and their tyrannical and foreign Establishment, to which the alien ‘British’ alone belong.

Secondly, all European countries, including Britain, are in any case far too small to have their own Local Orthodox Churches and, thirdly, Europe has anyway suffered quite enough from nationalism. We do not want any more insularity and nationalism in the Church – there is enough of that in the Balkans. What we need today is vision. Now, in this context, nearly thirty years ago, in 1986, I wrote a paper at the request of Archbishop George (Wagner) of the Rue Daru Paris Jurisdiction (Patriarchate of Constantinople) entitled, ‘Une Eglise Orthodoxe pour l’Europe: Vision ou Reve’ (‘An Orthodox Church for Europe: Vision or Dream’). As he was German, I thought he might be interested, especially as I had envisioned the Rue Daru jurisdiction as the possible kernel of such a future Local Church – in 2004 Patriarch Alexis II was to make the same mistake. I later found the paper thrown away into his kitchen wastepaper bin. Such were those visionless days – and he was by far from being the only bishop who had no vision for an Orthodox Europe.

Since that time it is true that we have seen the development of the pompously-named ‘Pan-Orthodox Episcopal Assemblies’ (= bishops’ meetings) in Western Europe. This is the imperialistic concept of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, rather naively promoted by Metr Kallistos (Ware) and Metr Athenagoras (Peckstadt) in Belgium. Of course, it is good that now the Orthodox bishops of any territory actually meet each other and know what each other looks like, but we all know that these meetings are going nowhere; they are often talking shops which occasionally meet, but at which no decisions of any consequence are ever taken. They just give a superficial prestige to Constantinople.

What I am saying from both the above examples is that we can expect nothing for the future of Orthodoxy in Western Europe from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which has never freely given any Church autocephaly and has continually tried to take back autocephaly even when political circumstances forced it to grant it – as in the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia etc. In this way Constantinople, fallen since 1453, politically captive since 1948, and through Greek nationalism totally failing to recognize that Church leadership long ago passed to the Russian Church, today resembles the other Balkan Churches. None of them has the vision, is big enough, is missionary-minded enough or is unphyletist and mutinational enough to set up the Pan-European Metropolitan structure necessary for the foundation of any future Orthodox Church in Europe.

2. The Duty of Care of the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe

This leaves the Russian Orthodox Church, fifty times larger than the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as the only Local Orthodox Church which can do anything for European Orthodoxy. After all, of all the Local Churches only the Russian Orthodox Church is large and supra-national. Its name in Russian is ‘Russkaya’, meaning ‘of Rus’, not ‘Rossiyskaya’, meaning ‘of the Russian Federation’. In other words, it alone is multinational – like its Patriarch, the Russian Orthodox Church is the Church of All Rus and this means not just Russia, the Orthodox Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Carpatho-Russia, but any part of the world where Russian Orthodox faithful live. It alone has kept the old multinational Orthodox ideal of ‘romaiosini’, of the unity in diversity of the Christian Empire. Indeed, in 2004 Patriarch Alexis II at last spoke precisely of the need to establish a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Western Europe. However, in 2004 the proposition of Patriarch Alexis II could only be theoretical. Only since 2007 has the Russian Orthodox Church even been in a theoretical position to establish such a Metropolia. Why?

a. Russian Orthodox Church Unity

In May 2007, the MP and ROCOR signed the Act of Canonical Communion in Moscow. With this one act, the division that began after the Russian Revolution between the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the Church Inside Russia (then called the MP) and was forced onto the Church by atheist persecution inside the Soviet Union ceased. According to the 2007 agreement, ROCOR was gradually to give up its few small temporary communities on the territory of the ex-Soviet Union (the canonical territory of the Church Inside Russia) and in return, in time, the Church Inside Russia would, as is only logical, cede its relatively few but sometimes large communities outside Russia to ROCOR.

The first part of this agreement took place fairly swiftly, but the second part of the agreement, for perfectly good pastoral reasons, can only be implemented with time. This situation concerns above all the shared territories of Western Europe and Latin America, since the vast majority of Russian Orthodox parishes in its other territories in Oceania and North America are in any case under ROCOR. Thus, for the moment, we still have the absurd situation of two Russian Orthodox bishops of Berlin, Archbishop Theophan and Archbishop Mark. However, all agree that this will not last.

In effect, both the old MP and the old ROCOR ceased to exist on that day in May 2007. What came into being was a reunited and worldwide Russian Orthodox Church, three-quarters of the whole Orthodox Church, with the same Faith and under the same Patriarch, politically free but administratively in two parts, inside Russia and outside Russia, so that both parts are Patriarchal, but one is based in Moscow and the other, much smaller, is based in New York. The unique canonical territory of the Church inside Russia covers all the countries of the former Soviet Union (except Georgia) and countries where all the missions were founded by it, officially only China and Japan, but in reality also Thailand, Iran, Cuba and North Korea.

The territories of the Church Outside Russia, and these are territories mainly shared with other Orthodox, include Western Europe, North America, Latin America and Oceania (including Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia). Thus the new ROCOR has the potential to become again (as it was in the beginning) a multi-Metropolia Church, with four Metropolias, one in Western Europe, one in North America, one in Latin America and one in Oceania. Perhaps one day it could also include Alaska as a fifth Metropolia, but only if that territory returns to the Russian Orthodox Church from its present American administration.

b. The Territory of Europe to be United in a Metropolia

Europe, that is Western Europe, is a cultural ensemble, because it is all basically ex-Orthodox (1,000 years ago) and now, as it has largely lapsed into its Gadarene secularism, ex-Catholic (historically ex-Protestant also means ex-Catholic). I am speaking of the following 25 countries: Iceland, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, Norway, Denmark (with the Faeroes), Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Hungary, Portugal, Spain (and the part of Spain called Gibraltar), Andorra, Italy, San Marino and Malta. I exclude from this definition of Western Europe Poland, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, as they already have their own Local Churches and canonical territory. Similarly, I also exclude Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, since, like Montenegro and Macedonia, they are part of the canonical territory of the Serbian Church. As for Albania, like Romania, Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus, it already has its own Local Church.

It is true that Finland, which is in this list of 25 countries, has over 20 parishes and other communities that at present belong to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and celebrate Easter on the Catholic calendar (similar to a non-canonical group in Estonia). However, Russian Orthodox do not frequent such churches, whose Faith has been called ‘Lutheranism with icons’. They prefer to attend the quite separate and canonical Russian Orthodox churches in Finland, which are growing. Also there are those who consider that Hungary, also in the list of 25 countries, should have its own Local Church, like the Poles and the Czechs and Slovaks. However, we live in the world as it is now, not as it may be one day. For the moment, therefore, Hungary must be included in the territory of a European Metropolia, as defined above.

3. A Future Metropolia

a. Structure

Now as regards a future European Metropolia under the Patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), it is clear that this will be a real Metropolia with several hundred real parishes and real churches and, very importantly, real monasteries. This will not be like the Paris Exarchate or the old Sourozh Diocese, a paper empire, a series of modernistic, semo-Uniat communities often fewer than ten or twenty in number, celebrating in front rooms and garden sheds, or composed of clergy who were ordained with little training because no-one else would ordain them or even who use blackmail against their Archbishop in Paris: ‘If you do not allow me to do what I want, I will join the Greeks’. (Or the Romanians or someone else. Much more rarely, this blackmail may involve a threat of passage to ‘the Russians’. However, this threat is rarely used because those who today remain in the Exarchate generally believe in Russophobia – the ideology which justifies the continued existence of the Exarchate).

Where should the geographical centre of such a Metropolia be? Until recently I had always thought of it as Paris, the historical centre of the Russian emigration, where there is, in temporary premises, a Russian Orthodox seminary and where a Cathedral complex has long been planned. However, as a Metropolitan centre this choice is threatened by two things, the ecumenism and modernism apparently ingrained in the Paris air and the Russophobic policies of the present US-controlled French government. Today France is in a state of social chaos and disintegration. It may therefore be that we should think more radically. Indeed, two other possible centres for a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe exist: they are Berlin (there are large numbers of Russian Orthodox in Germany) and Rome (where there is the large Russian church of St Catherine’s and above all which is the historical centre of the Western Patriarchate. After all, the initials of the English words ‘Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe’ spell R.O.M.E.).

It now seems to me that there should initially be seven dioceses in such a Metropolia. These are: Germania (Germany, German-speaking Switzerland and the Netherlands, including Flemish-speaking Belgium); Gallia (France, French-speaking Belgium, French-speaking Switzerland, Luxembourg and Monaco); Iberia (Spain, Gibraltar, Portugal and Andorra); the Isles (the British Isles and Ireland); Italia (Italy, San Marino, Italian-speaking Switzerland and Malta); Scandinavia (Iceland, the Faeroes, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland); Austria-Hungaria (Austria and Hungary). With time two or three bishops could be appointed to such large dioceses, under an archbishop. For example, Germania could have an archbishop in Berlin, a bishop for western Germany, a bishop for the Dutch-speaking areas and a fourth for Switzerland. Scandinavia could have an archbishop in Stockholm who would also look after Denmark, a bishop in Helsinki and another for Norway and Iceland. These are mere possible examples for two dioceses or future archdioceses. Who knows the future?

At present the episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe is not organized as one and some members are elderly. ROCOR is concentrated in Western Germany and Switzerland, though with several parishes in France, Belgium, Denmark and England, but it has virtually no existence in Italy, Spain and Portugal or in the rest of Scandinavia, in which countries the Church Inside Russia has over 100 parishes. ROCOR has three bishops, the youngest of whom is aged about sixty. ROCOR certainly has experience, but it will need new bishops. Some of the dioceses in Europe, which are still for the moment dependent on the Church Inside Russia, will also need new bishops in the future. Episcopal candidates must speak languages apart from Russian, know the cultures and cultural references of the countries where they will live and have a dynamic and missionary view of their episcopate. In other words, they must realize that their task is not just to look after immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union. They must be able to communicate with the children and grandchildren of such immigrants, as well as with the descendants of the centennial emigration, now in its fifth generation, and the native people of European countries, both Orthodox and Non-Orthodox.

For example, we know of one episcopal appointee whose first act was to buy an expensive black car. On that day he lost the confidence of his diocese. He did not understand that being a Russian Orthodox bishop in Europe is not at all the same as being a Russian Orthodox bishop in the former Soviet Union. Secondly, any diocesan bishop must also be a uniter – in Europe we still have bad memories of the late Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) who was an ecumenist and intercommunionist (in Rome) and did not want to do missionary work among native Europeans. Such figures were ultimately partly responsible for the Sourozh schism and the lack of trust among European Orthodox in bishops who were visiting them from the Soviet Union. On the other hand, we have an excellent memory of Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) who warned Metr Nikodim precisely against his political policies. Who then could be the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe? We believe that there is already at least one suitable candidate, at present an Archbishop.

It is now becoming urgent to establish such a Metropolitan structure. Millions of Orthodox have had to flee Orthodox Eastern Europe in the last 25 years for economic reasons. Since the fall of Communism, Eastern Europe has been seized by a wave of post-Communist corruption. Combined with the deindustrialization forced onto Eastern European countries when they joined the EU, millions of young people have been forced to leave their homes and families to take on mainly menial jobs in the building sites, factories and offices of Western Europe. There are now more Orthodox in Western Europe, the territory of the future Metropolia, than there are in the four ancient Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, combined. How then can this Metropolia be organized?

b. Organization

Before such a Metropolia could come into existence, all kinds of groundwork have to be laid. First of all, who should be the patron saint of such a Metropolia? To our mind, there can only be one candidate, the only saint of the Russian Orthodox Church who in the twentieth century lived for well over a decade in Western Europe – St John of Shanghai. He is the only canonized member of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe. He stands head and shoulders above all the personalities, intellectuals, artists, writers and philosophers of the emigration, for he was a saint and a universal saint at that. Strictly faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, for which he was much despised by modernists, he was also open to the pastoral needs of local people, encouraged the veneration of the historical saints of Europe and was the inspiration for Fr Seraphim of Platina, for which he was much despised by nationalists. In my view, St John has no rivals. However, the appointment of such a patron saint must be made by the Russian Orthodox bishops in Europe. We are not an anti-episcopal organization like the ‘Fraternite Orthodoxe’ in Paris, so we can only suggest to our bishops.

Secondly, we need a Metropolia website, run by people who have the skills and time to devote to this. Their skills must not only be technological but also linguistic. The website should, we believe, be in Russian, Romanian for our many Moldovan parishioners, English (as the international language) and, in the appropriate sections, in one of the other thirteen local languages of the Metropolia (German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Maltese and Icelandic). Perhaps, eventually, as pastoral need dictates, there could be pages in minority languages like Basque, Gaelic, Sorbian, Breton, Welsh etc. Who are the Russian Orthodox bishops in Europe? Such a website could present them with their photos. How many Russian Orthodox priests are there in Europe today? 200? That is only our guess; we do not have the information. The website could provide it.

Such a website could provide a calendar including the local saints of Europe, for example, Clotilde, Alban, Agnes, Ursula, Eulalia, Senhorina, Leander, Columba, Blandine, Olaf, Maurice, Kevin, Willibrord, Anschar, Sigfrid, Audrey, Corbinian, Illtyd, Odile, Devota, Publius, Gertrude, little known outside their own countries and regions, whose prayers can bind us together. There is a practical and a mystical necessity to link ourselves to them for it is ultimately on their noble Orthodoxy that European culture was built. The fact that modern Europe in its ignoble rush for self-destruction has turned its back on them only means that we should venerate them all the more. The website could present such information along with parish profiles, the addresses and phone numbers of individual parishes, their websites, histories, pictures of their church buildings, their clergy and parishioners, details of languages used in services, timetables and other activities and publications. And all our vital monasteries must have their place there too. There should also be some kind of resource of services in the many languages of the Metropolia and a simple vocabulary in the sixteen languages. How do you say ‘Orthodox Church’ in Hungarian, ‘priest’ in Finnish, ‘confession’ in Maltese or ‘candle’ in Norwegian? The website could tell us. Again, all this can only be done with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox bishops in Europe.

Thirdly, we need to hold a conference of Russian Orthodox clergy in Europe. We do not know each other. Initially, there could be a small conference with, say, two representatives from each country. One priest from Italy has already suggested the excellent idea of twinning parishes. Knowledge of one another could also be obtained from pilgrimages to local saints or relics or on the basis of visits to priests or laypeople who are already linked. Europe is rich in shrines, in Bari, in Rome, in Turin, in Milan, in Compostella, in Cologne, in Paris, in Lyons: Why not organize Europe-wide Russian Orthodox pilgrimages to such shrines? Alternatively, there could be pilgrimages to some of our wonderful churches in Europe, built under Tsar Nicholas II, in Wiesbaden, Geneva, Nice etc., or others built more recently in Brussels, Rome and Madrid. In such a way, by meeting, we can begin the most important task of praying for one another. Again, all this can only be done with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox bishops in Europe.

Two years ago I was contacted by a Russian woman in a province of France. She was in tears, very upset. She had been to a so-called monastery of the Paris Exarchate, where she had been refused confession because ‘she had not murdered anyone’. This meant that she had also been deprived of communion. She had found me on the internet, not knowing any priest in France. She told me her story on the telephone, how she and her son had been abandoned by her French husband and how she desperately needed a priest to talk to. Now, such things are happening all over Europe. The duty of care of the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe is to its faithful of all nationalities, to people like her. Let us begin by appointing a priest or priests whose duty it will be to look after the Russian Orthodox flock in any particular region of Europe. Since the above 25 European countries are divided into some eighty regions and there are a lot more than 80 Russian Orthodox priests in Europe, this can be done and the sort of incident that I have related above can be avoided. Everyone must have a priest to go to.

Some, reading the above, might ask about the role of Non-Orthodox in this. We believe in good-neighbourly relations with those who do not belong to the Orthodox Church. After a thousand years outside the Orthodox Church, many of them still believe in the Holy Trinity and the Divinity of Christ. Some, especially Catholics, go further than this and believe in the Virgin Birth, the Mother of God, the saints and the sacraments. Some share our moral views on such issues as abortion and euthanasia. The fact that the faith they have inherited is deficient in the understanding of the Holy Spirit, and therefore lacks an authentic spiritual and ascetic life, only means that it is remarkable how close some of them are to us. We have no reason not to be on good terms with them. However, this does not mean that we do not freely practise our Faith without compromise. Most Europeans have in the last generation or so decided to be atheists or at least agnostics, Europe today is a mission territory open to all. Conversely, most in the Russian Lands have in the last generation or so chosen to be baptized Orthodox. We should respect each other’s differences. We may be Europeans, but we are also firmly Christian and follow the Russian Orthodox Church in full.

Some, reading the above, might ask about the role of other jurisdictions in the shared territory of Europe, such as Constantinople’s Greeks and its political dissidents. In our view, the establishment of a Russian Metropolia in no way means that they cannot continue just as now. They could even establish their own international structures if they wish. The difference will always be that the Russian Orthodox Metropolia will alone be Europe-wide and multinational, not mononational, and therefore with the potential of growing into a new Local Church, as Patriarch Alexis II hoped. In the long term, as we know from experience, the jurisdiction that will survive in Europe will be the spiritually serious one, not the ones that wave nationalistic or ideological flags and so automatically alienate others and lose the second and following generations, who find such nationalism and ideologism foreign and irrelevant. Just as the fringes attract the fringes, vagantes attract vagantes, sectarians attract sectarians, personality cults attract personality cultists, so serious jurisdictions will attract serious people.

Conclusion

In recent years I have visited Russian Orthodox in Austria, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, the Czech Lands, Slovakia, Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Sweden and Finland, as well as receiving visits from Russian Orthodox from many of these countries and from Norway, Ireland, Spain and Italy. In all of them I have noticed the consistent ability of many Russian Orthodox to keep the best of Russian culture and to absorb the best of Western culture at the same time. This is because of our ability to see and live European life and culture through the correcting prism and filter of Orthodox Christianity. It is the pastoral duty of the Russian Orthodox Church to its own flock and to all European Orthodox to live like this, keeping faith and yet being European, not repeating the errors of either sectarian nationalists or of the equally sectarian modernists of the Paris Jurisdiction and the old Sourozh Diocese.

We European Orthodox have four layers of identity: local, national and continental (= cultural) and spiritual. In my own case, this means the East of England, England, Europe and Russian Orthodoxy (= Rus). All of these layers of identity can be combined by saying that I belong to the East of England Rus (Vostochnoangliyskaya Rus’), to the Russian Orthodox world that is planted in the East of England. Others can say the same thing, that in Sweden they belong to Scanian Rus, in Spain to Catalan Rus or Galician Rus, in Italy to Sub-alpine Rus or Sardinian Rus, in the Netherlands to Frisian Rus, in Scotland to Hebridean Rus, in Germany to Bavarian Rus or Saxon Rus, in France to Breton Rus or Occitan Rus, in Austria to Carinthian Rus or Tyrolean Rus etc. This is the unity on which our future Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe (R.O.M.E.) can be built, from Iceland to the plains of Hungary, from Lapland to the islands of Malta, in the local regions of the 25 nations of the continent of Europe where we live, and on our complete faithfulness to the integral Russian Orthodox Faith and Tradition.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
ROCOR Missionary Representative for Western Europe

Brittany, 24 July 2015