Category Archives: Suicide

Come, Holy Spirit! Over 5,000 Words on over Fifty Years of Faithfulness to the Orthodox Church

Fifty Years of History; 2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia; The Ukraine; The Suicide of ROCOR; Eastern Papism; A New Local Church

Fifty Years of History

Q: Why is 2025 a significant year for you personally?

A: 2025 marks fifty years of faithfulness to the Orthodox Church and Faith, forty-seven of them in the Russian Church, three in the Romanian Church, and forty years as an Orthodox clergyman.

Q: When did you begin this journey?

A:  My conscious journey began in 1968, when I was twelve years old. I realised then that my destiny was in the Orthodox Church and set about studying Russian, though there had been contacts with two local White Russian families before that. However, as I was under age, I was not able to join the Church until I was eighteen. Six years of waiting. In 1973 I at last managed to visit an Orthodox church. This was the Russian émigré chapel inside the house on the corner of Canterbury Road in Oxford. Soon after, the chapel became a library with the late Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, as the new octagonal University chapel, now Greek, had been opened in the garden outside.

Q: Why did you join the Russian Church?

A: Hobson’s choice, as they say in Cambridge! The only other Local Churches present in this country then, the Greek and the Serbian, would just tell you to go away. ‘You are not one of us’. They were ethnic clubs. Therefore, you had no choice. Only the two Russian jurisdictions would accept you. Not that they were very gracious about it either. They gave you the impression that they would accept you, but they would have preferred not to. Only because the elderly Russian emigres had no political power or money and were dying out, did some of them accept you. Many told us they would sooner die out than accept ‘foreigners’. They also entertained bitter political divisions and polemics, which you just had to put up with and make sense of.

2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia

Q: In 2022 three-quarters of the ROCOR Diocese in England, the so-called ‘Colchester Diocese’, though it stretches to Coventry and Manchester, that is, many ROCOR parishes, 5,000 people and 15 clergy, including three Western rite clergy, left ROCOR and 12 of you (all except for the Western riters) joined the Romanian Church. So do you regret that you had worked for forty-seven years for the unity of the divided three parts of the Russian Church?

A: No, not at all! To work for unity is always good. Without unity Churches fall out of communion and eventually become sects. This is my real experience, I have seen this and lived this. This is what began to happen to the two Russian émigré Churches, the smaller one based in Paris and the larger one based in New York, after the last emigres who had been adults and known the realities of Russia before 1917 had died out and direct contact with reality was lost.

After them, by the early 2000s, the sectarian fantasies, to the left and to the right, in both of them became ever stronger. The Paris group began falling away definitively towards liberal secularism under masonic sponsorship and the New York group began falling away definitively into old calendarist sectarianism under CIA sponsorship, like that of the elderly CIA Colonel Magerovsky. We were eyewitnesses to both and knew all the personalities involved, writing vigorously against both extremist tendencies. There was only one way out for them, to rejoin the broad Centre, which could hold everyone together.

Indeed, we finally got both parts into communion with the Centre in Moscow and so with each other, just in time, with many of the extremists falling away, 47% of the Paris group and 5% of the New York group. However, ironically, our triumph lasted only a little more than one year, for they fell out of communion with each other again. The fault here was entirely that of the very aggressive, old calendarist pharisee-bishops of New York, who had remained in ROCOR or infiltrated it after unity and were wreaking havoc. This took place after set in the dementia of the ever-memorable Metr Hilarion, who had no idea what they were doing in his name. The schism came in December 2020. Only one bishop resisted, the anti-sectarian and anti-rebaptiser Archbishop Peter of Chicago, who had been an altar boy to St John, but who has since died. His see is now without a permanent bishop and many there are now out of control.

Q: Why did the Centre in Moscow not try and hold the two émigré parts together?

A: As the Russians say of themselves, ‘We are slow to harness, but quick to ride’. In other words, Moscow is very passive, it does nothing for, say, twenty years despite all the warnings of the coming explosion from the grassroots, and then, too late, after the explosion, it overreacts to the extreme. This is the result of not working incrementally and being pastorally interested, only politically interested. Firstly, Moscow had, and refused to have, little or any understanding of the provincial Russian emigration and its petty political arguments. Secondly, Moscow was distracted from pastoral care by international politics, for by that time Moscow had itself fallen out of communion with the Greeks, after the grossly uncanonical actions of the Greeks in the Ukraine, breaking the first canons of the Apostles. Again, here too, Moscow overreacted.

Here we see how the fall from communion with the Greeks by the Centre affected the rest. Lack of communion is like an infection, a virus. So all our work for unity was undone by the Moscow error of overreaction to the Greek error, splitting off from the Church. Then, not having turned the other cheek, Moscow ‘did a Constantinople’, by interfering in the jurisdiction of Alexandria in Africa. Little wonder that people then began to say that ‘Moscow is as bad as Constantinople’.

Q: What do you do, if even the Centre is infected by the spirit of disunity and without principles tolerates sectarianism, and ignores schism and even the heresy of rebaptising Orthodox?

A: In such a case, you must transfer to a canonical Local Church which is not infected with the disease of schism and has a Diaspora structure. Today, that means neither the Russians, nor the Greeks. As I had been to seminary in the 1970s and a couple of the seminarians had become bishops, namely in the Serbian and Romanian Churches, and since I had been around for a long time and had met lots of other bishops since then and many had read the translations of my writings into Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, German and Czech, we had a choice of where to go. After the Russian betrayal of us in the Non-schismatic Diaspora, all the others offered to protect us from the new, brutal, sectarian, uncanonical and anti-pastoral ROCOR. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

The Ukraine

Q: What was the connection between your departure for the Romanian Patriarchate and the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: None, directly. We were received by our old friend, the very experienced Metr Joseph (Pop) of the four-million strong Autonomous Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe of the Romanian Orthodox Church on 16 February 2022, as proved by the documents issued on that day (despite the blatant lies of others on the internet who said that those documents were forged (!), much to the shock of Metr Joseph – he did not know that bishops can lie). Now that was eight days before the new phase of the Ukrainian conflict began on 24 February.

It was providential that we had left before that conflict, because then we did not have to face the deep and bitter divisions among the flock which the commemoration of Patriarch Kyrill has brought to all Russian parishes, especially in ROCOR, though it happens even inside Russia. There anti-war Orthodox are also boycotting the Church in very large numbers, not least after the ‘defrocking’ and exiling of liberal but popular priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky.

The reason why we left was the schism which occurred with the official introduction of the heresy of rebaptism of Orthodox under old calendarist pressure, not the problem of the Ukraine. Our departure was clearly not directly connected with the intensified conflict in the Ukraine eight days later, on 24 February, but there was still an indirect connection. This is because both the heresy of rebaptism and the scandalous support for a war against other Orthodox were caused by exactly the same lack of pastoral leadership. The chasm between the bishops on the one hand and the suffering priests and people on the other hand, whom the bishops have been persecuting, opened up for exactly the same reason.

Q: But you seem to support the Russian side in the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: Not at all, that is not true. No clergyman can support war and violence. However, as a political observer and cultural historian, who knows very well both Russia and the Ukraine, both officially and unofficially, and has met both recent Patriarchs and President Putin, and who also perfectly well knows the aggression and hypocrisy of the West, several things were obvious.

Firstly, it was obvious from the very outset that, as a Great Power, Russia would win that deeply tragic and catastrophic conflict. That is not support, it is just a recognition of an obvious fact. It was also clear that the Kiev regime was Fascist and atheist and was acting simply as a proxy of the highly aggressive USA and the EU. It was obvious that the anti-Ukrainian regime in Kiev existed only because NATO was using it to try and destroy Russia and grab its wealth, for the Ukraine is the last chance of the West to dominate the world and pay off its colossal debts. It was also plain for all to see that the Kiev regime had been persecuting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and all the minorities there (and the Russians in the Ukraine are a minority of 40%!) for years. Blood is on their hands – the Russians did not start this.

Moreover, the CIA and Constantinople support for the fake Church, the OCU, under Dumenko, is an abuse of the canons, on the same level as the abuse of the canons by others, as is the present ‘defrocking’ of bishops of Cyprus for their faithfulness to Christ in refusing to recognise the fake Church. The latter has totally discredited the Church of Cyprus, which kowtows to discredited Constantinople and the local US ambassador. Frankly, there is something quite satanic in the Kiev regime, as it closes hundreds of churches, threatens to turn them into casinos and propagandises LGBT.

It was also obvious that the Ukrainian people, especially the real Orthodox there, were the victims of that war. And finally, it was manifest that the ignorant and arrogant Western mainstream media, financed by the CIA and MI6, which are themselves financed by the Military Financial Complex of the USA and the UK, supported the Kiev Nazis because they could make a lot of money out of such a conflict. They told plain lies. It was the same in Britain in the First World War, where the newspapers which were owned by millionaire arms merchants told the same type of lies.

The Suicide of ROCOR

Q: How did ROCOR come to discredit and destroy itself?

A: All too many in the Russian episcopate now appear to want to suck money out of the parishes in order to finance their ‘superior’, oligarchic lifestyle and then in return sadistically punish the selfsame priests and parishes for telling the truth and living as Christians, also trying to destroy their families. Such bishops, whether inside or outside Russia, claim that they are acting according to the canons and that any who refuse to accept their vicious persecutions and slanders are committing the ultimate sin of refusing to participate in their evil. That apparently is ‘uncanonical’!

Clearly, these people are not Christians. It would be laughable if it were not so sad. We are obedient to Christ, not to those who are de facto filioquists, that is, who claim to have replaced Christ and so put their clearly twisted interpretations of the canons above the Holy Spirit. Their lust for power and money is what has temporarily corrupted the Russian Church, just as it has Constantinople. The Russian émigré Churches had never suffered from that disease, as they had neither power, nor money, which was precisely their glory, but they had died out by the early 2000s. We saw their last generation between 1975 and 2000.

The local example of a recent convert was of one who suffered from narcissistic rages and tantrums, throwing his toys out of his pram and acting as a typical unprincipled bully. Uneducated and ignorant, humiliating those who had been in the Church before he was even born, he threatened all with a metaphorical baseball bat. He was a kind of ecclesiastical Trump, wanting only to ‘grab property’ (the words of our outraged solicitor who examined his shameless claims in astonishment – she had never seen anything like it, even in the secular world) and dominate, without any understanding of local languages, history, geography, customs etc. Moscow now knows all about him, since the scandal he caused in the altar of a church in Paris last year, when he had to be restrained by another bishop from his aggressive rage and threat of violence.

Q: Was ROCOR’s entry into schism and even heresy inevitable?

A: No, not at all. As far back as 1997, a friend of mine, the late Fr Roman Lukianov in Boston USA, warned that ROCOR risked becoming a sect, as the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, successor of St John, had reposed in 1993. For decades Vladyka Antony had been the great moderating influence inside ROCOR against the American crazies. He was rightly concerned, as were others of us.

I remember one old aristocratic émigré in London, who had worked for MI6 (so many of them did) in Iran in the 1950s (himself he just said that he had worked for ‘The Foreign Office’, which was well-understood code). He said that no unity between ROCOR and the MP was possible because ROCOR was like a glass of pure water and the MP was like a glass of dirty water. I asked him then why St Matrona of Moscow and St Luke of the Crimea had been in the MP? Then I asked him why were there so many scandals in ROCOR, with the Grabbe affair, his ‘six million dollar’ son, and the defrocking for good canonical reasons of immoral priests and why there were so many ROCOR parishes that did not have priests? He simply answered that he had never heard of any of that! In other words, it was all ignorance and bigotry. It was the usual phariseeism of those who see the speck in others, but not the log in their own eye.

In fact, despite such people, ROCOR did not become a sect and ten years later it even entered back into communion with Moscow, then presided over by a former émigré, the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II. That was a miracle. I witnessed it. ROCOR through the ever-memorable Metr Laurus had received the most generous canonical agreement from the Patriarch, becoming a self-governing part of the Russian Church. ROCOR had basically become an Autonomous Church of the Diaspora. This had been exactly our hope all along. My only regret was that it had taken so long. Patriarch Alexis, whom I knew, had already made the same offer in about 1995! Seven years had been wasted after the revolutionary 2000 Jubilee Council in Moscow when all our just demands had been met.

With such an agreement to autonomy, ROCOR could therefore have avoided all the controversy of the later Russian schism with the Greeks and the conflict in the Ukraine and not broken communion with but co-operated with the other Local Churches. (By other Local Churches, I do not include the leadership of the Greek Churches, whose policies were purely political, dictated to them and paid for by the CIA).

But instead of using its autonomy and working with the concert of the politically free Local Churches, self-governing ROCOR showed no independence from Moscow at all, except to express CIA views of the Kiev regime! It not only entered into schism from the Greeks, but also took several priests from the Greek Church without letters of release, and accepted in silence the persecution of priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky. All this was because it did not want to recognise the Catholicity of the Church, but to be a schismatic ghetto-group, actually denying the sacraments of other local Churches, against its own people.

Q: But you must admit that ROCOR had long been a breeding ground for schism?

A: Yes, there had been the Bostonite old calendarist schism in, I think, 1986, when about 2,000 left, the tiny old calendarist schisms in France in 1987 and 2001, then the four schisms in the USA and England of 2007. But each time the numbers who left for all these various warring ‘True Orthodox’ sects were minute, often fewer than 500, sometimes as few as 50. The ROCOR Centre had remained firm.

And all those schisms proved just how necessary it was for ROCOR to enter into canonical communion with Moscow and to eliminate the sectarian spirit of hatred and division for ever. Those schisms also proved how ROCOR had for years been attracting the wrong sort of people, pathological extremists and the dissatisfied, sometimes second-generation immigrant Russians with their inferiority complexes and fantasies about pre-Revolutionary Russia, sometimes weird converts from Protestant sects, very often with sexual problems.

These are the sort of people who call normal Orthodox ‘World Orthodox’ and themselves, in their narcissistic and pharisaical pride, ‘True Orthodox’. There is no such thing as ‘World Orthodox’. True, there can be worldly or lapsed Orthodox, but they do not go to church and therefore, they are not Orthodox. An Orthodox is one who goes to church, unlike so many of the internet Orthodox who dare to call themselves ‘True Orthodox’. The only ‘True Orthodox’ are the saints of God, to whose state all Orthodox aspire.

Today, there are all of us who left ROCOR from 2021 on, in the USA, in England and elsewhere. Only this time we left not for weird and schismatic sectarian groups, but for the mainstream Local Churches, anti-Bartholomew Constantinople (those who joined Constantinople in the USA and Paris refuse to have anything to do with his fake Ukrainian Church) and then Bucharest, which welcomed us all with open arms and great sympathy, as heroic witnesses and refugees from ROCOR schism and heresy.

This time it was the scandal-ridden ROCOR itself which had become a weird and schismatic sectarian group. True, there were others in ROCOR who were too weak and fearful, including one bishop and several clergy, who did not leave for other Local Churches, but simply gave up and resigned in disgust at the lack of canonicity and corruption they had seen inside the new ROCOR. This is the end of ROCOR, its suicide. It has outlived its sell-by date.

Q: But what do you think about the anti-Moscow Patriarchate ROCOR Synod statement of 5 June?

https://www.synod.com/synod/eng2025/20250605_ensynodstatement.html

A: This was a clearly provoked by the very recent Sister Vassa debacle and the numbers of Russians leaving ROCOR in the USA and withdrawing their donations, since the documents contains nothing new and could have been written years ago. (Why wasn’t it written then? Well, as American say, ‘Follow the money’). It was clearly written by the German Metr Mark and his entourage, who have been running the Synod ever since they removed Metr Vitaly in 2001.

It is a document that deals only with the past of 70-90 years ago and fails utterly to address the present, the elephant in the room, the war in the Ukraine. The liberals will rightly mock the document as too little, too late. However, there is even worse.

From the Moscow viewpoint, the ROCOR document is scandalous. It is well known that the German Diocese of Metr Mark still has many children and grandchildren of Vlasovites (Russians who fought with Hitler) in it. For Russians in Russia Stalin was the victor of 1945, just as for British people Churchill (who was just as racist as Hitler) was the victor in 1945. And Vlasov was a traitor. Any attack of this manner on Stalin is seen as Nazi and therefore as support for the Nazis in Kiev, who are have been killing Russian civilians and children ever since 2014, with the support of the grandchildren of Nazis in Berlin and Brussels.

This statement has quite rightly outraged Moscow, especially since it has Vlasovite and CIA connections. It was 27 million Soviet citizens who were massacred by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945. Victory came when Stalin was the Soviet leader. Why is ROCOR, with its close Vlasov and CIA connections meddling in internal affairs in Russia? If Moscow ditches ROCOR, then it will lose its last shreds of a claim to canonicity and become officially the schismatic sect that it already is. For the quite correct Russian reaction, see:

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2025/06/06/sinod_rpcz_nastupaet_na_te_zhe_grabli

Q: Today ROCOR is attracting many young men. So ROCOR is not finished?

A: All Orthodox dioceses in the Diaspora are receiving many young people today. This is due to the internet effect of various influencers. But we have to be very careful and receive only the serious, not the beardy-weirdy. With such people the lapse rate is extremely high. I am now receiving at least one young person a month, though as many young women as men, including refugees from ROCOR sectarianism, now that they have understood their mistake. ROCOR is once more attracting the wrong sort of young men, the terminally online, the exclusivists, incels, woman-haters, closet homosexuals, bisexuals, extremists, narcissists, internet Orthodox. You cannot build a Church on their exclusivist pathology and hatred, and yet ROCOR usually ordains such young men, preferring them to the normal!

Thus, they claim that Orthodoxy is ’manly’ and ‘masculine’. But what about women? Are they not allowed? Why are they against family life and children? Clearly, all this is internet fantasy. Russian churches especially have always been filled with women, 80% or 90%. But you will not learn about that reality from the internet. Those remaining in ROCOR just never learn. They are just making it worse for themselves. All we can do is to pray for their repentance despite their schism and heresy.

Eastern Papism

Q: Why did some Russian hierarchs fall into exactly the same error as the Greek (Constantinople) Church before it, by proclaiming themselves to be some sort of Eastern Papacy?

A: Only about 2% of Orthodox belong to the Greek jurisdiction of Constantinople, whereas 70% (140 million) belong to that of Moscow. Moscow therefore thinks that it is No 1. However, Constantinople maintains that as the Church of the former Imperial Capital (which fell nearly 600 years ago!), it is the ‘first without equals’, that is, No 1.

Now promoting yourself as ‘No 1’ is precisely the heresy of Papism, which directly contradicts the Gospel, where Christ calls on us to serve others, not to lord it over others. The First Rome fell because it wanted to dominate. Those who call themselves the Second Rome and the Third Rome have learned nothing from its fall and have instead chosen to imitate that exact same ‘Roman’ fall. It is the sin of Rome-ism, even though you may call it worldliness, secularism, erastianism or Sergianism.

Fortunately, the Church works through Catholicity, not through becoming a State (the First Rome), ancient prestige (the Second Rome) or through size (the Third Rome). A Council of the whole Church, all sixteen Local Churches, is the solution to this childish division. In any case, as a result, both Moscow and Constantinople have punished themselves. Today Moscow is being reduced in size, losing a third of its territories and parishes, and as for Constantinople, it is losing the last shreds of its prestige, making itself into a laughing-stock, as one bishop after another in the Church of Cyprus is ‘defrocked’ for the ‘heresy’ of disagreeing with Constantinople!

Both Moscow and Constantinople are punished by the sin that they sinned with, as the Book of Proverbs says. God is not mocked. Meanwhile the real Church, the other fourteen Local Churches, goes on together with the many healthy elements within both Moscow and Constantinople are in accord. This is not a sickness unto death, for repentance is possible.

A New Local Church

Q: What after fifty years of struggle do you think of the chances of a new Local Church being established?

A: I have always believed that I would not live to see it, but I have always fought for it, for the sake of our children and grandchildren. It is still for the future and despite the present Greek and Russian squabble we are far closer to it than fifty years ago, when it was an impossible dream and even services in local languages hardly existed. The present schism does not fill me with pessimism because people in their eighties die. What is frightening is that people of that age appear to feel no repentance.

The point is that over the last fifty years I have seen both the Russian Church in the Diaspora and the Greek (Constantinople) Church dying out. Why? Because they stuck to what for the new Western-born generations of Russians and Greeks were foreign languages, Slavonic and Greek. They do not understand a word of them. The decision not to use local languages was suicide, the ethnic funeral of the Church.

On top of that, what possible missionary witness do you give to Non-Orthodox, if you do not even speak the local language and understand the local culture? Did the Apostles go around speaking in a foreign language to preach the Gospel? No, they spoke in the local language. This is one of the meanings of Pentecost. To speak in tongues does not mean to speak in gibberish in a wave of hysterical self-exaltation, like crazy Evangelicals and Pentecostalists. It means to work in order to learn another language, its culture and customs, in order to inculturate the Orthodox Christian Faith and so bring people to Christ.

St Nicholas of Japan, St Tikhon of Moscow and St John of Shanghai are recent examples, for they did exactly this. They did not impose, they set examples. All we have to do is follow them. For instance, when Japan started its proxy war against Russia with its undeclared surprise attack on Russia, St Nicholas told his Japanese clergy to pray for their armed forces and locked himself away to pray for the duration. Here is our example.

Q: And what about the chances of achieving an Autocephalous Local Church today?

A: Firstly, most Local Churches do not even have a Diaspora jurisdiction, so they are not concerned by the question.

Secondly, many of the Churches that do have a Diaspora jurisdiction would never give autocephaly to their Diaspora jurisdiction for ethnic reasons, especially if that jurisdiction is small. So there is no hope that in Western Europe, for example, the Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian or Antiochian Churches will ever grant autocephaly. This means that only the big three, the Greek, Russian or Romanian Churches could ever give autocephaly in Western Europe. True, the Romanian Church gave autonomy several years ago, but not autocephaly for very good canonical reasons, for which see below.

Thirdly, there is the question of local people who have joined that Church. This is all about missionary work. Ghetto-churches will never give autocephaly. Why should they? They are precisely not local and do not want to be local! But if there were large numbers of local people in a Church, then it would have to receive autocephaly. This so far is not the case anywhere, the numbers of native people accepting Orthodoxy have been very small.

Fourthly, there is the question of size. For example, the Greek Church is by far the largest in North America and Australia, the Antiochian the largest in South America, whereas the Romanian Church has in the last 15 years become by far the largest in Western Europe. In those regions, we must hope that the largest group would take responsibility and draw towards autocephaly. However, more of this in the final point below.

Finally, there is the issue of ability to get on with others, i.e, the absence of nationalism and narrow jurisdictionalism and even worse, of sectarianism. This disqualifies the Greek and now the Russian Churches, one of whose bishops told our Romanians and Moldovans that, ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. This is racism, chauvinism on the same level as Constantinople’s.

The fact is that the Greek Church of Constantinople has never voluntarily given or recognised genuine autocephaly to anyone because of its centralising tendencies, neither to the Serbs, nor to the Russians, nor to the Romanians and, most obviously, nor to the Bulgarians, nor to the Poles, nor to the Czechs and Slovaks, nor to the Macedonians today. Even the ‘autocephaly’ the Greeks recently gave to the Ukrainian schismatics is completely fake. Their fake Church of gangsters and thugs has no independence and depends entirely on CIA cash. Even in history, when the Copts and the Armenians broke away from Orthodoxy, the main reason was their nationalist reaction to Greek racism.

With the suicide of ROCOR and its schism from the Paris Archdiocese of the Russian Church, in Western Europe the Russians have now done exactly the same thing as the Greeks, excluding most Ukrainians, Moldovans and normal local Western Europeans from the Russian Church, that is, becoming like the Greeks a nationalistic ghetto-Church. There is only one option left – the Romanians.

Are the Romanians up to the job? I can affirm that many are, the publishing efforts in English and French of the Romanian Dioceses are formidable. But is that enough? Only time will tell. What is certain that no one Local Church can give autocephaly. It must be done in concert, which is why Bucharest did not give us autocephaly, only autonomy. Thus, there is no room either for nationalism, nor sectarianism.

Q: What might a new Local Church look like?

A: I see it as a group of bishops, with their flocks of different nationalities, presiding in turn for a fixed term over the new Local Church, its autocephaly granted collectively by all the Local Churches concerned. Each bishop would have his own diocese, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Georgian, Romanian, Russian and Antiochian. We must avoid the error of the Greeks who set up episcopal assemblies. These failed and no longer operate because the Greeks wanted to dominate them and sat in permanent control over them, heavy-handedly trying to impose their views. That is not the way to go. There must be complete respect and freedom for different languages, calendars and customs, not to mention different attitudes towards ecumenism. There must be no interference from the Mother-Churches. Autocephaly must mean autocephaly. There is no other way.

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Pentecost 2025

 

 

 

 

Suicide or Healing? On the Crisis of Legitimacy in State and Church

There are no demons in hell, they all live on earth.

The gap, or rather, abyss, between the elites and the peoples throughout the Western world, and it is a Western phenomenon, is causing crisis after crisis. It began in 2016 in the UK with the long-delayed popular vote in favour of Brexit, at last allowed by the hubristic British elite which had never imagined that the ‘plebs’ would dare to vote against them, followed soon after by the popular vote for Trump in the USA. However, both revolts turned out to be something of damp squibs, as the British Establishment elite never allowed Brexit to be implemented and between 2017 and 2020 Trump was surrounded by fawning members of the US Establishment, there called ‘the Deep State’, and, flattered by them, Trump did not do very much of what he said he had wanted.

This time it is serious. Following the oppressive policies of the Globalist elite dictatorship during covid and then during the NATO war against Russia, the Sovereigntist ‘plebs’ throughout the Western world are now in revolt. This is not just the election of a new Trump or the Reform movement in the UK, but also Orban in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia, Georgescu in Romania, when the authoritarian and Fascist EU allows him to be elected, and every European country whose people yearns to overthrow the US/CIA/EU/NATO-selected elites. Whether it is Weidel in Germany, Le Pen in France, Kickl in Austria and all the other European freedom movements from Croatia to Denmark, from Italy to the Netherlands, from Poland to Moldova, the movement is the same.

Nationalist governments are going to take over. Macron can forbid Frexit, Scholz can outlaw the AfD, Starmer can forbid elections in the UK, the Brussels dictatorship can cancel free elections and candidates through a corrupt Supreme Court in Romania, the US can defraud the electorate in Moldova, but it will make no difference. This is a crisis of legitimacy and the people will win, whether by violent revolution or peaceful evolution, whatever delaying tactics the CIA elite uses. Anyway, the CIA is under threat from Trump’s expanded America, just like NATO and its economic EU arm. For the unelected commissars of the European Union (EU), founded a few days after the fall of the Soviet Union (SU), will follow it into the same black hole of authoritarianism and autocracy.

However, as St Paisios the Athonite prophesied, it is not just the world that has become ‘a madhouse’, believing that men are women and that women are men, it is the Westernised administration of the Church too that has gone berserk, believing that good is bad and that bad is good. The Western world can commit suicide, or else it can seek healing. It is the same in the Church administration. They can behave like politicians and ideologues and commit suicide, or else they can behave like pastors and shepherds and find healing. If they choose the latter, they will find legitimacy, that is, the people will follow them. For that is what the sheep want of the shepherd, someone to follow. But if the shepherd is in fact a wolf in shepherd’s clothing, as he was, the people will quit him, as they did.

On the Suicide of Empires

‘America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’

President John Quincy Adams, 1821

‘Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.’

(In the Latin version ‘make mad’ is ‘dementat’)

William Scott, 1854

 

The Suicide of the Russian Empire

1916-1991

The Russian Empire was proclaimed in 1721. God gave Russia everything, by far the largest territory on earth, natural riches of all sorts, much genius, and the Orthodox Christian faith. But Russians threw it all away in apostasy. The first shot of the Fall was fired at the end of 1916, announcing the disaster to come. With the Emperor betrayed by the aristocratic elite within, enslavement was carefully planned and organised by their foreign allies. But Russia could only be destroyed by suicide, the suicidal consent to enslavement. After exactly three generations, 75 years, the Empire, at first Russian and then Soviet, had been destroyed. Only in 2022 did the New Russia show that it had learned from the treachery of 1917, declaring all traitors to be foreign agents and closing down all foreign-funded organisations and their media. The suicide had taken seventy-five years. It had ended in the rule of gerontocrats, Brezhnev and his followers.

The Suicide of the British Empire

1916-1956

The beginning of the British Empire can formally be dated to 1707, with the Union of England and Scotland. In 1740 it began singing its anthem ‘Rule Britannia’. In 1916 Milner’s Round Table group began the transfer of British power to the USA. They agreed that Russia would be overthrown and the US would enter the First War immediately afterwards. The British Century (1815-1916) had ended and the American Century had begun. A few months later came the Balfour Declaration, just after the second Russian Revolution, which brought bloodthirsty foreigners to power, implementing genocide there. Thus began the gradual suicide of the British Empire, dying in Suez in 1956, when the US betrayed the UK, establishing its own Empire. The British Empire, condemned by its own injustices worldwide, had ended. Its suicide had taken just forty years. The Empire ended with the half-American gerontocrat, the Victorian Churchill.

The Suicide of the American Empire

1990-2030?

The American Empire can trace its origins back to the centralisation of Unionist power after the Civil War in 1865. This had brought the south into the grasp of the industrial and oligarchic north. However, it was only after the Second World War in 1945 that American power came to dominate the Western world and most of the Non-Communist world. After the collapse of that Communist world which began in Berlin in November 1989, power went to the heads of the US elite and they actually believed that the whole world belonged to them, that history had ended with their triumph. Hubris was destroying them and so began their decline. The end of the American Century came in the Ukraine – the ultimate vanity project which opened in 2014. The slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ means it is no longer great. It had lost its faith, family life and identity. The decline is taking forty years. The demented Biden reflects its gerontocracy.

The Future: Five Great Powers

What of the future? What will replace the only ‘Superpower’, with which name the hegemon briefly flattered itself before its defeat and humiliation? To replace it, the nations of the free world are developing a New World Order, an Alliance of Sovereign Nations called BRICS, which replaces the failed UN, which replaced the failed League of Nations. However, from the world of nearly 200 sovereign nations, five strategic BRICS nations will play a particularly important role in the future, influencing the different regions and continents of the world. Clockwise, north, east, south and west, these are:

  1. North Asia (Russia) and Africa

With the world’s fourth largest economy, the largest in Europe, the Russian Federation is the ideological, diplomatic and military centre of the New World Order. It leads North Asia, that is Eurasia, the 5,000,000 square kilometres of the Eastern half of Europe (European Russia, the New Ukraine (Kievan Rus) and Belarus) and North Asia, including Korea and Japan. Russia also leads Africa ideologically, the land of the ancestors of the Russian national poet Pushkin, renewing the support of the martyred Tsar for colonially exploited Ethiopia and South Africa, both of which countries have been helped by Russia to join BRICS. Others African nations are decolonialising with Russian help and huge Chinese investment and are following BRICS: Algeria, Morocco, Niger, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Nigeria.

  1. East Asia (China) and Latin America

China has the largest economy in the world and is the first industrial and manufacturing centre of the New World Order. This ancient civilisation leads all East Asia, already with countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia. China also leads Latin America, which Chinese explorers may have visited in about 1420 and is now receiving large Chinese investments, especially through the BRICS founding member, Brazil. China is now returning to its pre-nineteenth century greatness and advanced status as a world power, whose main value is harmony.

  1. South Asia (The Indian Subcontinent)

The most populous country in the world and its third largest economy, India, is the second industrial and manufacturing centre of the New World Order. It leads all South Asia, with the countries of the Indian Subcontinent. India and its neighbours like Bengal (Bangladesh) are returning to their manufacturing pre-eminence, which they had before British exploitation and captivity.

  1. West Asia (Iran)

This is the third industrial and diplomatic centre of the New World Order and leads all West Asia (once incorrectly called the Middle East), with countries like Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and all the Arab world. Iran has shown unique moral leadership in the question of Palestine and so will dominate West Asia, with Jerusalem becoming an international capital.

  1. USA and the Anglosphere

Although, weighed down by unpayable debt and perhaps unable to survive in its present form, with the second largest economy in the world,  USA, or whatever will replace it, will continue to dominate the Anglosphere. It has by far the largest population from the English-speaking peoples. The Anglosphere consists of Northern America (USA, Canada and Greenland), Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), and Northern Europe (see below). Although these countries are much weakened and discredited and their future is uncertain, they can, together, recover, though all will need a great dose of humility if they are to take their rightful and humble place as just another part of the world community.

Western Europe

The 5,000,000 square kilometres of the western half of Europe have in recent years been dominated by the organisation known as the European Union (EU). As an amorphous, US-manipulated, anti-sovereignty organisation of very different cultures and languages, this has no future and may well divide into four groups.

  1. The first group of countries consists of the, for the moment ten, largely English-speaking countries of the Northern Union. These are: the UK, Ireland, the Nordics (Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland) and the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia). This northern group of countries, of which the UK has already left the EU, are dominated by the English language and ex-Protestant culture. Although the UK will almost certainly disintegrate into England, Scotland and Wales, and Northern Ireland will return to Ireland, all these by then twelve countries will become for a time at least, part of the Anglosphere (see above).
  2. The second group of countries consists of the, for the moment sixteen, countries of south-eastern Europe, the ex-Habsburg, ex-Ottoman countries, many of which are Orthodox countries. These are: Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Moldova, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Greece and Cyprus. This large group of countries, including the Non-EU Western Balkans, will co-operate with Russia and China and, on an individual basis, join BRICS. However, first they have to remove their American, NATO or EU puppet rulers. This has already happened in Hungary and Slovakia, but Serbia, Austria, Croatia, Moldova and now Romania are following and others too will join them. The fate of Bosnia as an independent country is still uncertain, Montenegro may yet rejoin Serbia, and the Romanian part of Moldova may one day rejoin a free Romania, making perhaps only fourteen countries.
  3. The third group consists of the, for the moment, eight countries of south-western Europe. These are: Portugal, Spain, Andorra, France, Monaco, Italy, San Marino and Malta. These are all countries of Latin culture and will eventually follow the south-eastern European countries into BRICS. However, Catalonia may yet become independent, making nine countries.
  4. Finally, there is the fourth group, composed of the, for the moment, seven countries of the central strip of Europe (Benelux, Germany, Switzerland. Liechtenstein and Poland). These too will, in time, join BRICS on an individual basis, although the artificial country of Belgium may yet return to the Netherlands and France.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Towards the Civilisation of the Resurrection

Introduction: The Obvious Russian Victory in the Ukraine

It was from the outset clear that there could only be one winner in the conflict in the Ukraine – the Russian Federation. This is because it is fighting on its doorstep – so there are no logistic issues – in a country where nearly half the population is pro-Russian anyway. Russia, by far the largest country in the world, certainly does not need more territory. Indeed, it is not fighting for territory, but for security by demilitarising and denazifying the very threatening Russophobic Kiev puppet regime, which exists only because of the support, finance and arms of the US elite. And Russia is ideally placed to conduct a war of attrition, which is what it is doing, as Kiev suicidally throws its few arms and few troops into the direct lines of Russian fire.

Russia also has seven times the present Ukrainian population and is completely independent in terms of natural and human resources. It also has one of the best educational systems, very advanced technology and one of the largest militaries in the world. It has most of the world’s most advanced and cheapest arms, such as hypersonic missiles, outmatching NATO’s absurdly expensive and obsolete arms. Russia can provide these arms to others who wish to protect themselves from US threats, it has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world and is supported diplomatically by China and indeed the Non-Western 90% of the world. The deindustrialised West stands no chance against it. However, it is one thing for Russia to win a war, quite another, as all should know from the recent US invasions of West Asia, for Russia to win the peace.

Why the Ukraine?

Essentially the conflict in the Ukraine is a civilisational war. Who does the Ukraine belong to? Does it belong to Western Civilisation, first Catholic, then Protestant, and now Secularist? Or does it belong to (Orthodox) Christian Civilisation, which stretches up from Gaza and Jerusalem northwards to the White Sea and eastwards from the Montenegrin shores of the Adriatic, from eastern Slovakia and eastern Poland to Vladivostok? History tells us that the Ukraine is a strange amalgam, an artificial country, invented at the end of the 19th century by the Austro-Hungarians in order to divide and rule, justifying their domination. In reality, over 80% of the Ukraine is part of Christian Civilisation, for the south and the east of what is now called the Ukraine was part of Russia until 1922 and all the Ukraine is an invention of Communist dictators since then. It is the decisions of these Communist dictators which are being so keenly supported by the US and NATO governments today.

These dictators were Lenin (in 1922), Stalin (in 1945) and Khruschev, who at a drunken party in 1954 gave the Russian Crimea to the Ukraine. Obviously, none of these evil and brutal dictators ever consulted the Russian population whether they wanted to belong to the Ukraine, let alone if they wanted to abandon their own language and be forced to speak Ukrainian. Perhaps the greatest error was that of the atheist Stalin, who in 1945 stole a small area of the far west of what is now called the Ukraine, called Western Galicia. It was this Western Galicia which Tsar Nicholas II had intended to give to the newly independent Poland after the Russian victory in the First World War. This Western Galicia had for centuries been part of the Habsburg Empire and then, after 1918, of Poland. At the same time, he stole smaller areas that had long belonged to Romania and another part called Carpatho-Rus, also miscalled ‘Ruthenia’, which had belonged to Hungary, before that to Czechoslovakia, and before that to the Habsburgs who had oppressed it.

The West Galician Tragedy

The West Galicians alone spoke authentic Ukrainian (a language different from Russian and Polish) as their first language. Like nearly all Catholics in Europe at the time, from de Valera’s Ireland to the Catholic priest Hlinka’s Slovakia, the murderous Pavelic’s Croatia, Salazar’s Portugal, Franco’s Spain, Petain’s France and to Mussolini’s Italy) these Galicians, some of them joining the SS, had been ardent Nazis under the German Occupation from 1941 to 1944, as they were also ardent anti-Communists. With Nazi encouragement they ethnically cleansed, massacring Jews, Poles (over 100,000) and Russians alike, in huge numbers. The Galicians gradually rose to power, armed by parachute drops of arms from the CIA and MI6 after 1945 right up till the late 1950s, oppressing others and their languages, Hungarian, Romanian and Carpatho-Rusyn. The Galicians were nearly all Uniats (also known as Greek Catholics), which is a fanatically nationalist religion, different from the rest of the Ukrainians who are Orthodox and from the Poles who are Catholics.

The rise of the pro-Nazi West Galician Uniats became a steep and victorious ascent under the Americans from 1991 on. So that they could Americanise the population, the Americans sent a host of Protestant missionaries. When this failed, in 2018 the Americans set up a fake Orthodox Church, staffed by gangsters and other dollar-paid thugs, and then imposed the Western calendar on it. Of course, virtually nobody has joined it, everyone knows it is an American fake. In other words, after Western European countries had been forced to give up their settler colonial empires around the world after 1945 (the Dutch, the British, the French, the Belgian, the Portuguese and the South Africans), the US set up an apartheid colonial empire in the Ukraine, using the fanatical pro-Nazi Galicians as their enforcers, a battering ram against Russia, just as the British had used the Sikhs in India and the French the Harkis in Algeria against the rest. However, this was not the first case in the late 20th century, for the US has already done the same thing with Israel.

The Western Civilisation of Suicide

However, the period of the domination and exploitation of the world’s peoples by the Western elite, essentially the elite of the USA and of the very narrow strip of land north of it where 90% of Canadians live, and Western Europe, is largely over. The spirit of Cruel Britannia and Cruel America and their forever wars is ending. However, the Western elite resists the death of its domination and refuses to accept constructive change and co-operation, seeking confrontation instead. Its resistance to inevitable change on account of its denial that it is inevitable is leading to suicidal actions in its death agony. And it has exported that agony. Thus, the Western strategy in the Ukraine which has never been to help that wretched country, but to try and weaken US rivals, Russia and, through it, China.

So the Ukraine shares in the same demographically suicidal trap. Since the bloody Western coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in Kiev in 2014, the Ukraine has already lost half its population, down from 40 million to 20 million, also losing one and a half million dead or wounded troops in two years. It is no longer a viable State and cannot even pay the salaries of its civil servants, which are paid by the US and the EU. Who wants to live there or have children there? There is no future. However, the owner of the Ukrainian State, Biden, also lives in a country of suicide in a mixture of bankruptcy and fentanyl. Biden’s US cannot even defeat the Houthis of Yemen. Biden’s term that began with the humiliating US rout in Kabul is ending with the humiliating US rout in Kiev.

European Suicide

However, the same suicide is also taking place in the US colony in Israel, which commits genocidal blunder after genocidal blunder and loses all sympathy worldwide. This suicide is also happening in Europe. Self-imposed sanctions against Russia have meant an 84% increase in European energy costs, equivalent to a loss of one trillion euros. Meanwhile, Russia simply sells its energy to many other willing buyers outside the Western world. Poland and the Baltic statelets have bankrupted themselves helping Ukrainian ‘refugees’, who have run away from the suicidal danger of having to serve in the Ukrainian Army. The German elite has committed economic and social suicide by allowing the US and its allies to destroy its source of cheap energy, the Nordstream pipelines. Germany, once the locomotive of the EU, is now losing its strength, its manufacturing industry. Russia has overtaken the German economy. The French elite, led by the banker Macron, has committed suicide with its racist ideology of superiority towards its colonial empire in West Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, where in nickel-rich Kanaky (New Caledonia) revolt against France is again on the streets.

In the UK, with its collapsing infrastructure, reducing parts of its town and city administrations, water supplies, railways, roads, hospitals and schools to Third World levels, as in the USA, the unelected and extremely unpopular Sunak has given up. First, there was his self-humiliation, while standing in the pouring rain, of declaring that he will hold an election on 4 July, US Independence Day, for the UK has outsourced its Independence to the US. Now Sunak the bank teller has declared that he does not want any young people or people with children and grandchildren to vote for him by absurdly decreeing that he will reintroduce National Service for young people. (Something that Germany had rejected just before him). He and his Party are dead. But then the anti-Left wing Labour ‘Opposition’ which also supports the anti-Ukrainian genocide in the Ukraine and the anti-Palestinian genocide in Gaza is just as dead.

The Ukrainian Myth and Western Self-Esteem

Western politicians declare: ‘We cannot let Russia win in the Ukraine’. Why? Russians, keenly supported by long-oppressed Eastern and Southern Ukrainians, consider that they are fighting to liberate Russians who live on ancient Russian territory, that is, in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The sacked and disgraced British Prime Minister Johnson has explained: ‘We are at risk of losing Western hegemony’. Admitting Western hegemony, he believes in what can only be called the ‘Western ideology’, that is, the myth that the West is superior to the Rest. This is the ideology of hubris, rejected by the seven billion people of the Global Majority and also by many in the West itself (see below). And that ideology, like all ideologies which apply narrow human imaginings to ever-changing reality, makes those who believe in it stupid.

Western politicians have replaced the old ideological opposition between Capitalism and Communism with a new and mythical opposition between ‘Democracy and Autocracy’. And yet the Ukraine is not a democracy. Its President is a martial law dictator, whose term in office ended on 20 May, who has banned other political parties, the free media, and has had murdered those who disagree with him or else sent them to the torture-chambers of his secret police. His Neo-Nazi military pressgang ordinary Ukrainians into the Army, which is why some ten million of them have either fled abroad (ironically, above all, to Russia), or else are in hiding in their apartments, leaving the streets empty of men. No Ukrainian man wants to face almost certain death by being pressganged into serving in the Ukrainian Army.

Western Fascist Ideology

However, which Western leader has been elected by over 50% of his citizens, let alone represents their views? Not a single one. They are all minority leaders. In fact, so-called Western ‘Democracy’ is a unipolar hegemony, a Uniparty, supported and run by wealthy oligarchs. For in so-called ‘Democracy’ there is no value higher than profit. There is no-one to vote for, both parties are run by the ‘Deep State’, that is, by the Establishment. The West is living in Communist times. There you could vote for anyone, as long as they belonged to the Communist Party. So in the modern West you can vote for anyone as long as they belong to the Establishment/Deep State. Not the Soviet Union, but the Western Union. As for ‘Autocracy’, ‘authoritarian government’, it forms a multipolar world of sovereign patriotisms, supported by the people. (This is why ‘democrats’ deride them as ‘populists’). For ‘Autocracy’ there is no value higher than patriotism. Thus, the actual division in the modern world is not between Democracy and Autocracy, but between Transnational Oligarchy and National Sovereignty, or, put more simply, between Globalism and Patriotism.

In the former French colonies they know this, they at least have no illusions. That is why they are kicking French (and American) troops out. They know it in Armenia, where, led by a patriotic archbishop, they are trying to kick out EU meddlers and their anti-patriotic, EU puppet-leader. None of this is described in the delusional Western media, since globalist oligarchs own them. The Western ideology is supremacism, of which Nazism is only the best-known form. This ideology is espoused by Western supremacist EU officials, many of them grandchildren of actual German Nazis, and the disgraced liar, the British Prime Minister Johnson. He openly praised Ukrainian Nazis as ‘heroes’ and had his photograph taken with them and their Nazi Azov flag. This is the disease of exceptionalism, ‘we are above the law’, as seen in the Western decision to ignore the findings of the International Criminal Court against the genocidal Mileikowsky (who hides behind the alias of Netanyahu). This is satanic pride.

The World on the Nuclear Brink

As a result, we face a situation potentially worse than in 1962, when the world was threatened by nuclear war on account of US missiles positioned near the Soviet border in Turkey. Once the US President Kennedy had removed those missiles, the USSR removed its threat to position its missiles in Cuba. Today some in NATO are threatening to bomb Russia through their Kiev proxies and Russia is therefore threatening to reply in kind. A simultaneous triple war is threatened, in the Ukraine, in the Middle East and in Taiwan, plus the probability that the West will lose Slovakia (where it has tried to assassinate the Prime Minister), Hungary, Georgia (ruled by a Frenchwoman and CIA-run NGOs and whose patriots are threatened by EU assassination), Central Asia, Kosovo, Armenia, Syria, all of Africa (in uranium-rich Niger, Burkina Faso and the Congo in particular), most of Latin America and even the rest of the now bankrupt EU. This includes the US-run Baltics, Poland, Bulgaria and Moldova, which are in fact for the moment run by their US ambassador-governors.

To describe all this, they use the absurd term ‘Cold War’ or ‘Cold War II’. This never existed. Wars were and are always hot, whether in Korea, Africa, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq or today in the Ukraine and Gaza. Western politicians declare that there is a Russian threat to ‘Western Civilisation’, i.e., if defiant Russia does not agree to be bombed by NATO without reply and back the direct and indirect Western massacres which have taken place in Korea, Vietnam, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and Gaza, and Western colour revolutions, which use small numbers of dollar-paid protestors in Belarus, Kazakhstan, today in Georgia, and tomorrow perhaps in Slovakia and Hungary, then, indeed, that particular exploitative and corrupt form of ‘Western Civilisation’ will collapse. Thank God.

Christian Civilisation

However, that does not mean that Civilisation in the Western world will collapse. On the contrary, it will become civilised, renewed, recovered and restart its long-ago interrupted existence. Clearly, we who are Western and were born in the West do not belong to that ‘Western Civilisation’ of Fascist superiority and impunity, of Nazi hubris and arrogance. That can be called ‘Zionism’ (this is nothing to do with Jews), which proclaims that anything it does is justified because it is ‘superior’, ‘indispensable’ and, just like its ancestor the Roman Papacy, ‘infallible’. For example, the leader of the British Labour Party, an Establishment multi-millionaire, proudly states that he is a ‘Zionist’. So do the Catholic Biden and the atheist Johnson.

We are not Zionists, for we belong to another Western Civilisation, whose sign is not pride, but humility. This Civilisation is called Christian Civilisation. Here we are not speaking of ‘Western Christian Civilisation’, which does not exist as such, but of Christian Civilisation in the West. This Civilisation is part of that same worldwide Orthodox Christian Civilisation which was founded in Jerusalem in AD 33 and existed almost all through the Mediterranean world in the first millennium and still exists in parts of the Middle East and large parts of Eastern Europe. And we too still belong it, this Civilisation of the Resurrection. It does not matter whether we are in the East or the West, we are Orthodox Christians.

The Renewal of Orthodox Christian Civilisation

The definition of Orthodox Christian Civilisation is that it produces saints, for saints are the product of the Holy Spirit, Who makes the Church live. Some say that this Orthodox Christian Civilisation is corrupted, that is, that it no longer produces saints. This is not true. Within the last 100 years, we have seen many new saints on Mt Athos, in Greece, Serbia, Romania, in Carpatho-Russia and everywhere in the former Communist lands. True, there are parts of the Church where we do not see any saints for the moment, but we do see persecuted Confessors of the Faith, bishops, monks, nuns, priests and laypeople and Martyrs for the Faith – clergy and laity. Critics will point to individuals, especially in the heights of Constantinople or Moscow, who have been corrupted and created scandals, either financial or moral, through being tempted by money or power.

However, it is notable that after his landslide election victory and new mandate, President Putin is now strong enough to begin resolving the problems caused by post-Soviet corruption in Russia. Within two weeks, he has had four generals arrested for stealing large amounts of money and equipment. He has now appointed a new Minister of Defence, an Orthodox Christian economist, who is said to be incorruptible. After purging the military, perhaps next the President will purge the post-Soviet Church administration, with its top-heavy centralism, corrupt individuals and scandals, including those infiltrated by the CIA. All these ‘princes of the Church’, with their love of clerical luxury, ignore the grassroots and have made the Church in Russia very unpopular. Their only use for priests is as an army of moneymakers for themselves. We the monastics, the parish clergy and the people have no time for this disgusting froth. If the new Christian Civilisation is to take shape and take root once more in the West and in the East, it must not be corrupt.

Conclusion: A Way Forward

We have spoken about winning the peace. This will be essential for the Church in the Ukraine after the military conflict is over. ‘For the peace of the whole world, the peace of all Rus and victory over the forces of evil, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all, let us pray to the Lord’. Here in bold are the words that we thought should have been added to the great litany of the Russian Church for the duration of the conflict. And the Communist-period named Patriarchate of Moscow should have been renamed ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’, its administrative headquarters being removed to the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. As Russia is now a national State, albeit multi-ethnic, the Russian Orthodox Church should at once have granted autocephaly to Churches outside its national borders, thus forming the Ukrainian Church, the Moldovan Church and the Baltic Church (covering Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland).

Thus, it would have established three new Autocephalous Churches, outplaying US-orchestrated Constantinople schisms in Lithuania, the Ukraine and Estonia, just as the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches were created for newly-independent countries in the last century and so avoided schisms. And if Belarus and the five countries of Central Asia also desired autocephaly, they too should receive it, creating two more Autocephalous Churches, the Belarussian and the Central Asian. And schism should never have been encouraged by Moscow in ROCOR or in Africa. And senior hierarchs could have adopted the attitude of St Nicholas of Japan during the Japanese War against Russia in 1904-5, who locked himself away and prayed. This is the Civilisation of the Resurrection. Here was a way of winning the peace. None of this has been done. And that is why all is now so delicate.

Afterword: Russia’s Lost Time and the Magic Mountain of Europe

In 1913 the famous French economist Edmond Thierry (1854-1925) predicted that by 1950 Russia would dominate Europe politically, economically and financially. In other words, if Russia had not undergone the 1917 ‘revolution’, 33 years later, in 1950, Russia would have dominated Europe. What happened? Quite simply, Russia lost 74 years (1917-1991) under the Soviet regime. Only now, in 2024, has it overtaken Germany and become the largest economy in a Europe which it also dominates politically and soon will dominate financially.

Exactly 100 years ago the German author Thomas Mann wrote his novel ‘The Magic Mountain’. It is about a group of Europeans in a sanatorium. It is about all the problems of a Europe in disarray. The novel was perhaps written prematurely. Perhaps it should have been written today, for Europe is now in an even greater disarray than after the slaughter of the Great War. There is only one hope for the present Europe which is now in its self-made sanatorium of civilisational collapse: that hope is to head for the Civilisation of the Resurrection.