Category Archives: The Future

The Ten Commandments and the DeChristianisation of the Western World

About 1300 years before the birth of Christ – nobody now knows exactly when – Moses received from God the Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, which provided a radical new basis for all human civilisation, life and morality. These Commandments were fulfilled and supplemented, but in no way rejected, by Christ in the Beatitudes. The Ten Commandments are expressed in the following simple form:

1. Thou shalt have no other Gods but me.
2. Thou shalt not make for thyself any idol, nor bow down to it or worship it.
3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
4. Thou shalt remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
5. Honour thy father and thy mother.
6. Thou shalt not murder.
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
8. Thou shalt not steal.
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.

During the first millennium after the birth of Christ, Western Europe was gradually Christianised, steadily submitting to the Ten Commandments in their natural order, from first to tenth. The Commandments were brought to it by the Church from Jerusalem, centred in Her Capital of New Rome (later called Constantinople), its double-headed eagle uniting east and west, Asia and Europe.

However, Western paganism, formed by a complex mixture of pagan Romanism and pagan Germanism, began to take over Western Europe. This process took place in an ever accelerating way, so that in the ten centuries of the second millennium after the birth of Christ, Western Europe rejected each of these Commandments in reverse order, in this way reversing its Christianisation.

This process took place in reverse order because the last Commandment to have been implemented had had the least time to become rooted in Western European society. Therefore, it was challenged and overturned more easily than the earlier Commandments which were better rooted. Thus, throughout the ten centuries of this second millennium, each Commandment was rejected in turn.

In the eleventh century, the covetous Crusades in the Iberian Peninsula, in Sicily, England and then the Middle East and the Holy Land, marked the systematic and institutional beginning of imperialist greed and colonisation, with Western Europe covetously ravaging and pillaging its neighbours.

In the twelfth century, filioquists bore false witness, asserting that the Church had omitted the filioque from the Creed!

In the thirteenth century, in 1204 the Christian Capital of New Rome was looted, its shrines, relics and artefacts stolen as were many other Christian towns and cities.

In the fourteenth century, the ‘Church’ of Western Europe committed adultery with State values, its vestigial Christianity being made subject to a State-like authority, so becoming a ‘Church-State’.

In the fifteenth century, Western Europe began its murder of the peoples of the New World in unspeakable genocides, thus bringing them ‘Western civilisation’, ‘freedom and democracy’.

In the sixteenth century, Western Europe dishonoured its father and mother by rejecting many of the remaining vestiges of the Orthodox Faith by falling into Protestantism.

In the seventeenth century the Western world dishonoured holiness through its iconoclasm.

In the eighteenth century, the Western Enlightenment took God’s name in vain, rejecting the Revelation of God the Holy Trinity, preaching man-hating deism and then atheism in violent wars and revolutions.

In the nineteenth century, the ethnocentric Western world made an idol of itself, idolising its newly acquired knowledge of the fallen world (‘science’) in a cruel industrial revolution, idolising its all-limiting rationalism in a multitude of theories that despised God and exploited man.

In the twentieth century, the Western world rejected God and instead made gods of everything, inventing every ism, so beginning its suicide in World Wars and giving itself the ability to destroy every living thing on the Earth many times over.

If, one by one, the Ten Commandments were rejected in the Western world, century by century during the second millennium, what then can be said of the twenty-first century, of the third millennium?

Only this – that the Western world is living on borrowed time.

The Final Delusion

One of the oldest standard atheist cliches is that religion causes all wars and strife in the world. As the Jewish-American left-winger Tom Lehrer sang nearly fifty years ago:

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Moslems
And everybody hates the Jews.

A generation later, his words were echoed by another anti-religious left-wing singer, John Lennon:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace.

Of course, none of this true. In reality, to paraphrase Dr Johnson (1709-84), religion, and not patriotism, is ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’. Scoundrels do not justify their hatred, envy, malice, cruelty and lust for wealth, territory and power by announcing truthfully that they are hateful, envious, malicious, cruel and lustful for wealth, territory and power, they camouflage it behind the noblest human instincts. Religion, the noblest, is therefore their flag, their best excuse, although ‘patriotism’ or ‘freedom and democracy’ will do, whenever atheistic and secularist societies want to justify their evil aggression and massacres.

However, interestingly, in the Gospels Christ does not ask if on His return, He will find religion on earth, rather He asks if He will ‘find faith on earth’ (Lk 18, 8). For religion means a humanised, institutionalised, thisworldly system, adapted to the demands of states. It is a State-manipulated substitute for real faith and it may well abound when Christ returns. On the other hand, faith is the Holy Spirit living and acting in the hearts of the faithful, and that will be very rare when Christ returns, if it exists at all.

And this is what Tom Lehrer’s song and John Lennon’s songs are about. We can see it very clearly in the present war in Syria, where ethnic groups hide behind their religious name tags. Daily we hear of Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Druze and Christians, all fighting and slaughtering one another. It is the same in Burma (Buddhists versus Muslims), in Northern Ireland (Protestants versus Catholics), in Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), and in almost every other conflict in the world, present, past and future.

So are Tom Lehrer, his follower John Lennon and the standard atheist, right when they imply that religion is the cause of war?

Of course, they are not right. It is human evil that causes war, though very, very often it cloaks itself in ‘religion’ – but never in faith. Faith, the knowledge of spiritual reality (not institutionalised or nationalised ‘religion’), is the cause of peace, not of war.

However, such subtlety is lost on the atheistic mass media, which always present human conflicts as caused by ‘religion’, despite all the obvious cases when it is caused by anti-religious atheists – like Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and any number of other tyrants. The mass media always present wars as ‘religious wars’, ‘wars about religion’, and not about ethnic identities fighting for wealth, territory, natural resources and power.

And this is how, surely, the end will come. Some ‘great’ man will appear as a peacemaker and unite, i.e. destroy, all religions and settle in Jerusalem, not far from Syria, where deluded people will bow down before him and all his magic tricks and illusions. Peace will come for a short time – but at the cost of freedom, and Antichrist, the Grand Inquisitor, as Dostoyevsky foretold, will triumph from his throne. No religion, no heaven, no hell, just imagine – ‘it’s easy if you try’, ‘all the people living for today’. We have seen so many of Antichrist’s little forerunners, from Charlemagne to Napoleon, from Hitler and even the deluded imagination of John Lennon, that we know the story of the end. Let us then beware.

The End of a Civilisation: The Beginning of a Civilisation

After a thousand years, Europe is ending. And where the old European culture is not ending, it has already ended. This is because Europe has stopped believing in its ethno-religious ideology which drove it to worldly ‘greatness’, to conquer the world, in crusades, in exploration, in exploitation, in wars, in empire-building, in invention, in colonisation. That ideology killed itself during and in the aftermath of two great European Wars, which Europe spread to its colonies worldwide and called World Wars.

Europe’s ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the two generations before 1914 ‘worked’ because it used machine guns against spears and bows and arrows. But in Europe’s ‘Scramble for Europe’ in 1914, machine guns faced machine guns and so Europe slaughtered the flower of its own youth. It took America to end that slaughter. Ignoring its opportunity for repentance, Europe was not content with one slaughter, and so a generation later it began another slaughter, which was ended by an American invasion and occupation.

Today’s Europe no longer believes in Something. Therefore it believes in Anything. It has sold its cultural birth-right to others, whom it invites to live in its midst. Its native birthrates are in permanent decline and the statistics would be declining even further if many European men were not marrying Eastern European and Asian women, who unlike many Westerners did not forget their instincts in the 1960s, in order to have children, and if many Muslims and Africans did not live and have large families in Europe.

The seeds of Europe’s destruction were contained in its very ideology, which asserted that the European human-being is god. As a result, today Europe is itself being colonised – because others have simply imitated its ideology and asserted themselves and not Europeans, as gods, only more efficiently, more rationally, more logically. Already an American colony, is Europe now to become an Asian colony, as America, itself an imitation of Europe, in turn declines in bankruptcy? Where does Europe go from here?

For fifty years Europe has imitated America, spoken like America, built like America, dressed like America, eaten like America, drunk like America, listened to America and watched American television. For fifty years Europe has lived on borrowed time. But now time has run out and so we speak of the end of its civilisation. But he who says that a civilisation is ending also says that now there is space for a new civilisation to begin. But which civilisation can this be? Surely not the old European paganism?

Europe cannot go forwards to find a new civilisation. Therefore, it has to go backwards, not as far back as to its old paganism, but to that time when its now failed ideology of the fallen human spirit did not exist, that is, to a thousand and more years ago. That age still exists, for Europe is still haunted by that civilisation of its saints, which ended a thousand years ago. And it is this saint-haunted Europe, inspired by the Holy Spirit, which contains the key to the survival of Europe – because that Europe is its spiritual essence, its very soul.

The Odour of the Apocalypse

Tsar Nicholas III, in a recent speech in St Petersburg, called for the right of all sovereign peoples to determine their own futures without outside interference…Imperial Russian Armies have now crossed the Caucasus and are heading in a two-pronged attack towards Constantinople and through Turkey and Syria towards Jerusalem.

From It’s Later than You Think, July 1991, from Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition

Introduction

Yesterday’s bombing in Boston was appalling and evil. Innocent bystanders, children included, were killed or maimed. However, there are events going on in the world today that are worse even than this. The difference is that those events are hardly reported by the Western media, which often appear to have little but contempt for those who are not included in its ethnocentric navel-gazing.

The Middle

Yesterday’s bomb in Boston is what Iraqis have had to put up with, only on a far worse scale, every few days for the last ten years. A million or more are dead, their country ravaged and in part destroyed, families maimed and killed, even water, gas and electricity in this once rich country are not available all the time. Sometimes, in this oil-rich land, no petrol can be had for cars. The result is that all who can are getting out and that half of Iraq’s almost bimillennial Christians are living in refugee camps and in exile, their lives ruined by a thoughtless and selfish invasion and occupation, which has brought little but misery.

Then there is the war in Syria, largely an invasion being waged by foreign mercenaries against the Syrian people on behalf of powers playing a great geostrategic game to divide and rule the Middle East, whose centre is in Jerusalem. Tunisia, Libya and Egypt have already been destabilised by those powers, their Christian inhabitants the first victims. The terrorists in Syria are fanatical Islamists, their ideology invented by the CIA. They are financed and armed by Afghan drug money, greatly increased since the invasion of Afghanistan, and by the despotic but oil-rich, feudal Islamist monarchies of the Gulf.

These have airlifted in thousands of tons of arms, mainly from Croatia and the Ukraine, to the terrorists who are being trained by US, UK and French Special Forces in the Jordan and Turkey. At stake are the huge untapped gasfields in the Eastern Mediterranean and pipeline routes to Europe. Turkey, for long a puppet, but once the centre of the Ottoman Empire, eyes territory and reserves. The Lebanon quakes, fearing the spillover into its territory. Israel hopes but trembles, seeing opportunities but also threats. The victims are the millions of Christians and other minorities, who mostly live in and around Damascus, Aleppo and Homs.

The West

Meanwhile, the Western world is riven by the problems which it created in 1917, when it exported an ideology of hatred to destroy the Russian Empire, the sole remaining bastion of the Orthodox Christian world, the Orthosphere. Since the fall of that Christian Empire, the world has known only instability. Over the last ninety years, the West has attempted to destroy the soft underbelly of the Orthosphere, installing its candidates as Patriarchs of Constantinople and attempting to undermine the other Greek Patriarchates in Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Local Churches in Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria.

In the last twenty years the Western world, directed from Washington or from its puppet in Brussels, has tried to further undermine those and other parts of the Orthosphere. First, it attacked Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo in a divide and rule policy, bombing Belgrade for Easter, deforming Serbian babies with ‘uranium-enriched’ warheads in Nazi atrocities. Then, having bribed Greece to join the EU, it bribed Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic States, so bankrupting them. Finally, the West set about destabilising the Ukraine, Georgia, Syria and, last year, the final bulwark, the Russian Federation.

Western people are many-layered. In order for them to rebecome Christian, they have to remove every layer of their anti-Christian culture, which they deludedly imagine to be Christian. The layer of modern secularism has to go, then that of 19th century imperialism and rationalism (in fact anti-rationalism), then the darkness of the ‘Enlightenment’, then the protest of the Reformation (as if you could understand the Scriptures without the Holy Spirit), next feudalism, scholasticism and the crusades all have to be removed. Sadly, few are able to cleanse themselves of all the delusions of these layers of proud cultural prejudice.

The East

At the other end of Asia to the physically and spiritually bankrupt ‘Judeo-Christian’ West, there is the East. Today, this means the threat from North Korea, a gigantic Stalinist concentration camp, ruled by madmen, who appear to have nuclear weapons, like India, Pakistan, Israel and perhaps Iran. Yet, it is doubtful if this North Korea could exist without Capitalist-Communist China, which is so hard-working and therefore so rich that it also owns much of the Western world. Yet, paradoxically, it may be that it is this part of Asia which may bring solutions to the current world crisis of this time before Antichrist.

Two prophecies tell us that salvation will come from the East. St John of Kronstadt (+ 1908) prophesied that the deliverance of Russia would come from the East and, ten years later, St Aristocleus (+ 1918) prophesied that the real end of Russia’s errings would come through China. And errings there are. In Russia, which stretches from the East to the West and whose canonical Church territory includes China, current dissatisfaction is real and exists because of ingrained and systemic corruption. It is this dissatisfaction, in itself justified, which is so easily exploited by the dark forces of the West which seek to destroy Russia.

If we are worthy of these prophecies, Russia will be restored and with it the rest of the Orthosphere, which for now is captive to German economic power (able even to steal from private bank accounts) and American military power (able even to steal from private computer accounts). If we are worthy of these prophecies, we may yet also be able to gather together the remnants of the peoples of the whole world into the Church before the end. If we are worthy of these prophecies, it may be that the peoples of the East and West will be reunited once more, not by Babylon, but by Jerusalem.

Conclusion

The Christian Russian Empire, heir to the Christian Roman Empire, was crucified in its Golgotha of 1917. After three ‘days’ (generations) it rose from the dead. The giant is now beginning to speak to the world, East and West alike, of the Resurrection and what it saw when it went down to hades. Will the world, seemingly unaware of this odour of the Apocalypse, listen? We can only pray.

Note:

1. In 1973 the Abbess of the Convent at Gethsemane, Mother Barbara (Tsvetkova) spoke of the prophecy of Elder (now St) Aristocleus of Athos (1838-1918), who was then living in Moscow. The Elder told the future Abbess, then a young student, that ‘regeneration in Russia will begin after a most powerful explosion on the bank of a big river’. When in 1986 the atomic catastrophe occurred at Chernobyl, this prophecy came true.

The Next Pope: An Orthodox Perspective

Presumably, the next Pope will be elected from among the 115 cardinals now in conclave in Rome. Of course, it is also possible that they could break with some 750 years of custom and elect one who is outside their college. That would be acceptable, although highly surprising. As regards who will be elected, nobody knows and it is a waste of time speculating. Obviously, Orthodox will not be consulted about the election, but we might think what general type of man we would like to be elected.

Firstly, we would like to see a man of faith, and not some swim-with-the-secular-tide conformist. This might suggest an African, or at least someone who is not from Europe. Normally, a man of faith would automatically have some sort of charisma, or presence, which he could express and communicate – that is essential. Thus, the future Pope should not look like an elderly and dreary Vatican bureaucrat, as so many cardinals appear to.

Secondly, it is clear that Roman Catholicism needs to be managed, which rather excludes the ivory tower intellectual, academic, teacher type, represented by the last Pope. However, a manager does not at all mean that the next Pope should be an accountant/administrator with an MBA. That would be a disaster. What is needed is someone who knows how to delegate the necessary management to the right people, so that he is left to perform his main task – praying.

Thirdly, Roman Catholicism surely needs someone who can distinguish between the ‘primaries’ of the Faith and the ‘secondaries’. The primaries are the Church Tradition, teachings established in the First Millennium, the secondaries are those inessential customs that replaced primaries, or else were added on to it, in the Second Millennium. The primaries include all the dogmas and teachings of the fourth century Creed, purified from the filioque deformation first confessed in Rome in 1014, nearly 1,000 years ago. They also include a sacramental attitude to the world, a male priesthood and the Biblical, Apostolic and Patristic attitude to homosexuality.

The secondaries include the introduction of such temporary and pernicious customs as priestly celibacy, which has helped to lead to sexual perversion, or the dogmatic attitude to contraception that makes almost all married Catholics into hypocrites. This also means putting back what has been taken away in the Second Millennium, restoring the original understanding of the Holy Spirit, the Mother of God, the Saints, holiness, the Church as the image of the Holy Trinity, unity in diversity, the role of the Local Church and the episcopate, the sense of the mystical and the sacred.

The above three qualities, a prayerful faith communicated through charisma, the ability to delegate management to the right people, and the ability to return to the essentials of the Christian Faith, rid of the deformations of the Second Millennium, may not be found in any of the 115 cardinals. In that case, it would be time to look outside their college. The right choice is vital – because Roman Catholicism now faces a test of survival. Either it can go the whole way and become fully secularised like most of the Protestant world, as it threatens to do, or else it can return through repentance to the Church and Orthodoxy, which it so short-sightedly abandoned a whole millennium ago. It is make or break time. May God’s will be done.

The Father and the Son: Christendom, the West and Patricide

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Foreword: Patricide

The above is the revelation to all mankind, written in the Prologue of St John’s Gospel. However, we also know that after the beginning and after the creation of heaven, of the invisible world, there came a fall in that invisible world. Jealous of God, Lucifer with half the angelic host fell away in a revolt against the Father. This was attempted patricide, which is why his name is also the slanderer, ‘o diavolos’, he who slanders the Father. Some 150 years ago the Orthodox thinker, Alexis Khomiakov, called the filioque that lay behind the Western Schism of 1054 ‘fratricide’. We wonder if the word ‘patricide’ might not have been more suitable here too.

The Ideology of Patricide

The death of the Old Orthodox West and the birth of the new, anti-Orthodox West began with the sin of the Frankish iconoclast Charlemagne. This consisted of adopting a provincial expression of faith from Spain, used there to bolster Orthodoxy against Arianism by emphasising the Divinity of Christ, and making that into the Ideology of the New West. This was the Ideology of Illusory Superiority. In itself innocent, though also profoundly ignorant, unScriptural, unApostolic and unPatristic, this expression, called the filioque, became the flag and motto of a new and aggressive anti-Orthodox ideology. This asserted that the Father was irrelevant, because the Father is absent, never having become incarnate, and that therefore the Father (Christian New Rome) had been replaced by the Son (pagan Old Rome).

This attempt to usurp legitimate authority was dismissed by the Orthodox Popes of Rome. As Pope John VIII condescended in the ninth century, the expression could be allowed the barbaric Germans for a time on account of their ignorance. Sadly, that time and their ignorance has lasted for 1200 years and during that time has spread worldwide. From the representative of the Son in Old Rome – called from the eleventh century onwards ‘the Vicar of Christ’ – flowed all spiritual authority. From him proceeded the Holy Spirit. Inevitably, this claim of universal authority ultimately meant declaring as a dogma that the Pope of Rome is infallible. He had taken over from the pagan Roman Emperor and became a new Pontifex Maximus. Thus, the popes took over from the emperors, claiming that they, and not the emperors, incarnate Christ on earth. In this way the popes of Rome became secular and not spiritual rulers.

The Patricide in Constantinople

By its return to pagan Rome, the whole Church in the West fell out of Christendom. In order to justify itself, the Western elite had to discredit and then kill the Father. This came with accusations that the Church was disloyal to the Creed by ‘leaving out the filioque’. This ignorance was compounded in 1098 when Anselm of Canterbury, the Father of Scholasticism, spoke aggressively ‘against the Greeks’, justifying the Western heresy by syllogism. At that time Western warriors had already set off for areas outside Western Europe on their ‘Crusades’. (Even before this they had conducted centralising military operations against outlying parts of Western Europe, in southern Italy, Sicily, Spain and in 1066 England and from there the rest of the Isles). All this was to discredit the Father. But in 1204 the Son set about killing the Father by bloodily sacking and looting New Rome, the Capital of Christendom, of Romanitas.

With their conversations in Lyon in the thirteenth century and in Florence in the fifteenth century, the patricidal Western elite did its utmost to destroy the Father. Indeed, once it had bribed the elite in Constantinople to betrayal and apostasy, in 1453 Constantinople fell. It is significant that the Schismatics themselves see this date as ‘the end of the Middle Ages’. In other words, the fall of the City was their own spiritual loss. So they set out on the road to Protestantism, in which every individual is a pope and Christ is no more than a private opinion, at best personal pietism, ‘Jesusism’. Although schismatic historians state that Rome had already fallen some thousand years before 1453, Rome did not fall, not even in 1453. Escaping the decadence of the neo-pagan Renaissance and the unspeakable popes of that age, the Capital of Christendom, of Romanitas, was transferred for a second and final time, this time to Moscow, where Romanitas is called Rus.

The Patricide in Moscow

There began a constant self-justifying struggle by the Western elite to discredit and kill the Father here also, to prevent Moscow from ever freeing Constantinople by wiping Russia off the map. Already in the thirteenth century that elite had sent out Teutonic Crusaders to destroy Russia. St Alexander Nevsky had saved it by paying tribute to the East, which at least left Russia free to practise the Christian Faith. However, now came full-scale invasions. First came the Polish-led invasion of 1612, with Lithuanians, Germans and Swedes, occupying Moscow. Then, 200 years later in 1812, came Napoleon and the twelve tribes of neo-pagan Europe. The new Frankish knights now occupied Moscow. Just as in Constantinople in 1204, now too they destroyed churches, raped nuns, slaughtered priests and made bonfires of icons, proving once more that like the iconoclast Charlemagne before them they too had no concept of the Incarnation.

Seeing Christian Russia mighty after it had freed Paris in 1814, throughout the nineteenth century the British Establishment mounted attacks on it, organising the Decembrist revolt in 1825, allowing anti-Christian terrorists to set up shop in London, Lenin to study at the British Museum, even glorifying those terrorists in the early twentieth century children’s book ‘The Railway Children’. In 1854 came another ‘Crusade’, that of the French and the British, allied with the anti-Christian Ottomans, to prevent the freeing of Constantinople. Then, sixty years later, came the German and Austrian invasion of 1914 and in 1915 the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, again to prevent the freeing of Constantinople. This was followed by the British-organised, French-greeted and American-financed coup d’etat of 1917. Ironically, the ‘useful idiots’ were the US-financed, murderous atheist Trotsky-Bronstein and the other foreign Bolsheviks, who replaced the Third Rome with their Third International.

The Father Answers the Son

Ironically, the Bolsheviks’ Western atheism was defeated by yet another Western anti-Christian Crusade, the invasion of the multinational Axis forces in 1941. Then even the atheist Soviet tyrant realised that he could not defeat this evil without Holy Russia. Sovereign Russia had overcome Trotskyist internationalism. When fifty years after this in 1991, the old atheist ideology of the West finally fell in the Soviet Union made bankrupt by it, the traitors then in power adopted the new atheist ideology of the West, the consumerist worship of the golden calf. But this lasted only a few years as Russia began to return to her roots. In 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church at last glorified the New Martyrs and Confessors, the glorious sacrificial victims of the patricidal West. This was a turning point.

Since then national healing and recovery, however hesitant and fragile at times, has gone forward. And with it comes the possibility of international, inter-Orthodox, healing and recovery, the recovery of the old vision, role and calling of Russia as the centre of Christian (Orthodox) civilisation. 2012, the fourth centenary of the occupation of Moscow by the Poles, Lithuanians and Germans and the second centenary of the occupation of Moscow by the twelve tribes of Western Europe, was a key year. In that year, there was a repeat of the anti-Russian Western propaganda onslaught of 1916. This new attempted patricide failed. The Western elite and the fifth column Russian traitors who orchestrated it betrayed themselves and were seen to be ridiculous. Their little plot to discredit and destroy failed lamentably. Now, 2013 is the fourth centenary of the House of Romanov, Roma Nova, New Rome, and hopes for the long-awaited restoration rise in our hearts.

Afterword: Prophetic Times

The West, not content to be an outlying province of Christendom, invented its own self-justifying ideology. The Son wanted to take the place of the Father and, following the Luciferan principle, attempted patricide. Despite this, that which we have been praying for all these long years, ‘the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all people’ may yet be coming for a brief time before the end. Prophecies, old and new, speak of the Liturgy being finished in the Church of Christ the Wisdom of God (Aghia Sofia) in Constantinople. Perhaps – but we must know that all prophecies are conditional, dependent on our repentance. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Quo Vadis, O Vaticane?

There are many views of Pope Benedict’s recent shock resignation. Some see just an old and failing man who cannot go on any longer, who is exhausted by ‘the heat of the day’. Others see more sinister forces at work. Some believe that his resignation came about as a result of pressure from various international groups, political and financial lobbies or pro-homosexual and pro-contraceptive lobbies. They believe that the Pope, ‘the infallible Vicar of Christ’, was forced to leave his post because he was resisting those secularist lobbies. There are after all groups who are working towards the New World Order, in which there is no place for sovereign institutions such as the Vatican, or indeed anyone who shows spiritual independence from the financial domination of a future Global Government. If this is all so, at present, it seems, these powers are operating a two-pronged attack, financial and political.

Firstly, they are setting the stage for a World Bank, required because of the present purely artificial financial crisis, a worldwide manipulation which is now in its sixth year. This was caused by indebtedness, which was long promoted by Western governments and banks, Secondly, these powers are sowing chaos in the Arab World, taking back Arab countries to the Middle Ages. The influence of these powers in Rome seems to be clear from the Vatican’s silence on Libya and its apparent abandonment of Egyptian and Syrian Christians, like Christians in Iraq before them and Christians in Serbia before them. Already on 5 September 2011, the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, himself of Jewish descent, openly announced to the Roman Catholic Maronite Cardinal of Antioch that, with the coming to power of Western-backed Islamists in Syria, Christians there would have to flee to Europe.

Interestingly, the Western Roman Catholic Press attacked this same Roman Catholic Cardinal’s denunciations of the West for its support of Islamist terrorism in Syria. The Vatican’s silence and even encouragement of Western interventionism, exactly as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, suggests that it may already have become the puppet of the New World Order project, which only further weakens its spiritual authority. The global elite behind the New World Order project is not so much saying, ‘If you do not go along with us, your country will descend into chaos’, but rather, ‘If you do not go along with us, we will ensure that your country descends into chaos’. It has already happened in fragmented Yugoslavia, and now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Now it is happening in Syria, with its ‘Somali-isation’, that is, division by bandit warlords into rival fiefs.

If all this is so, then the Cardinal-electors of the new Pope face a stark choice. Are they going to assert their independence from the New World Order, or are they going to fall for globalism and ‘global governance’, as it is called? This is very much their last chance to choose. After a thousand years of compromise with this world, this may well be the Vatican’s final choice. In today’s terms, it means a choice between the continued desacralisation of protestantisation and secularisation, begun fifty years ago with the Second Vatican Council, and spiritual resistance to secularisation by siding with Non-Western countries. Undermined and discredited by the pedophile scandal, which was completely of its own making, the Vatican may well choose secularisation. That would make it popular with the highly-controlled Western media. But that would also be its suicide, the end of the road.

The crisis in Rome is nothing new. In the past the Papacy has continually been manipulated by foreign and often atheist powers, from Medieval Monarchs to Napoleon and from Republicans to Fascists. Thus, only recently, there was a Polish Pope, elected to destroy Communism. And the present German Pope reflects the Western Schism of 1054, which occurred as the result of another carefully chosen German Pope, Leo IX. However, if the present crisis is the final crisis, one of its results will surely be the exile of Orthodox refugees from the West to Russia. After all, in her time Catherine II gave refuge to Serb, Bulgarian and Greek Orthodox from Turkish oppression and Tsar Nicholas I gave refuge to French citizens from Revolutionary oppression. Some of their descendants fought for Russia against France during the allied Western/Ottoman invasion of Russia known as the Crimean War.

Although the Russian Federation and Church seem to have defeated last year’s orchestrated media attacks from the West, the rest of the Orthodox world is in chaos, not least in the Ukraine and Georgia. The four Orthodox countries that were seduced by Western money to join the EU are now in crisis: Greece has gone bankrupt and Cyprus is going bankrupt amid elections; the Bulgarian government has just resigned amid demonstrations; poverty-stricken Romania is on the verge of bankruptcy – as also the depopulated Baltic States with their Orthodox minorities. Orthodox Syria is being divided and returned to the Middle Ages by 65,000 foreign Islamist terrorists, financed largely by Qatar and flown there by the USA under its divide and rule policy. The only light is the sight of Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria and Africa aboard a Russian warship in Dar es Salaam on 17 February.

Little wonder that eyes are turning with hope to a future when a restored Orthodox Russian Federation could once more become the visible centre of the Orthodox and so Christian world. At this moment when we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the House of Romanov and the 1700th anniversary of the Incarnational Edict of Milan, our prayers turn to a new Tsar, who could renew the monarchy of St Constantine. Soon the Orthodox Patriarchs will be gathering in Nish in Serbia to commemorate the Edict. As Orthodox, we should beware, however, of extremists on the left (disincarnate, liberal, ecumenist and modernist) and on the right (sectarian, nationalist and zealous not according to knowledge) fringes of the Church who have tried, try and will try to stop the restoration of Orthodox Russia to her inter-Orthodox calling. Only the Royal Way, the Tsar’s Path, will save us from such temptations.
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The Roman Catholic Crisis and the Orthodox Future

On July 18th, 1870, the (First Vatican) Council met for the last time. As the first of the Fathers stepped forward to declare his vote (on papal infallibility), a storm of lightning and thunder suddenly burst over St Peter’s. All through the morning the voting continued, and every vote was accompanied by a flash and a roar from heaven.

Lytton Strachey, on ‘Cardinal Manning’ in his ‘Eminent Victorians’

The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI last week shocked many, not least Roman Catholics. Conspiracy theories are rife, all the more so since on the evening of his resignation a violent thunderstorm erupted over Rome and, dramatically, lightning struck St Peter’s Basilica. Some of these theories assert that the Pope of Rome is dying of cancer and has not long to live, others that he resigned in order to escape a deepening of the pedophile scandal, or else a financial scandal. Others believe that the next Pope will be the last Pope and will call a Third Vatican Council, which will be the end of millennial Roman Catholicism.

According to these crisis theories, this last Pope will either be a saintly man or else a profoundly evil one, and that either the Vatican will come under persecution and disappear, or else that a new Church will replace it. In the latter case, for us, this can only mean a Western European Metropolia under the Russian Orthodox Church, the only multinational Local Church, and the only Local Church large enough to establish such a Metropolia. One wonders if this Friday’s meteor that appeared over Russia and then exploded just south of Ekaterinburg, the place of martyrdom of the Royal Martyrs in 1918, is not linked with this.

Against this background do we not see the genocide of Orthodox Syria, organised and financed by the anti-Christian Western Powers and their Islamist allies? It is written: ‘Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…land fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven…’ (Lk 21, 10-11). However, let us remain sober. What practically are the prospects for such a Metropolia to come into being? The Orthodox Diaspora seems to be divided into narrow ethnic ghettos, generally unable to see beyond temporary nationalistic or political interests. Such ghettos have only one destiny – to die out. They are history.

A great move forward occurred six years ago, when the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church were reunited, after it had been proved that the Church inside Russia was free of State interference. Now together and growing with 824 parishes and monasteries in countries of the Diaspora, Russian Orthodox churches outside Russian Orthodox canonical territory are clearly a vital part of Orthodox life in the Diaspora. It is obvious then that no Metropolia can be built on political division, or on groups used for Cold War purposes and financed by Non-Orthodox Powers, who are at present orchestrating the destruction of Orthodox Syria.

The regular meetings of all local Orthodox Bishops in different countries or groups of countries (North America, Latin America, France, Great Britain and Ireland etc) only became possible after this reuniting of both parts of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2007. Until then the Russian Church of the Diaspora was excluded for political reasons and so any meetings were unrepresentative, political manipulations. The next step is an inter-Orthodox step to unite the Diaspora in regional Metropolias. Such regional Metropolias, in Western Europe, in the Americas and in Australasia, cannot be built on the lowest common denominator.

The fact is that Metropolias, the essential basis for new future Local Churches, will be built on the maximum of Orthodox practice, not on some artificially contrived minimum and compromise. The concept that a Church can be built on the lowest common denominator of different Orthodox dioceses (so-called ‘jurisdictions’) is surreal. It must be built on the maximum and only then can economy be applied. Any other ‘solution’ would be a grave mistake. Indeed, it was tried experimentally in the USA during the Cold War and has been a moral and financial fiasco. This is an experiment not to be repeated.

For example, all Local Churches believe that there are no sacraments outside the Orthodox Church; however, all regularly apply economy in their reception of heterodox. All Local Churches agree that there is only one Church calendar. However, all apply economy, that is allow temporarily for pastoral reasons, the use of the secular calendar for the fixed feasts, to those communities which are not spiritually strong enough to live the Orthodox calendar. Similarly, all Local Churches clearly need traditional monastic life, as with the Greek Archdiocese in the USA, which has been saved by the monasteries of Fr Ephraim.

Of course, all can also agree that some extreme practices are simply unacceptable, even out of economy. We can think of intercommunion, the abolition of fasting and confession, cremation, or other strange practices of small marginal convert groups, who have never integrated the Orthodox Faith. These of course we exclude. The time is coming when new Orthodox Metropolias, composed voluntarily, will be born. Orthodox need them so as to be stronger together. But also the failing heterodox world, which is clearly in crisis, needs a canonical Church with a married priesthood and sacraments. It has only one choice.

Why We do not Fear the Future

Introduction

The Church stands at the centre of the Universe. This is because the Church is the Body of Christ, the Body of the Son of God, the Body of the Maker of the Universe. His redemptive sacrifice on the Cross and His Resurrection from the dead are unique and unrepeatable acts, once and for all events that save the whole Cosmos, providing only that the Cosmos accepts this salvation. The Church Alone believes in Orthodox wise in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Spirit, according to the unchangeable Creed. Around the Church in concentric circles stands the rest of the world, nearer or further away.

Nearest the Church stands Catholicism, which fails to believe in Orthodoxy in the Holy Spirit, then comes Protestantism, which calls the Son of God the man ‘Jesus’, then the Non-Christian world, which however still believes in a Father. Those furthest away are those who have consciously rejected the Holy Spirit, Christ the Son, and God the Father, altogether. This is today’s atheist West, the once Protestant world now quite lapsed and secularised. The Church is Triumphant, having achieved two great victories, but the Church is also Militant, being engaged in two great battles. What are they?

The Church Triumphant

The Church, with some 220 million baptised, is said statistically to represent just over 3% of the world population. However, this overlooks the fact that the visible Church is only the tip of an iceberg. The statistics of this world overlook all the millions of saints and all the billions of faithful departed, who also belong to the Church. These are Her first great victory.

It can be said that the visible, earthly part of the Church actually grows smaller as history ‘progresses’, that is, as we approach the end of the world, whereas the invisible part grows larger. Hence the image of the iceberg. To see the Church as only 3% of the whole is a lack of faith, a worldly view, as it overlooks all the invisible part of the world, all the faithful departed and all the invisible creation of ‘the Maker of heaven (the invisible part of creation) and earth’, in Whom we believe.

The New Martyrs and Confessors Triumphant

The New Martyrs were martyred defending the full Christian Tradition against the ideology of materialism. The New Confessors lived and suffered defending the same Christian Tradition. We do not forget that the Revolution was financed and organised by the ruthless Western world. Some Russians and others naively believed in it under the Bolshevik yoke, until they finally realised that they had been manipulated by a fairy story.

Thus, the New Martyrs and Confessors provide us with the story of integral Christians defending spiritual values against the grossness of materialism, defending the Church against traitors and apostates who had sold out to Western materialism and idolatry. The New Martyrs and Confessors are Christian patriots. They defend the Truth against the idolatry of humanism that worships fallen humanity. After the aberration of the twentieth century, they are triumphant, for their enemies are now derided and despised by history. Their feat is the prefiguration of the final triumph of the Church and Her second great victory.

The Battle for Catholicism

The first great battle faced by the Church now is Catholicism. However, after fifty years of Protestantisation imposed by the Second Vatican Council, is there anything left of Catholicism? In Western Europe and North America, it is dying on its feet. However, in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, there is still faith. There, many of the parish clergy are de facto married, so Catholicism there is not discredited by the compulsory clerical celibacy scandal of the Western world. Now that the US has lost interest in Catholicism as a political tool – because the use of a Polish Pope and American dollars to overthrow Communism in Eastern Europe was successful – the battle for Catholicism is to take place.

After the hiatus of Pope Benedict XVI, the elderly caretaker Pope, we shall see whether Catholicism wishes to become 100% secular and so spiritually irrelevant, or if it wants to choose the path of return to the Church and Orthodoxy. The new Pope, his baptismal name supposedly ‘Peter’, ‘Petrus Romanus’, the last Pope according to the dubious 400-year old ‘prophecy of Malachi’, may not perhaps be the last Pope, but he may be the last Roman Catholic Pope. However unlikely it may seem, after over a thousand years of Non-Orthodox Popes of Rome, we may, even in our lifetimes, see once more new Orthodox Popes of Rome, if, that is, we are to see any at all in the atheist West.

The Battle for the Non-Christian World

The second great battle faced by the Church now is the secularist Western world, which is ever more conditioned by atheist aggression and so the desire for world domination, domination of the Non-Christian world. Using the myth that it fights for ‘liberty and democracy’ against tyranny, thirty years ago it set out on a two-pronged attack, firstly against Communism and secondly against Islam. After the fall of Communism and the domination of Russia by materialist traitors, Gorbachov and Yeltsin, the Western world tried to occupy Eastern Europe with the tool and bribery of the EU, with its military assets and Muslim terrorists in Yugoslavia, then with bribery in the Ukraine and Georgia.

Although failing in certain parts of this attack, it next set out to defeat the Muslim world, weakening Iraq (by entrapment, promising but then withdrawing the lure of Kuwait), Afghanistan (where it had already trained and armed fanatics), destroying Iraq, sowing division and chaos in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Mali and Syria (by financing and arming Muslim mercenaries). Its intention, if it can destroy Syria by reducing it to anarchic bloodshed as it has done elsewhere, is to occupy Iran, using the colony of Israel with its US armaments. From there, the Western world can attain its final goal of occupying Azerbaijan, the Caucasus and Siberia and controlling all their immense mineral resources.

Conclusion

Today, we see the battle lines being drawn for some final confrontation that must take place in the Middle East. We see the growing alienation of the ex-Protestant, now secularist and atheist, world from the rest of the world, both from the Church, and from the world outside the Church, be it Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. As we have seen even in this country in the last seven years, there are inevitably those who fall away from the Church, and are praised for so doing by the Western media and Western politicians, from Zbigniew Brzezinski to Madeleine Albright. Whose side are you on? Are you with the New Martyrs and Confessors – or are you with the materialist enemies of Christ?

Apostasy has made many mistakes in the last 100 years. First, it attempted to destroy Russia 96 years ago – and failed because of its New Martyrs and Confessors. Then it alienates China, now officially the greatest trading power in the world. Then it sets itself once more against the Muslim world, represented by Iran. Then against India. There are the faint-hearted who, drowning in faithless manipulations like that of ‘climate change’, despair. They despair because they do not know that God is Almighty and can change the climate in an instant. They do not know that the final battle is, as ever, between Good and Evil, between Right and Wrong, between Truth and Untruth. The faint-hearted do not know either that the final victory is Christ’s. We do not fear the future, even if it is apocalyptic sooner than we might think. Might is not Right, for God is in charge. As a great saint once said, God is not in worldly power but in a far greater power, He is in Truth.

The New Martyrs and Confessors
28 January / 10 February 2013

The Stumbling-Block and the Foolishness of Millennial Western Cultural Prejudice

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
(Matt 5, 8)

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.
(I Cor I, 23)

The culture of Western Europe began as Orthodox Christian. The history of the first millennium AD confirms this bold but factual statement. Thus, the Apostles Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome, an event followed by the martyrdom of thousands of others in Rome and all over Western Europe, veneration of whom is fundamental to the Orthodox Church. Thus, there are great Orthodox Church Fathers in the West, such as St Irinaeus of Lyons, St Cyprian of Carthage, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose of Milan, St Vincent of Lerins, St Leo of Rome and St Gregory the Dialogist. Thus, Orthodox monasticism from Egypt and Palestine entered into European life through those like St Martin of Tours, St John Cassian, St Benedict of Nursia and St Columba of Iona. Thus, the whole territory of Western Europe, Portugal and Spain, Italy and France, Switzerland and Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, Britain and Ireland, Denmark and Sweden, Norway and Iceland, became patterned by monasteries and churches and their Orthodox Christian life and the place names they left behind them.

Of course, there was another element in Western culture – the paganism of the pagan Rome Empire and of the pagan Celtic, Latin and Germanic peoples. This element always existed in the first millennium, alongside the Orthodox Christian one. However, this does not explain the reasons why the descendants of the once Christianised peoples of Western Europe are so little drawn to the Orthodox Church of today.

For this we can identify three reasons. The first is that many Western people may not live anywhere near an Orthodox church. Until very recently, there were very few Orthodox churches in Western Europe outside the capitals and major cities. The second reason is that even when such churches do exist, they may cater only for foreign-language immigrant communities, who consider that their task is precisely to conserve their foreign language and customs, which are not to be watered down with a local language. It must be said, however, that, whatever the excuses of the past, both these factors are much less relevant today than twenty-five or fifty or seventy-five years ago. Indeed, it is now obvious that there is a third reason – ultimately a factor which is far more important than the first two, because it is a spiritual reason. What is this?

This is that any who have been subject to Western culture, by birth or by assimilation, must first divest themselves of anything in that culture which cannot be baptised into the Church of God. This means ten layers of anti-Christian cultural prejudice, ten centuries of a false messiah, which have, like a parasite inside the body, become attached to the original Western Christian culture. What are they?

1. 11th century: This is the fundamental layer, which asserts that Western man can replace the Holy Spirit, that fallen and mortal man, whose immortal destiny by throwing off the Fall is heaven, is already a god on earth.

2. 12th century: This is the layer of the arrogant mind, the layer of the proud and aggressive and unrepentant individual human reason, which asserts that it knows all mysteries, that it knows better than the Church.

3. 13th century: This is the layer of false spiritualism, of the emotional pietism of the soul, of the self-exalted psyche, which imagines in its illusion that it sees God, when in reality it sees only its own fallen reflection.

4. 14th century: This is the layer of violence, of war and plague, which brings the spirit of morbidity into the Western soul, which fears death because it does not know of the Resurrection and even denies it.

5. 15th century: This is the layer of clerical corruption, which brings hatred and mistrust, the misperception that a mere human institution is the Body of Christ and that therefore it cannot exist anywhere else on earth.

6. 16th century: This is the layer of protest and revolt of the individual, the individualism which is in fact the egoism that lies at the root of the self-loving bubble of consumerism, which it claims as its ‘human right’.

7. 17th century: This is the layer of the puritanical witch-hunt, of the rejection of superstition, but which also rejects all that is beyond the narrow and limited understanding of the fallen mind as politically incorrect.

8. 18th century: This is the layer of irrational reason which claims enlightenment, but which in its darkness justifies its arrogant and imperialist desire to enslave others in its all-conquering quest for power, land and gold.

9. 19th century: This is the layer of delusional triumphalism, which asserts that the idolatrous Western domination of the whole world, through arms and industry and science, is messianic and will bring paradise on earth.

10. 20th century: This is the layer of the abandonment of God and His replacement by technology, which asserts the primitive superstition that, despite now recognised weaknesses, human knowledge is all-saving.

Thus, the first five centuries of the second millennium saw Orthodoxy as a stumbling block in the process of reducing the Faith to a mere human institution. That is why it sent out its troops to destroy the Church, which remained as a living reproach to the imperialist Western substitute for it. The second five centuries of the second millennium saw Orthodoxy as foolishness before the so-called triumph of the individual human mind divorced from God. That is why it despised as superstition and idolatry the Church, which remained as a living reproach to the rationalist Western substitute for it.

What then can we say of the 21st century?

We consider that it is too early to speak of this unfinished layer. However, we predict that in this century so-called human freedom will be proved to be enslavement. Therefore, this is the century when millennial Western cultural prejudice will evaporate, as it is seen that in truth the only real stumbling block has been the reduction of the Church of God to a human institution and that the only real foolishness has been that of the individual human mind divorced from God. This is the century when the spiritually sensitive in search of spiritual purity will find the Church, but the spiritually insensitive in search of spiritual impurity will find Hell.