Category Archives: The Middle East

Syria: A Watershed

It is now clear that the brutal war in Syria has become a watershed in twenty-first century history. 2013 is becoming an acid test, just like the events of 1913 in twentieth-century history. Thus, the elites of some countries have adopted a most hostile view towards the Syrian government and supported the terrorists; others, however, have supported the government and denied the terrorists. The same is true of all countries and institutions, from South Africa to the Vatican, from China to NATO, from Sweden to the Establishment BBC. More relevantly to us, the leaderships of various Local Orthodox Churches have also had to define their attitudes towards Syria and the merciless war there.

For example, the Arab-speaking Antiochian Orthodox Church is now drawing ever closer to the Russian Orthodox Church as a result of the Syrian crisis. On the other hand, there is the deafening silence of the US-backed Patriarchate of Constantinople – like the city of Antioch, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is in Turkey, the last remnant of the Ottoman Empire, and so is not free. Even more shocking are the anti-Christian and Russophobic criticisms of Russia by members of the immature OCA group is North America. However, unlike these, most Local Orthodox Churches are now realising that they have only one true friend – the Russian Church. They are leaning towards us and away from their pro-Western regimes.

As for the two parts of the Russian Church, the small Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the enormous Church Inside Russia (which we may here call ROCIR) are also drawing together. We have come a long way from our reconciliation of 2007. Since 2007 ROCOR has drawn closer to the Church Inside Russia, losing its politicised, Russophobic elements, whereas ROCIR in turn has been losing its old Soviet tinges. The two parts have been coming together, recognising how much we have in common. The same is true of individuals. Thus, one notable personality inside Russia, previously a pro-Western critic of the Tradition of his Church, has intelligently made a 180 degree turn and now fully supports his own Church.

It is indeed time to come together. A great question is now facing all the Local Orthodox Churches and, for that matter, all conscious Orthodox: whose side are we on? Previously, it was possible to dither and hesitate, to put off. Previously, it was possible to ‘be open’ and not take sides. But the opportunity for indecision is now rapidly coming to an end. The fact is that all who have not yet decided will have to make a decision – and soon. The Western elites have opted for the suicidal devaluation of marriage and at the same time support for Islamic terrorism. What do we do? Are we on the side of the Russian Church and Jerusalem – or are we on the side of the Western elites and Sodom?

Tsar versus Antichrist: What Lies Behind

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Abraham Lincoln

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.

‘It’s Later than You Think’ (July 1991) in Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition

The sabre-rattling by chemical-weapons-providing Western elites against the Syrian government has for the moment been stopped by the common sense of Western peoples. The peoples recall the recent lies that they were told about Iraq by their financially and morally bankrupt governments. As they say: Once bitten, twice shy. However, what has not been explained as yet is what the present turmoil in the Muslim world, the centre of which is Syria, is really about.

Ever since the fall of Communism, it has been clear that the next enemy of those who want to see a World Dictatorship, which will lead to the enthronement of Antichrist in Jerusalem, is Islam. This is clear from the Western creating and arming of the Taliban and Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, then from the first Gulf War, which ended even before the final days of the collapsing Soviet Union. And since then from the wave of divisive events, in Iraq, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere.

Only when the Islamic world has first been divided, brought back by the most barbaric violence to a primitive state, can it be ruled over. And the Islamic world can be divided most easily by pitting Sunni against Shia. This is exactly what is happening in Syria, where the oil-rich, Sunni, Saudi and Qatari dictatorships, strongly backed by the West, are financing and arming the fanatical terrorists and mercenaries who are fighting against the Shia-backed Syrian government.

Why, however, must the Islamic world be ruled over? It is because only when it has been divided and so ruled over can the Islamic shrine of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem be destroyed. And only when the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem has been destroyed, can the Temple where Antichrist is to be enthroned be rebuilt. Fortunately, there are still healthy forces in the world which consciously and unconsciously resist this movement towards a World Dictatorship.

Firstly, there are some independent Western people who still resist the movements of their own elites. The latter are desperate, as their lies show, to become paid minions of the coming World Dictatorship, which is to be centred in Jerusalem. Some Western people realise that their countries are being prepared by bankruptcy and used, so that they can be enslaved to this coming Power. Secondly, there are countries outside the Western elite’s hegemony, such as Syria, Iran, China and, now most visibly, Russia.

At present post-Communist Russia is ruled by a Russian politician. Like all politicians, he is liked by some and disliked by others. This is inevitable because he is only a politician. A Russia ruled by politicians will always be mixed and divided. However, as the respected Athonite Hieroschemamonk, Fr Raphael (Berestov), has prophesied: ‘There will be a Tsar in Russia’. And it is only then that the Coming of Antichrist will be truly resisted and systematically opposed.

Syria: Another Western War Crime In The Making

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2013/august/27/syria-another-western-war-crime-in-the-making.aspx

Syria: Another Western War Crime In The Making
Tuesday August 27, 2013
Refuse To Fight

The war criminals in Washington and other Western capitals are determined to maintain their lie that the Syrian government used chemical weapons. Having failed in efforts to intimidate the UN chemical inspectors in Syria, Washington has demanded that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon withdraw the chemical weapons inspectors before they can assess the evidence and make their report. The UN Secretary General stood up to the Washington war criminals and rejected their demand. However, as with Iraq, Washington’s decision to commit aggression against Syria is not based on any facts.

The US and UK governments have revealed none of the “conclusive evidence” they claim to have that the Syrian government used chemical weapons. Listening to their voices, observing their body language, and looking into their eyes, it is completely obvious that John Kerry and his British and German puppets are lying through their teeth. This is a far more shameful situation than the massive lies that former Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell claims that he was deceived by the White House and did not know that he was lying. Kerry and the British, French, and German puppets know full well that they are lying.

The face that the West presents to the world is the brazen face of a liar.

Washington and its British and French puppet governments are poised to yet again reveal their criminality. The image of the West as War Criminal is not a propaganda image created by the West’s enemies, but the portrait that the West has painted of itself.

The UK Independent reports that over this past week-end Obama, Cameron, and Hollande agreed to launch cruise missile attacks against the Syrian government within two weeks despite the lack of any authorization from the UN and despite the absence of any evidence in behalf of Washington’s claim that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the Washington-backed “rebels”, largely US supported external forces, seeking to overthrow the Syrian government.

Indeed, one reason for the rush to war is to prevent the UN inspection that Washington knows would disprove its claim and possibly implicate Washington in the false flag attack by the “rebels,” who assembled a large number of children into one area to be chemically murdered with the blame pinned by Washington on the Syrian government.

Another reason for the rush to war is that Cameron, the UK prime minister, wants to get the war going before the British parliament can block him for providing cover for Obama’s war crimes the way that Tony Blair provided cover for George W. Bush, for which Blair was duly rewarded. What does Cameron care about Syrian lives when he can leave office into the waiting arms of a $50 million fortune.

The Syrian government, knowing that it is not responsible for the chemical weapons incident, has agreed for the UN to send in chemical inspectors to determine the substance used and the method of delivery. However, Washington has declared that it is “too late” for UN inspectors and that Washington accepts the self-serving claim of the al Qaeda affiliated “rebels” that the Syrian government attacked civilians with chemical weapons.

In an attempt to prevent the UN chemical inspectors who arrived on the scene from doing their work, the inspectors were fired upon by snipers in “rebel” held territory and forced off site, although a later report from RT says the inspectors have returned to the site to conduct their inspection.

The corrupt British government has declared that Syria can be attacked without UN authorization, just as Serbia and Libya were militarily attacked without UN authorization. In other words, the Western democracies have already established precedents for violating international law. “International law? We don’t need no stinking international law!” The West knows only one rule: Might is Right. As long as the West has the Might, the West has the Right.

In a response to the news report that the US, UK, and France are preparing to attack Syria, the Russian Foreign Minister, Lavrov, said that such unilateral action is a “severe violation of international law,” and that the violation was not only a legal one but also an ethical and moral violation. Lavrov referred to the lies and deception used by the West to justify its grave violations of international law in military attacks on Serbia, Iraq, and Libya and how the US government used preemptive moves to undermine every hope for peaceful settlements in Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

Once again Washington has preempted any hope of peaceful settlement. By announcing the forthcoming attack, the US destroyed any incentive for the “rebels” to participate in the peace talks with the Syrian government. On the verge of these talks taking place, the “rebels” now have no incentive to participate as the West’s military is coming to their aid.

In his press conference Lavrov spoke of how the ruling parties in the US, UK, and France stir up emotions among poorly informed people that, once aroused, have to be satisfied by war. This, of course, is the way the US manipulated the public in order to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. But the American public is tired of the wars, the goal of which is never made clear, and has grown suspicious of the government’s justifications for more wars.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that “Americans strongly oppose U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war and believe Washington should stay out of the conflict even if reports that Syria’s government used deadly chemicals to attack civilians are confirmed.” However, Obama could not care less that only 9 percent of the public supports his warmongering. As former president Jimmy Carter recently stated, “America has no functioning democracy.” It has a police state in which the executive branch has placed itself above all law and the Constitution.

This police state is now going to commit yet another Nazi-style war crime of unprovoked aggression. At Nuremberg the Nazis were sentenced to death for precisely the identical actions being committed by Obama, Cameron, and Hollande. The West is banking on might, not right, to keep it out of the criminal dock.

The US, UK, and French governments have not explained why it matters whether people in the wars initiated by the West are killed by explosives made of depleted uranium or with chemical agents or any other weapon. It was obvious from the beginning that Obama was setting up the Syrian government for attack. Obama demonized chemical weapons–but not nuclear “bunker busters” that the US might use on Iran. Then Obama drew a red line, saying that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrians was such a great crime that the West would be obliged to attack Syria. Washington’s UK puppets, William Hague and Cameron, have just repeated this nonsensical claim. The final step in the frame-up was to orchestrate a chemical incident and blame the Syrian government.

What is the West’s real agenda? This is the unasked and unanswered question. Clearly, the US, UK, and French governments, which have displayed continuously their support for dictatorial regimes that serve their purposes, are not the least disturbed by dictatorships. They brand Assad a dictator as a means of demonizing him for the ill-informed Western masses. But Washington, UK, and France support any number of dictatorial regimes, such as the ones in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and now the military dictatorship in Egypt that is ruthlessly killing Egyptians without any Western government speaking of invading Egypt for “killing its own people.”

Clearly also, the forthcoming Western attack on Syria has nothing whatsoever to do with bringing “freedom and democracy” to Syria any more than freedom and democracy were reasons for the attacks on Iraq and Libya, neither of which gained any “freedom and democracy.”

The Western attack on Syria is unrelated to human rights, justice or any of the high sounding causes with which the West cloaks its criminality.

The Western media, and least of all the American presstitutes, never ask Obama, Cameron, or Hollande what the real agenda is. It is difficult to believe than any reporter is sufficiently stupid or gullible to believe that the agenda is bringing “freedom and democracy” to Syria or punishing Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons against murderous thugs trying to overthrow the Syrian government.

Of course, the question wouldn’t be answered if asked. But the act of asking it would help make the public aware that more is afoot than meets the eye. Originally, the excuse for Washington’s wars was to keep Americans safe from terrorists. Now Washington is endeavoring to turn Syria over to jihad terrorists by helping them to overthrow the secular, non-terrorist Assad government. What is the agenda behind Washington’s support of terrorism?

Perhaps the purpose of the wars is to radicalize Muslims and, thereby, destabilize Russia and even China. Russia has large populations of Muslims and is bordered by Muslim countries. Even China has some Muslim population. As radicalization spreads strife into the only two countries capable of being an obstacle to Washington’s world hegemony, Western media propaganda and the large number of US financed NGOs, posing as “human rights” organizations, can be counted on by Washington to demonize the Russian and Chinese governments for harsh measures against “rebels.”

Another advantage of the radicalization of Muslims is that it leaves former Muslim countries in long-term turmoil or civil wars, as is currently the case in Iraq and Libya, thus removing any organized state power from obstructing Israeli purposes.

Secretary of State John Kerry is working the phones using bribes and threats to build acceptance, if not support, for Washington’s war crime-in-the-making against Syria.

Washington is driving the world closer to nuclear war than it ever was even in the most dangerous periods of the Cold War. When Washington finishes with Syria, the next target is Iran. Russia and China will no longer be able to fool themselves that there is any system of international law or restraint on Western criminality. Western aggression is already forcing both countries to develop their strategic nuclear forces and to curtail the Western-financed NGOs that pose as “human rights organizations,” but in reality comprise a fifth column that Washington can use to destroy the legitimacy of the Russian and Chinese governments.

Russia and China have been extremely careless in their dealings with the United States. Essentially, the Russian political opposition is financed by Washington. Even the Chinese government is being undermined. When a US corporation opens a company in China, it creates a Chinese board on which are put relatives of the local political authorities. These boards create a conduit for payments that influence the decisions and loyalties of local and regional party members. The US has penetrated Chinese universities and intellectual attitudes. The Rockefeller University is active in China as is Rockefeller philanthropy. Dissenting voices are being created that are arrayed against the Chinese government. Demands for “liberalization” can resurrect regional and ethnic differences and undermine the cohesiveness of the national government.

Once Russia and China realize that they are riven with American fifth columns, isolated diplomatically, and outgunned militarily, nuclear weapons become the only guarantor of their sovereignty. This suggests that nuclear war is likely to terminate humanity well before humanity succumbs to global warming or rising national debts.

Flickr/Alan Denney
Tags – Syria
Written by Paul Craig Roberts

A Recent Interview

1) Please could you introduce yourself and how you became an Orthodox priest?

I was born and grew up in a modest family in a small town in the north of Essex, my father was local, though my very anglicised mother was of Russian origin. They had met during the War. I passed my 11 +, went to the local grammar school and then studied Russian, the language my mother had lost, at University. Next I went to work in Greece for a year, after which in 1979 I decided to study at what was then the only Russian Orthodox seminary in Western Europe, called St Serge, in Paris. In 1981 I was made reader in the Russian Orthodox Church. Four years after this I was ordained subdeacon and deacon and, seven years later, priest. I lived and worked in France between 1983 and 1997. I am married and have six adult children.

2) What is the vision behind Orthodox England?

I first began writing in the 70s, but my work was not published until the early 90s. Orthodox England began as such only in 1997 as a journal and, from the new millennium on, it developed into a website. After ten years, in 2007, the journal went fully online. Our vision is to call back English people and others living here, to their spiritual roots in original Christianity. In other words, our vision is to restore something of what was, so that we can survive by keeping our spiritual integrity today.

3) Why do you see Orthodoxy as the true faith of the British Isles and England and not either Roman Catholicism or Protestantism

Rather than ‘true faith’ I would say original faith.

Protestantism, in its many forms is obviously an invention of the sixteenth century, developed as a moralising reaction to Catholic deformations. Roman Catholicism, however, was itself only an invention of the eleventh century. It was developed as a geopolitical project by the Western elite out of the original first millennium Christianity in Western Europe as an ideology to justify its attempt to conquer the world.

First millennium Christianity in Western Europe was very different from both Protestantism and Catholicism. Any historian can tell you that. The main difference was a different Creed, which meant a different set of values and way of life, so that the Christianity of the first millennium here was in communion with the Church in the homelands of Christianity, in Jerusalem, the Middle East, Asia Minor, the Roman Capital in Constantinople and so on. The native people in Jerusalem and all these places belonged, and still belong, to the Orthodox Church. Therefore, the Christianity of the first millennium West can also fairly be called Orthodox. Thus, today’s Catholicism and Protestantism are fragments and vestiges of this original Orthodoxy, which fell out of communion with it through introducing its new Creed.

4) Could you explain what the Orthodox understanding of Church-State relations is and how it mainly differs from the Papal or Protestant view?

The Papal view of Church-State relations is called ‘papocaesarism’, the idea that the Pope should control the world. The Protestant view is called ‘caesaropapism’, the idea that the ruler (or parliament) decides on the faith – examples are Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, or the fact that whoever the current Prime Minister is – and he may be an atheist – appoints all bishops of the Church of England.

The Orthodox view is based on the Incarnation; as God became man, so man is called to become God-like. Therefore Orthodoxy calls for balance between Church and State, known as ‘symphony’, the idea that the secular ruler is dominant in affairs of State, the Church in spiritual matters that concern the salvation of the soul. However, spiritual matters do not mean some sort of inward navel-gazing, disassociated from social action. In fact, spiritual matters inevitably profoundly affect political, social and economic matters, the two spheres overlap and interpenetrate one another, hopefully in a positive way. We believe that as God is incarnate in the world, so the Church is incarnate in the world and must be active in transfiguring it.

5) Could you explain as to what you feel is of central significance as to the Western Churches’ historic adoption of the filioque and how this has affected Western Christendom both theologically and culturally?

The filioque is the local alteration to the Christian Creed, rejecting the consensual Creed and Faith of the Universal Councils. This alteration officially took place in Rome in 1014, one thousand years ago next year. (Unofficially, it had begun as a slow process over two centuries before, but only in certain provincial areas and then not with the later significance and in Rome the popes had then categorically rejected any alteration to the Creed). In other words, the Christian Faith was changed in the West at the outset of the second millennium and led to its isolation from the roots of the Church and mainstream Christianity.

The filioque, a Latin phrase that means ‘and from the Son’, secularises our whole understanding of the Christian God, the Holy Trinity. In combination with the claims of the Pope of Rome, also developed and enforced soon after 1014, the filioque says that the source of the authority and spirituality of the Church, the presence of Christ in the world, is no longer spiritually freely available through the Church. In other words, authority and spirituality are no longer dependent on the Holy Spirit, they are held captive, dependent on a human being. With the filioque, authority and spirituality depend on whoever makes himself recognised as the representative or ‘vicar’ of Christ on earth. According to these innovations of the 11th century, in Western Europe this representative was deemed to be the Bishop of Rome. Thus, all authority and spirituality was put into his hands.

The much later Protestant reaction to this was to make everyone into a pope; this was the innovation that led to modern individualism and secular humanism, man-worship. None of this would have come about, if it had not been for the introduction of the filioque, which had already been defined by the late 11th century by Anselm of Canterbury as the single distinctive motto of the arrogant and imperialistic ideology of Western Europe, which opposed it to all other cultures. Already in the eleventh century this ideology lay directly behind both the colonisation of England, known as ‘the Norman Conquest’, and the later colonial movements of plunderers known as ‘The Crusades’.

6) What are your views on the “Pussy Riot” incident in Russia?

Let me put that incident into its historical context – otherwise it will be meaningless.

We know for a fact that the 1917 Revolution in Russia was organised and implemented by the Western Powers in order to destroy Russia, its rival, one which, in their own words, would have become more powerful than any Western country by 1950. Therefore, British and the Americans sent Trotsky and the Germans sent Lenin to carry out the Revolution in Russia. We also now know that the order to assassinate the Tsar and his family actually came directly from New York – just as the Tsar himself had predicted it would, some ten years before. The Soviet Union was a purely Western foundation, founded on the Western ideology of Marxism.

However, in creating the Soviet Union, the West made a strategic mistake, a rod for its own back, because of course the Soviet Union became very powerful, the second ‘Superpower’. This was not as the West had intended, for the Nazis were supposed to destroy the Soviet Union. The West had not counted on historic patriotism and sense of national identity, a movement far deeper than the superficial Soviet Union. Therefore, when the Soviet Union fell, over twenty years ago now, the West’s greatest fear was that a free and independent Russia would be born, that, having thrown off its shell, the tortoise underneath it would turn out to be a hare. Hence the ‘Wild East’ chaos which the West encouraged in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s with its ‘divide and rule’ policies and privatisation. This was nothing more than institutionalised theft from the people.

The problem for the West came in the year 2000 when Russia finally recognised that it had to recover from this ‘Wild East’ Capitalism, the Mafia State, and set out on the very, very long path of recovery under President Putin. Therefore, the West had to destroy Putin. In some respects, he is an easy target because he rules over a post-Soviet country, still full of that corruption and mafia mentality introduced there in the 1990s. Therefore, it is easy to attack Putin’s Russia (although it is doubtful if the amount of corruption there is any greater in reality than in the EU or the USA) and Putin has been lamentably slow and weak in tackling corruption.

Thus, what really upsets the Western elite is the fear that Russia may yet free itself from this corruption and the former Russian Empire largely reconstituted in a Eurasian Confederation. The only focus of Russian unity, the multinational Russian Orthodox Church, is also the only force which can overcome post-Soviet amorality. Both Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright have made it clear that they are utterly opposed to the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church and want to dismember Russia – much as Hitler planned to do. So Western so-called ‘NGO’s and Evangelical ‘missionaries’ have done their best to undermine the authority of the Church, even publishing attacks on the Church in the ‘Economist’ and the ‘Harvard Business Review’!

It is in this context that we understand the obviously set up ‘Pussy Riot’ incident, based around a non-existent female punk band. It seems that the financial backer of this pathetic little plot was Boris Berezovsky, who sent these women money through his friend Alexander Goldfarb. His reason for doing this was the refusal by the Patriarch just a few weeks before to back Berezovsky’s political campaign to become President. His letter was well publicised by the media.

So it was all about petty revenge, using these foolish young women (one of whom clearly needs psychiatric help) as stooges. In other words, the whole thing was a very obvious and unsubtle political manipulation by Russophobes. And it failed, because people could see what it was, a put-up job. And now Berezovsky, a thief of the Wild East 1990s, a Robin Hood in reverse, who stole from the people and gave to the rich, who was associated with and perhaps funded the terrorists who massacred the children of Beslan and funded the murder of the spy Litvinenko, has apparently committed suicide. I fight against the thought of Judas coming to mind, but it does…..

7) What are your views on “Nationalism” and should this be better contrasted with instead “Patriotism” from an Orthodox perspective?

Nationalism is hatred of others out of ignorance and deluded pride, usually in what is worst in one’s own country, of the sort: ‘We are better than others’. ‘We are the best in the world’. We can see this in the xenophobia of racist movements, like the National Front, the British National Party and the so-called ‘English Defence League’. When I see their slogans and hateful ideology, I can find nothing in them with which I can identify; their strident nationalism, arrogance and ignorance are among the worst aspects of this country – not the best. Christianity can never approve of hatred.

On the other hand, patriotism is love of what is best in our country and culture. In a globalised world there is no place for nationalism, but there is place for both patriotism and what I call ‘inter-patriotism’, the love of what is best in all countries. In fact, if you do not love your own country, if you are not patriotic, how can you possibly love other countries and their cultures?

8) Do you look for a restoration of the Orthodox Tsar in the future and is Orthodoxy intrinsically monarchist ultimately in its political leanings?

The Orthodox Churches live and have lived in all countries and under all sorts of regimes: Pagan, Communist, post-Soviet, Fascist, Capitalist, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim etc. However, history shows that the Church is able to influence society for the best when there is an Orthodox monarch.

Here we must emphasise that the Orthodox use of the word ‘monarch’ means something quite different from the Western usage. In the West it means a right-wing figure, who is extremely powerful and rich and uses that power and wealth to exploit for egotistical purposes, a kind of permanent Tony Blair or any other self-deluded narcissistic megalomaniac. Conversely, in Orthodox language, a monarch means a popular monarch, whose power and wealth exist only for the people’s benefit. His sovereignty is the reflection of the people’s sovereignty. Christian monarchy is where the people are the guarantor of the monarchy and vice versa. That is quite different from the absolutist and despotic monarchies with which Western history is littered. In 1917 Russia fell because of thoroughly corrupt and self-serving aristocrats, oligarchs as we would call them today, who connived with foreign powers, overthrew the monarchy and betrayed the monarch-loving peasants and workers, whom they ruthlessly exploited.

Prophecies, which are always conditional, clearly state that, if the whole Russian nation repents, a suitable candidate will appear to be Tsar again, just as in 1613 after the Polish invasion. All Russian Orthodox, and all conscious Non-Russian Orthodox, look forward to this possible restoration, because it will change the whole future of the world for the better, rebalancing it and turning it away from its present, suicidal course.

9) Please could you explain the Orthodox concept of “Romanity”?

‘Romanity’ originally meant that part of the Roman Empire that had become Christian. When the Emperor Constantine realised that Rome was integrally pagan, he transferred the capital of Romanity (= the Christian Roman Empire or Christendom) to New Rome (much later called Constantinople). After the barbarian Catholic schismatics sacked the capital of this Roman Empire and Christendom in 1204, it became very weak and finally fell to Islam in 1453. From then the capital of Romanity was transferred to Moscow, the new ‘Centre’. Today Romanity simply means all Orthodox Christendom, Orthodox civilisation, the ‘Orthosphere’. However, it is true that there are considerable fragments of this in countries outside it, including in the Western world.

9) Is there an alternative Orthodox vision of a Christian England within a Confederate Europe that can be advocated instead of the current EU super state project?

We are for Europe, we are not anti-European (that would be self-destructive – the British Isles and Ireland are obviously geographically European), but we are anti-EU. The EU denotes a corrupt and tyrannical political, commercial and banking elite which serves only itself. We believe in a European Confederation of Sovereign Nations, not in a Babylonian Superstate, a Fourth Reich of the United States of Berlin, which is what is on offer today. (Anyone who has seen pictures of what is happening in Greece and Cyprus, where German bureaucrats are meddling in national banks and national ministries at this moment, can see this quite clearly).
We believe that a Free Confederation of Europe, balancing unity and diversity, would at one and the same time eliminate the old tribal nationalism of Europe, as seen in the two great European Wars (so-called ‘World Wars’) and also eliminate the Babylon internationalism of the EU Superstate, which is a mere US colonial superstructure. The United States of Europe is made in the image of its colonial master, the United States of America, a corrupt institution which came to power on the 600,000 dead bodies of Americans who died in the American Civil War.

Theologically, Confederation is a Trinitarian concept, in the image of the Holy Trinity, unity in diversity. This is quite different from the centralism of the EU, which is merely the modern equivalent of the old papal centralism of the Middle Ages. In other words, the only essential geographical difference between the Middle Ages and today is that Rome has moved to Brussels.

10) Do you see Islam as being a significant threat to the UK or Europe in the future?

No, not in itself. Islam is only a threat if Europe and the UK continue on their suicidal path of renouncing and annihilating their Christian roots. As it is said, ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. In other words, since Christianity as the foundation of Western culture is being renounced by Western society, why should Islam not take over? There is a free market in religion now. If the West wishes to inflict Islam on itself, that is not the fault of Islam, only of the West. That would be the West punishing itself in freely-chosen self-destruction. It is not easy to stop a suicide.

11) Please could you clarify what you see as being theologically suspect in the “Paris School”?

The ‘Paris School’ of philosophy (there was no theology or Orthodoxy in it) was a marginal movement affecting a few dozen intellectuals and their naive followers. It started in Paris in the 1920s. After the Russian Church had been taken captive in 1917, these uprooted fringe intellectuals, former Marxists, a former Hindu, a hypnotist, occultists, theosophists, freemasons, and others, often not of an Orthodox background, left the Russian Church. Without Church discipline or the living Tradition, they decided to attempt to merge Orthodox theology with Protestant-based secularism in a sectarian and cultish way, the apex of which they called ‘Sophianism’. This was a syncretistic pseudo-intellectual mish-mash, rejected by the vast majority, which is destined to die out completely in the coming years, now that the Russian Church is being restored.

12) What is your understanding of “Sophia” in Orthodox theology and mysticism? Also what do you think of the many Marian apparitions that have happened in the West particularly since Fatima which referred to the conversion of Russia etc as many of the “messages” behind these alleged visitations of the Theotokos appear to completely theologically contradict Orthodox doctrine and practice?

You speak in your question of ‘Sophia in Orthodox theology and mysticism’. I have to translate and demythologise such exotic and coded language. Firstly, ‘Orthodox’ for us whom the outside world calls ‘Orthodox’ means ‘Christian’; the word ‘mysticism’ has no meaning, for all authentic theology is ‘mystical’, inasmuch as it all comes from God i.e, it is not rationalistic; as regards Sophia, this is simply the Greek word for ‘Wisdom’, that is, the Person of Christ. So what your question means is simply my understanding of ‘Christ in Christian theology’.

In reply: In Christian Rome (much later called Constantinople), the main Cathedral was and is dedicated to ‘The Holy Wisdom’ (in Greek ‘Aghia Sofia’), that is to the Saviour. In other words, it is ‘Christchurch’. In the Gospels the Saviour is called the Wisdom (‘Sophia’) and Word of God. So in answer to your question, the Christian theology of the Wisdom and Word of God, is that He is the Son of God Who became Incarnate, was crucified and rose from the dead, and there is no Wisdom or Word outside Him. This means that the highest form of Wisdom and Literature reside in Christ the Saviour, Who Alone overcame death. All other forms of wisdom and literature are, however valuable, still deathly, mortal, not of the Resurrection.

There have been several ‘Marian’ apparitions since Fatima. Each one must be treated differently. Medjugorje, for example, is a fake – according to Roman Catholic authorities. It is possible that others have been fake too. However, I believe that both Fatima and Lourdes were real. Sadly, the messages involved were ruthlessly and deliberately deformed and manipulated by the Vatican machine.

For five years I was the rector of the Russian Orthodox parish in Lisbon and collected information about the Fatima revelation, which happened precisely in 1917 and concerned Russia. For me the message is quite simple: the Mother of God was warning the Western world that if it did not stop plotting against Russia and did not repent, stepping back from the brink, it would destroy itself. And of course this is exactly what has happened and is happening now. I remember how President Putin warned Blair, I think it was in 2006, against encouraging atheism. The advice was ignored. The West ignores the Russian experience of Soviet materialism, so well described by Solzhenitsyn, at its peril.

13) What do you think of the late but influential Fr Seraphim Rose’s teaching as regards the “Toll Houses”?

I never thought that the late Fr Seraphim Rose, an Orthodox monk in California, was influential. This is news to me.

Fr Seraphim spoke in one of his books of the imagery of ‘toll houses’, which is used to illustrate symbolically what happens to the soul after death. Sadly, some people have misinterpreted and deformed his words and tried, very crudely and primitively, to make his words material, despiritualised. It is as if the Last Judgement was being presented as a law court with bewigged barristers and a judge. This is such a grossly materialistic, Kafkaesque deformation that it is unworthy of attention. I would say the same of the deformation of the Orthodox understanding of the image of the toll houses. Fr Seraphim was not responsible for this. He was merely trying to explain to the uninitiated. Perhaps, his fault, if any, was only in trying to ‘cast pearl before swine’.

14) Do you see any future for the Anglican Church? In your book “Orthodoxy and the English Tradition” you quote the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson from his book “Religion and the Rise of Culture” when he says “The West is different from other civilisations because its religious idea has not been the worship of timeless and changeless perfection but a spirit that seeks to incorporate itself within history. Other civilisations realised their synthesis between life and religion and maintained their sacred order but in the West the changing of the world became an integral part of its cultural ideal.” Would you say this is the spirit behind Anglicanism as it seems completely beholden to and compromised with modernity?

The Anglican Church was an invention of the power-grabbing and land-grabbing tyrant and serial wife-killer Henry VIII and then of Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. Henry is said to have massacred tens of thousands, using atrocious tortures; Elizabeth, not a lot better, wrote the doctrines of Anglicanism. Anglicanism was invented as a nationalist compromise, necessary only to the State, Protestant in doctrine, though with some Catholic externals, notably stealing all the Catholic churches of the country, though ruining them with whitewash and sledgehammers. The idea was to unite everyone, Protestant-minded and Catholic-minded, in a single State-sponsored institution.

From the beginning, there was dissidence, even though some of the extreme Protestants were exiled to colonies in North America and Catholics were slaughtered, fined and exiled. The Anglican Church continually followed the State and its fashions, as an integral part of the Establishment, without spiritual independence, following whatever decision the State decreed, creating its ‘vicar of Bray’ scenario.

Never has there been a clearer example of nationalism, erastian caesaropapism, a so-called Church created by a State for a State. It is the same today; the State says ‘gay marriage’ and, lo and behold, many Anglican bishops and clergy say the same. Whatever the State commands, it follows. Someone said some years ago that the only difference between the Church of England Establishment today and 100 years ago is that then it was for fox-hunting and against buggery, but today it is against fox-hunting and for buggery.

Of course, it can be said that the Orthodox Churches have also been manipulated by States, with individual bishops vetted and even appointed in Russia by Tsars and Soviet Commissars, in Greece by sultans and Greek ministers and in Constantinople by the US Secretary of State. However, although all that is scandalous, it was also resisted by the vast majority, hundreds of thousands of martyrs and confessors, and also the Faith itself was not attacked and not altered. These unworthy bishops were appointed from the scrapings of the barrel that remained after mass persecution. But the Anglican Faith was altered – dictated by the State from the very outset.

What is the point of Anglicanism today, when the State is not only secular but openly and unashamedly anti-Christian? In this country it is a tiny group in any case. I would be surprised if the Anglican Church will continue to exist in another generation. A secular ‘Church’ is a contradiction in terms and has no more reason to exist. Its huge wealth will be grabbed by the greedy and bankrupt State. As a tiny minority, cut off from the broader currents of Christianity, Anglicanism is now breaking down into its unOrthodox component parts: the mass will lapse altogether into secularism; the practising will go to Protestantism; a small minority will go to Catholicism. This process has already been happening for centuries, but it is about to speed up.

15) What are your views on the Israel-Palestine question that so preoccupies current evangelical eschatological discourse?

It is an ironic fact that it was the persecution of the Jews in and by Western European culture that led to the foundation of Israel. However, the invention of Israel, an American colonial project, its Middle East base, just as the UK is its North Atlantic base, was a catastrophic event. It meant that the native inhabitants of Palestine were forced out of their own homeland. Many of their descendants are still living in refugee camps today, 65 years later. The existence of Israel has guaranteed permanent terrorist war in the Middle East and murderous attacks on the USA like 9/11 and on all Western countries that support this project, not to mention the purely terrorist (‘shock and awe’) invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As long as Israel exists in its present form, there will never be peace.

Prophecies say that the end of the world will take place in Jerusalem, near Armageddon. In other words, the foundation of Israel in 1948 is of apocalyptic significance; it guarantees that the end of the world moves nearer. If we wanted to postpone that end, the best way would be to deconstruct Israel in its present form, though obviously with safeguards for the ordinary Jewish people, who are dupes in the affair.

16) What are your current projects and where can one find out more about Orthodox England please?

Currently, we are laying the foundations to extend the Russian Orthodox mission from Colchester to other centres in the East of England. We have a list of target towns to set up. Our target groups are Orthodox already in this country, but not practising for lack of local churches, as well as the vast masses of English people who do not practise any religion and probably never have done. (The tiny minority who already practise a religion, for example in the Church of England, should, we believe, stay there; we have never in any way tried to recruit them). To find out more, see: www.orthodoxengland.org.uk.

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.

Terrorists in Syria Kidnap Patriarch’s Brother

22 April 2013

Near the city of Aleppo, armed terrorists have kidnapped the Antiochian Orthodox Metropolitan Boulos (Paul) al-Yazigi of Aleppo and Iskanderun and a Syriac Metropolitan Ibrahim. According to details relayed to the an-Nahar agency by concerned sources, Metropolitan Boulos was on the Turkish side of his archdiocese, which extends from Aleppo to Antakya (Antioch).

Along the road on their return to Aleppo, an armed group stopped them before they could arrive in the city, murdering Metr Ibrahim’s deacon-driver and kidnapping the two metropolitans. The Orthodox metropolitan’s office relates that the two metropolitans were not injured. Metropolitan Boulos is the brother of Patriarch Youhanna (John) of Antioch (Damascus). Additional information came into an-Nahar indicating that the kidnappers include individuals from Chechnya.

This event is a challenge to Western countries, especially the USA, Great Britain and France. In camps in Turkey and the Jordan they are training, financing and arming the Sunni Islamist terrorists of 22 different nations who are operating in the war against Syria. Now that the Patriarch’s brother has been kidnapped (and is probably being held to ransom), will the West retract its support for Al-Qaida terrorism and support the native Christians of the Middle East? Or will it do as in 1054, 1204, 1453 and on countless other occasions since, and once more betray the Church of God?

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.