Category Archives: The Orthodox Church

Who Governs the Church?

Preface

In my last article, I wrote:

‘Mission on most of five continents, in most of Europe, most of Asia, in Oceania and in North and South America, lies before us. And this mission can only be carried out by a Church, which is uncompromised and untainted by State interference, by racist nationalism, by secularist ecumenism and modernism’

One reader wrote to me and said that such a Church has not existed for some 1,700 years. I replied that we must distinguish between the Church and the hierarchy. Below is my fuller reply to him.

Introduction

In forty-five years of Church life I have met between one and two hundred bishops of the present 900. I believe that at least two of them were saints. Many others were good. However, some were bad, indeed awful.

Bad bishops like the ones I have encountered traumatize their priests. The faithful quit them because nobody can trust them or some of the priests whom they ordain. Such bishops are at best celibates. (And some of them are not even celibates – see below). However, celibates can also be corrupt and incompetent and even atheists. Celibates can also be under-educated, incapable of writing anything, chronically ignorant. They can also be over-educated and nobody can understand their pompous and overblown philosophies. And celibates can prove to be incompetent simply because they are too old and ill to be competent, for instance falling asleep during Synod meetings. In their weak old age they then get manipulated by women, called in Russian ‘bishopesses’. However, most of the temptations that I have seen bishops falling into concern either morality or else power.

  1. Moral Temptations

There are three of these:

The first is money and the luxuries it provides. Who has not met a Greek bishop with a fancy villa in Athens? Or a Russian bishop with an expensive black cars. With all this goes pride, snobbery and elitism.

The second is sexual. Fortunately pedophilia is extremely rare (though I do know of two cases from the Soviet period). Sadly, homosexuality is relatively widespread among Diaspora bishops, with the episcopate of one group in the Diaspora known as ‘the gay mafia’. These like ordaining homosexual boyfriends to the priesthood, excluding married clergy and so perpetuating their vice. I have seen it. Then there are the heterosexuals, the most notorious one being the Soviet-period Metropolitan of Kiev, the notorious Filaret, whose wife had men ordained to the priesthood in return for expensive presents and flattery. One I knew here took Church funds and bought his mistress a house with the money. Another wanted to sleep with the wife of a candidate for a priesthood, He walked out of his old Diocese forever and was ordained elsewhere by a moral bishop. The senior priest (uncanonically ordained) in his old Diocese, who knew all about his bishop’s conquests, defended his bishop: ‘It’s his only fault’. After some years his Diocese came to be in a critical state. No surprises there.

Thirdly there is vanity. Vain bishops are easily manipulated. Their narcissistic vanity is used to deprive priests and their families of their parishes and income. Insults, humiliations, slanders and bullying follow them. The Diocese is ruled by flattering favourites, who support and ordain bad elements against the good. Injustice rules and awards are given to corrupt favourites. Pastoral life suffers, parishioners are not visited, the flock sees no example from above and quits the Church, as nobody cares and those who do care are punished. The sheer lack of love of the vain and narcissistic bishop who abandons the good, preferring the bad, wrecks whole dioceses. I have seen it twice in my life.

  1. Power Temptations

There are three of these:

The first is politics. Uncanonical dependancy on figures in the State leads to uncanonical actions. Thus, for centuries patriarchs of Constantinople have been appointed by Muslim sultans, British and French ambassadors and today US ambassadors. Russian bishops were appointed by lay ‘oberprocurators’, at least one of whom was an atheist. We of course know about the Soviet period. We have the example of today’s Ukraine where a Jewish-Uniat president has set up his own Church, exactly like Henry VIII in England. Power corrupts, and this is why so many recent patriarchs and bishops of Constantinople have been freemasons, trying to corrupt candidates for the priesthood, as I know.

The second is the heresy of phyletism, the Greek word for racism. We have seen so many churches draped in national flags, especially Greek, Romanian, Serbian and Georgian. In one Greek Cathedral forty years ago we saw the Greek metropolitan actually stop the Liturgy: The Greek ambassador and his family had just entered and had to be escorted by the deacon to their seats…Such is spiritual death.

The third is dictatorship. Power goes to the head of the bishop and he becomes a dry dictator, a ‘good administrator’, ‘an effective manager’. Never consulting local people whom he only has contempt for anyway, such a bishop is just a spiritually dead bureaucrat. His diocese dies.

Conclusion

Some may be scandalized by the above and even despair. I say: So what? There is nothing new in the above, for there is nothing new under the sun. Sin is intensely boring because it is just the same old thing over and over again. Given the list above, my reaction is that this proves that the Church is Divine. If the Church were a secular company, it would long ago have gone bankrupt. For the Church is not governed by bishops – and if any bishop thinks that, he is clearly insane. The Church is governed by the Holy Spirit. Man proposes, but God disposes. And that is why, they can throw and have thrown all sorts of the above bishops at us and we are still here. And they are not. Victory is always ours, for Christ stands behind us.

 

On the Liberation and Restoration of Church Life

It is impossible to recall peace without dissolving the cause of the schism – the primacy of the Pope exalting himself equal to God.

We seek and we pray for our return to that time when, being united, we spoke the same things and there was no schism between us.

St Mark of Ephesus

Fall and Liberation

The near-750 year process of the fall of the See of Constantinople since the so-called Councils of Lyon and later Ferrara-Florence is now over. It has finally fallen under a Jesuit-trained Patriarch, who in his delusion actually justifies himself, to the same millennial disease as Old Rome – Papism. New Rome fell to the same heresy of Old Rome: the lust for power justified on ethnic grounds – the mythical superiority of one race over another and over Christ, in the first case, of Latinized Germans and, in the latter case, of phyletist Hellenes. St Mark of Ephesus was right.

As a result, Constantinople parishes, few and scattered already, have been cut off from the Church and true Orthodox have begun leaving them. Withdrawing, they will join one or other of the thirteen Local Churches. Fragments of the Russian Orthodox world in North America and OCA, under Constantinople for political reasons, are hopelessly divided. Now the Orthodox elements in them can rejoin the worldwide Russian Church, returning in repentance to Orthodox practices and values in canonical conditions, without phariseeism or sectarianism.

Restoration and Rise

Now, to assume the leadership of service of the Church on earth, Whose only Head is Christ, the Patriarchate of Moscow, perhaps better repentantly renamed the Patriarchate of All Rus, must too cleanse itself of all the same Phanariot poison. This poison is the fatal mixture, summed up in utterly failed Muscovite diplomacy, of narrow nationalism and modernist ecumenism. Thus, the Third Rome must beware that it too does not fall to the same disease. When will we know that the Russian Orthodox Church is ready to assume this leadership of service, so that Church life can be restored?

  1. When there is no more Great Russian chauvinism and so no more talk of the Patriarch of Moscow as the ‘Ecumenical Patriarch’. This is the title which the Orthodox Pope of Old Rome, St Gregory the Dialogist, rightly condemned already at the end of the sixth century.
  2. When there is no more Russian Orthodox dallying with the Papacy of old Rome and the Pan-Protestant World Council of Churches, with both of which the representatives of the Phanar are naturally active. And so when there is no more new calendarism and experiments with the spiritual death of Paris ‘theology’.

Then, at last unhindered and uncompromised by the shackles of the past, we will be able to get on with our sadly interrupted mission to the seven billion Non-Orthodox, in concert with the other Twelve Local Churches. And only then shall we see Church life restored after such a disgraceful period of decadence.

 

 

 

1918-2018: The Hundred-Year Nightmare Ends: As Day Breaks the Third Rome Wakes Up At Last

Introduction

Parroting the words of the Russophobic Brzezhinzki school of string-pullers in Washington, President Poroshenko has declared that with autocephaly granted to the Ukraine ‘one of the basic geopolitical problems of the world has been solved’, adding that: ‘This is the fall of the Third Rome as the concept of Moscow having world domination’ and that autocephaly is ‘part of our pro-European strategy’ and ‘the basis for the path of development of our State and our nation’. Clearly Poroshenko, a Jew by his father and who has been seen on one occasion taking communion from the Uniats, believes in the Neo-Nazi chant of his extremists, who, instead of the traditional greeting ‘Glory to Jesus Christ’ uses: ‘Glory to the Ukraine’. In other words, he lives in a world of illusions and xenophobic lies.

In reality, the Ukrainian affair was ordered by the scared US State Department, which has used its puppet fantasist Patriarch Bartholomew to carry out its plan. The latter wanted petty revenge for the failure of his Crete junket, but in fact he has had to cut off his nose to spite his face. This marks a very positive turning point. It marks an end to the dalliance of those in the Russian Church who cultivated the dangerous Phanariot illusions of apostasy, secularism, modernism, ecumenism and venality, illusions of an Orthodoxy for show. Now Moscow has to wake up from the illusions of ‘Church diplomacy’. Now at last the tiny group in Moscow concerned can stop playing with the World Council of Churches, the Vatican and the Phanar and start being the Third Rome. We have waited for so long.

Assuming the destiny of the Russian Orthodox Church, all can now tell the Truth. After all, it is not diplomacy that sets us free, but the Truth that sets us free, and the Church is the last bastion of the Truth in this world of illusions. This means that the paralysis is at last ending. Some in Moscow weakly allowed the Phanar to interfere in the Russian Diaspora in Paris, then, much more recently, in the Ukrainian Diaspora, then in Estonia, then in the Sourozh Diocese, now at last they are waking up. We who have been abandoned for so long by the Third Rome, all the while defending it, can at last be heard. The Orthodox world can now be reconfigured – providing that the Russian Church acts responsibly, in concert with the Twelve Disciples, the other Local Churches, as the Third Rome.

I can recall nearly 40 years ago how Fr Alexei Kniazev, the rector of the St Sergius Institute in Paris, told us seminarists how he went to Constantinople in 1966 and put the question directly to Patriarch Athenagoras: ‘So are you the Oecumenical Patriarch or are you just a petty Balkan bishop?’ He never received an answer, except between the lines, and so soon after tried to join the Moscow Patriarchate – which irresponsibly rejected him. So today we ask that Moscow assumes once more the role of the Third Rome. In this matter it is not the Russian Church that is the servant of the Russian State, it is the Russian State that is the servant of the Russian Church. For the Russian Church is not Russian, but God’s, as the Church does not belong to Russia, but Russia belongs to the Church.

History

Let us recall how all this came about:   

In 1948 the freemason and notorious atomic mass murderer, Truman, obsessed with the unchallenged power of having the only weapons of mass destruction in the world, decided to take over the Patriarchate of Constantinople. His gangsters removed the Patriarch Maximos V and duly installed his fellow-mason Archbishop Athenagoras as Patriarch. In the same year Truman set up the World Council of Churches as a Pan-Protestant propaganda tool. The Local Orthodox Churches in capitalist countries were humiliatingly forced to join it. In 1961 the Ukrainian tyrant and atheist Khushchov forced the Russian Church and other Local Churches in socialist countries to join it, thinking that he could both finally finish off the Churches by 1980 and at the same time undermine the Americans.

In reply, the US State Department soon organized the Second Vatican Council and successfully protestantized the Vatican’s worldwide operation, their greatest following success being to enable the CIA to have the Polish Cardinal Wojtyla elected in order to undermine the Soviet Empire. When that Empire did duly collapse and its countries became the vassals of the ‘Truman Doctrine’, Washington declared itself the victor, briefly assuming world hegemony and ‘the end of history’. Of course, such nonsense did not match reality. The attempt to secularize and so enslave the Orthodox Church could never succeed, as it had with the Protestant and Catholic denominations. The Body of Christ cannot be enslaved by the world, because the Holy Spirit inhabits Her and transfigures Her.

Of course, the devil had tried to enslave the Church. In the 1920s he used his slave, the British freemason Patriarch Meletios Metaksakis (elected with £100,000 of Anglican money channelled through the British State), to set up a ‘Pan-Orthodox Conference’. In 1923 this imposed the Western calendar on its slaves. However, this was not enough. In 1961 Patriarch Athenagoras reactivized this ‘Conciliar’ process and in 1977 Patriarch Dimitrios nearly concluded it, but was sabotaged by St Justin (Popovich). It took nearly another forty years for the next apostate puppet in the Phanar, a graduate of the Gregorian University in Rome, to set up a ‘Council’ in Crete in 2016. However, the free Orthodox world boycotted it, as just another attempt to secularize the Church, ignoring its dogmas and canons.

 Conclusion

Now that the Church is free from the apostatic deadwood of the Truman Doctrine of US world supremacy, including over the Church of God, we can at last move forward. Ignoring the arrogant ignorance of primitive Muscovite nationalists, the Russian Church and State can now assume the burden of the Third Rome, for none now can doubt that the Second Rome is well and truly fallen and that ‘a fourth Rome there will not be’. Let us forget the expensive mascarades of diplomacy, for they have utterly failed. Only the Russian Orthodox Church, supported by Russian Orthodox statesmen, can hold the world back from its end, whither it rushes like a suicidal lemming. The Third Rome, the Patriarchate of Holy Rus, stands Risen from the Crucifixion of Atheism and we await its saving words of the Resurrection.

Now we have to be an example to all those who seek salvation, but do not know how to get there. Russia was destined to be an ark of salvation for the many peoples and has no other meaning. If it does not do this beneath the standard of Christ – no other standard will do – it will disappear from the face of the earth and then the whole world will end. Noah’s Ark is here, ready for the flood of fire that hangs over the planet. We await only its captain, the coming Tsar, who will take up the mantle of the Tsar-Martyr, the great benefactor of World Orthodoxy, reformer and builder of churches from New York to Nice, Patron of all the Local Churches. Then all the apostates and traitors will have the opportunity to repent, even at this eleventh hour. We await the Council of New Jerusalem, outside Moscow, to enlighten the world according to the Light of Christ and not to the darkness of men.

 

Orthodox Church Statistics

With various irresponsible and inaccurate articles being published at present, suggesting that the Orthodox Church has 250 million (or even 300 million!) members, we are republishing our statistical survey of the Orthodox Church. We would be grateful if anyone can correct the statistics presented, if they are incorrect. Thank you.

 

The Orthodox Church is a family of Local Churches, just like the Churches of the Galatians, the Ephesians, the Romans, the Thessalonians, the Colossians etc, as described in the letters written to them by the holy Apostle Paul. Each of the fourteen Local Orthodox Churches has a main administrative figure, a chief bishop known as a Patriarch, or in the case of smaller Churches, a Metropolitan or Archbishop. However, the Church as a whole has no earthly head, because the head of the Orthodox Church is our Lord Jesus Christ. His authority is expressed in the Orthodox Church through the Holy Spirit as revealed, particularly through Church Councils and the saints. Below you will find details of the Orthodox Churches and their approximate sizes, totalling in all over 218 million members with some 843 active bishops.

1. The Russian Orthodox Church 164,000,000

Also known as the Patriarchate of Moscow, this accounts for 75% of Orthodox. It cares for Orthodox living in the canonical Russian Orthodox territories, spread over one fifth of the planet (the former Soviet Union except for Georgia, plus China and Japan) and peopled by 62 nationalities. These territories include the Russian Federation, the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Transcarpathia (the main part of Carpatho-Russia), Kazakhstan, Central Asia and the Baltic Republics, such as Latvia (250,000). The Russian Church also includes the self-governing, multinational Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (400,000 worldwide, mainly in the Americas and Australia as well as parts of Western Europe.), the Japanese Orthodox Church and the Chinese Orthodox Church.

2. The Romanian Orthodox Church 18,800,000

Also known as the Patriarchate of Bucharest. Apart from in Romania, there are also many Romanian parishes in the Diaspora, especially in Western Europe.

3. The Greek Orthodox Church 10,000,000

Under the Archbishop of Athens, this Church cares for all Orthodox in Greece.

4. The Serbian Orthodox Church 9,000,000

The canonical territory of the Patriarchate of Belgrade covers Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia. There are also many Serbian parishes in the worldwide Serbian Diaspora.

5. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church 4,500,000

The Patriarchate of Sofia covers Bulgaria and has a few churches in the Diaspora.

6. The Georgian Orthodox Church 3,500,000

The Patriarchate of Tbilisi covers Georgia and a very small Georgian Diaspora.

7. The Patriarchate of Constantinople 3,500,000

This includes Greek Orthodox in Istanbul (about 1,000), those on Greek islands such as Crete and Rhodes (700,000), and above all the Greek Diaspora in the Americas, Western Europe and Australia. There are also twenty-four autonomous parishes in Finland and small groups of other Non-Greek Orthodox elsewhere.

8. The Patriarchate of Antioch 1,800,000

The canonical territory of the Arab Patriarch, who lives in Damascus, includes Syria, the Lebanon and Iraq. There are also parishes in the Diaspora, including some 10,000 ex-Protestants in the USA and 300 ex-Protestants in the UK.

9. The Patriarchate of Alexandria 1,600,000

Although for historical reasons its Patriarch is a Greek and his appointment is in the care of the Greek government, this Patriarchate is in Egypt. It also cares for St Catherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai, but the vast bulk of its faithful are Africans, spread over 54 African countries.

10. The Orthodox Church of Cyprus 700,000

Under an Archbishop, this Church cares for all Greek Orthodox in Cyprus.

11. The Polish Orthodox Church 600,000

Under the Metropolitan of Warsaw, this Church cares for Orthodox of all origins who live mainly in eastern Poland.

12. The Albanian Orthodox Church 200,000

Under the Archbishop of Tirana, this Church cares for Orthodox in southern Albania, most of whom are of Greek origin.

  1. The Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia 170,000

Led by a Metropolitan, this Church cares for Carpatho-Russian, Slovak and Czech Orthodox, as well as large numbers of recent Ukrainian Orthodox immigrants to Slovakia and the Czech Lands.

14.The Patriarchate of Jerusalem 130,000

Although its Patriarch is a Greek and his appointment is in the care of the Greek government, this Patriarchate cares for Arab Orthodox in Palestine and the Jordan.

 

 

 

 

The City is Lost! The Church is Found!

Introduction: The Bad Old Days

It is always sad to see the clerical elite of Local Churches fall into the sins of treachery and apostasy. It happened in Constantinople just before its Fall in 1453, when those in charge fell into the sin of Uniatism, hoping that the Vatican, and not God, would save them from the Muslim invader. It happened in 1948 when CIA thugs kidnapped the canonical Patriarch Maximos V and threatened to kill him if he did not get into their Presidential aeroplane and go into exile in Geneva, appointing in his place the half-Orthodox American Archbishop Athenagoras. As an eyewitness, his Archdeacon and later the Bishop of Birmingham, told me, Patriarch Maximos said as he was being forcemarched away: ‘The City is lost!’

And now it is happening again, with the latest anti-canonical decisions of the latest Patriarch, a Turkish citizen who depends entirely on the US State Department for his survival, with his absurd ‘Council of Crete’ and, above all, his meddling in the territories of other Local Churches. Whether in the USA (setting up its own jurisdiction, thus destroying Church unity), in Russia (supporting the renovationists against St Tikhon), in Finland (the notorious Aav schism), in France (the Evlogian schism), in Estonia (the ‘Apostolic Orthodox’ schism), in England (the Sourozh schism), in Greece (in the ‘New Territories’), in Macedonia or now in the Ukraine, tiny Constantinople has been trying to create for itself a flock which it does not have, by stealing the flocks of other Churches, in disobedience to the most basic canons, but with the support of illegitimate, US-backed, regimes.

Of course, there is still, but only just, time for repentance for the latest intended insanity of Constantinople. This is in the impoverished and wartorn Ukraine, controlled by vicious US-sponsored corrupt oligarchs, who live no differently from primitive African tribal leaders. However, if repentance does not come, despite the last minute journey to the Phanar and the desperate pleas of Patriarch Kyrill for repentance last week, then Constantinople with its tiny flock will fall away from the Church. This would be tragic for them – but not for the rest of the Church, for Divine Providence can always bring good out of human stupidity.

Possible Positive Results

Firstly, as Constantinople, for centuries the plaything of foreign powers and their bribes, has over a century become the bastion of modernism, all the Orthodox parts of that sorry Patriarchate, its faithful clergy and people and Mt Athos, could transfer to an Orthodox Church, at last feeling at ease under genuine Orthodox bishops. Here the most likely option would be to enter the present Church of Greece, though with long-awaited guarantees for the internationalization of Athos and so permission for thousands of monks from other countries to live there. This would become inevitable if the Archbishop of Athens took the title of Patriarch of Constantinople. This would be logical, given that the present one is falling into schism and even heresy.

Secondly, the modernists with their papal calendar and liturgical illiteracy, who have infiltrated some smaller Local Churches, would find themselves without support. Thus, we might see the eight smaller Churches, Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, returning to the Orthodox calendar, as the Church of Poland already has. In this way, they would repent and rejoin the 80% of the Orthodox world that remained faithful in the Churches of Russia, Serbia, Georgia and Jerusalem. The old calendar schisms in the above eight Churches could thus also be overcome.

Thirdly, it could lead to solving the divisive Diaspora problem, created initially by the phyletism of Constantinople. This would put all Orthodox nationalities under the single but multinational jurisdiction of the Russian Church, as was the case in the USA before the 1917 Revolution. This is not some sort of hegemony a la Constantinople, Eastern Papism or ecclesiastical imperialism, but preparation for autocephaly. This has been the case with other Orthodox missions of the Russian Orthodox Church down the centuries, from St Stephen of Perm to St John of Shanghai. Unlike Constantinople, the Russian Church has always helped towards independence, not created dependence. We cannot forget that Constantinople has never freely given any Church autocephaly, but has always clung on to power for as long as possible.

Conclusion: The Good New Days

In the future, we can see a real Orthodox Council, not a Halfodox one as in Crete, being held in order to anathematize the poison of the dogmatic, canonical, spiritual and moral errors of the Constantinople elite over the last 100 years, from new calendarism to liturgical modernism, from ecumenism to simony, from papism to the remarriage of priests.

In the future, we can see the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches returning and becoming autonomous Churches within the Russian Orthodox Church. We can see the Albanian Church returning and becoming an autonomous Church within the Church of Greece, or rather Patriarch of Constantinople, as it would then be called, making the present fourteen Local Churches into ten. We can see the diptychs being changed to classing these ten Local Churches by size: Russia, Romania, Constantinople (Greece), Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, Alexandria, Cyprus and Jerusalem.

In the future, we can see four united and autonomous Metropolias being founded in the Diaspora under the Russian Church, awaiting Autocephaly in the fullness of time, like the Churches of Japan and China already. These would be the future: Church of Western Europe, grouping all the ex-Roman Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe, from Iceland to Finland and from Portugal to Hungary; Church of North America (thus ending its present jurisdictional chaos); Church of Latin America; Church of Oceania. This would leave only certain parts of Asia, like the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia, to come under the jurisdiction of various Local Churches, perhaps the Antiochian and the Russian between them.

For 100 years, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has in its purely worldly, prideful and racial fantasy of ecclesiastical imperialism, systematically followed divisive policies. These  have created schisms, both old calendarist, fragmenting the Church by repressing zeal, and phyletist, fragmenting the Church by nationalism, as at present in the Ukraine, all around the Orthodox world. It has made itself into an Eastern Papacy, thus gradually divorcing itself from the Church and its ecclesiology. Its departure from the Church in the coming months, however tragic for the often elderly individuals concerned, would actually clear the air, overcoming past injustices and obstructive barriers to unity, making progress at last possible after a century of frustration. This may be the moment that we have been waiting for ever since 1917.

 

 

The Orthodox Church: 218 million faithful and 907 bishops

The Orthodox Church is a family of Local Churches, just like the Churches of the Galatians, the Ephesians, the Romans, the Thessalonians, the Colossians etc, as described in the letters written to them by the holy Apostle Paul. Each of the fourteen Local Orthodox Churches has a main administrative figure, a chief bishop known as a Patriarch, or in the case of smaller Churches, a Metropolitan or Archbishop. However, the Church as a whole has no earthly head, because the head of the Orthodox Church is our Lord Jesus Christ. His authority is expressed in the Orthodox Church through the Holy Spirit as revealed, particularly through Church Councils and the saints.

Below you will find details of the Orthodox Churches and their approximate sizes, totalling in all over 218 million members with 843 active bishops. However, this does not including the 52 titular bishops of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, where the term bishop or metropolitan is particularly often used as an honorific award and the 14 bishops of the 90,000-strong North American (‘OCA’) group under the Russian Orthodox Church, which is not universally recognized. This brings the real total to 907.

1. The Russian Orthodox Church 164,000,000

Also known as the Patriarchate of Moscow, this accounts for 75% of all Orthodox and has 368 bishops. (Another 14 bishops are to be found in the dependent North American group known as the OCA). It cares for Orthodox living in the canonical Russian Orthodox territory, spread over one fifth of the planet (the former Soviet Union except for Georgia, plus China and Japan) and peopled by 62 nationalities. These territories include the Russian Federation, the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Transcarpathia (the main part of Carpatho-Russia), Kazakhstan, Central Asia and the Baltic Republics, such as Latvia (250,000). The Russian Church also includes the self-governing multinational Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (400,000 worldwide, mainly in the Americas and Australia as well as parts of Western Europe), the Japanese Orthodox Church and the tiny Chinese Orthodox Church.

2. The Romanian Orthodox Church 18,800,000

Also known as the Patriarchate of Bucharest, it has 53 bishops. Apart from in Romania, there are also many Romanian parishes in the Diaspora, especially in Western Europe.

3. The Greek Orthodox Church 10,000,000

Under the Archbishop of Athens, this Church with 101 bishops cares for all Orthodox in Greece.

  1. The Serbian Orthodox Church 9,000,000

The canonical territory of the Patriarchate of Belgrade covers Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia and the Church has 44 bishops. There are also many Serbian parishes in the worldwide Serbian Diaspora.

  1. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church 4,500,000

The Patriarchate of Sofia covers Bulgaria, has 15 bishops and a few churches in the Diaspora.

  1. The Georgian Orthodox Church 3,500,000

The Patriarchate of Tbilisi covers Georgia and a very small Georgian Diaspora.  It has 37 bishops.

  1. The Patriarchate of Constantinople 3,400,000

This includes Greek Orthodox in Istanbul (about 1,000), those on Greek islands such as Crete and Rhodes (700,000), and above all the Greek Diaspora in the Americas, Western Europe and Australia. There are also twenty-four autonomous parishes in Finland and small groups of other Non-Greek Orthodox, mainly Ukrainian, elsewhere. It has 73 active bishops and 52 titular bishops, 125 in all.

  1. The Patriarchate of Antioch 1,800,000

The canonical territory of the Arab Patriarch, who lives in Damascus, includes Syria, the Lebanon and Iraq. There are 44 bishops and also many parishes in the Diaspora, including some 10,000 ex-Protestants in the USA.

  1. The Patriarchate of Alexandria 1,400,000

Although for historical reasons its Patriarch is a Greek and his appointment is in the care of the Greek government, this Patriarchate is in Egypt. It also cares for St Catherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai, but the vast bulk of its faithful are Africans, spread over 54 African countries. It has 31 bishops.

  1. The Orthodox Church of Cyprus 700,000

Under an Archbishop, this Church cares for all Greek Orthodox in Cyprus and has 17 bishops.

  1. The Polish Orthodox Church 600,000

Under the Metropolitan of Warsaw, this Church cares for Orthodox of all origins who live mainly in eastern Poland. It has 12 bishops.

  1. The Albanian Orthodox Church 200,000

Under the Archbishop of Tirana, this Church cares for Orthodox in southern Albania, most of whom are of Greek origin. It has 6 bishops.

13. The Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia 170,000

Led by a Metropolitan, this Church cares for Carpatho-Russian, Slovak and Czech Orthodox, as well as large numbers of recent Ukrainian Orthodox immigrants to Slovakia and the Czech Lands. It has 6 bishops.

  1. The Patriarchate of Jerusalem 130,000

Although its Patriarch is a Greek and his appointment and that of other bishops is in the care of the Greek government, this Patriarchate’ flock consists mainly of Palestinian Orthodox in Palestine and the Jordan. It has 20 bishops.

 

Towards a Planet of Twelve Patriarchates

Today’s Reality

The first millennium saw the development of seven Local Orthodox Churches, arranged in five Patriarchates and two Autocephalous Churches: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and the Churches of Georgia and Cyprus. In theory, these covered the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe. Their number decreased to six after the defection of Rome to its new creed of Papalism and the Western tip of Europe fell away from the Church.

However, in the second millennium the number increased. This happened when the Patriarchate of Constantinople was infected by Greek nationalism (Hellenism) and monolingualism. This nationalism had already played a role in the nationalistic foundations of Monophysite and Nestorian denominations in Egypt, Ethiopia, Armenia and groups in Syria, but it fragmented further in Balkanization. Thus, the autocephalous Serbian Church was founded, followed by the Russian, Romanian and Bulgarian, creating another four Local Churches.

In the 19th century Imperialist Britain also forced the Greek Church to separate from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, making eleven Local Churches. Then in the 20th century, the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches were carved out of the Russian and Serbian Churches for political reasons and the Albanian Church came into being, because the border between Greece and Albania was unjustly delineated, adding another three Local Churches. Thus, at the present time there are fourteen Local Orthodox Churches, so many of which exist only because of the vagaries of politics and nationalism.

What If?

What if the twelve apostles were to meet today in a new Council of Jerusalem, as they did before in 33 AD, with the above information, a map of the world as it is in front of them and information about history, geography, culture and present-day populations (Asia, 4.45 billion; Africa, 1.2 billion; the Americas 1 billion; Europe 740 million; Oceania 40 million), how might they divide the world amongst themselves? Perhaps into Twelve Local Orthodox Churches, something like this?

  1. The Patriarchate of Jerusalem and All the Holy Lands. (A Church based in the City of the Resurrection and covering today’s Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia and the Balkans (Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and ex-Yugoslavia), thus uniting two of the present ancient Patriarchates and seven of the present autocephalous Churches.
  2. The Patriarchate of Baghdad and All the Middle East. (A Church to cover all the Christian and Muslim Middle East, from the Lebanon, Syria and the Jordan to the Arabian Peninsula, to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan).
  3. The Patriarchate of Nairobi and All Africa. (A Church based in Nairobi to cover the 1.2 billion people of the African Continent. Main languages: English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish and native African languages).
  4. The Patriarchate of Moscow and All the Russias. (A Church covering most of Northern Eurasia, one sixth of the planet, including Mongolia and the Korean Peninsula).
  5. The Patriarchate of Vienna and All Western Europe. (A Church based in the cultural heart of Central Europe, and not in off-centre Rome, to cover all of what was Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe, from Iceland to Hungary and Portugal to Finland, including the territories of the Local Churches in Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia).
  6. The Patriarchate of New Delhi and All India. (A Church to cover the ancient territory of Hindu Civilization with nearly 1.4 billion people, together with Nepal and Bhutan).
  7. The Patriarchate of Beijing and All China. (A Church to cover the nearly 1.5 billion Chinese population, Taiwan and Tibet).
  8. The Patriarchate of Tokyo and All Japan. (A Church to cover the ancient and unique Japanese Civilization).
  9. The Patriarchate of Bangkok and All South-East Asia. (A Church to cover the largely Muslim and Buddhist populations of Bangladesh, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia).
  10. The Patriarchate of Manila and All Oceania. (A Church to cover the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand and all the Pacific Islands).
  11. The Patriarchate of Washington and All Northern America. (A Church to cover the USA, Canada and the Carribean. Main languages: English and French).
  12. The Patriarchate of Rio de Janeiro and All Latin America. (A Church to cover South and Central America and Mexico. Main languages: Spanish and Portuguese).

The Gap Between Reality and What If?

As we can see from the above, only Churches No 1, 2, 3 and 4 already exist, although: Church No 1 is at present tiny and seems to be run largely as a Greek clerical colony; Church No 2, though claiming to be the Church ‘of All the East’ is at present small, based in Damascus/Beirut, though claiming to be in Antioch in Turkey, and is largely run by four merchant families; Church No 3 is also small, and though claiming to be ‘of All Africa’ is governed almost entirely by Non-African bishops, is based very far from its flock, in Alexandria, and has converted only 1% of those in its canonical territory. Although Church No 4 would remain much as now, Churches Nos 5-12, to cover some 5.5 billion human-beings, do not even exist.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

 

Christ or Antichrist: There is No Room for Half-Christ

At the present time the politically-minded representatives of a minority of fewer than 20% of members of the Orthodox Church oppose the representatives of the majority of over 80%. This was clearly seen at the 2016 Inter-Orthodox forum in Crete, boycotted by representatives of over 80% of Orthodox and whose pre-written, ‘Halfodox’ documents respected Orthodox bishops refused to sign. The representatives of nearly 20% are from the Greek and EU parts of the Church that are US/Western run and influenced; the representatives of the 80% are the politically free, who are able to keep to the Christian Tradition, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and who believe in the Incarnation of the Church in the Christian Empire.

The 20% who in fact, consciously or unconsciously, betray the Church are composed of two groups.
The first group is formed of petty nationalists, who fall into idolatry by putting their national flag above the multi-national Church. The result of such nationalism is that those outside their nationalism are swiftly assimilated into surrounding groups. For example in the Diaspora, the descendants of such nationalists, speaking above all the local language and assimilating the local culture, are soon absorbed into the Non-Orthodox majority. Thus the churches of such nominal, nationalistic Orthodox rapidly die out, as the foreign nationalism of nationalist forebears has no relevance to descendants born in the Diaspora and they quit the Church.

The second group is formed of modernists, who have no deep love of the Church, no spiritual life or values, and tell you that it is irrelevant whether you belong to the Church or not – as ‘it is, after all, just another culture’. They are therefore inferiority-complex relativists and so ecumenists. Such people used to baptise their children (if they baptised them at all) into what they perceived to be the majority religion of the country where they lived. In other words, such modernists are relativists because they are conformists, who swim with the tide of the Establishment where they live, whatever it may be. Their Diaspora descendants also have little time for the Church and are quickly assimilated into the atheist masses.

As a result of the defection of one emigre group of such modernists, already dissident before the Revolution, which indeed they brought about, to the US-run, largely nationalist and modernist Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church has had to build a new Cathedral in Paris. This is a Cathedral for those Orthodox who are faithful to the integral Christian Tradition, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and who believe in the Incarnation of Christ and so of the Church in the Christian Empire. Only here, for example, is the Orthodox calendar adhered to, only here is the tradition of confession before communion adhered to, only here do women keep to the Christian Tradition of modest dress. In other words, only here are spiritual ties to the integrity of the Church kept.

After consecrating both the Russian Orthodox Cathedrals in London and Paris in the last two months, it is clear that the Russian Orthodox Patriarch is intent on witnessing to the integral Orthodox Christian Tradition before the Western world. This is a clear rejection of the watered down, modernist, relativist and ecumenist Cretan or Westernized version of Orthodoxy, created by the neocon sponsors of Greek Orthodoxy in Washington. This anti-dogmatic Halfodoxy is unable to witness anything to anyone except its inferiority as a merely exotic version of Western secularism.

Today, 100 years after the blood-soaked Revolution, the Church is returning to witness to the spiritually damaged Western world that the Western-developed, globalist atheism that persecuted it for three generations in the Soviet Union, in the greatest persecution seen in history but which is virtually ignored in the guilty West, is dead. Moreover, this clearly implies that if the Western world continues its adoption of that globalist atheism, then it too is dead. As in 2016 Western people after Western people re-assert their national identities, to the fury of their power-grasping, US/EU political and media establishments, the message of uncompromised Orthodox Christianity is at least being heeded.

1916-2016: Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’.

Exalt the Lord our God and worship at His footstool; for He is holy.

Psalm 98, 5 (Septuagint)

Rus is the footstool of the Throne of the Lord.

St John of Kronstadt

Foreword: Personal

However absurd it may seem, including to myself, I have long felt and observed signposts to my destiny in my heritage and the life of Tsar Nicholas II. For example, the future Christian Emperor Tsar Nicholas II was born in the Alexander Palace in the Imperial Capital of Saint Petersburg on the feast-day of St Job the Much-Suffering in 1868. At the same time my great-grandfather Thomas was born in the poorest conditions of the workhouse in a provincial village in Eastern England. However, fifty years later, in 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, whose emblem was the double-headed eagle uniting east and west, the Imperial Family and their faithful servants were murdered in Ekaterinburg, a city in the Urals on the confines of Europe and Asia, uniting east and west. As for my great-grandfather, he died in the same village as he was born in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands. That invasion ended four years later with the liberation of Vienna, where my father went in 1945, and of Berlin by those whose homeland had been so treacherously and bloodily attacked with death, rape, fire and pillage.

I was born on the 19th July, the day in 1918 on which the assassins of the Russian Imperial Family ritually finished destroying their earthly remains. As a child, I collected postage stamps: only one stood out from the 3,000 others – that with the face of Tsar Nicholas II seemingly calling to me to serve his cause. Almost exactly fifty years after the Tsar’s martyrdom, in 1968, 100 years after the birth of the martyred Tsar and 50 years after his sacrificial martyrdom, in a Scottish city almost on the same latitude as Saint Petersburg, I was called to learn Russian and three months later, in a message coming from the east, called to serve the Russian Orthodox Church. Then there was the tutor to the Tsarevich, Fr Nicholas Gibbes, the first English Orthodox priest in almost a millennium, like me a man from the provinces in an Orthodox country as a teacher and becoming a Russian Orthodox priest. Fr Nicholas served in Oxford, where I studied in the same college as Felix Yusupov, the murderer of Tsar Nicholas’ holy elder. And in darkest 1974, when there seemed no hope of it at all, I was called on to write of the coming resurrection of the Russian Church and Empire (1). I never sought any of this, and yet this has been my calling and my destiny.

1916-1981: The Fall of the Christian Empire and of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire

On 30 December 1916, Anglo-Zionist spies in Saint Petersburg, sent by those who by then had in 1916 taken control of the bankrupted British government and aided by decadent, anti-Christian, Russian aristocrats, carried out the assassination of a much-slandered Russian Orthodox holy man and spiritual counsellor to the Imperial Family. Exactly as foretold by its victim, this would begin the process that would lead to the overthrow in 1917 of the Tsar, then on the very point of victory and so of ending the vile and atrocious First World War that was slaughtering the flower of Europe. His overthrow would lead to almost two more years of vile war, millions more of victims, and unspeakable bloodshed throughout the Russian Empire, exactly as the Mother of God forewarned innocent peasant children in distant Portugal in 1917. This meant the collapse of the Christian Empire after 1600 years and its replacement by two false Empires, both founded on Western materialism by those who had engineered that collapse. These Empires were the Bolshevik Atheist Empire and the Western Atheist Empire, the first centred in Moscow, the second in New York.

In 1981, 64 years after the 1917 coup d’etat in Saint Petersburg, the only remaining free part of the Russian Orthodox Church, that outside Russia and centred in New York, carried out a heroic act. This was under the leadership of the ever-memorable Metropolitan Philaret (+ 1985), once an exile in China, who had been chosen as Metropolitan by Archbishop John of Shanghai, once also an exile in China (+ 1966). The Metropolitan’s surname was Voznesensky, also the name of the street of the Ipatiev House, where the Imperial Family was martyred in Ekaterinburg. (In 1998 the Metropolitan’s earthly remains were found incorrupt). As for Archbishop John, canonized a generation later (2), he had been slandered, persecuted and even taken to court by false Russian brethren in exile. This heroic 1981 act was when the Church of the emigration at long last canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors. At their head stood Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family and servants, faithful to the end. This act was an act of repentance on behalf of all Russian Orthodox and those Russian émigrés whose ancestors had vilified and betrayed Tsar Nicholas.

This repentance of part of the Russian emigration, living in apparent freedom, had taken a scandalously long 64 years. St John of Shanghai had called for it almost fifty years before. Nevertheless, it represented the long-awaited repentance by descendants of those in the emigration who by treason had abdicated from the Throne and brought about the February 1917 coup d’etat. They had then fled for their lives into an often impoverished and harsh exile, blaming the Tsar for their foolishness, treason and poverty. For that February coup had in turn led to the October 1917 seizure of power by satanic atheists who then ritually murdered the Tsar, his Family and faithful servants. This 1981 canonization led to the rapid deaths of three Soviet leaders from 1982 on, and to the end of stagnation. And in 1991, 75 years almost to the day after its founding act on 30 December 1916, the Bolshevik Atheist Empire, centred in Moscow and which had murdered the Tsar collapsed. Thus, the murders of the Tsar and Imperial Family, ordered from New York in 1918, were literally reversed by an act ordered in New York in 1981. The first part of the curse had been lifted.

In 1988 we wrote that what had begun in New York must be completed in Moscow, that is, by the vast majority of the Russian Orthodox Church, inside Russia. We did not know then that the Bolshevik Atheist Empire would, so painfully for its peoples, finally dissolve in 1991, 75 years almost to the day after the December 1916 assassination by British spies. This is what we wrote then: ‘Our hope is from the living and suffering faithful on Earth and in Heaven, the Martyrs and Confessors of Christ, the One Lord and Saviour. Is then the seventy-year Babylonian captivity of the Russian Church now coming to an end? As yet we cannot know for sure. We shall be certain only when all those many Martyrs and Confessors are venerated without exception, openly, officially and universally in the Russian lands, when the work begun in New York is brought to its fullness in Moscow; this will be the ‘True Pascha’ of which St Seraphim prophetically spoke…The canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors is a gift of God made through the Church for the spiritual enrichment of the whole Orthodox Church, of all the Orthodox Christian peoples…’.

ReChristianization and DeChristianization

When in June 1941 Nazi tanks invaded the Soviet Union, in the western Ukraine (formerly eastern Poland), naïve Ukrainian peasants greeted the Nazis as liberators from Bolshevism, because the peasants saw crosses on the Nazi tanks. They soon learned of the evil of the Nazis who sadistically slaughtered all who stood in their way. Paradoxically, the Nazi invasion brought about a measure of repentance in the Bolshevik Atheist Empire and the reinvigoration of the implicit Christian values of pre-Revolutionary culture that had been preserved, in terms of the provision of social justice (in the Tsar’s Russia you received free health care for the payment of a stamp costing one rouble per year) and also of ‘socially conservative values’, of normal family life. There dawned on some the realization that the liberation from Nazism of Vienna and Berlin in 1945 could have happened in 1917 under Tsar Nicholas II. That would have been far less bloody, far more disciplined, like the Russian liberation of Paris in 1814, with concerts of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin in the main squares of those cities to celebrate Christian culture, as in Palmyra this year.

The story of the slow but gradual reChristianization of the Russian Lands after 1941, increasing especially rapidly fifty years later, after 1991, is the reverse of the Western story. If the red star of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire became ever more cross-like, the white star of the Western Atheist Empire became ever more satan-like. The two became like two trains on parallel tracks, but heading in opposite directions, to heaven and to hell. Unlike the Bolshevik Atheists, who did not reject their inheritance of social justice and socially conservative moral values from the Tsar’s Empire, Western Atheists have rejected Christian culture. True, anti-Christianity had been inherent in Western history from the Crusades to Wars of ‘Religion’, from Colonization to the French Revolution, from the French and British siding with Islam to invade Russia in 1854 or the German siding with Islam against Russia in 1914. But in the 1960s, 50 years after the Western-orchestrated ‘Russian Revolution’ of 1917, the West entered into a frenzy of deChristianization, rejecting all Christian values implicit in its culture, even male and female roles in the family, resulting in today’s gender hysteria.

1981-2016: The Fall of the Western Atheist Empire

So, in August 2000 the far greater part of the Russian Orthodox Church, that inside Russia, was at last freed, completing the work begun in New York 19 years earlier, canonizing the New Martyrs and Confessors, at their head Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family. This has led in turn to the process that is now reversing the second part of the blood-soaked pattern of catastrophic 20th century and early 21st century history. In other words, since 2000 Russia has been rising and the Western Atheist Empire, centred in New York, its myths of ‘freedom and democracy’ spread like tentacles throughout the world, has been falling. Just as New York freed Moscow between 1981 and 2000, so since 2000 Moscow has been freeing New York. This is the fall of the Empire founded on the ruins of the Christian Empire by traitors in 1917, bringing US troops into the Great War, just as demoralized Russian Imperial troops left it. That ensured 100 years of worldwide bloodshed, just as the Mother of God had warned peasant children in Fatima in Portugal in 1917, though those children would be bullied into silence and their revelation utterly deformed by men of the Vatican machine.

Thus, on the feast-day of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, 11 September 2001, we witnessed the attack on the New York Twin Towers, the beheading of the Western Atheist Babylon. Engineered in secret by forces still unknown, though much suspected, this murderous attack with its 3,000 victims foretold the beginning of the collapse of the Western Atheist Empire that stretches throughout North America, Western Europe, Australasia and to vassal states like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. It had come to power by financing from New York and organizing the collapse of the Christian Empire eighty-four years before, in 1917. 1917 to 2001: 1984 had indeed come. For the collapse of the Twin Towers did not lead to repentance and the questions, ‘Why is this happening to us?, and, ‘What have we done to deserve this?, as did the collapse of the Tower of Siloam (Lk 13, 1-5), but to illegal, unjustifiable, vengeful, bloody and chaotic invasions of innocent Middle Eastern and Islamic countries. These have in turn bankrupted the indebted US branch of the Western Empire and led to unbearable anarchy and unspeakable misery for the peoples in those lands.

Why did these invasions take place? For oil and gas? For strategic advantage and to set up ever more US military bases? For the usual neo-colonial, Western bullying and asset-stripping of weaker countries, unable to defend themselves against sophisticated arms of ‘shock and awe’? Yes, superficially, all this was the case, but this was only a superficial reason, to keep greedy banksters and military industrialists quiet. In reality, these bloody invasions of Islamic countries, carried out by the neocon elite against the interests of ordinary, hoodwinked and now bankrupted Americans, zombified by their corporate media, took place for another reason. They were designed to weaken the Muslim world, so that the Temple in Jerusalem can be rebuilt by the Zionists in the place of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and there the representative of their chief, the prince of this world (Jn 14, 13), can be enthroned. This is why the possible election of the nationalist and populist Trump next month is feared as a huge setback to their plans by the ‘Anglo-Zionist’ neocons. For whatever he may be, he may at least put US internal affairs above meddling in other countries’ internal affairs.

These invasions are also causing the collapse of the European branch of the Western Empire, called the European Union, a weak group of vassal puppet-states controlled by the American Union and heir to the Soviet Union in terms of its tyranny. This absurd, overstretched and bankrupted Union, never wanted by its peoples but only by its moneyed elite, and used to extend a Fourth Reich of German political and economic hegemony over all Europe, is now being overwhelmed by the invasion of Islamic refugees, resulting in divisions everywhere. This leaves only a weakened Western German core, set up to lead Europe under US control at the end of the Second World War, when it was occupied and colonized by US troops. However, if the countries that make up the present EU can regain their freedom and sovereignty, Europe could be saved by returning to its cultural roots. It could return not to recent human and political manipulations and cheap surrogates like Protestantism and Catholicism, but to its real Christian first millennium roots, so long lost, forgotten, scorned and despised, to Orthodoxy Christianity, to the Church of God.

Afterword: The Christian Empire May Rise Again

Today the Russian Federation, once the centre of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire which was dissolved 25 years ago in great pain for its peoples, collapsed through treason and cynical lack of belief in anything except self-interest, so-called Communists becoming Capitalists overnight, is starting to save itself. The Soviet Union had to die if it were to turn its back, however hesitantly, on the Bolshevik heritage of alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce. Thus, the restoration by patriots of the Christian Empire after the 100-year long nightmare that began at the end of 1916 now actually looks possible. In this way the Russian Federation can start to save the ever more fragile European nations of the Western Atheist Empire, bringing them back to their senses, back to true freedom (not the ‘freedom’ to murder millions of children in the abortion holocaust or the freedom for sexual perversion), to true culture (not the Coca-Cola culture of feeble imitations of imported cowboy culture) and to their own national sovereignty (not national degradation). A spectre haunts Europe – the spectre of freedom, sovereignty and national restoration, which are spelled Brexit.

But why is this process of salvation, which is now beginning, nowhere yet complete? Because nowhere is repentance yet complete. St Seraphim of Sarov said: ‘I will glorify the Tsar who glorifies me’. Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’. But for the Tsar to be glorified, we must first be brought together into Rus by full repentance, by understanding the sin of regicide and all that followed and by accepting the Christian values which he and his family incarnated. This will mean those in the dead Bolshevik Atheist Empire, and at least some in the Western Atheist Empire, which is also to die, overcoming their treason, lies and prejudices about the Christian Empire of the last Tsar. Only when this has been done can the Lord raise up the still unrevealed and unknown man who is to become the next Christian Emperor, the next and perhaps the last Tsar. He alone will resist him who is to be enthroned by our enemies in Jerusalem, as St John of Kronstadt prophesied. But the next and coming Christian Emperor will not appear until the masses are first ready to accept and glorify the last Christian Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. Yea, come, Lord!

Notes:

1. ‘Beloved Land, soon to be made fragrant and all-holy, shone through and warmed by the love of so many martyrs’ blood, there is an unknown redolence and radiant light in thy still brightening churches; we neither ask why nor question how, but we know and feel and have Faith’. (From ‘Premonition’, Chapter I of ‘Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition’, English Orthodox Trust, 1995, 1997 and 2014).

2. St John was the first saint of the Church Outside Russia. Two others have since followed: Bishop Jonah of Hankou (Hangchow – also in China) (+ 1925) canonized in 1996, and Archbishop Seraphim of Sofia (+ 1950), canonized in 2016. Will Metropolitan Philaret be the fourth? His possible canonical canonization under discussion.

“This article also appeared on Katehon.com http://katehon.com/article/1916-2016-today-tsar-nicholas-ii-says-i-will-glorify-those-who-glorify-me”.

Christ the Invincible Power

Answers to Questions from Recent Conversations and Correspondence

Q: When did you first become conscious of the Russian Orthodox Church?

A: My introduction to the Orthodox Church was through the local saints of England in my native north Essex, notably St Edmund, but also St Albright (Ethelbert), St Cedd, St Botolph and St Osyth. However, as regards the Russian Orthodox Church as such, my first encounter was almost fifty years ago, just after my 12th birthday, in August 1968. As a result of that revelation, I began teaching myself Russian in October of that year in Colchester because I already knew that the Russian Orthodox Church is my spiritual home. However, I had to wait nearly another seven years until I could take part in Russian Orthodox life, as in those days (it is not much better now) there were so few Russian churches anywhere. I only managed to visit any Russian churches in 1973.

Q: Which part of the Russian Church did you join?

A: Having been told by two of its members that the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) would not allow me to join it because I was English (I had no idea at that time that my great-grandmother was Russian, I only discovered that distant link much later), I had no alternative but to join the Moscow Patriarchate. They may have been many things in those distant days, but at least they were not racists.

Q: What was your path to the priesthood after that?

A: A very hard one. First of all, since I could not live and work in Russia on account of the Cold War at that time, for my first job I went to live and work in Greece. I thought that was the next best alternative. After a year there and visiting the then Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, I understood that the Balkan Churches were no solution to the need for a Local Orthodox Church in the West. They were all inward-looking, culturally very narrow and hopelessly nationalistic. Later, contacts with Romanians and Georgians told me the same about them and in the Romanian case there is the huge problem of simony. So, with Russia closed off, in 1979 with the blessing of Metr Antony (Bloom) I went to study at the St Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, which I had in my ignorance imagined to be a Russian Orthodox seminary.

Q: What was it in fact?

A: It was the remains of a Russian Orthodox seminary mingled with an institute of philosophy and, frankly, of heresy. It openly preached modernism or Renovationism, which is Protestant-based, and is therefore not even remotely interesting to someone coming from a country like England with a Protestant culture, so alien to me. One English priest, rather harshly, called St Serge a Methodist Sunday School. Very harsh, but there was some truth in it.

Q: Why did you not think of going to Jordanville in the USA?

A: For the same reason as before. I was repeatedly told by members of ROCOR that they only took Russians. Remember in those days there was no internet, no advice, you had to make your own way, you went by what local representatives told you, even if it was incorrect.

Q: What happened next?

A: In 1982 I was offered the priesthood by the Moscow Patriarchate on terms which I can only describe as scandalous. I walked out, never to return, and enquired again at the Church Outside Russia. I got the same answer as in 1974, though I noted that this time there were actually a few ex-Anglicans in a separate branch of ROCOR in England. However, these rather eccentric conservative Anglicans seemed to have no interest in the Russian Orthodox Church, but only in being anti-Anglican and they had a huge interest in fanatical Greek Orthodox sects. Never having been Anglican and having lived in Greece, I had no interest in either. This was all the more frustrating since ROCOR had just canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors and naturally I had their icons and venerated them. Nevertheless, in 1983, I decided to emigrate to France and join my wife’s jurisdiction, the Paris Jurisdiction.

Q: Wasn’t that foolhardy? I mean you already knew about the problem of modernism there?

A: What you have to understand is that in Paris in 1981 they had elected a new Archbishop. Under the very elderly and saintly old one, renovationists had come to the fore, taking advantage of his old age, but the new Archbishop promised us personally that he would sweep them away and return his jurisdiction to Orthodoxy and canonical Russian practice. So this was a time of great promise and even excitement. Patriarch Dimitrios of Constantinople even said at the time that the Paris Jurisdiction would be returned to the Russian Church as soon as it was free. So, with hope in a promising future, in January 1985 I was ordained deacon there.

Q: What happened next?

A: in May 1985 I was offered the priesthood providing that I would become a freemason. I refused, scandalized. Then we became witnesses to the complete takeover of the jurisdiction by renovationists. The new Archbishop ordained them one by one, completely breaking his promise – not because he was a liar, but because he was weak. It was the same problem as Metr Evlogy, the first Paris Jurisdiction ruling bishop; he had never wanted to leave the Russian Church, but he was a weak man surrounded by powerful laymen, mainly freemasons and those who had betrayed the Tsar and organized the February Revolution. It was the end of the possibility that that jurisdiction would ever return to the freed, restored and reunited Russian Church. But I only understood that the meaning of that bitter disappointment afterwards.

Q: Why did you not leave such a masonic group?

A: Not all by far were freemasons and I felt that I had to labour on until God’s will for me should be revealed.

Q: When was that?

A: Without doubt it was in summer 1988 when the Paris Jurisdiction celebrated the millennium of the Baptism of Rus. Instead of inviting the Russian bishops in Western Europe to the Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and returning to the Russian Church in unity, they railed against the Russian Church and invited the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Paris. I was not only scandalized but spiritually distraught. I was an eyewitness to treason and apostasy. It was the last straw. They preferred heresy to Orthodoxy.

Soon after, I met Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR, who told me that he would be happy to receive me and that I had no need whatsoever to labour on in such anti-canonical conditions. I jumped at the opportunity. 17 people left with me, including a priest. So we all joined the Church Outside Russia in January 1989. That was a transforming moment because previously I had only known the Church Outside Russia in England. On the other hand, Vladyka Antony, heir to Vladyka John of Shanghai, though traditional, was not racist or fanatical, but missionary-minded. He lived in a different world from the fanatics in England and we freely concelebrated with other Orthodox.

I remember him telling me about the extremists who were trying to take control of ROCOR in New York. He said: ‘But there’s nowhere else to go’. I have not the slightest doubt that he would have returned to Russia, if he had had the chance. I also remember conversations with him about Metr Antony of Kiev (Archbp Antony came from Kiev), whom he had known well in Belgrade and whose name he had taken. He was the real ROCOR. Real Russian Orthodox. At last. It had taken me 20 years to get to that point! 20 years of facing illusions, lies, broken promises and corruption. You would think it would have been easy, but nothing of the sort. All hell was against the Russian Orthodox Church, a sure sign of truth.

Q: What happened next?

A: Well, I was at last living as a proper Russian Orthodox. Nearly three years later, in December 1991 I was ordained priest for the new ROCOR parish in Lisbon in Portugal.

Q: What was your attitude to the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: We were all just impatiently waiting for it to become politically free and free of renovationism. That happened officially with the Jubilee Council in Moscow in 2000.

Q: So why didn’t the Church Outside Russia join up with the Patriarchate straightaway in 2000?

A: It is one thing to proclaim the truth at a Council, but another for the decisions of that Council to be implemented. For example, after that I can still remember how at the London Patriarchal Cathedral they refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs and also, incidentally, they refused to sell the books of Fr Seraphim (Rose) or anything traditional. Priests and people coming from Russia were persecuted by the renovationists because they were ‘too’ traditional. We had to wait for the Patriarchate to free itself from such Renovationism.

Also, it must be said, we had to wait until the fanatical elements that had done so much harm to ROCOR since they had started infiltrating the Church in the mid-sixties had left us. When the extremists did finally leave, almost at the same time, there was a huge sigh of relief, because then we could get on with being Orthodox. So it was we had to wait until 2007.

Q: How do you know that people are free of Renovationism?

A: Easy: The yardstick is veneration for the New Martyrs, especially the Imperial Martyrs. The renovationists hate them.

Q: How do you know that people are free of sectarian fanaticism of the sort you describe as having infiltrated ROCOR?

A: Easy: The yardstick is the willingness to concelebrate with other Orthodox Christians.

Q: What is going to happen in the future? At present there are countries like England where there are two parallel jurisdictions of the Russian Church, one dependent on Moscow, the other dependent on the Church Outside Russia?

A: According to the 2007 agreement, where there are two parallel jurisdictions, ROCOR should, in time, absorb the Patriarchal jurisdiction. This will probably take a generation, so that no-one will be under any pressure and everything will take place naturally, organically. However, in reality, already nine years have passed and we can see that in certain areas, like North America and Australasia, ROCOR will indeed clearly take over responsibility for those territories, whereas in other areas the Patriarchate will take over, as in South America, not to mention South-East Asia. The problem comes in the mixed area of Western Europe, including the British Isles and Ireland. In this area, only time will tell, clearly it is the more competent of the two that will take responsibility.

For the moment we shall lead parallel lives. There is in any case so much to do. I could start 12 parishes tomorrow, if I had the money to buy buildings and get candidates for the priesthood ordained. The state of Orthodox infrastructure and the general pastoral situation here are so appalling as to be scandalous; no wonder so many Orthodox lapse or become Roman Catholic or Protestant. All we pastors meet with is indifference. Those in authority should hang their heads in shame. Why is there not a church, our own property in every town over 100,000? This should have been done a generation ago. For example the teeming millions of London only have two small churches!

Colchester is the 50th largest town in England (and incidentally the 500th largest in Western Europe). It has a church that belongs to us. But want about the other 49 larger ones? Only five of them have their own churches: London, Manchester, Nottingham, Norwich, Birkenhead-Liverpool. That is a scandal. There is no missionary vision at all. Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK with a population of two million. And where do the faithful of the Patriarchate have ten liturgies a year on Saturdays (that’s all the priest can manage)? In the Ukrainian Uniat chapel. The next time you hear some naïve Orthodox boasting about his Church, tell him that. Orthodox should be ashamed of themselves.

Q: So is there competition between the two parts of the Russian Church locally?

A: No, not at all. It all depends on who has the priests and the buildings. A concrete example. I was asked to visit a prison in Cambridgeshire. Now, since there is no ROCOR presence in Cambridgeshire (because through incompetence it refused to set anything up there in the 1980s), I gave the prison authorities the references of the Patriarchal priest who lives in Cambridgeshire. On the other hand, when there was question of the Patriarchate setting something up in Norfolk (it had lost what it had had there a few years before, also through incompetence), but knowing that ROCOR had a presence there dating back to 1966, it was referred to me. So here is a territorial division. Now, where there is a double jurisdiction, as in London (the only case), something will have to be sorted out. But, as you can see, that will be as a result of competence. Only time can settle such matters. The more competent part, the more spiritual part of the Russian Church will prevail and form a united jurisdiction.

Q: So there is no rigid territorial division in Western Europe?

A: No, nobody wants to impose such a system. Let everything be done freely, let the people choose. Though, having said that, we can observe a tendency for ROCOR to dominate in the English-speaking world. Canada, the USA and Australasia are clear examples. For example, with Archbishop Mark of ROCOR retiring to Germany and the ROCOR Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland being taken over by Metr Hilarion of New York, we can even talk about a sort of ROCOR Brexit. Metr Hilarion will in fact be Metropolitan of New England and Old England. That is an exceptional event, historically speaking, and may be significant, a turning-point.

So it is possible that in a generation from now ROCOR will only exist in the English-speaking world, but will unite all Russian Orthodox there. ROCOR will become ROCA – the Russian Orthodox Church in the Anglosphere. That is one quite organic and natural possible scenario, a united Russian Orthodox Metropolia for the Anglosphere, the English-speaking world. The Patriarchate will look after everything else in various Metropolias, in Latin America, in Alaska, in Western Europe, in Asia etc.

Q: So Western Europe would completely go to the Patriarchate?

A: That is the way that things are developing at the moment. All the young bishops and all the dynamism in the Russian Church there is Patriarchal. ROCOR only has three ageing bishops and is not opening any new churches.

Q: Is there a difference between ROCOR churches and Patriarchal churches?

A: I think there is a small one, in general. Strangely enough, ROCOR is at one and the same time more Russian, but also more local, more integrated. We have done the translations, we print in English, we speak the local languages and know the local laws, we were born here. At the same time, however, we are utterly faithful to the best of the Tsar’s Russia, never having endured the Soviet period and Renovationism. ‘To quote the saintly Metr Laurus: ‘We are for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy’. We are Imperial priests and people.

Q: What about your own relations with the Russian Church inside Russia?

A: We are very close to all those who are Churched in Russia and they feel close to us. For example, in Moscow one of the closest friends of ROCOR has always been Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov), whom some have even suggested will be the next Patriarch. (Bp Tikhon has been in the news recently, since he outraged the British Establishment by inviting students from Eton College to experience Christianity in Russia; not something the atheist Establishment likes). In general, those who especially venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors at once feel at home in ROCOR. I have this nearly every Sunday. People from different parts of Russia, from the Ukraine, from Moldova and elsewhere say that they feel at home, whatever the language, the atmosphere is like at home. In my native town of Colchester, that is a great thing that we have such an oasis of Orthodoxy.

Q: Who are the unChurched in Russia?

A: You find all sorts of people. There are those on the right hand side who mingle superstition with Orthodoxy, for instance, those ritualists who think that holy water is more important than holy communion, who mix in pharisaic sectarianism, puritanism and judgementalism, or, on the other hand, those on the left hand side, who mix in Soviet nationalism, love of the tyrant Stalin, or modernism. But all that is superficial, the majority make their way to the Church sooner or later. You do not waste time on the convert fringes of the Church – otherwise you might end up thinking that that is the Church! A terrible delusion!

Q: Why have you stayed faithful to the Russian Church despite all the difficulties that you have faced over nearly fifty years?

A: Because the Russian Orthodox Church is the Invincible Power. History since 1917 proves it. The gates of hell have not prevailed – and shall not prevail – despite all the enemies and traitors, both external and internal, we have faced. Judas betrayed, but the other apostles triumphed. So tragedy becomes joy. The stone that was rejected is become the headstone of the corner. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!