Category Archives: The Ukraine

The Future of the Ukraine and the Church

What is going to happen in the Ukraine? Some say that the Russian winter campaign in the Ukraine that is due to start in November will result at the very least in the provinces of Nikolaev and Odessa being taken by Russia, as foretold by Elder Jonah of Odessa (+ 2012). That might bring this nightmare conflict to a swift end. It will mean that the remaining Ukraine will become a landlocked state.

Others refer to another prophecy of Elder Jonah of Odessa that there will be a ‘bloody Easter (= 2022?), a hungry Easter (2023?) and a victorious Easter (2024?). It means that the war will continue for another eighteen months yet. Others refer to the prophecy of St Seraphim of Sarov: ‘Towards that time the bishops will become so impious that in their impiety they will surpass the Greek bishops of the time of Theodosius the Younger (401-450), so that they will no longer believe in the main dogmas of the Christian Faith’.

We should recall that all prophecies are conditional, dependent on repentance – or lack of it.

Whatever happens in the war in the Ukraine, and there are many predictions, it is clear that the canonical Church in the Ukraine will have to become autocephalous. Russia can, and we believe will, win militarily, but that does not solve the pastoral problem. No mother, father, aunt, uncle, wife, sister, brother, children of a dead Ukrainian soldier will frequent a church where the Russian Patriarch is commemorated. Many in the Russian Church are in denial about this: we are not.

At the mere mention of the name Patriarch Kyrill in churches in the Ukraine or here, people walk out. Russian Orthodox churches, Moscow or ROCOR, all over Western Europe, as in the Ukraine itself, have lost a great many of their flock. If we had been under the Russian Church (by Divine Providence we got out exactly eight days before the Special Operation began), we would certainly have lost half of our parish. At present, under the Zelensky government, any Ukrainian priest who concelebrates with the Russia Church in Western Europe (either branch) faces five years of prison on his return for ‘collaborating with the enemy’.

In the Moscow Patriarchate in Lithuania four priests have been defrocked for not commemorating Patriarch Kyrill. And yet in the Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate, priests are free to commemorate the Russian Patriarch or not. Patriarch Kyrill is banned by sanction from visiting Canada, the UK, Lithuania and of course the Ukraine. He would not be welcome anywhere else in Europe outside the Russian Federation and Belarus. If he cannot visit his churches, then independence must be granted to them.

It has come to our knowledge that there are those in Russia who are praying that Metr Onufry of Kiev will become the next Patriarch of Russia. No doubt his first act will be to grant the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly. The same is surely inevitable in the Baltic States (today the Latvian Orthodox Church has officially asked Patriarch Kyrill to grant it autocephaly). We think that autocephaly, or at least autonomy, will have to be given to the Russian Orthodox churches in Moldova and also in Western Europe. As for the Moscow parishes in Northern America, they have no bishop and so no future at present. Here too a solution is required.

The situation is chaotic, Nothing, indeed, will be as it was before.

 

The Russian Orthodox Church and the Tragedy of Soviet Centralisation

Introduction: Soviet Centralisation in Kiev = The End of the Ukraine

I was recently asked a strange question: Do you think that the Ukraine has a right to exist? To which I answered: Obviously, yes! The Ukraine is for Ukrainians! And that is precisely the problem, the Ukraine is for Ukrainians, not for Non-Ukrainians. I believe in self-determination. What the Soviet-style Kiev government did not have the right to do is to ban and oppress the languages and cultures of others and even ‘ethnically cleanse’ the non-Ukrainian minorities. Sadly, that is what has been going on since 1945, starting in what Kiev still calls ‘Transcarpathia’, even though it is Kiev which is Transcarpathian. And in the last three decades that were supposedly ‘post-Soviet’ the centralising Soviet-style oppression has got worse everywhere.

Clearly, the independent Ukraine after 1991 either had to become a loose Confederation, as suggested by the leaders of Germany at the time, or else it had to change its unnatural borders, returning to its pre-1922 borders, returning land to Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania. Instead, it rejected both options, rejecting democratic referenda, remaining a centralised Soviet State. So now it is being forced to return to its natural borders by the drama of military action and appalling bloodshed. Therein lies its horrible tragedy, all so avoidable, the tragedy of all those who have not thrown off the atheist Soviet heritage with its disregard, plain lack of love, for others. It is all so typically Soviet: close the churches and padlock their doors, so people cannot go to them. ‘Hate your neighbour’ is our slogan.

Soviet Centralisation in Moscow = Autocephaly in the Ukraine

In the Russian Church, unlike in other Local Churches, there is a tradition of praying for not just the diocesan bishop, but also for the Patriarch. If you are in the Russian Church, you should do this. However, over the decades, there have been inside and outside Russia, numbers of bishops and priests who have refused to do this. Thus, after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Church in the Polish part of the former Empire received autocephaly and the parishes in Finland left for Constantinople. This was also in order to avoid praying for a Patriarch who was under the orders of atheists.

Then, for over 80 years, bishops and priests in the émigré Church, ROCOR, refused to commemorate the head of the Russian Church because they considered that the Metropolitans and Patriarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate were slaves or hostages of the atheist Communists who were persecuting the Church, and therefore they were not Orthodox. Indeed, if they had commemorated the Russian Patriarch, the people would have walked out, so not to pray for him publicly was a pastoral necessity. And in the neophyte 1990s there were protesters inside Russia who also refused to commemorate their Patriarch. These non-commemorators justified themselves as they considered that the Patriarch was an ecumenist and so was not Orthodox.

Today, in the Ukraine clergy have stopped commemorating Patriarch Kyrill for the same reason as ROCOR, because they do not consider him to be Orthodox and therefore, at the mention of his name in churches, the people walk out or else they refuse to go to church anyway. Rightly or wrongly, they consider him to be the slave of the post-Soviet State, a politician and not a churchman. As a result, the canonical Ukrainian Church has had to declare itself ‘fully independent’. It had no choice. The decision was forced on it by the people. Far more importantly than this, however, is the fact that when the conflict in the Ukraine is over, and whatever the outcome, there will be an independent/Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It will not return to centralised, Soviet-style Moscow. Moscow is still in denial about this, but this will not change the reality. Indeed, arguably, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church should have been given Autocephaly decades ago.

Soviet Centralisation = Autocephaly Elsewhere

I have always been opposed to ‘Autocephalitis’, the idea that all problems can be solved by the granting of autocephaly to groups of Orthodox, however small, in any country in the world. Autocephaly can only be justified, when there are sufficient numbers of Orthodox with spiritual maturity in any particular location. However, after the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991 and the formation of many new independent states, it should have been clear that new independent (Autonomous or Autocephalous) Churches would have to follow. Probably the time for partial independence (Autonomy) is over – it is already too late. Full independence, Autocephaly, is now on the cards for virtually the whole Russian Orthodox world outside the Russian Federation and the Russian Orthodox Exarchate in Belarus. Autocephaly means precisely that His Holiness Kyrill, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, will no longer be commemorated at services.

True, it is too early for Autocephaly in the new and small Russian Orthodox Exarchates in South-East Asia and Africa, but Autonomy will have to be envisaged for both within the next ten years and then Autocephaly. Elsewhere, it is full steam ahead. The Latvian Orthodox Church has already taken the chance of Autocephaly, with the excuse of pressure from the Latvian government. However, as it has only three bishops, perhaps, as we have suggested, a single Baltic Orthodox Church (grouping all Orthodox in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, together with all Orthodox in Finland who use the canonical date for Pascha). This would solve the problems and schismatic pressures in Lithuania and in Estonia, and provide at least six bishops. (For Autocephaly, four bishops are a minimum). How long before governments in other countries also impose Autocephaly on local Russian Orthodox? 20% of Moldovan parishes have already gone to the Romanian Church. Moldova is certainly large enough to become an Autocephalous Church, indeed it would become one of the larger Local Churches.

Apart from the Baltics and Moldova, there is also considerable dissidence among multinational Russian Orthodox in Western Europe, in the Russian Orthodox Exarchate in Western Europe of the MP (potentially eight or more bishops), the Western European Archdiocese of the MP (three bishops) and in Western European ROCOR (Autocephaly impossible with its four present bishops, but clergy and people are already voting with their feet), from which many have walked out. Autocephaly in Western Europe could be envisaged, providing it was done with the co-operation of the other Local Churches, and not done, schismatically, against them. Since parts of the New York-run ROCOR have gone into schism, with the Moscow Patriarchate itself! (the Western European Archdiocese) and with the treacherous backing of politicians in the Moscow Patriarchate in Moscow!, there is no hope of this happening on the part of ROCOR. The latter has walled itself off in a schismatic bout of ‘OneTrueChurchism’, which is very American and highly political. But others are free to pursue the path of a new Local Church of Western Europe and clearly some want to.

Soviet Centralisation = Crisis

Interestingly, when Japan started a war against Russia in 1904 with a treacherous and unprovoked attack against Russia (not Russia against Japan), the Russian Bishop of Tokyo told his parishes to pray for the Japanese Emperor, the authorities and the Japanese armed forces. He locked himself away for the duration of the war. It seems to me that he, a future saint, set an example and the same should apply now. In any case, the fact is that Ukrainians consider that they cannot pray publicly for Patriarch Kyrill and the people refuse to attend churches where his name is commemorated. They see him as a politician, not a churchman.

If England were under military attack from Russia, whatever the reason, I don’t see that anyone in this country would wish to hear public prayers for Patriarch Kyrill. Either the Russian Church here would declare itself Autocephalous (as happened with the canonical Church under Metr Onuphry in the Ukraine), or else the State would declare it Autocephalous (as happened in Latvia), or else everyone would join another Local Church. Indeed, many people were forced to take the latter course by the Moscow Patriarchate itself in this country even before the war, because of the schismatic actions of some in the Russian Church, whose political support Moscow needed, even though the actions Moscow was supporting were schismatic.

In other words, nearly one third of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Non-Russian part, is in crisis. Interestingly, this ‘independence movement’ inside the Russian Church has brought no benefit to the ‘Churches’ which the US-manipulated Patriarchate of Constantinople set up in Estonia a generation ago and in 2019 in the west of the Ukraine. Most of their church buildings, stolen by violent thugs from the canonical Church, stand empty and padlocked. People know they are fake and refuse to go there. It must be depressing to be inside the Russian Church in Western Europe today. All the more so, as most ‘Russians’ here do not come from Russia itself, but are Russian-speakers from the Baltics, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Belarus and, especially, from the Ukraine.

Conclusion: New Jerusalem and All Rus

In the light of the conflict in the Ukraine, what can be said about the concept of ‘Holy Rus’? This conflict is between the largest of the supposedly Orthodox peoples of ‘Holy Rus’. Clearly, the majority are not Orthodox and indeed have not been since 1917. Today the majority still acts in the old Soviet way, with its atheistic mentality. For a long time now it has been our suggestion that the Moscow Patriarchate, a name that reminds many of the old Soviet heritage of the Russian Orthodox Church, be renamed ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’. Physically, it could quit Moscow and establish itself in the now renewed New Jerusalem Monastery by the River Istra (Jordan) nearby, and so justify that new name and new reality.

Whatever the present tragedy in the Ukraine, the Trinitarian ideal of ‘Holy Rus’ of Unity in Diversity, remains. As to whether it will be incarnated before the end of the world, we do not know, for we do not know when the world will end. It depends on mass repentance, which has been absent since 1917. Thank God, we have been released from the post-Soviet Church, in both its Russian Federation and its American political incarnations, and are able to go on in freedom to help build up the future multinational Local Church with the free Local Orthodox Churches. These are neither American, nor post-Soviet, neither CIA, nor FSB, and so, by the grace of God, can remain outside the geopolitical games of the Superpowers, as can we.

 

Will the Russian Orthodox Church Survive as a Church for Non-Russian Citizens?

Since February 2022, the once multinational Russian Church has slowly been breaking apart. First there were the parishes in England, including the largest former ROCOR church in Western Europe, which, incredibly, was expelled from the Moscow Patriarchate by ROCOR with explicit Moscow Patriarchal agreement. 5,000 Orthodox and 12 clergy happily left for the Romanian Church. These churches had merely followed the path already taken by some 300, or 20%, parishes in Moldova that have left the Patriarchate for the Romanian Church over the past thirty years. Then in March 2022 came events in Amsterdam (a very large parish and all its clergy left for Constantinople), a parish in Italy and a parish in Germany (Constantinople too), sanctions against a Russian priest in Spain and four priests defrocked in Lithuania (all for disagreeing with the Moscow Patriarchate). Others elsewhere in Western Europe may face similar sanctions.

Dissidence has spread and the Russian bishop for the UK, Ireland and North America has been confined to Moscow. Its bishop in the Netherlands seems to have disappeared. Its senior Metropolitan in Western Europe, a very young man, was sent back to Moscow, meaning that he is not in Western Europe to look after his dioceses and churches. Then came the events in the Ukraine, when essentially the whole Ukrainian Church of some 10,000 parishes under Metropolitan Onuphry, one quarter of the whole Patriarchate, declared autocephaly and stopped commemorating the Russian Orthodox Patriarch. Then came tensions and divisions of opinion within the 300+ parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. These were tensions between the pro-Russian wing and the pro-Ukrainian wing. Some, especially Ukrainians and other Non-Russians have ceased attending those churches.

Now we have the situation in Latvia. Here the head of the Latvian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Alexander (Kudryashov) of Riga, asked the Latvian Parliament (Saiema) that his church be declared Autocephalous – something he had long been dreaming of. This was duly done on 8 September. Specifically, Artuss Kaimiņš, Chairman of the Human Rights and Public Affairs Committee, said: ‘With the adoption of the Law, the historically existing autonomy and independence of the Latvian Orthodox Church is strengthened, preventing the Russian Orthodox Church from having influence or power over our Orthodox Church’…‘Such a decision is in the interests of Latvian Orthodox Christians, society as a whole and national security’. A few years earlier the Latvian Parliament, again specifically at Metropolitan Alexander’s request, had already passed another anti-Russian law.

That law declared that any bishop of the Latvian Orthodox Church must have lived for at least five years in Latvia serving in the Church and be a Latvian citizen. In this way, the Metropolitan ensured that no outsider from Russia could become a bishop in Latvia, where there are three Orthodox bishops. Now Metropolitan Alexander has by political means obtained his dream of seceding from Moscow. We wait to see the reactions of Moscow, which seems at the moment to be powerless, and, above all, in which countries where they have also long been yearning for autocephaly, refused for decades by Moscow, will Russian Orthodox do the same. The situation looks like ecclesiastical suicide. You simply cannot continue as a multinational Church when you administrate from Moscow on the basis of nationalist centralisation, which is a hangover from the Soviet period.

It is true that Ukrainian nationalism, with its refusal to form a Confederation from the very different peoples in the modern Ukraine, started the problem. However, the correct response was not Russian nationalism. That has only made things worse. It looks as though the Russian Orthodox Church, which has already lost one quarter of its parishes and people, may lose altogether one third, reducing it to a Church of only 100 million, making it only 50% of the whole Orthodox Church. If, as we believe, the conflict in the Ukraine will be won by Russia, this does not solve the problem. The Russian Church may ask all who have left to return to it. It is likely to be met with stunned silence and the question: Why should we? It is one thing to win the war, it is quite another to win the peace. You cannot force people to go to your church. Having committed its very gross and anti-canonical blunders, Moscow has yet to realise this.

An Interview on the Turmoil in the Church

The Past Local Turmoil

Q: You spent nearly four decades serving as a clergyman, and were a layman for ten years before that, in the Russian Church, but in February 2022 you left, together with many others. Why the mass exodus?

A: The irony is that we did not leave, we were forced to leave. Why? Well, they know better than us why they acted in their bizarre and suicidal way and forced us out! Perhaps they do not want Non-Russians in the Russian Church? Perhaps they want to become as small as possible? I don’t know. But here is what happened to us:

At the end of our tethers after three years of persecution, at the beginning of May 2021 we alerted the authorities to the grabbing, alienisation, sectarianisation, papalisation, politicisation and so self-destruction of that part of the Russian Church. As we were whistle-blowers, we were persecuted and punished. Nobody wanted to know the Truth which we were clearly telling them. They preferred to brush the reality under the carpet. The problem is, and I have observed this so many times in my life, for example in the case of Metr Antony (Bloom) in the 1970s, which led straight to the Sourozh break-up in 2006, or in the case of Metr Vitaly (Ustinov) in the 1990s, which led straight to his deposition by the other bishops in 2001, that if you brush reality under the carpet, it will come back and hit you in the face with much greater force later on. This is exactly what happened to them when they tried to punish us for telling the Truth. As Christ says: ‘The Truth will set you free’. This means that telling untruths will enslave you. And that is exactly what has happened to them.

Part of the Russian Church fell into a top-down, colonial, sectarian and cultish schism, without any understanding of the Tradition of the Church or the need for missionary-work among local people, both Orthodox and Non-Orthodox, who live in this country and to whose language you must adapt, rather than try to impose on them a foreign jargon. This situation had obviously been carefully prepared for it as an entrapment by the infiltrators all through the Russian Church, including their agents in Moscow itself, but we acted canonically and tried to join one of the two other parts of the Russian Church. This was not allowed by one part since they too had been entrapped, and although the other part received us, they were not allowed by the powers behind them to keep us for more than six months. Both rejections were clearly 100% political acts.

In this way, ironically, they all condemned themselves as ‘Sergianists’, that is, people who put loyalty to their political masters above loyalty to Christ. In this, they simply showed their hypocrisy, for they had always condemned Sergianism in others who were forced to be Sergianists when they were political hostages, and yet when they themselves were politically free, they made themselves into Sergianists! The attempts to persecute the faithful and close our churches here differ in no way from what the Soviet State tried to do inside the USSR generations ago, or what the US-created Kiev government is doing against Metr Onuphry today. It suggests that they are all Trostkyists. Their underlying anti-Christian and ultimately Satanic ideology, whatever the various masks it may wear, is the same.

Q: So what did you do after you were forced out of the Russian Church?

A: If the Russian Church were to reject its own despite our loyalty to it, our Plan B had always been to join the Patriarchate of Romania. Discussion and consultation in mid-February 2022 only confirmed that Plan. So, having been released from the Moscow Patriarchate, this is exactly what we did. Indeed, our old family friend, going back nearly 50 years, Metropolitan Jean of the Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate, who had been forced to release us by certain individuals (we know their names), actually told us, after we had informed him that we had joined the Romanian Church: ‘That is exactly what I thought you would do and I actually told the Patriarchate that that is what you would probably do, to their loss. To which they had replied: ‘Too bad’’. He laughed ironically at the suicidal action of the Moscow Patriarchate. It had lost, discrediting itself, showing that it put careerist State politics first, spiritual integrity second. This act will go down in the history books as an act of self-destruction. Will the Russian Church here ever recover? Will it now only ever be an Embassy Church?

Q: Why had your Plan B always been the Romanian Church?

A: As soon as 2001, when Romanian immigration started, we had had Romanian parishioners, later a deacon and a priest, and by 2021 six of the twelve clergy and three-quarters of the people in our group of parishes were Romanian-speaking, that is Romanians or Moldovans. We were received into the Romanian Patriarchate on 16 February, within exactly four hours of applying, though we did not receive our signed antimensia until 27 February 2022. We had found canonicity and no longer feared having our property taken or being in a colonial and schismatic sect and alien, politicised cult, which is what that part of the Russian Church had become. Since then we have been in weekly contact with our Metropolitan Joseph, whom members of our family have known since the 90s, when he first moved to Paris.

When they tried to deny and complain about our reception in April, His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel rejected their nonsense, though they had actually dared to contact him in Bucharest personally not once, but twice! Since then all has been plain sailing, we soon opened two new parishes, receiving more antimensia from Metr Joseph. That had been on hold until then, and now other clergy and people are joining us, with a nice surprise coming in October, God willing. Every day we thank God for bringing us to the safe and canonical haven of the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchate. Glory to God for all things!

Q: So for your group, firmly entrenched inside the Romanian Metropolia, and consisting of six parishes, 5,000 faithful and 12 clergy, the turmoil has been over since 16 February, but for the rest of the Church, it started on 24 February.

A: Yes, and what an irony that was. We had found a safe and quiet canonical haven out of the awful political mess of the Russian Church, but for others the mess had only just begun. Actually, at the beginning of March, a priest from the MP Sourozh Diocese contacted us and told us he was jealous! Our situation shows Divine Providence towards us in getting us out of the Russian mess a few days before the Ukraine tragedy unfolded. We thank God.

Q: What is the situation of the Romanian Church in the Western European Diaspora?

A: As regards the Diaspora situation in Western Europe today there are just over 4 million Romanian speakers (Romanians and Moldovans) in Western Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_diaspora). This is by far the largest Orthodox group in Western Europe. They are everywhere, though half of them live in Spain and Italy. As one Londoner who frequents the ageing Cypriots in their emptying churches there told me: ‘When you see children in a Greek church, you know they are Romanians’. (Sadly, the Greek-Cypriots have repeated exactly the same error as the Russians two generations before them, that is, they have completely failed to pass on the Faith to their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc. And just like the post-1917 Russians, they are now dying out).

The Western European Metropolia of the Patriarchate of Romania, which is Autonomous, has six bishops, one of whom is French, several Non-Romanian clergy and it uses both calendars. Our Metropolitan Joseph, who is an engineer by education and a real monk, comes from the north of Romania near the Ukrainian border – Metr Onuphry comes from just across the border on the other side, where Ukrainians and Romanians live side by side and there are many bilingual churches. Metr Joseph is very active in promoting the use of local languages, especially French, as he realises that the children born in Western Europe need them. One of our parishioners is his distant cousin, from the same village as him. Metr Joseph has been active in helping Ukrainian refugees, who, quite naturally, refuse to attend any Russian churches.

The Present Universal Turmoil

Q: Leaving aside the actions of Divine Providence in your case, what would you say about the general turmoil that the Orthodox Church finds itself in today?

A: Well, first of all, at least the turmoil proves that the Church is living. We are not dead. On the other hand, there is good turmoil and bad turmoil. This is bad, though God can always bring good out of bad.

The turmoil was initially caused by the catastrophic and deliberate failure of the ideology-bound Western elites to recognise the human rights of the large Russian minority in the Ukraine. This was Russophobia. However, for the Ukrainian majority, even if compromised and manipulated by the West for its own political advantages and by the theft of Ukrainian land and resources by US corporations like Monsanto and that of Hunter Biden etc, this was no solution. We support the Romanian-speaking Metropolitan Onuphry and have prayed for him and his suffering flock at the Great Entrance at every Liturgy since 2018. We cannot support war. His line is ours. They tried to take our churches and failed; they are taking his churches and succeeding. So we understand and suffer with him.

For a long time, the Orthodox Church was seen as either Greek or Russian. The ‘Greek’ Church was seen as basically Greek-speaking – Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Greece, Romania, Cyprus and Albania on one side. The ‘Russian’ was seen as basically Slav – Moscow, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia and the OCA on the other side.

In fact, that was never true, as, for example, Romanians, Georgians, Arabs and Albanians are neither Greeks nor Slavs. Today, it has become quite untrue, because both certain Greek and Russian bishops have played politics – and lost the sympathy of their own Greek-speakers and Slavs alike. In reality, the Church is like a see-saw, with Greek extremists at one end and Russian extremists at the other end. The balance is maintained by those inbetween, including non-political Greeks and Russians. At the centre of the whole contemporary storm is the provincial Ukraine, which is only a plaything in the hands of the geopoliticians. Make no mistake, this is a war of the USA and its vassals against Russia and China. The Ukraine is just a location, a battlefield. This is not a war between Russians and Ukrainians, this is not a racial or a religious war, but a political and economic war for the future of the world.

As you know, in 2018 Constantinople agreed, under the bribery of American ‘pressure’, to set up a pro-American, pro–LGBT etc, pseudo-‘Church’ in the Ukraine. This was a scandalous act, as it meant that it had accepted the morally fallen and Neo-Nazi nationalists, thugs and criminals and proclaimed that they were Orthodox clergy and laity! In a word, the ‘Greeks’ had sided with the persecutors of the Church for a mess of American pottage. They had lost any moral high ground that remained to them. At once they found that they had not only caused a schism in the Ukraine, but that the ‘Russians’ refused to concelebrate with them, that they had virtually caused schisms inside the Churches of Greece and Cyprus, that the Churches of Romania, Antioch and Albania did not support them and that the Church of Alexandria had lost half its clergy and people to the new Russian Exarchate in Africa. Constantinople had lost all down the line, isolating itself from the Orthodox world in its own self-made schism.

A Russian victory? No!

As you know, from February 2022 Moscow began persecuting its own, first us in England, then others, in the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Lithuania, Spain, and now Latvia and, above all, in the tragic Ukraine. The ‘Russians’ had stabbed their own most loyal supporters in the back, also for a mess of political pottage! They too had lost any moral high ground that remained to them. At once they found that they had not only isolated themselves from their own Church in the Ukraine, but that the world had seen that the ‘Russians’ were quite capable of betraying their own all over Western Europe and creating a division on the canonical territory of another Patriarchate (Alexandria), in exactly the same way as the ‘Greeks’ had done on the canonical territory of another Patriarchate (Moscow). Their natural supporters in the Churches of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia and the OCA stood aside in silence and either failed to support the Russian Church or else outright opposed it. Moscow had lost all down the line, it too had isolated itself from the Orthodox world.

Holy Rus is a fine ideal, but you will never spread it with missiles and shelling. We had warned about the danger of this temptation continually for fifteen years! Go back to your Sergianism at your peril! Or else prefer the freedom that God has given you. All was possible, we said, one or the other. Well, they chose the other, the rejection of mass repentance.

As we have already said, for a long time the Orthodox Church was seen as either Greek or Russian. Today, both Constantinople and Moscow have disqualified themselves from the moral leadership of the Church. Both have shown themselves to be victims of their own nationalist and racial politics, the ‘Greek world’ and the ‘Russian world’. Neither talked about the Orthodox world! Non-Russians are not interested in the Russian world. Non-Greeks are not interested in the Greek world. We need the Orthodox world. This means that both Constantinople and Moscow have lost the moral high ground, including the chance to lead the cause of unity in the Diaspora. Neither Greek nor Russian is now the future, precisely because of Greek and Russian misbehaviour. It is now up to all the other Local Churches to lead the way.

A Council

Q: Do you see any end to this turmoil between the Greeks and the Russians?

A:  Only a Church Council can resolve all the Inter-Orthodox problems. Not the political manipulation of a Council of Moscow in 1948 or of a Council of Crete in 2016, but a real Council of all the Churches, a Council that is politically free of both Washington and Moscow. Sadly, for the moment, that is not going to happen. Constantinople is enslaved to its US-backed and quite absurd project of universal domination. Everyone must become a Greek! Moscow is enslaved to supporting the Russian State, come what may – regardless of whether the Russian State even wants its support! It is a catastrophe and plunges the Church into a new period of paralysis.

However, there is hope. The Greek Patriarch is in his 80s, the Russian in his 70s. Great changes lie ahead, as US hegemony falls after the routs of the US and its NATO vassals in Iraq, Afghanistan and now in the Ukraine. It is yet another disastrously lost war for the overweening and now bankrupt West, which through its military incompetence and immense hubris has not won a single war since 1945.

However, when the ‘Greeks’ lose their US backers, that does not at all mean that the Russians will have won. The Russian State can win the war in the Ukraine, but how will it win the peace? That is quite another matter. The Moscow Patriarchate has betrayed its multinational vocation through backing narrow Russian nationalism, just as the Patriarchate of Constantinople backed provincial Greek nationalism before it and lost the broad, imperial vision of the old Constantinople. The only hope for Constantinople is a generation of bishops who were not bishops in the ‘US’ period of Constantinople, and for the Russian Church a generation of bishops who were not bishops in the Soviet period and so do not have that State mentality.

Q: What should be on the agenda of a free Council?

A: It hardly depends on me! But there are some problems which everyone can see and which have been crying out for solutions for generations.

Firstly, in order of size, the Churches of Romania, Ukraine (which, like it or not, is now de facto, though not de jure, an Autocephalous Church under Metr Onuphry), Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, North Macedonia (presumably all recognise it), Poland, Cyprus, Alexandria, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Jerusalem, all the universally-recognised Local Churches, except for Constantinople and Moscow, will have to meet initially and discuss something like the following:

  1. The canons must no longer be weaponised for political, racial and territorial reasons. For example, let us drop the nonsense of the deliberate Greek misinterpretation of Canon 28 of Chalcedon, which was introduced 100 years ago. Let us drop the gagging, sacking and even ‘defrocking’ of clergy, as in Lithuania, because they do not vote for the same political party as their bishops! This was not in the Gospels!
  2. You cannot go back on autocephalies and territories recognised by the whole Church as granted to Local Churches in the past. Canonical territories must be respected. Stop the Greek nonsense in Estonia, the Ukraine and elsewhere. Stop the Russian nonsense in Africa or at least, divide the African territory into two, North Africa for the Greeks and Black Africa for the Russians, for example, or something like it was 100 years ago, so that there are no overlaps.
  3. There must be four new Autocephalous Churches for the Diasporas, in Western Europe, North America (which would solve the OCA problem), Latin America and Oceania. New, multinational Local Church structures are the only way the Church can exist long-term outside the old homelands. This is a problem that should have been solved 100 years ago, but instead we have had 60 years of hot air and the loss of generations of Orthodox who were assimilated because they could not understand anything in their parents’ churches. If the Church authorities had put pastoral care first and not political and racial ideologies first, this problem would have been solved long ago.
  4. The great crisis in the Church, arguably for centuries, has been the lack of leadership. The essence of this crisis is that the authorities have not for the most part appointed genuine monks to the episcopate, but only single men, ‘monks’ in name only. Thus, they have appointed careerist bureaucrats and scandalous homosexuals (‘the lavender mafia’, as is so often the case with the Greeks), not to mention secular failures, alcoholics, freemasons, womanisers and ‘secretly’ married men (as is so often the case with the Russians), to the episcopate. A Council should proclaim and enforce a canon that all candidates for the episcopate should be monks who have spent at least ten years in a genuine, working monastery, or else that married bishops should be allowed. It must be one or the other – or both.

Once these matters have been discussed by all the other Local Churches, Constantinople and Moscow could be invited to a full Council to take them further, provided that they show that they are at last politically free, have repented for their past and so are worthy of taking part in a non-political Council.

 

The Looming Disaster

The news for the Western world is grim. The much-vaunted Ukrainian counter-attack near Kherson has been a catastrophe. 1,700 Ukrainian troops killed. No doubt thousands of others wounded, deserted and surrendered. Nearly all their equipment, including their Polish tanks, destroyed. This was the last gasp.

Meanwhile, on this 1st September, dozens of European business are going bankrupt every day. Yesterday we received this e-mail from a business supplier:

‘Thanks for your email,

Just to give you some idea of the current manufacturing costs here in Slovakia and to be brutally honest throughout the upside down world, We paid last year 85,000 euros for electricity, This year its going to be around 500,000 euros, As of Jan 1. 2023  its going to be 1.2 million euros at best.

So that’s just the electricity, never mind the gas, the increase in raw materials, salaries and all other manufacturing costs, This is a hard way of saying its impossible to reduce and every customer of ours has to accept it or not, Surprisingly we have never ever been as busy! You cutting margins down low is of course difficult, but at least you have margins, We simply do not have anything to reduced’.

In conclusion, expect revolutions and riots in Western countries. Russia has plenty of cheap oil and gas. All that Western countries have to do is to buy them from Russia in roubles. It is not complicated. The West has sanctioned its own people. Russia is awash with money that has come from the refusal of Western countries to buy their commodities.

If you don’t believe me, read the article below by Professor Geoffrey Sachs. He should know.

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/8/30/wests_false_narrative_china_russia_ukraine

 

 

Six Months On: The Completely Avoidable Tragedy of the Ukraine and the Curse of Nationalism

‘Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity, but I’m not so sure about the universe’.

Words Attributed to Albert Einstein

 

Foreword

We have never had any doubt that the Russian Federation would win militarily in the conflict in the Ukraine, for which eventuality it had carefully prepared for eight long years. (I stress the word ‘militarily’). During that time the West continually poked the bear and then was surprised when the bear’s patience ran out – on 24 February 2022. That does not mean that I approve of anything that has happened in the Ukraine since 2014. I visited different parts of the Ukraine six times between 2014 and 2021 and my many parishioners from all over the Ukraine only confirmed what I had seen.

I could see only too well its immense problems, the corruption which led to an infrastructure, far worse even than that in the oligarch-dominated UK, and the poverty of the masses, making it poorer than many African countries. In this article I take no sides. All wars are huge human tragedies and cannot be approved of. However, I am interested in the truth, not in propaganda, whichever side it comes from. And here, as everywhere and always on this site, without the burden of any careerism I am free to be interested only in the truth and its causes and consequences for Church life.

Introduction: The Tragedy: 2014-2022

After the 2014 US-organised coup d’etat (cost to the US taxpayer = $5 billion, as officially admitted by the US politician Victoria Nuland), one thing was at once obvious. This was that the new Kiev government needed to carry out internationally-observed referenda. Then they could let the various peoples in the Ukraine, with its purely artificial, Soviet-made borders, assigned to it by the atheist monsters Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, freely decide which country they wanted to belong to. Any enforcement of the old atheist centralisation from Kiev would, as in Yugoslavia, lead to exactly the same tragedy and war as in Yugoslavia. Both amalgams, Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, were hangovers from the Communist period with their absurd borders, jamming together peoples who had little in common and no desire to live in the same country as one another.

Sadly, the reality is that this current completely avoidable tragedy in the Ukraine is ‘Yugoslavia II’, that is, it the same thing again, only on a far greater and more serious scale. And here, unlike in Serbia, NATO cannot use its air force, for it will be shot down by superior Russian technology, and its army and navy are shut out.  In 2014 an internationally-observed referendum was held in the Crimea, and all went well, with a clear 97% majority choosing to return to Russia, after 60 years of enforced separation from it. However, Kiev itself refused to allow referenda anywhere, including in the Crimea. Therefore, the Kiev government, or rather those behind them who would not allow referenda, are responsible for today’s catastrophic consequences and tens and probably hundreds of thousands of deaths. They have blood, a lot of it, on their hands. What are those consequences?

The Catastrophe: 2022-

  1. Local Consequences: The Human Cost

In 2014 war broke out in the Ukraine, specifically in the Russian-speaking Donbass, whose language and culture were oppressed and mocked by the racist centralisers in Kiev. Up to 14,000 people, including 400 children, were massacred by the Kiev authorities and the other 6 million were told to leave the Ukraine, if they did not like Kiev’s new ‘democracy’. This year, there has been much worse. Six months of conflict have now passed, though it was clear from the beginning, like it or not, that the small Russian expeditionary force had already won in the first few weeks. Their feint to the North, as if to take Kiev, locked up the Kiev military there (the same tactic as the US used in Iraq with a feint from the sea), enabling Russian forces to achieve their aims of conquering much of the Russian-speaking East and take the Russian-speaking South as far as Kherson, where they were greeted by many as liberators. This was what the Russians had openly stated that they intended doing all along, but they had been disbelieved.

Like it or not, the ensuing decision by the USA/West/NATO to send billions of dollars of their weapons, disarming their own troops, to be destroyed by Russian missiles, sometimes before they can even be unpacked (as on 24 February at Borispol Airport), is only prolonging the inevitable defeat and making the bloodshed far worse. So far the Russians and their Allies have lost over 6,000 troops dead, although over the last two months since they took strategic Mariupol, casualties have been very low, as this has largely become a war of satellites, drones, artillery and precision missiles. On the other hand, the Kiev Army has lost some 250,000, at least 60,000 of them killed, and continues to lose many hundreds of ill-trained, ill-equipped and often very young or very old troops almost every day, whether killed, wounded, or by surrender and desertion.

You should not be fighting a modern war when you do not have air superiority. Kiev does not, as most of its air force was destroyed in the first few days. It is a catastrophe and leaves widows and orphans everywhere. Every son killed had a mother and a father, a brother and a sister. The whole country is in bitter mourning. Its population is now down to 30 million. Of 6 million refugees, Russia is the European country that has taken the most, with 2 million fleeing the bankrupt Ukraine. However, 4 million others have left futureless bankruptcy for various countries in Western Europe, over half going to Poland and Germany. It costs the US taxpayer $5 billion every month just to keep the Kiev government afloat, let alone the billions of dollars of destroyed US military equipment.

Unless the 13% of the world, which is all the Western world/G7/NATO is, really wants a nuclear war to annihilate humanity, as Mrs Truss says she does, the West will just have to accept that Russia has taken back the Russian Lands within the former Ukraine. People like Mrs Truss, with her extraordinary ignorance of the basic history and geography of the Ukraine, simply do not realise that this is an existential war for Russia on its doorstep, even though V. Putin explained this quite clearly. Russians will die to win this war to free their brothers and sisters in the East and South of the Ukraine.

However, despite what Mr Johnson has recently proclaimed, no-one in the UK has chosen to pay 400% more for fuel bills, let alone die for the Ukraine, of which country few in the UK had even heard until six months ago. The result of the UK government’s refusal to buy Russian gas and other commodities and to arm the Ukraine, without consulting the electorate, which is not even allowed to elect the next Prime Minister, is soaring inflation, social disruption, strikes and grinding poverty, which will probably topple the UK government in the near future. Here is the difference with Russia. Nobody in the UK wants to suffer, let alone die, for an unknown country.

Local Consequences: What Does the Future Ukraine Look Like?

It looks something like the following – something that could have happened without any bloodshed, had democratic referenda been allowed back in 2014:

The Real Ukraine of Ukrainian speakers, the ‘Kyiv Protectorate’, or whatever it will come to be called, may take 11 demilitarised central and western provinces of the former Soviet Ukraine: Sumy, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, Ternopil. Population: 11.2 million. This will be a landlocked nation, in effect a Second Belarus, with a population of just over a quarter of the 1991 Soviet Ukraine.

Russia may take the 9 Russian-speaking eastern and southern provinces: Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhe, Kherson, Crimea (Crimea of course already rejoined Russia in 2014), Nikolaev, Odessa. Population: 14.2 million.

Poland may, with Russia’s permission, take back the 3 far western ‘Habsburg’ provinces: Volyn (though a small number in the north of Volyn might want to join Belarus), Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk. Population: 3.2 million. This is the historic ‘Ukraina’ – the word that simply means the borderlands (that are next to Poland). Clearly, this real Ukraine would have to receive some sort of autonomy within the NATO-ruled Polish Republic as a demilitarised buffer-zone.

Hungary may take 1 province: Zakarpattia. Population: 0.85 million. This is providing that its mainly Carpatho-Russian people vote for this by referendum, though, true, many have already accepted Hungarian passports. This region would also have to receive some sort of autonomy within Hungary.

Romania may take 1 province: Chernivtsy. Population: 0.6 million. This is providing that its largely Romanian-speaking people vote for it by referendum, which seems highly likely.

  1. Global Consequences: Western Sanctions Cause Chaos in Western Europe

Why is the Russian campaign taking so long, why did Russia not use 25% or even 50% of its armed forces and take the whole of the Ukraine within a few weeks? Because that is not its strategy. By its own admission Russia has never had any intention of occupying the whole of the Ukraine and its capital Kiev. Therefore, only 5%-10% of the highly professional Russian Armed Forces have been engaged in order to take back the Russian-speaking areas, which were separated from it by Marxist diktat exactly 100 years ago. In any case, most of the fighting is being done by the local anti-Kiev Eastern Ukrainians and Chechen allies, who have suffered most of the casualties.

Then there is no hurry – the Russians want to conserve the lives of their own troops and of Ukrainian civilians and to conserve infrastructure. Time in any case is on the Russian side: their greatest ally is, as is usual in Russia, General Winter. By deliberately stretching the conflict out by agreeing to provide arms ‘until the last Ukrainian is dead’, Western European governments have foolishly fallen into the trap of extending the war into the winter. In this way they will have to suffer a winter with little fuel and face national emergencies, probable popular uprisings and riots and the fall of governments. The West has been completely outwitted – by its own stupidity.

Nowhere in Western Europe is the situation as grim as in the UK. With its privatised utilities, which are in reality unregulated, the law of the jungle prevails. For example the energy price cap imposed by the French government on its State energy monopolies is 4%. In the deregulated UK, prices by January will probably have increased by 400%. This is unsustainable. Expect a universal bill boycott, already started, and food riots. In the UK, Johnson’s words of 25 August, ‘You (note, ‘you’ not ‘we’) must endure to defeat Putin’ do not work. Nobody in the UK voted for this. Moreover, in the ‘democratic’ UK, 160,000 mainly elderly, wealthier people are taking two months just to choose the next Prime Minister, the fourth in six years. The UK used to mock political instability in Italy; it had better look at itself.

Global Consequences: Sanctions and Dedollarisation

Europe’s own anti-Russian sanctions, even though forced on it by the USA, are suicidal. Bankruptcy stares it in the face. The rouble has stabilised at a very healthy 60 to the dollar (before the conflict it was over 90 and briefly went up to 120) and money is flooding into Russian coffers as the whole Non-Western world wants its oil, gas, grain, fertilisers, rare earth metals, not to mention its highly effective arms. They are available to anyone in Western Europe who does not sanction them, as long as they pay for them in the Russian currency. On the other hand, the euro has sunk to parity with, or is even below, the dollar. The conspiracy theorists are even saying that the whole conflict was created by the USA to destroy, not Russia or even the Ukraine, but the EU, notably the German economy. Probably crazy, but actually quite logical.

China, India and indeed over 85% of the world have no sanctions against Russia, indeed they basically support Russia. The West is isolated, with its manufacturing dependent on China, which will soon claim back Taiwan. And Russia and other countries are now insisting on payment for their essential commodities in roubles or in their own currencies. The world economy is being dedollarised – that is a disaster for the USA.

  1. Church Consequences

Now we come to the second half of this article, what interests us most. What are the Church consequences of the conflict in the Ukraine, especially, what is happening to the Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Orthodox Church? Here the situation is grim indeed. On 25 August the Russian Church was forced to abandon plans for its Patriarch Kyrill, already sanctioned and banned from visiting the UK and Canada, to meet the Pope of Rome in Kazakhstan in September. Centralised Church authorities in Moscow had totally misread the public mood and the proposition had led to a huge scandal.

However, the misreading, or just plain non-understanding of the views of the local Orthodox grassroots, is far more generalised than this mere detail. The authorities of the formerly multinational Russian Orthodox Church has tried to impose the political views of Russia on its multinational flock. The result? Its Non-Russian flock has largely left it. This is a repeat of what happened in the 1920s when the leader of the Church then, Metropolitan Sergius, tried to enforce loyalty to the atheist Soviet State on his flock outside Russia. Result? He lost his flock outside the Soviet Union. We can see exactly the same result, all over again, in many regions of the world. For instance:

a) The Ukraine.

Few can describe the hatred felt by Ukrainians, mostly from central and western Ukraine, for Russia and Russians. They are simply boycotting the churches where the name of Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned. I speak from what I have seen. Even here, for example, Ukrainian refugees come to us and ask who our Patriarch is. When I reply that last February we were issued with letters of leave to quit the Moscow Patriarchate (its Western European Archdiocese) for Patriarch Daniel of Romania because of political persecution, they smile and say they will return to us. They feel at home with us; we are neutral. However, wherever the name Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned in church services, Ukrainian refugees, like many other Ukrainians who have already been here for some time, vote with their feet and leave. Understandably so.

Even Autonomy for the only canonical Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, that which is led by Metropolitan Onufry, is now no longer enough. It is too late. Moscow has totally lost control. It is Autocephaly that has to be granted, exactly as the saintly Serbian Patriarch Porfiry recently granted to the Church of North Macedonia. This simple message has yet to get through to Moscow, but it is a fact. Otherwise, the Ukrainian Church will simply be an empty shell. This need for Autocephaly is not a top-down case of political manoeuvrings by a nationalistic elite who want their ‘own’ National Church to command and control, as was the case of the Protestant Churches in Western Europe (e.g. the Church of England or those in Scandinavia) or the purely political group founded in the Ukraine in 2018 under the Church of Constantinople.  This is a case of the people demanding Autocephaly, it is a ‘down-top’ movement.

b. The Baltic States

Russophobia here is virulent. There are already two Churches in Estonia and there are about to be two in Lithuania because of nationalism and hatred for Russia. The US-sponsored Patriarchate of Constantinople stands behind both breakaway groups in Estonia and Lithuania. It seems to me that at the very least the three Baltic States must have their own Local, Autonomous, if not Autocephalous, Orthodox Church. Only that will stop the schisms. Again the message is clear to everyone, except to Moscow. Does Moscow really think it can weather the storms and hold on?

The situation in Lithuania is especially disastrous, where priests have been defrocked for a purely political disagreement with Moscow. This is an abuse of the canons. As our bishop, Metropolitan Joseph, said to us in a recent conversation, defrocking happens to clergy for moral, financial or criminal reasons, not because the clergy disagree with their bishop about politics or, as missionaries, are defending their churches from predatory and anti-missionary bishops. Nobody in the free Orthodox world recognises political defrockings. They are not only uncanonical, they are anti-canonical. They are particularly ironical, when those who should be defrocked for molesting women parishioners or stealing money from parish funds are not only not defrocked, but receive all manner of awards!

c. Moldova

Already 20% of churches in Moldova have left the Russian Church for the Patriarchate of Romania. The conflict in the Ukraine is making Moldovans shudder. Will we be next? The tiny Russian Transdnestria was of course long ago lost to Moldova, but what about Moldova itself? It seems inevitable that Moscow will lose the remaining 80% of its parishes there to the Romanian Church. Large parts of the Russian Diaspora are also composed of Moldovans, for example some 70 of the 72 Moscow Patriarchate parishes in Italy are Moldovan. Surely they too will leave for the Romanian Church?

Already in England most Moldovans have had to leave the Russian Church because of Slav nationalism and, sadly, a certain corruption. Here too, Russian nationalism appears to have destroyed the Russian Church’s once multinational character, as everywhere in the Western world. One nationalist bishop of the Russian Church in the Diaspora actually said in public: ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. That seemed to amuse him: it did not amuse the Romanians and Moldovans, or any of the Non-Russians, present. Here there is cause for the suspension of the bishop, if not for his actual defrocking. As far as I know, Christ never commanded us to hate other races.

d. The Western European Exarchate

In 2018 Moscow at last set up a Western European Exarchate, its centre in its brand-new, purpose-built Cathedral and centre in the most prestigious part of Paris, rumoured to have cost 50 million euros. Today, the Exarchate too is shattered, seemingly destroyed by Russian nationalism. Its first head lived in the Cathedral with his wife and child, and had another vice. He was duly sent away. (Though not sent so far as their Bishop Gury in the 1990s, who did something so serious that he ‘had to go’ and freeze in Magadan, opposite the Sea of Japan). The second head, a very politically-minded and very ecumenically-minded and very young man, who has not spent any time in a monastery and who speaks no French and poor English, now lives in Moscow and does administrative things.

Meanwhile, the Moscow Patriarchate Diocese in the UK no longer has a bishop, he is in Moscow. Few even remember who was the last Englishman to be ordained to the Russian Orthodox clergy in the UK. And the Moscow Patriarchate bishop in the Netherlands also seems to have disappeared. He got into great trouble with the Dutch government for threatening the clergy of his huge church in Amsterdam with ‘the Russian Embassy’, because, as Non-Russians, they had expressed purely political disagreement with the conflict in the Ukraine. As a result, the parish and about 70% of the people transferred to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as did a parish in Italy and another in Germany. Frankly, it appears as if the Western European Exarchate had its chance and failed. Does it have any future after the events in the Ukraine? That it might become the foundation to set up a future Western European Orthodox Church, as Patriarch Alexiy II wanted twenty years ago, now sounds like a bad joke. Hopes have been dashed by those who have betrayed their pastoral duties.

e. North America and ROCOR

In the USA the Moscow Patriarchate has also lost its bishop. Its forty or so parishes are left without a leader and, it seems perhaps without any possibility of even survival through new ordinations, let alone expansion. However, in general, all parts of the Orthodox Church in North America are in chaos. The largest group by far, the Greek Archdiocese, is facing scandal and disorder with the probable deposition of its new, highly political and secularising Archbishop Elpidiphoros. The second largest group, the OCA, which has Russian origins, is facing many difficulties, mot least the behaviour of its administration in over-zealously closing churches and persecuting clergy during lockdowns. The third largest group, Antioch, sometimes called ‘The Church of the Four Families’, faces a scandal involving allegations against its Metropolitan Joseph.

The fourth largest group, quite small in fact, a Russian group, ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), faces very embarrassing accusations of defamation, precisely from a Ukrainian priest, Fr Alexander Belya. The US courts will clearly favour him, though they must first justify his allegations to find out if they are true. Several other scandals in the USA involving properties and Russian clergy who have fled it for the Greek Church are also left unanswered. On top of all this, questions have been raised about the use of the electronic signature of the late Metropolitan Hilarion of ROCOR. He was clearly very ill for quite some time, at least for a year, if not for several years, before his death in May 2022, and yet all manner of very serious documents were being issued in his name by others. His death also leaves his Western Rite group, already dissolved in England, all at sea.

Moreover, ROCOR faces huge difficulties outside the USA. In Western Europe it lost half its English Diocese, 12 clergy, 5,000 people and two million pounds worth of Church buildings, ultimately to the Church of Romania, which canonically received them all, with the blessing of Patriarch Daniel himself. In 2007 they had already lost their only two monasteries in England to an Old Calendarist Church only because their analysis of the degree of the deSovietisation of the Church inside Russia varied with that of their bishop. On top of that, that English diocese then lost another four clergy to various other jurisdictions. Although still (!!) in complete denial of this reality, ROCOR here has now largely become an internet presence. The churches that left it for the Romanian Church are full and growing in clergy and people. Its very few remaining churches are very small. Meanwhile, in Geneva it also faces yet another court case on internal matters concerning administration and very embarrassing sackings, allegedly illegal, involving its appointment of freemasons.

From 1917-1991 ROCOR existed as the free and unpersecuted branch of the Russian Church outside the Soviet Union. After the atheist Soviet Union fell in 1991, and even more after ROCOR’s long-awaited reconciliation with the post-Soviet Russian Church in 2007, many began to question the reason for its continued existence. Some felt that Providence had given it a chance to justify its continued existence as the missionary part of the Russian Church outside Russia. It had the chance to prove itself as such from 2007 to 2017. Then all was still possible. Sadly, it failed to realise its potential and openly abandoned missionary work in whole areas of the world, such as Latin America, Indonesia and most of Western Europe, and instead concentrated on trying to amass money and striving to obtain impossible-to-obtain properties gained by previous unsupported missionary work. It seems as though the once persecuted Church has become the persecuting Church.

At the same time, some of its members turned inwards and selected Trumpism, and not Christ, as their ideology. It was clear that some in ROCOR had lost their way. Having chosen not faith, but a political ideology, and one which fails to work outside narrow US Republican ghettos, and lost most of itself outside North America, ROCOR may now be obliged to retreat to North America and lick its wounds. A well-known Russian Orthodox Metropolitan wrote to me only last week and told me that he does not think that it can survive at all; ROCOR risks becoming an embarrassment to the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia. This is a Church Titanic, of which Fr Alexander Belya is only the tip of the iceberg.

Conclusion: Lose-Lose?

The curse of nationalism has been lose-lose for all who have taken that particular acid bath. The Kiev government has lost by persecuting its own people and playing with several different nationalist and schismatic ‘Glory to the Ukraine churches’ and persecuting its only canonical Glory to God Church. Its false ‘churches’ have not only not created unity, but they have destroyed all remaining unity by persecuting and striving to seize the properties of the canonical Church (more parallels with the situation in the Diaspora). The Church of Constantinople has lost by playing with Greek and then Ukrainian nationalism. Western Europe has lost by playing with European nationalism (its ‘freedom and democracy’ myths) and enforcing Russophobic sanctions to cut off its nose to spite its face. ROCOR has lost by playing with American nationalism, exactly as the much persecuted St John of Shanghai prophesied. And the once multinational Russian Church has lost most of all by betraying its multinational vocation, that very vocation set by Tsar Nicholas II, with Russian nationalism, thus wrecking its multinational reputation. It will not recover from that for at least a generation.

Everyone is a loser. However, Divine Providence can and does make good out of bad. You will see and are already seeing it. Here is the possible end of schisms in the Ukraine and its opportunity, shorn of its Russian territories, to find its true identity and unite around a liberated and demilitarised Kiev. Here is the opportunity for scandal-ridden Constantinople to become a missionary Church, having understood that nobody is interested in a secular-minded, political and racist Church. Here is the opportunity for Europe, including the UK, to make peace with Russia after nearly 1,000 years of hatred based on jealousy and intolerance. Here is the opportunity for the two parts of the Russian Church in North America, the OCA and ROCOR, together with the bishopless Moscow parishes, to unite and love one another, instead of hating one another. (The apparently still unknown commandment of loving one another is to be found in the Gospels). It is all so simple. Here is the opportunity for the Russian Church, having for now lost Europe, to turn to serious missionary work in Asia and in Africa. God always gives opportunities. Sadly, men do not always take them.

 

Disunity and the Ukraine

The news that the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the local jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, intends to consecrate Alexander Belya as an auxiliary bishop of the Greek Archdiocese for its ‘Slavic Vicariate’, has brought even more disunity there.

In a letter addressed to the Greek Archdiocese’s Archbishop Elpidophoros, the hierarchs of the five other largest Orthodox dioceses in North America, warn that the consecration of Belya poses a great threat to Orthodox unity in America. Indeed, if he is made a bishop and therefore becomes a member of the Assembly of Bishops, the hierarchs warn that they will be forced to leave the Assembly, as they recognise his defrocking in 2020 as canonical. The defrocking was done by ROCOR, which has received many strange clergy from the Ukraine over the last thirty years, who have always caused profound division and distress.

The hierarchs are already concerned about the break in communion between the Moscow and Constantinople Patriarchates, following the latter’s establishment of their Epiphanius Church in the Ukraine in 2019. The Assembly hierarchs should do nothing to further impede the eventual return of Russian hierarchs to the work of the Assembly, write the OCA, Antiochian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Serbian hierarchs. Moreover, we have heard that Archbishop Elpidophoros, a highly controversial political figure, is opposed in this decision by most of his own Greek bishops in the USA.

Yet again, we see how the Ukraine stands at the centre of disunity within the Orthodox world. First, there were the uncanonical ‘Churches’ of Filaret and Epiphanius. Then, according to some critics, declared in a Sergianist manner, there is the virtually autocephalous Church under Metr Onufry, forced into being under State pressure and the theft/closure of his 250 churches in the last four months. Finally, there is the fourth Ukrainian Church, consisting of those who continue to commemorate Patrarch Kyrill. Thus, we actually have four groups on the same territory, all using more or less the same language and same rite. They are divided by nationalism, not by doctrine.

I visited the Ukraine five times between 2016 and 2021, as the Missionary Representative for Europe, appointed by the late Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral), the last ROCOR First Hierarch. I can confirm that Inter-Orthodox relations throughout the whole Orthodox Church are in a state of paralysis and will remain so until the conflict in the Ukraine is over. How long will this be?

According to Western data revealed at the recent NATO meeting in Brussels, Ukrainian military losses now stand at about 200,000 troops killed (including some 2,000 mercenaries, 102 of whom were British), with nearly three quarters of their military equipment and ammunition destroyed. In just four months. This is catastrophic. As Western secret services MI6, the BRD and that in Poland state this, then there is little future or hope for the present government in Kiev. We can only expect military collapse and the formation of a new government. Then the Church situation will be transformed. But how exactly, nobody knows.

We see yet another confirmation that all divisions in the Church are caused by politics.