Category Archives: The World

On the Pivotal and Worldwide Importance of the Martyred Tsar Nicholas II

Introduction

I was recently asked by a group of pilgrims from Russia how I, as an Englishman, had come to spiritual awakening and the understanding that Tsar Nicholas II is a saint. I answered them briefly, though giving all the essentials of a fifty-year long process, but then realised that the question deserved a more detailed and systematic answer, as it may interest others too. Here now is that detailed answer.

First Impressions

The first event was when as a child I collected stamps and I remember a stamp with the portrait of Tsar Nicholas on it. His face seemed to stare out at me and it struck me as different from all other stamps; why I could not tell, but it was the first impression and memory of the Tsar and it has always remained with me.

The next stage was after seeing the film Dr Zhivago in 1968, I began reading about the Russian Revolution. This was because that Revolution was clearly the essential turning point in the creation of the whole Cold War world which then surrounded me and terrorised so many. I wanted to understand how it had come about.

Pro-Bolshevik accounts that I read then stood out as false; it was clear that any work that justified the bloody genocide of millions by Marxism-Leninism could not be trusted. However, the only other books available in English, mostly written by Western academics, were no less ideologically-motivated. They all seemed to think that the February 1917 ‘Revolution’, or treason by aristocrats and generals, which had deposed the Tsar (and later led to the October 1917 power grab by Bolshevik bandits) was an excellent thing. The sole book with some interesting content was that by Robert Wilton.

However, even my soul could see that this view was only because their authors imagined that every country in the world should be westernised and have the same constitutional monarchies or else republican governments as in Western Europe and North America. But I already knew these regimes to be spiritually corrupted. In other words, the views of these academics merely reflected their subjective and self-interested agnostic or atheistic materialist cultural prejudices; they did not represent objective reality, but merely the psychological conditioning of their authors. But what could that objective reality be? Although I instinctively sensed that the truth was other and profound, I was still searching in the dark for details.

The Emigration in England

On meeting émigré Russian Orthodox in Oxford in 1974, I began to enquire further. Here I heard three different views among those whom I encountered:

The first émigré view was a minority Patriarchal one which said that the Bolshevik coup d’etat was a triumph, that the Soviet Union was remarkable, that there was no persecution of the Church in Russia and that the Tsar had got what he deserved. This was the pro-Communist view. This was the absurd self-deception of blind Soviet nationalism which put the Soviet Union above the Church. This view held no water with me.

The second émigré view, the majority one, was that, although the Bolshevik power grab had been a disaster, the removal of the Tsar by the February treason had been an excellent thing, since the Tsar had held up ‘progress’. Although he and his family had not deserved to die, there was little pity for them, since those who held this view considered that if they were in exile, it was ‘the Tsar’s fault’. This was the pro-Western or ‘Parisian’ view, as I would later learn to call it. These emigres reckoned themselves as apolitical, but in fact they were highly political. In Oxford, for example, this was the view of Anglophile exiles who admired the Western Establishment, who loved Anglicanism and read ‘The Daily Telegraph’, the newspaper of the Conservative Party. This was the absurd self-deception of blind Western nationalism, a worldly, sociological manipulation, which put the West above the Church. This view held no water with me.

The third view, also political and not spiritual, held in Oxford by only two people, but by some others who attended the church in London, was like the second one, but more extreme. These people had a symbolic respect, but little real love, for the Tsar, but what they wanted above all was revenge, their property and their money back from ‘the evil Soviets’. Some of these exiles had worked for MI6 in that spirit of revenge, which knew no forgiveness or prayer for enemies. The Church for them was in many respects a social and ethnic club. This was a rabidly anti-Communist, purely political view which knew only black and white. Typically, many in that London parish rejected the later 1981 canonisation by the Church authorities. This view held no water with me.

I was disappointed. I had expected to find some kind of spiritual sensitivity and spiritual understanding of Tsar Nicholas II among Russians who were connected with Church life. I had not found it. However, in Oxford I did find out about Fr Nicholas Gibbes, former tutor to the Tsarevich, the first Englishman in the 20th century to become a Russian Orthodox priest and the first such priest in Oxford. Arriving in Russia with typically English prejudices about constitutional monarchy, he had been so influenced by his meeting and life with the exemplary Royal Family, that after many years of reflection he had later joined the Russian Orthodox Church. Moreover, on entering the Church, he had taken the name Alexis after the Tsarevich and then, when he became monk and priest, he took the name Nicholas after the Tsar-Martyr. This was a definite influence on me.

Having read about the New Martyrs and Confessors in a book about them published by ROCOR in North America, I was shocked to realise that the fact that they had still not been canonised was clearly only for political reasons, not only inside Russia, but also in the emigration. In 1976 I therefore created my own calendar, adding the names of the New Martyrs, including the Royal Martyrs. I still have that calendar. However, at this point my understanding was still limited; I understood the Tsar only as a martyr and, out of ignorance, did not yet see the holiness in his life and policies as Tsar, which were the preparation for his martyrdom.

Towards a Deeper Understanding

The next stage was in 1977 reading about Vladyka John of Shanghai and his veneration for the Tsar-Martyr. If this saintly bishop, with his international breadth of vision and gift of prophecy, held such views – and he had wanted to see the Tsar canonised at least as early as the 1930s – then there was more for me to understand. After this I obtained copies of ‘Pravoslavnaya Rus’, the bimonthly Jordanville journal. There I read many articles in preparation for the long-awaited canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs. One article, written by Archbishop Antony of Geneva, on the international repercussions of the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II with the active support of the Western Powers, particularly struck me.

After the long-awaited canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors by ROCOR in 1981, I began praying openly to the Royal Martyrs and reading more and more in Russian about the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. My mind and soul began to be illumined. One by one the Western/Bolshevik (essentially the same) anti-Tsar myths, dissolved. The stampede at Khodynka, the myths of the ‘weak’ Tsar and the ‘hysterical’ Tsarina, the pogroms, the Russo-Japanese War, ‘Bloody Sunday’ and the 1905 Revolution, violent mutinies, strikes and outrages, the myth that the Tsar opposed the re-establishment of the Patriarchate and canonical Church order, the myth of the ‘backwardness’ of the Tsar’s Russia, Rasputin, the First World War, the 1917 ‘Revolution’ and then the Bolshevik coup d’etat – all of these had a completely different interpretation from that which had been given to them by Western and Soviet anti-Tsar propaganda. My instincts had long told me this, but I had lacked the facts to piece it all together.

Living by that time in Paris, I was shocked by the views of Russophobic Paris Jurisdiction emigres, many from aristocratic families in St Petersburg, who actually agreed with the anti-Tsar propaganda and blasphemously slandered the Tsarina and Rasputin. Many of them were descendants of those who had carried out the February 1917 Revolution; they therefore had their own axe to grind. It was at this time that I finally clearly grasped that Tsar Nicholas II had lived his life as a Confessor before ever becoming a Martyr. Reading the pre-Revolutionary prophecies of holy elders, I finally understood that the Tsar had been first slandered and then removed by Satanic forces because he and the Russian Empire had been the last obstacle to universal apostasy. And those who agreed with such slanders were actually, though perhaps unknowingly, participating in a form of Satanism.

This became more and more obvious when in the 1990s materialistic Communism (the Tartar Yoke) collapsed as a result of the canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors in 1981. What is most to be repented for in the Church Outside Russia is that this canonisation had not taken place much earlier. After the disastrous post-Communist period of the 1990s, when the countries of the former Russian Empire were ravaged by the materialistic Capitalism of Western-supported bandit-oligarchs (the Mongol Yoke), in 2000 that canonisation was at last effectively recognised by the then freed Church in Moscow. Thus came the mystical last chance when all Russian Orthodox, of all nationalities, were called on by the Lord to prepare for the last and worldwide Orthodox harvest before the Second Coming.

And so this recognition made negotiations and then unity with our Church Outside Russia possible. It also meant that it was now only a question of time before the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church would go further and influence the political, economic and social life of the countries where it is in the majority. What is most to be repented for is that some, especially in the Patriarchate outside Russia, rejected that canonisation. How well we remember, for example, being told in 2001 that there were still no icons of the Royal Martyrs at the London Patriarchal Cathedral because there was ‘no space’ on their blank Anglican walls.

The Last Pieces of the Puzzle

Books written about the reign of Tsar Nicholas II over the last fifteen years by professional historians who have access to the archives in Russian Federation, such as Bokhanov and Multatuli (definintely not the absurd Soviet myths of the venal scandalmonger and non-historian Radzinsky, so beloved of Western Russophobes) have supplied me with the last pieces of the puzzle. Like the Jordanville historian E.E. Alfer’ev’s excellent ‘Emperor Nicholas II as a Man of Strong-Will’, Pierre Gilliard’s ‘Thireteen Years at the Russian Court’, Prince Zhevakhov’s memoirs (in Russian) and S. S. Oldenburg’s ‘The Reign of Tsar Nicholas II’ (also in Russian), they supply details, truths which primitive Western (= Soviet) anti-Tsar mythology still reject. I hope that one day the sources will be translated into English. For example

The stampede at Khodynka was caused by the greed of a small element in an unprecedentedly huge crowd of hundreds of thousands, not by the Tsar or his administration.

The Tsar was not weak or incompetent, but an incredibly strong-willed, brave, faithful and courteous man who survived War and Revolution, and, as his contemporaries noted, had his own independent vision, uninfluenced by anyone except the Gospels. Only those who deny the Gospels – like most Western academics and politicians – deny this.

The Tsarina was a self-sacrificing, pious and noble mother and Russian Orthodox patriot, like her sister the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, an example to all Russian Orthodox in the West. She was not a hysterical fanatic or pro-German traitress; only militant atheists and anti-Orthodox think of her as this.

Anti-Jewish pogroms were Europe-wide; the worst ones were in Vienna and Berlin. In the Russian Empire they took place mainly in Poland and among Romanian-speakers. Some of them were indeed started by Jews against Non-Jews and as many Non-Jews died as Jews – about 1500 on each side. The mere fact that so many Jews lived in the Russian Empire is proof of the tolerance of Jews, who had long before sought grateful refuge in the Russian Empire from Western intolerance.

The Russo-Japanese War was treacherously started without a declaration of war by the Japanese. They had been financed and armed by Britain and the USA who wanted to dominate the Pacific and Asia and use Japan as a proxy to weaken Russia. Although non-militaristic Russia spent very little on arms – about a fifth as much as other countries – and its Navy was small and very old-fashioned, by 1905 it was winning the war against a highly militaristic Japan, with its latest British ships, but which was going bankrupt as a result of the costs of the war it had initiated. Russia ended the War on very favourable terms, decided entirely by the strong-willed Tsar Nicholas, who would have continued the struggle, had it not been for the treacherous sabotage inside Russia by a foreign-financed fifth column. Even so, in Japan the peace treaty that ended the War was seen as a defeat.

‘Bloody Sunday’, not at all a peaceful demonstration, but also far less deadly than the propagandists maintain, the 1905 Revolution, violent mutinies, strikes and outrages were terrorist provocations. They had relatively little support outside certain anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox groups in St Petersburg and a few other large cities and they were successfully and courageously put down.

The Tsar had himself in 1904 proposed the re-establishment of the Patriarchate. Those without vision had rejected it. The Church had to wait for the Patriarchate until 1918, because senior representatives, used to the Synodal system, had not been ready for it before.

The Tsar’s Russia was not ‘backward’. In 1914 it was already the breadbasket of Europe and rapidly becoming the greatest industrial power in Europe. 90% of the land then belonged to the people. By 1920 90% of the population would have been literate. By 1950 it would have become the most powerful country in the world, overtaking even the USA. By 2000 it would have had a population of 600 million. What was good in the Soviet system, its world-class education, its health system and sense of national and international social justice were not inventions of the Bolsheviks – they were all inherited from the Tsar’s Russia. And that is precisely why in 1914 the Western Powers wanted to destroy it.

Rasputin was not a ‘mad monk’, but a devout married peasant layman, a good Orthodox family man with three children, who was granted an extraordinary gift of healing by God. His torture and brutal murder by British spies, supported by a transvestite, Oxford-educated Russian aristocrat, was justly seen by the Orthodox peasantry as the anti-people and anti-piety act of decadent aristocrats that it was.

The First World War was forced on the peace-loving Russian Empire by an Austro-Hungarian Empire, backed by an ultra-militaristic, Prussianised Germany, which did not want peace but conflagration. Russian setbacks against Germany, because of the small Russian military budget, lack of guns and munitions and promises on supplies broken by Britain, were matched by successes against Austro-Hungary and the planned campaign of 1917 which would almost certainly have led to victory and the end of the War in that year. Instead of this, the Western Allies chose another year of warfare by encouraging and backing treason by aristocrats.

The Revolution was not caused by the Tsar-loving masses who were suffering some sort of social injustices, but by immensely wealthy and treacherous spoilt aristocrats – conservative but anti-Traditional. Most of these right-wingers ruthlessly exploited the masses, hated the Tsar for his measures of social justice and wanted to grab power for themselves. The Tsar did not abdicate, but they treacherously abdicated from the Tsar and his legitimate authority. Then, in their incompetence, not understanding that the Tsar, God’s Anointed, was the only glue that could hold the Russian Empire together, scarcely six months later, they handed over that power to a bunch of utterly amoral bandits and terrorists – the Bolsheviks.

The Consequences

Retribution came to all the traitors: after 1917 retribution came to the aristocrats who had betrayed the Tsar – they were killed or went into bitter exile, having lost the source of their wealth; retribution came in 1940 to France and Great Britain which had betrayed the Tsar with the humiliating defeat of France and the British humiliation of Dunkirk and the Blitz; retribution came to the Bolsheviks in 1941 when the Soviet Union was treacherously invaded on the feast of All the Saints that have shone forth in Rus; in the Pacific retribution came to the USA in the humiliation at Pearl Harbour and to Great Britain in the humiliation at Singapore, when the Japanese did to them what they, then backed by the USA and Great Britain, had done to Russia at Port Arthur in 1904; retribution came again to Great Britain with the Battle of the Atlantic when the country was nearly starved into submission in 1942 by German U-boats, for the country which until 1914 had been fed by abundant grain from the Russian Empire now depended on North America; retribution came to Austro-Hungary and Germany when the Red Army took Vienna and a devastated Berlin in 1945.

And then all received further retribution in the Cold War, with its ‘balance of terror’, bankrupting arms race and the last generation of paranoiac American hubris, for which the whole world is still paying in 2013. None of this would have happened if Tsar Nicholas II had remained in power in 1917. They are all consequences of his illegitimate overthrow, which the whole world is still suffering to this very day. Are these evil, worldwide consequences not reason enough for universal repentance, repentance for our own sins and for those of our ancestors and nations?

As for the Orthodox Church, the consequences were catastrophic. With the Tsar removed, the Russian Orthodox Church was attacked both by the atheists from outside and by the renovationists inside. With the key Russian Orthodox Church martyred, paralysed and captive, the other much smaller and much weaker Local Churches were attacked by decadence one by one. Above all, the old but spiritually enfeebled Patriarchate of Constantinople fell under the control of Western and masonic agencies, encouraged modernist schism inside and outside Russia, enslaved by the flattering myth of the absurd interpretation of Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon.

And so Uniatisation of calendar and ritual began to follow. The aim was a spiritually neutered and neutralised Orthodoxy, a bland, decadent and unsalted ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, that no longer presents any danger to militant secularism or, ultimately, to the forces of Antichrist. The consequences of this are still being played out in the Phanariot interference in Russian Church life in Paris, the Ukrainian diaspora, Finland and Estonia; in all the new calendar Local Churches; and even in Serbia, Georgia, and at this very moment on the streets of Kiev and in the chancellery of the Czechoslovak Orthodox Church.

Conclusion

The recognition as saints of St John of Kronstadt and the prophetic St John of Shanghai, both firmly of the Orthodox calendar and both firm monarchists, has been a lodestone of Orthodoxy. It was – and is – sometimes hard for supporters of the new calendar, let alone modernism, to venerate these saints honestly and conscientiously. Today, it is the veneration of Tsar Nicholas II as a saint that is a lodestone for contemporary Orthodoxy, a sign of the spiritual awakening to authentic Orthodoxy, or, wherever it is lacking, a sign of the spiritual slumber of semi-Orthodoxy.

To recognise Tsar Nicholas II as a saint is to awaken spiritually and recognise him as the greatest sacrificial victim of the great 20th century apostasy. It is to renounce all the lies and spiritual impurity of the twentieth century and to repent for them. There may yet come a time in this faltering 21st century, which may not end, when the holy martyred Tsar will be recognised not just as a Martyr and the Martyred Lord’s Anointed, representative of all the New Martyrs, but also a Great-Martyr, as was prophesied at Optina.

Local and Faithful, or Westernised and Hellenised

Since the Russian Revolution the Patriarchate of Constantinople has taken into its jurisdiction a variety of Russophobic dissidents. Their schisms have come about because the dissidents have been too spiritually weak to remain faithful to the Russian Tradition and so have been dragged down into party politics or personality cults. Thus, they have either been virulent nationalists or else anti-Tradition liberals and freemasons, cultivating political and theological schisms caused by that Revolution. Having lost sight of the big picture of Orthodox civilisational values, the Orthodox world-view, they have been brought down into petty, provincial concerns.

Some of the dissidents have been Slavs – Russians, Ukrainians or ex-Catholic Carpatho-Russians – others have been Western converts – Finnish, American, French, Estonian or ex-Anglican. Here we look at the dissidents, originally Russophobic, pro-Kerensky aristocrats from Saint Petersburg, who, leaving Russia, then the Church outside Russia and then the Church inside Russia for Constantinople, over 80 years ago formed the Rue Daru jurisdiction in Paris. After nearly a year without a leader, they are now hoping to elect a new archbishop in November 2013.

Although issued from the Russian Tradition and even claiming to belong to it, since they left the Mother-Church these dissidents have gradually become more and more Westernised and absorbed into the US and Turkish-controlled Greek Patriarchate in Istanbul. This can clearly be seen in their forsaking of the Orthodox liturgical calendar and Orthodox liturgical, dogmatic and pastoral practices for modernist, Western, secular practices. This simultaneous Westernisation and Hellenisation is inevitable and can only be avoided by their leaving schism and taking the path back to the Mother-Church.

If, after the election of a new archbishop, they cannot return to the Mother-Church, they will consign themselves to remaining a small archdiocese of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, perhaps 5,000 in number in all, most of their parishes set up in temporary or rented premises and less than 25 strong. Their ethos will continue to be intellectual, not spiritual, philosophical, not theological, disincarnate, not incarnate, with mainly untrained clergy, without a living Tradition and without a Mother-Church, yet dependent on the Russian Church for vestments, literature, musical culture and people to fill its small parishes. Clearly, eventually, they will disappear, absorbed into Greek Church structures and practices.

However, if, after the election of a new archbishop, they can return to the Mother-Church, they will be able to rejoin the multinational and multilingual free Russian Orthodox Church, fifty times bigger than the tiny and captive Patriarchate of Constantinople. They will be able to take part in the construction of the Metropolia of Western Europe, with its hundreds and hundreds of real parishes and historic churches all over Western Europe, the stepping-stone to a future new Local Church and yet at the same time authentically faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition and Church in all ways. Local and Faithful, or Westernised and Hellenised: this is the choice that they face.

The Blue Lady of Sycamore Hill

By Alvin Alexsi Currier (Available from Amazon at £5.99 in the UK)

This is a little book, published in the USA, with just 28 pages. You might think it expensive, but it is not, because this is the most Orthodox book of this year. And it will make you weep.

It tells the story of the Appearance of the Mother of God to four young Orthodox women in southern Poland in 1925. It is full of the most delightful, childlike pictures. The text also is ultra simple. But it is worth far more than all the learned tomes of ‘theology’ produced at universities and talks given at ‘conferences’. Unlike them, this book will not send you to sleep.

This book is first of all a tribute to the Carpatho-Russian people of south-east Poland, known as ‘Lemkos’. It is a tribute to their suffering under the cruel Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire, then under Fascist Poland that in turn was swept away by Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism. It therefore has a universal significance for all real Orthodox, because we all face the same devilish, this-worldly tribulations to survive anywhere, especially those of us who have been called to live in the Western world.

As the gifted author, who writes from the heart, says: ‘The Latin literacy of the West gave birth to a church rich in learning, piety and art. However, our mostly illiterate Eastern Orthodox ancestors painted, sang and acted out the Gospel, weaving it through a rich, liturgical cycle, wrapping it in a vibrant folk culture and celebrating it in their amazing churches. Our faith more than anything else is the mark of our people’.

These words are true not only for the Carpatho-Russian Lemkos, but for all of us who are destined to be Orthodox of all nationalities the world over. Put away your dusty monographs and heavy tomes! Come down from your ivory towers! Taste of the sweetness of Orthodox Christian LIFE! All 220 million Orthodox Christians of every race and clime the world over, hearken to the words of the Most Holy Mother of God on Sycamore Hill, words of revelation to us all this very day:

‘Our compassion embraces you. Here I will make a home among you. Here I will be one of you and you shall be mine. Ahead lay rivers of tears and valleys of pain. You shall tread the edge of the abyss of despair, but here a spring shall flow, to nurture your return to the love and beauty that is your heritage and destiny’.

Obstacles to the Restoration of Orthodox Russia

Since the fall of Communism in 1991, work towards the restoration of Orthodox Russia has become the common task of all conscious Russian Orthodox. However, if this restoration is to happen, then three obstacles must be overcome. What are they?

The first obstacle is to overcome the Western fashions which have flooded into Russia since 1991. Consumerism, pornography, homosexuality, drugs and all that had accumulated in the West since the 1960s entered Russia after 1991. Such decadent egoistic fads lead only to primitive Western-style infantilism (for example, Pussy Riot) and the zombification of political correctness, spoilt infants demanding their toys or ‘rights’. Only once this Western individualism has been overcome, can Russia come to the second obstacle.

The second obstacle is full spiritual and so moral renewal. Without such a movement of mass repentance, because that is what these words mean, there can be no return to national roots and values. We speak of the restoration of Orthodoxy which is incarnate in Russia and so in tune with its history. Only such a restoration can create a new consciousness and understanding of national history beyond the deformations and divisions introduced by the Synodal period, the Soviet period and the Western period since 1991.

The third obstacle is political and so economic renewal. In Orthodox Russia, there should be no great divisions caused by excessive wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, as there is today and as there also was before 1917. Just as corruption came into Russia through a Westernised aristocracy, so today it comes through a Westernised oligarchy. There should be no corruption, but social justice and free access to educational and health care systems. Ultimately, this means the restoration of sovereign popular monarchy.

The possibility that Russia may overcome these three obstacles would have international repercussions, as Russia has responsibility both to the Orthodox world and to the world at large. We must wait and see in patience, if this potential is to be realised.

Quo Vadis, O Vaticane?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why We do not Fear the Future

Introduction

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

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

The Church Triumphant

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

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

The New Martyrs and Confessors Triumphant

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

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

The Battle for Catholicism

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

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

The Battle for the Non-Christian World

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

The New Martyrs and Confessors
28 January / 10 February 2013

Orthodoxy and the Future of the Western World

Never has the power of sin dominated humanity as it does today…And we know that if sin is victorious over all humanity, then Antichrist will appear.

His Holiness, Patriarch Kyrill, 1 February 2011, (http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/print/1398799.html)

Today we recall the prophetic words of St John of Kronstadt on the birthday of Tsar Nicholas II in 1907:

‘The Empire of Russia wavers, shakes, is close to falling…Hold firm to your Faith and the Church and Orthodox Tsar…If you fall away from your faith…then there will be no Russia or Holy Rus, but a collection of all sorts of people of other faiths, trying to destroy one another…’.

We can understand this prophecy in the light of later history, as recalled by ROCOR faithful:

In Paris the White Russian General P.N. Krasnov related how during the First World War Kaiser Wilhelm once asked a thousand Russian Muslim prisoners of war, for whom he had built a mosque, to ‘sing your prayer’. To a man they sang, ‘God, save the Tsar!’

The overthrow and the arrest of Emperor Nicholas II caused great sorrow to many of the Protestant Baltic Germans in the Imperial Army, such as Count General Keller and General von Rennenkampf, or the Muslim General, Ali-Hussein Khan Nachichevansky, who remained faithful to the Tsar, unlike so many other generals.

In Tobolsk, where the Imperial Family had been exiled, the local Tartars prayed with their mullah for the well-being of the captives in front of the house where they were under arrest.

In 1939, that faithful and most active layman of ROCOR in Western Europe, P.S. Lopukhin, wrote:

‘In this essence of Orthodoxy and Orthodox people lies the foundation of Russian expansion and the ability to join peoples to them, without crippling them. Foreigners perhaps sometimes even more than Russians have loved their ideals, for example, the idea of the White Tsar. This is of course a purely Holy Russian idea. ‘Don’t think’, said one Palestinian, ‘that the Russian Tsar was only Russian. No, he was also Arab. The Tsar is the all-powerful protector and defender of the Orthodox East. While he lived, millions of Arabs lived in peace and security’. Another man said: ‘When the news that they had killed the Tsar reached the Middle East, then in three countries (Syria, the Lebanon and Palestine) there was a wave of mass suicides. Already at that time Arabs felt that with the death of Tsar Nicholas human history was over and that life on earth had lost all its meaning’. A Russian Orthodox man recalled how when the news of the murder of Emperor Nicholas II first reached Kazan, a Tartar said in despair: ‘Russia is dead. We are all dead’.

Today, in many parts of the world, for example in Syria, we see the results.

Why do we recall these words today? Let us look at Western Europe today, first recalling events which took place in Portugal in 1917 – 96 years ago:

‘We will not dispute the miraculous nature of the original appearance of the Mother of God (in Fatima)…like other similar appearances. All these signs had one general task: to warn faithful Catholics of coming misfortunes and to call them to repentance, to change their lives and draw near to God – in order to avoid these misfortunes. To the unprejudiced consciousness, all these appearances, especially the miracle at Fatima, contain what is applicable to Russia, clearly and beyond argument’.

Fr Konstantin Zaytsev, Pastoral Theology, Vol II, P. 41, Jordanville 1961

And what has happened 52 years on since these words were written? Has there been repentance? Let us look at four items, taken from the news this very day, 7 February 2013:

It has been announced in Germany that the Catholic Archdiocese of Berlin is to reduce the number of churches it has from 105 to 30 in the next seven years.

Meanwhile a similar situation has developed in Brussels, (which within a generation will, it is said, have a majority Muslim population, where scores of its 108 churches are to be closed, including the central St Catherine’s church, which is to be turned by the Archdiocese into ‘a vegetable market’.

After being deluged with complaints from outraged religious groups, Obama’s health department has dug in its heels, saying its decision to force employers to provide abortifacient birth control drugs will continue as planned – although faith-based groups will be given a year reprieve. In response, U.S. Catholic bishops have not minced words, vowing to fight the order as ‘literally unconscionable’.

It has been announced that the government of the Russian Federation will review its policy of allowing Russian orphans to be adopted in countries like France and Great Britain, since legislation is being passed there to allow single sex ‘marriage’.

What is the purpose of Orthodoxy?

That I may not be accused of speaking from myself, I will quote again from that renowned Orthodox thinker and writer, Fr Konstantin Zaytsev, from page 136 of the very same book as above:

‘The world has previously been on the threshold of its end. Even now the end can be postponed. What is necessary for this? The Restoration of the Russian Orthodox Empire. The Restoration of Age-Old Church Consciousness’.

He continues on page 138:

‘As regards the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia…inasmuch as it remains by succession a surviving part of the Russian Orthodox Church, it thereby remains faithful to the idea of the Russian Orthodox Empire…’.

The West has westernised Russia. All aspects of modern, everyday life, from blast furnaces to railways, from electricity supply to television, from cars to smartphones, have been shaped by technology born in the West. However, all this belongs to the realm of the natural. But there is that which belongs to the realm of the supernatural, the miraculous: This is the bringing of the West to Christ and only a fully restored Orthodox World can do this.