Category Archives: UK

EU Independence Movements and the Future of Europe

It seems to some that the political and business elites of many European countries have over the decades sold their souls and sold out their countries for the sake of EU lucre. Today more and more believe this and are deciding to retrieve their independence and freedom. They want no more to do with a ‘Fourth Reich’, as they call it. They do not want a Germanisation of Europe, but a Europeanisation of Germany, the latter being divided into its constituents parts, instead of dominating Europe as at present. Whether the United States, whose project the EU was and is, would allow this, is another question.

In England, where the ‘Conservative’ Party which, in this as in many other areas, has not been conservative for decades, this situation has led to the rise of a political Party called the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). A new movement in Germany, Alternatives for Germany, Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD), also wants to escape from the straitjacket of the EU dystopia. Moreover, these movements are mirrored in new political parties, resistance movements and street protests in other countries in the EU, whether in Poland, Czechia, Greece, Spain, Cyprus, Italy or elsewhere.

All these new parties and protest movements face their problems and temptations, notably of falling into extremism or racism. For example, UKIP seems to want independence from Brussels and yet at the same time seems to refuse independence for Scotland. Brussels is after all only Westminster magnified, with the same anti-democratic and totalitarian ‘one size fits all’ mentality. Indeed, this Party’s error may well be in its very name, UKIP. It would perhaps be better if it were simply called the Independence Party (IP). Otherwise, it may simply be seen as a party of past-worshipping nationalists and racists.

Similarly, in Greece, the EU ‘Golden Dawn’ Opposition appears to have Fascist tendencies, in Germany AfD has been reproached as a party of academics and intellectuals, in Italy the protest movement has been accused of political irresponsibility, and so on. However, it has still not been explained why in 1975, when the UK was granted a referendum on possibly leaving the Common Market, as it then was, the vote counters were sworn to secrecy by the Official Secrets Act, and the majority in favour of remaining in it was astoundingly large. In any case it is easy to criticise the EU.

There is the obvious failure of its absurd euro project; its clear anti-democratic ethos; its openly admitted lack of transparency, especially of financial transparency. Little wonder it has been called a mafia superstate. In a global world, this EU customs union is surely totally out of date, a mere hangover from the reaction to the murderous European tribalism of the Second World War on the part of wealthy politicians who are now all retired – or should be. But what if the EU were to break up? What could it turn into? One possibility might be smaller groups of countries. For example:

A Northern European Confederation of some 140 million with Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

A Central European Confederation of some 165 million with the German Lands, France, Benelux, Switzerland, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania.

A Mediterranean European Confederation of some 185 million with France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Malta.

A Eurasian Confederation of some 350 million with the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan (the present Eurasian Union) and the other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, together with Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece, Cyprus, the Lebanon and Syria.

In other words we would suggest that the future of Europe may be in confederations of countries which actually have a shared history and culture, rather than in an unwieldy and centralised bureaucratic conglomerate.

English-Language Island Orthodoxy

Introduction

Seven of the fourteen universally recognised Local Orthodox Churches are represented in the Diaspora and therefore in the British Isles. The Local Churches present are: the Russian with two dioceses – the Sourozh Diocese, directly dependent on Moscow, and the Diocese of the self-governing Church Outside Russia, known as ROCOR; the Greek Thyateira diocese, under the Church of Constantinople; the Antiochian deanery; the Serbian; the Romanian; the Bulgarian; the Georgian. However, the last four dioceses, though witnessing to a venerable Orthodox Tradition, are not relevant to our consideration here, as we are concerned with parishes which make extensive use of English. What then is the situation of the first four groups today, with regard to their use of the English language in services?

The Sourozh Diocese

The Sourozh Diocese, founded in 1962, originally consisted of only two tiny parishes, because 90% of exiled Russians saw it as a Soviet institution and deeply mistrusted it. In order to exist as a diocese, however small, it therefore had to recruit members among Anglicans – hence its need to use English. The difficulty with this was that Sourozh, based around a personality rather than the Tradition of the Church, often failed to integrate these Anglicans into the Church, receiving them very swiftly. The result was that many of the faithful Orthodox, either Russian or else English, but Non-Anglican, left Sourozh, or rather were forced to leave it. The modernistic, new calendarist ethos being promulgated by the Anglican newcomers was alien to those who knew the Tradition.

Being based around a single divisive personality, Sourozh therefore never had a real diocesan structure and premises outside London and, just, Oxford; this today is yet another bitter fruit of its past legacy, which is not yet buried. For the same reason, once the personality had died (as all personalities do), a schism took place. For decades, the followers of the personality cult had ejected actual Russian Orthodox, because the former were a majority imposing their politically-minded Orthodoxy on the minority. However, once Russian Orthodox had become the majority through immigration, the old majority of 300 decided to leave. This was in 2006. Reality had caught up with fantasy and political Anglican-Orthodox syncretism could only continue outside the reunited and restored Russian Tradition and Church discipline.

Of course, they were free to leave. No-one would have minded that. The error of its leaders was to try and take away Church property and the Russian Orthodox name with them. For, as is clear with the example of those centred in Paris who also left the Russian Church in order to create a modernist ideology, you can only be Russian Orthodox if you are faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church. After the 300 had left, diplomacy was required. Nevertheless, even a diplomat of foreign culture with some English can misunderstand English people. Misunderstandings are inevitable. Today, the future direction of Sourozh is not clear, other than that it will, in time, merge with the ROCOR Diocese as part of the future Western European Metropolia, one of probably three in the future ROCOR.

The ROCOR Diocese

In the 1950s the ROCOR Diocese, with a bishop living in Preston and a saintly archbishop on the Continent, had been second only to the Thyateira Diocese in size. However, within a generation it had gone from big to small. Even in the early 1980s its London Cathedral was still attended by some 400 every Sunday (600 in the 1960s). But they were nearly all elderly. Insisting on Russian ethnicity and language, ROCOR lost the young and parishes closed one after the other. Within a few years ROCOR was to lose its bishop, its clergy (who went to North America or Western Europe), its Cathedral and most of its diocese. Greek old calendarism appeared with an Anglo-Catholic tint. Many in the 1990s thought that the local ROCOR Diocese would die out completely; however, in recent years there has been a revival.

Nevertheless, ROCOR’s great weakness is the lack of a resident bishop. The problem here is that the Diocese is now too small and poor to have a bishop; but this is a vicious circle; it only became small and poor because there was no bishop in good health or resident. This may be called ‘the South American syndrome’, where in a similar situation, action was also taken too late. A uniting, bilingual (and bicultural) bishop would be the solution, especially as the Sourozh Diocese is to merge into the ROCOR Diocese. Such a figure is also necessary, for if the situation in Russia were to degenerate and, for example, some pro-Western regime came to power there and began to persecute the Church, as happened in Constantinople, the self-governing Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) would have nothing to fear.

The Thyateira Diocese

Under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Thyateira Diocese has been the largest of the Local Churches present in the British Isles and Ireland ever since post-War immigration from Commonwealth Cyprus. However, its situation is now increasingly similar to that of ROCOR about forty years ago. Many of its parishes are dying, attended by the elderly. The young have been lost because of the insistence on ethnic identity and the Greek language. Thus the Anglican Diocese of London has for instance six priests of Greek background. Not speaking Greek, but only English, they felt no identity with the ‘Greek’ Church. And even educated young people, who remained faithful to Greek Orthodoxy, have left for the Greek Church in USA, where they are not reprimanded for using English.

Within this Diocese there are a small number of ex-Anglicans, who entered mainly under a previous archbishop in the 1980s. They have faced hellenisation, with their Christian names being supplanted on ordination by names such as Kallistos, Aristobulos, Athanasios, Pankratios, Palamas, Athenagoras etc. At the same time, clergy imported from Greece and Cyprus go by names such as Peter, Paul, Michael, John etc. There is also the small deanery of some 300 mainly ex-Anglicans who left the Sourozh Diocese. Supposedly following Russian Church music and its clergy in Russian dress, they are deprived of a Mother-Church, as their former head, Archbishop Gabriel, pointed out. Inevitably, they will be swallowed up into post-1948 American new calendarist Phanariotism, like the rest of what is now a de facto deanery.

The Antiochian Deanery

Of the four groups concerned here, this is the newest and also the most English-language oriented. It was founded eighteen years ago by ex-Anglican clergy and laity. Indeed, virtually all of its priests are Anglican-trained and there is some doubt as to whether Non-Anglican clergy, that is regular Orthodox, would be accepted into it. Asking to enter the Church with its own agenda, this Anglican group was rejected first by the Sourozh Diocese and then by the Thyateira Diocese – it did not ask the ROCOR Diocese. As a result, the group was received into a new and separate Deanery under the Arab-speaking Patriarchate of Antioch (Damascus). The problem here was that the group had in effect no training and no Mother-Church, being cut off by language and culture, disincarnate from the Tradition, yet actually using elements of Russian Church music and its clergy in Russian dress.

With no possibility of integrating the Mother-Church through contact with its representatives, some members of this group in fact remained Anglicans. In such cases ordinary Orthodox were alienated by it, not feeling at home in it. Charismatics continued their unOrthodox practices; those of Low Church background remained in their Puritanism; those of High Church background remained in their unCatholic Catholicism. Without integration into Orthodoxy, some continued to act and think as Anglicans, with intercommunion and new calendarism, the Divine Liturgy interrupted for ‘speaking in tongues’ and confession unknown. This was mirrored by the exclusive use of English and a phyletist insistence on a ‘British’ Orthodoxy, on Protestant-style proselytising and ‘outreach’ only to Anglicans.

This part of the Deanery was in fact in hock to the British Establishment, the inventor of Anglicanism, and so out on a limb with the rest of the Orthodox Church in this country. Hence, a refusal to concelebrate. Such an ethnic Anglican ‘Orthodoxy’ will die out, since it is of no interest to real Orthodox, even less to Non-Anglicans. However, although this above aspect exists, there are many in the Antiochian Deanery who have integrated the Orthodox Church, understanding that their survival is dependent on this. Here there is cause for optimism and good pastoral work is being done, and Romanian and other Orthodox are teaching the Deanery what Orthodoxy is and how to do the services. But in such a case will the Deanery not one day be released by Antioch and sent to join another Local Church?

Conclusion

It is clear that all English-language Orthodoxy has a Russian background; it refers to the Russian Tradition, Russian Church music and Russian practices, however simplified and ill-understood. Then why are not all united in the Russian Church? It is clear that the fault lies half with representatives of the Russian Church and half with those who have come to the Church. Neither side has always met its responsibilities, sidelining the Tradition, diverting from the mainstream, putting first not the Kingdom of Heaven, but an ethnic or political identity and a lack of cultural understanding, or a personality cult and a lack of competence. Unity is lacking because of the lack of any uniting personality in any of these groups. Despite this, we should never underestimate the grace of God to transfigure the present situation in these Isles.

A Cardinal Error

‘If marriage is forbidden to priests, they will fall into sins worse than mere fornication, not abhorring the embrace of other men.’

Bishop Ulric of Imola, The Rescript, c. 1060

The resignation in Scotland of Cardinal Keith O’Brien has come a day after claims by three priests and a former priest emerged in the Observer newspaper. These claims date back to the 1980s and concern ‘inappropriate behaviour’. Yet another scandal for Catholicism, coming only days after the revelations in Ireland about tens of thousands of young women, more or less imprisoned as slave labourers in laundries run by nuns.

Last week, the self-same Cardinal called for Roman Catholicism to end its celibacy rule for the priesthood. He told the BBC: ‘I realise that many priests have found it very difficult to cope with celibacy as they lived out their priesthood, and felt the need of a companion, of a woman, to whom they could get married and raise a family of their own’.

Nearly thirty years ago now, I remember talking to an Italian Catholic priest about clerical celibacy. As a married Orthodox cleric, I asked him how Catholic priests coped with the imposition of celibacy. He told me in his honest Italian way: ‘It depends. In Germany the priests are overweight – they eat to compensate. In Ireland they drink Guinness. In England, they are uptight and frustrated. And in Italy, well, we just ignore it’.

I have to say that he was one of only two Catholic priests I have ever met (true, I have not met many) who was not homosexual. The other one was Portuguese and he of course was married and had two children. In the north of Portugal this is not only acceptable but normal and parishioners would not even accept ‘celibates’, full well knowing what they really were.

This situation is common in Spain, the south of Italy, Africa and Latin America. Latin and African blood will not take this nonsense. Only a few months ago I was talking to a Polish taxi-driver in Colchester. He was from Krakow, the centre of Polish Catholicism, and he described to me how much of his income there had come from taxiing Polish priests and seminarians to and from local brothels…

It is time to do away with the piece of jesuitical word-play which says: ‘On no, we don’t have compulsory clerical celibacy; priesthood in Catholicism is voluntary’. The fact is that celibacy is compulsory, if you are a Catholic priest. (Unless, of course, you are a Uniat in distant lands, banned from ever coming to Western Europe or North America, or, only very recently, an ex-Anglican).

This nonsense of compulsory clerical celibacy, introduced by force into the West in the late eleventh century, has to stop. It is the source of that ugly distortion, clericalism, and, by reaction, secularist feminism, which thinks it is being deprived by not being admitted to the priesthood. But even worse than all this, it is the source of perversion and hypocrisy.

Such a rejection of perversion and hypocrisy seems unlikely, because it would mean that the Vatican would have to admit that it has persisted in its anti-Apostolic error for nearly a thousand years – as we Orthodox have always known. The real question therefore is – does the Vatican have the humility and spirit of repentance necessary for it to return to the Evangelical Faith of the first millennium?

If it does, then who knows, perhaps it will even return to the Faith of the Apostles, the Fathers and the Seven Universal Councils, even reinstating the Christian Creed. Perhaps then its various branches, Anglican, Protestant etc., might do the same. Humility and repentance are always miraculous. Perversion and hypocrisy never are.

Extremism Breeds Extremism

Introduction

The recent trial and sentencing for attempted terrorism of three British-born Muslims should cause few surprises. A whole generation of Muslim youths, often of Pakistani origin, has grown up in this country. It has been profoundly disaffected by the profoundly anti-Muslim attitudes and policies of British governments – even to the point of planning or committing murderous terrorist attacks. Obviously, such dangerous individuals have to be imprisoned in order to protect the public, Muslim and Non-Muslim alike. What errors have British governments committed in order to create such disaffection?

Errors

The first error is historic, in fact going back many centuries to the Crusades. These were in fact Catholic or Western holy wars – anti-Muslim jihads. The Crusades themselves began a ‘tradition’ of racist attitudes and ignorance towards Islam, highly visible in the British Empire. Given such a historical background, it seems extraordinary that governments should have invited Muslims to come and live in Great Britain. It is almost as if they desired to create friction. After 1945, when British factories needed immigrant labour, governments could have invited immigrants from European backgrounds to come and work here. This surely would have created far less cultural friction.

The above error was compounded by secularism. Secularism had no understanding of religion and the fact that culture is moulded by religion. Therefore it had no understanding of Islam and Muslim culture. It presupposed that Islam would die out, just like British Protestantism has died out. In its supreme contempt for and ignorance of genuine religious belief, secularism promoted so-called ‘tolerance’ – actually indifference – and called it ‘multiculturalism’. Obviously, multiculturalism could never work and the ruins it has created are visible throughout Western Europe. Here, Islam is set to become the main practised religion, replacing the dying Western denominations.

Solutions

The solution to historic hostile attitudes to Islam is to spread knowledge about Islam and its historic contributions to, for example, technology and medicine. A shift in the teaching of medieval history in British schools would be welcome. Western ethnocentrism has taught generations that the Crusaders, e.g. the cannibal French King of England Richard the ‘Lionheart’, were not the barbarians, but Muslims were! All those who have lived in countries with large Muslim minorities or majorities for centuries, for instance Russia or Syria, have always practised respect towards Islam, not racism. In this way, those peoples have been able to live side by side with Muslim neighbours in peace.

Such respect must be strengthened by realism. Realism means not mythical ‘multiculturalism’, but separation. Wherever Christians and Muslims have lived together in the same country in peace, it is because they have lived in separate areas. They have been good neighbours, but no more than this. Thus, at the time of the Crusades, militant Westerners arrived in countries where local Christians and Muslims had been living side by side in peace for five centuries or more. It was the foreign and alien violence which they brought which destroyed the peace. Similarly, today, it is the new militant Islam, Islamism, which is destroying peace in Egypt, Libya, Syria and a host of other countries.

Conclusion

Most sadly, there is little doubt that more and more British-born Muslims, most frequently the sons of Muslim immigrants, will be attracted to the new Islamic extremism. There are, it is said, some 500 of them among the foreign Islamists fighting at present in Syria. We can only hope that the security services of this country will protect us from the evil which these Islamists scheme, as has now happened. Most sadly, however, this disaffection has been directly caused by the extremism of recent British governments, which have undertaken invasion

The New World Disorder Goes On

Statistics from the 2011 UK census, just released, show that 59% of the population of England and Wales still calls itself Christian. This figure is down from 72% in 2001. Clearly, the fall is because the older generation, who are nearly wholly nominal Christians, is dying out. It is surprising that this figure for even nominal Christianity is still so high. We would have thought less than 50%. (The figure for practising Christians is probably about 3%). At the same time, this census has not surprisingly revealed that over a quarter, 25%, of the population has no religion at all.

Clearly, the figure of 59% who call themselves Christians has been boosted by the massive immigration to the UK since 2001. Immigrants have been admitted by governments greedy to exploit the hard work of Christians from Eastern Europe, especially Poland, and Africa. (True, governments have also been greedy to exploit the masses of poor Muslim immigrants allowed into the country in recent years – but with cultural consequences which they will live to regret. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/dec/11/census-2011-religion-race-education).

Other Western European countries report figures very similar to Britain for apostasy and mass atheism. It is clear that practising Christians today are a very small minority in all Western European countries. Moreover, it is a minority that is already undergoing indirect persecution. Unless there is an as yet unforeseeable movement of repentance, this persecution will become direct. By 2021, the figure for nominal Christians could easily be as low as 40%, perhaps less. Even in the USA, the number of ‘Christians’ is falling fast. (And most of these seem to be sectarians, compromised by poor education, US nationalism and happy-clappy fundamentalism, which trends have supported the extremes of the Republican Party).

All this comes against a background of direct worldwide persecution of Christianity in Africa and Asia. Nigeria, Mali, the Sudan, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia are only some of the countries concerned. Millions of Christians there have been massacred in recent decades. Today, the Copts of Egypt are being severely persecuted, thanks to the seizure of power by the Western-backed Muslim Brotherhood. However, the most serious situation of all is in Syria. Here the Orthodox Patriarch has just died. His flock, once concentrated in western Syrian centres like Damascus, Aleppo and Homs, is being scattered and murdered. We cannot help thinking that Patriarch Ignatius, who always supported Pan-Arab nationalism, must have died of a broken heart at seeing his country and people being torn to pieces, victims of geopolitics and greed.

The latest anti-Syrian fantasy accusation is that the Syrian government is set to use chemical weapons against its own people. This is nonsense. Its stocks of chemical weapons only exist out of fear that Western-armed and financed, nuclear Israel, whose stockpiles of chemical weapons are 180 time superior to that of Syria, may use its chemical weapons against Syria. This fantastic accusation is an excuse, as were the invented, non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq an excuse; international rumour has it that Western nations together with Islamists are planning an attack on Syria at the end of December and the assassination of the Syrian President.

The curious thing about the whole anti-Christian Arab winter is that the aggressive, secularist and anti-religious West has allied itself with Muslim fanatics against Christianity. Of course, we should not find this curious. The West already did this in Afghanistan in the 1980s, arming to the hilt those it now calls ‘Taliban insurgents’, but then ‘heroic freedom-fighters’. And the British did the same in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, freely allowing the Ottomans to persecute and massacre the Christians of the Balkans. And when Turkey, taking advantage of the Western-organised revolution in Russia in 1917 to massacre one million Armenians, the West was also silent. Today the US and the UK continue to allow Turkey to occupy 40% of Cyprus and massacre the Kurds and persecute Greeks and Armenians. But then of course the UK itself gassed the Iraqi Kurds in the 1930s and the Western Powers supplied Iraq with poison gas to massacre its Kurds in the 1980s.

The meeting of diametrically opposed extremes is nothing new. Did not the Romans and the Jews connive to crucify Christ? Did not Roman Catholic Crusaders and Muslim Turks connive to destroy the Capital of Christendom and the millennium-old Roman Christian Empire? Did not the Mongols and the Teutonic Knights attempt to destroy Russia under St Alexander Nevsky? Did not German generals and American capitalists connive to finance the Russian Revolution? Did not NATO and Albanian Muslim terrorists connive to steal the most ancient part of Serbia?

Today, Syria is the target of the extremists. Islamist mercenaries, especially from Libya, Qatar, the Caucasus and Central Asia, are being shipped in and armed by the US. Qatar wants to put a gas pipeline through Syria to supply Western Europe with natural gas. Turkey wants the same pipeline to go through its territory too. The stakes are all the higher, for it is now known that Syria too has huge reserves of natural gas, which have not yet been exploited by Western companies – as they are now doing with impunity in Libya. And if Syria falls back into the Middle Ages because of Islamic fundamentalism, the West will rejoice; such backwardness will allow it to exploit the country at will.

The massacre and exile of a million or two Syrian Christians is not going to stop this. However, although the West was left free to take over Libya, it is not being left free to seize power in Syria. Syria has friends, first of all, in China. And the West fears China’s economic power. Secondly, there is Russia, which hopes to extend the already-existent Eurasian Union to the whole Orthodox Christian and Central Asian world. And thirdly, there is Islamist Iran, which is hostile to atheism. If the new atheist West really wants to spark a Third World War, it really is doing its best. We live in dangerous times. The 17 US Navy ships, the 5 British ships, the French aircraft carrier and those of other nations at present gathered off Syrian coasts, and the forces at the US bases in Turkey, Kuwait and in the Gulf, spell danger.

St James the Great-Martyr of Persia / Iran
27 November/10 December 2012