Introduction
Faithfulness to the beliefs and practices of St John and the Old ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), to which he belonged, is vital for us his spiritual children, for he is a saint. The Old ROCOR of St John greatly venerated the martyred Tsar, who so loved and supported Orthodox of all nationalities, However, this heritage has largely been lost among the politicised bishops of today’s North America, who have adopted the practice of rebaptising other Orthodox into the Church, contrary to the Creed. Ironically, concelebration there with other Local Churches is rarer now than before the Act of Canonical Communion.
That was signed in Moscow in 2007, and we had fought for it for decades. This isolation is especially so in various dioceses, which today are virtually becoming a de facto American Russian Old Calendarist Church Outside Russia. All in St John’s life and writings contradicts the sectarian-minded, old calendarist bishops of today. Whether it is his attitude to the Catholicity of all the Orthodox Churches, his attitude to the Russian Church inside Russia, to the Tsar, to missionary work, and to money, all is different. To throw away his attitudes has been an act of spiritual suicide.
The Catholicity of the Church
In St John’s time, as in my time in the generation after him, the time of our beloved Abba Vladyka Antony of Geneva, the successor to St John in the see of Western Europe, our Archdiocese was in communion with all, whether the Churches of Constantinople, Serbia and Jerusalem or, already from 1991 on, with the Russian Church inside Russia, known as the Moscow Patriarchate. And ROCOR’s new calendar Romanian parish in Paris, with three priests, was the Archdiocese’s largest. There were no connections between him and old calendarist sectarians.
As St John said at the ROCOR Council in 1938: ROCOR must not cut off communion with other Local Churches (1). And in 1960 he preached that: We in ROCOR keep our unity, in communion with all the Churches, with whom it is possible to be in communion with (2). He concelebrated with all he could concelebrate with, just like Vladyka Antony and all of our generation. This is quite unlike today’s proud schismatics, who consider that communion with others would dirty them, for only they are ‘the One True Church’.
In St John’s time, ROCOR never declared that it was a separate Church or the whole Church, but simply an inseparable part of the Russian Church, temporarily working on a self-governing Synodal basis, until such time as the atheist regime in Russia has been abolished. St John wrote that each Local Church has a significance of its own…all together make up the one Universal Church and contribute to it their own specialities and gifts…Our ROCOR is the free part of the Russian Church…Spiritually the Russian Church is indivisible…
The Russian Church Inside Russia
You ask why I commemorate Patriarch Aleksei of Moscow. You say, ‘He’s a Soviet!’ I tell you, ‘Inside Soviet Rus is Holy Rus! God hasn’t abandoned our people. The Soviet Union is still Holy Russia’.
St John was clear that ROCOR was only part of the Local Russian Church and that it maintained spiritual unity with the other part, but it had been only temporarily forced to reject its administration. Just like us today. In 1960 he wrote that ROCOR is not spiritually divided from its suffering Mother, It prays for Her and at the same time is united with Her, until such time as the reasons for disunity have vanished (3).
In other words, just as in our case, corrupt administration did not mean spiritual division, only administrative separation and so freedom from its hatred, corruption and decay. Therefore, we live within a canonical Church, even if not in the Russian Church, which today is no longer captive to Communist atheism, but which is captive to Capitalist mammonism, the dollar, with all its forces of self-interested schism.
St John added that: ROCOR, no longer administratively submitted to Metropolitan Sergius and his Synod, remains as before, feeling spiritually one with the suffering Mother Church (4). Naturally, at that time the Synod never declared that the Church inside Russia was without grace. Indeed, Vladyka John said that the official Church in Russia does of course have grace, even if individual bishops behave unworthily (5). Moreover, in 1945 in Shanghai St John restored the commemoration of Patriarch Alexei II in his diocese and encouraged others to do so.
On 31 July 1945 he wrote to Archbishop Viktor of Beijing: In view of the lack of information about the Synod Abroad for several years, any other decision of our diocese would make it completely independent, autocephalous. There are no canonical reasons for such independence…and would not be recognised by the Patriarch. Relations with the administration of the Church are now possible (6).
In his Epistle to his flock in Shanghai, written on 2 August 1946, he said: The information that canonical communion with the Moscow Patriarchate has been restored without hindrance has brought us sincere joy…We pray to the Lord, that he will hasten that desired and awaited moment when the First Hierarch of All Rus, going up to his Patriarchal place in the Church of the Dormition in Moscow will gather around himself all the Russian hierarchs who have come from all the Russia land and all foreign lands (7). This prophecy was realised in 2007.
True, in obedience to Metr Anastasy, St John later ceased publicly commemorating the Patriarch in the litanies, but he still commemorated him at the Great Entrance and the Proskomidia. Indeed, he continued to commemorate the Patriarch every day when he was in Paris. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer for him remains…liturgically we are one. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we with it and in it (8). When he was in Western Europe, for almost four times longer than he was in America, St John continued to correspond with Patriarch Alexei II and blessed parishioners to go to Patriarchal churches.
He certainly never accused the Moscow Patriarchate of heresy. Fr Peter Perekrestov pointed out that: ‘St John never in a single piece of writing, sermon or letter used the term ‘Sergianist’’. This was of course the purely political accusation, a pseudo-heresy invented for political reasons by the CIA and its asset Count Grabbe and their others. And they themselves later did fall away from the Church in the first manifestation of the ROCOR rebaptism heresy in the 1970s, so resisted by Vladyka Antony of Geneva (9). This was followed by the second manifestation of this same heresy in 2021.
The Tsar
The greatest crime committed with regard to the family of the martyred Tsar must be erased by ardent veneration for them and glorification of their spiritual feat.
The Russian Imperial Family in exile stayed in Tobolsk, the city of St John’s 18th century ancestor and patron saint, also called St John (Maximovich). Here too is another spiritual link. Increasingly, especially in Russia, St John the Wonderworker (another of his titles) is venerated as a second St Nicholas the Wonderworker, as he helps travellers. He is after all ‘Wonderworker of the latter times’, as we sing to him in his Akathist, composed by one of his spiritual children, who also later composed an Akathist to the martyred Tsar.
In his preaching St John rejected the lies of both liberals and conservatives about the Tsar and always sought the truth. The cosmopolitan, anti-patriotic bourgeois liberals, who helped depose the Tsar in February 1917, openly mocked and slandered him. They called him reactionary, corrupt and bloody, and most of them wanted to adopt an atheist Republican or possibly agnostic Constitutional (as in the UK) political system. Thus, they naively led the country into the bloody tyrannical yoke of the Communist atheists, who followed a German rabbi’s grandson, Marx.
The Western-loving conservatives, who also helped depose the Tsar in February 1917, bishops among them, lost their careers, money or estates and were bitter for this reason. They called the Tsar weak, indecisive, stupid, a religious fanatic and they murdered the slandered, pious family man Gregory Rasputin. Some of them said that the peace-loving Tsar should have murdered all his opponents (as they did under the White flag – it is little known that most so-called Whites were anti-Tsar) and especially hated anyone who reminded them of the state of the poor in Russia. Having sold out to Western countries in 1919, most went to live in Western Europe and some of them later even fought for Hitler.
St John considered that the Emperor Nicholas II had always been a model of piety and total dedication to God’s will, showing the patience of the Righteous Job, on whose day Tsar Nicholas had been born. St John deemed that the crime against the Tsar and his Tsarina was made all the worse by the murder of their innocent children. He said that such crimes do not go unpunished. They cry to heaven and bring down the wrath of God onto the earth. And so he called all in the Russian Lands to repentance:
Rus’ must bow down before the humiliated, slandered and martyred Passion-Bearer Tsar. Only then will he will have that daring before God, and his prayer will save the Russian Land from the misfortunes that it has had to bear. St John constantly repeated to others that only in such a case would the martyred Tsar and his Holy Family become new heavenly defenders of Holy Rus’ and that their innocently spilled blood would regenerate Russia.
Missionary Work
Orthodoxy in the West will revive. There will be Orthodoxy in Britain and Ireland, in France and Germany, in Holland and Spain and in America, too. Every language and nation will have Holy Orthodoxy. This is the charge laid on our Russian immigration for our repentance.
St John converted people to the faith wherever he lived, in Serbia, in Macedonia, in China, in the countries of Western Europe and in the USA. And he also united people. In Shanghai, he brought warring, nationalistic Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs and Chinese together. Later he did the same in San Francisco. For he was no Russian nationalist and imperialist, unlike the ROCOR bishops who put him on trial in America.
This openness to all nationalities, which he took from the Tsar, who had wanted to establish an Orthodox church in every European capital, is why St John was much criticised for his pastoral concern that brought him to allow a Western rite. Unlike Western Europe, where he lived for nearly twelve years, he lasted only three years among the Russian nationalists in the USA. What the critics of the Western rite at that time do not understand is that in the 1950s and early 60s there was a real Western liturgical rite, a living tradition. It then existed, just as St Tikhon had understood fifty years before St John.
All the rite then needed was modifying, returning to Orthodoxy. This is quite unlike today’s situation, when fantasy Western rites are developed. Since there is no living Western rite, all was tragically done away with in the 1960s, today’s ‘Western rites’ are artificial, inorganic restorations, resurrected museum pieces. They attract and live very few, they are not passed down organically from generation to generation. This is unlike the Orthodox rite which is organic, living, is passed down, and for which people know how to sing and read and feel the spontaneous gestures that go with it.
Love of Money
America is a great country, but greed and sensuality will be its downfall.
Here is the prophecy which says everything and for which some so much hate him. For they suffer precisely from these two passions – love of money and perversion. This is why they proclaim that St John did not wear shoes and gave them away to the poor, only because he found them uncomfortable! They need the very expensive vestments from Belarus, gold and diamonds.
For the new, dollar-driven Americanised bishops in their very expensive black leather shoes and with the obsessive personal cleanliness of the sensual, to dress barefoot and in an old cassock and vestments like St John (or St Seraphim) is unthinkable. They need silk and velvet. The most terrifying thing is that in the sixty years since St John was tormented to death, we have seen his above prophecy come true.
Notes:
[1] Acts of the Second ROCOR Council, Belgrade 1939, P. 402
[2] St John Maximovich. On the Spiritual and Moral Significance of ROCOR, Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, No 6 (2007)
[3] Archbishop John (Maximovich), Brussels 1960, P. 13
[4] Ibid. P. 9.
[5] Letters of Archbp Antony of Geneva to Fr Dimitry Dudko (Posev, 1979 No 12
[6] Decree No 650 of 6 September 1945. Priest Dionysy Pozdnyayev, The Acceptance of the Jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Church Schism in Shanghai. Alfa and Omega No 2 (13) 1997, Pp. 150-151
[7] Ibid. Pp.153, 158.
[8] Bishop Basil Rodzyanko, On Vladyka John. http://www.episkopvasily.ru/ru/works/
[9] Archpriest Peter Perekrestov. The Helmsman of the Church, then and now – the All-Powerful Spirit. http://www.pravos.org/docs/doc466.htm