The Ukraine Chooses Freedom

The Ukrainian government today decided to suspend the signing of an association agreement with the European Union. Instead, the decision was made to study and work out measures to recover lost production volumes and directions of trade and economic relations with Russia and other member states of the Eurasian Union: ‘With a view to protecting and enhancing the economic potential of the State, active dialogue should be resumed with Russia and other members of the Customs Union and CIS countries to revive economic and trade relations’, said a spokesman. As a condition of the association agreement, the EU had demanded the release of the former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, the pro-American puppet who was imprisoned for corruption.

The decision followed an open letter addressed to President Viktor Yanukovich by Orthodox citizens of the Ukraine, Russia, Moldova and Kazakhstan, warning him that the Ukraine faced a choice between light and darkness, Christ and Antichrist. By associating itself or integrating with the EU, the Ukraine would enslave itself, as have Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria. In its new slavery, the Ukraine would lose its cultural roots in Christian civilisation, betraying this unique faith for the mess of secularist pottage offered by the US-backed EU, which the authors of the letter called ‘Eurosodom’.

They noted that supporters of the EU were the spiritual descendants of Catholicised and Polonised ‘Ukrainians’ (= border-dwellers) in the extreme west of the Ukraine, who had persecuted the Carpatho-Russians during the First World War and fought with the Nazi SS in the Second World War. The authors also noted the anti-Christian nature and practices of the EU with its secularist policies and open support for bandits in Syria and the Middle East, who were intent on the genocide of Christians there, and its persecution of the remaining Christians in Western Europe. The authors considered the possibility of the Ukraine associating itself with the EU as a new Unia and a new betrayal of millennial Orthodox Christianity, the Holy Rus that began with St Vladimir in Kiev 1025 years ago.

Suffolk Restores St Edmund

The county of Suffolk was buzzing with activities yesterday in celebration of (the new style) St Edmund’s Day. Downpours failed to dampen the spirits as different events honoured the King of East Anglia, who was martyred by Viking invaders on 20 November 869.

Greater Anglia’s St Edmund train was rededicated at Ipswich railway station yesterday morning by the Precentor of St Edmundsbury Cathedral. In Bury St Edmunds, Greene King marked the day by opening its new £750,000 St Edmund Brewhouse at its headquarters in the town. Elsewhere, St Edmundsbury Cathedral hosted a performance of Courage of a King and held a special communion service. Author Mark Taylor was at the Cathedral and at Waterstones signing copies of his new book Edmund: The Untold Story of the Martyr King and his Kingdom, and prizes in the St Edmund’s Day Awards were handed out yesterday evening. Thousands of schoolchildren across Suffolk took part in activities to promote the Saint. And finally councillors from Suffolk and Norfolk, the bulk of the old East Anglian Kingdom, met to discuss uniting several of their services.

St Edmund has always been the patron saint of England, even though St George the Great-Martyr eclipsed him from the 14th century on. In the last few years, however, throughout East Anglia, St Edmund has been promoted and begun to eclipse St George as the local favourite. The Bury St Edmunds MP, David Ruffley, and The East Anglian Daily Times have backed a campaign to get him reinstated as the nation’s patron saint, which has been led by BBC Radio Suffolk.

Dr Carey and the Church of England

Today’s reports in various tabloid and semi-tabloid British newspapers that the Church of England is just ‘one generation away from extinction’, in yesterday’s words of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, do not make news. We have known this for some time. Nor is the agreement with him of the Archbishop of York, who has told the Church of England General Synod that compared to the need to attract new worshippers, ‘everything else is like re-arranging furniture when the house is on fire’. However, the later was correct in stating that the Synod spent too long ‘arguing over words and phrases, while the people of England are left floundering amid meaninglessness, anxiety and despair’.

The Church of England was only ever a sixteenth-century Establishment fix, invented to prevent civil war between Catholics and Protestants, to keep ‘the plebs’ in order. The fact that it has survived into the twenty-first century was surely never meant to be; it is a historic anachronism. Its only hope of survival is if parts of it display real faith in historical, and not ‘make it up as you go’, Christianity. It is commonly said that 40% of Church of England clergy, including bishops, do not believe in God, let alone in the Holy Trinity, the Divinity and Incarnation of Christ, the Resurrection, the Virgin-Birth, the Communion of Saints or the devil.

If that is the case, it would perhaps be more honest if the Church of England closed itself down and handed over its vast fortune to believing Christians, whether Protestant, Roman Catholic or Orthodox. Unlike the tabloid reports, the former Archbishop never said that Christianity faces extinction – it is only the Church of England – and that is a very different thing from the Church in England.

A Letter from the Russian Orthodox Church

The Nation was in need of a Great Fast
To cleanse a fallen consciousness.
To remind all of both God and Tsar,
To save the ‘civilised’ and self-satisfied,
To reconcile all with the Cross and the Truth, –
To give new birth to all in forgotten truths.
For there is love, faithfulness and beauty,
There is faith – that which does not decay.

Nina Kartashova (1953- )

Scattered Abroad

The times appointed from on High will pass, Communists will disappear, the Revolution will vanish into the past; but the White Cause, born in this struggle, will not disappear; its spirit will be preserved and merge organically into the way of life and building of the New Russia.

Ivan Ilyin (+ 1954)

One third of the 164 million Russian Orthodox have passports that do not say ‘Russian Federation’, but the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Estonia or, more exotically, Japan, China, Thailand….As for our passports, they are even more varied; they say Portugal, Canada, Luxembourg, Tonga, Chile, France, USA, Spain, Haiti, New Zealand, Venezuela, UK, Switzerland, Argentina, Belgium, Australia, Pakistan, Germany, Mexico…

Scattered outside Russia, we speak Russian with varying accents and degrees of competence, some not at all, and our churches use Church Slavonic to varying degrees, some not at all, using a local language instead. However, apart from our secular passport, we also have a spiritual passport. And on that passport, next to ‘Place of Residence’, it says ‘Rus’. And all who know that we live in Rus are at the heart of the Church, not on its fringes.

Rus

I am a part of Rus on the southern fringes of the sea:
With me is my sword, black hussar’s jacket
And portrait of the Tsar, like an eternal spectre of grief,
And in my heart the trace of wounds I have survived.

I am a part of Rus which tribulation
Flung like a ball beyond the ocean-sea,
I am the faithful son of a great nation,
A soldier in soul and a bard of the days of old.

Vladimir Petrushevsky (+ 1961), Australia

For the Churched, this spiritual passport is much more important than our secular passport, for we see our secular place of residence through the eyes of Rus, through spiritual eyes. Thus, there is European Rus, American Rus, Australian Rus….The words ‘Outside Russia’ in ‘Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia’ mean outside the old Russian Empire, not outside Rus – as our spiritual passports show.

Our residence in Rus also shows that our Faith did not come from Russia, but through Russia, just as it did not come from Constantinople, but through Constantinople. (To say that our Faith is ‘Russian’ or ‘Greek’ is a great mistake; such a nationalistic spirit is how the ‘Greeks’ alienated many peoples and lost the Second Rome). We serve another spirit. Where did our Faith come from? It came from Christ, like our Church.

Why?

The Apostles

It is not by chance that blind fate
Has scattered us among foreign lands,
It is not by chance that life has imposed on us
The cheerless lot of the slave.

It is not by chance that in crowded markets
We bear in silence the cross of sufferings
And tread a thorny and toilsome path
To goals that are unknown to us.

No! – A great and wise mystery
Is hidden in our feat as slaves,
And believe me, our destiny,
Unprecedented, is not by chance…

Heavenly powers guide us,
The Leader who is everywhere leads us
Along the way, where graves do not bring fear,
Where neither bread nor home are required.

In this sorrow of hard privations,
In this torment of bodily exhaustion,
A wondrous lot has been appointed for us,
A lot of humiliations, threats and doubts.

In the darkness of this servile world
We bear in triumph the beacon of the spirit
And loudly summon God’s chosen ones
To the bridal chamber of the Orthodox feast.

We tread a thorny road,
We soar above worldly vanity,
We are the apostles of the faith of Christ,
The heralds proclaiming holy truth.

We summon the races and the peoples,
Clothed in the crimson of brotherly blood,
To the kingdom of true and everlasting freedom,
To the kingdom of goodness, light and love.

S.S. Bekhteev, 1928

Why do we live in all these lands scattered across the face of the Earth? The reasons are many – but all result from the pogrom, first of the betrayal of the Faith, then of Rus and then of the Tsar. Whatever our exact story, our reason for being scattered in the lands where we live is ultimately because God has allowed it. We stand, looking at 1,000 years of Western history, a history without the Church of Christ, but with its vestiges; in Europe we look back beyond those 1,000 years of wandering, to the first millennium, when the roots of Europe, and so the roots of the whole Western world, were in Christ and His Holy Church.

We have been sent to live in these lands to gather in the harvest of all these vestiges into the granaries of the churches of Rus before the end. The harvest of sincerity, of righteousness, of virtue, of nobility, of inner beauty, of spiritual culture, of piety, of holiness, the harvest from 2,000 years of history of Europe, is here in our churches, in our oases in the desert, in our lighthouses on the far distant shores of Rus, shining out to the lost world. We are among the gatherers and keepers of Rus, for it is time to gather the scattered stones together (Ecclesiastes 3, 5), and restore what has been destroyed, defiled and profaned.

Our Future

I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not nigh.
Numbers 24, 17

Our Russian Orthodox Faith, our ideal of Rus, is our international response to globalisation. No other part of the Orthodox Church is large enough or strong enough or free enough to resist the tide of globalisation and provide such a response. Other parts of the Church are responsible for only one nationality; there is no Orthodox response to globalisation other than Rus. No other part of the Orthodox world has been crucified for the sins of the world and for faithfulness to Universal Orthodoxy as have we. This is why Rus is the meaning of world history and world destiny, the key to salvation in the last times.

This is why we who have come out of the White Cause continue to further the process of healing inside Russia, the independence of the Church from State interference and from secularist, Western ideologies, and seek the continuing canonisation of all the New Martyrs and Confessors, led by the martyred Royal House. The Church inside Russia is Lazarus, the miracle of the Resurrection, the Four-Day Dead, dressed in Soviet rags, but still the Friend of Christ. Now together we make ready and pray and hope and wait for the restoration of legitimate authority in Rus, the Orthodox Tsar restored by the Sovereign Mother of God.

Our Hope

Arise, O saint-haunted Europe, the one thousand years have passed!

There was once a Europe where peoples were still free to follow Christ and their own innocent ways, a Europe where Englishmen played cricket, Portuguese sang fado, Carinthians dressed in folk costume, French people tasted wine from all over, Italians sang opera at work, Scottish people wore kilts, Spaniards were noble, Germans were helpful and Dutch people were informal; as for Russians, they named their children Nicholas and Alexandra. And it seemed that this would continue until Kingdom come…

But then there came a grey Europe, a homogenous Union, in which centralised bureaucrats try to regulate and control every detail of our lives. This is an anti-Europe which plays at Hitler’s game of divide and rule, which now attempts to balkanise and provincialise the next victims of EU debaptism and gay parade colonisation, the weak countries of the soft underbelly of the Orthodox world, Montenegro, Macedonia, the Ukraine and, if only it were possible for the eurocrats, Moldova, Georgia and even Belarus.

But there is coming a Rus of all the East Slav peoples, reunited in a single Tsardom, opposed to the electronic concentration camp of the New World Order in formation. This will be a Rus where the media are not controlled, as now, by foreign, anti-Orthodox propaganda, which brainwash, debauch and zombify the people, where the families with many children will be protected from countries that have renounced Christ and seem to be crawling towards hell, of their own so-called free but indoctrinated and conditioned will.

This is yet to be a Rus under a Tsar chosen by the Queen of Heaven, as Elder Nikolai Guryanov foretold, a Romanov by his mother, as the prophecies tell us, where Siberia will be transformed, the Church cleansed and joined by many peoples, including the Greek, as Elder Joseph of Vatopedi foretold. Rus will be the Ark for all faithful Orthodox when Orthodoxy will have faltered elsewhere. And there, from Europe, Asia and America, people will gather to live according to the Church and preach the Orthodox Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Let us pray to Christ, the Mother of God and the holy, martyred Tsar Nicholas, his family and all the New Martyrs and Confessors that this may soon be so.

A Mystery Solved?

The Passionate Attachment

America’s unrequited love for Israel
Were Arafat and Litvinenko killed by the same people?

http://thepassionateattachment.com/2012/07/05/were-arafat-and-litvinenko-killed-by-the-same-people/

­By Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
July 5, 2012

In Guilt By Association, a thoroughly researched analysis of a transnational crime syndicate whose members “share an ideological bias sympathetic to Israel,” Jeff Gates challenged the consensus view on the murder of former KGB colonel Alexander Litvinenko. Questioning the media’s eagerness to link Litvinenko’s poisoning to former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, Gates suggested:

Who, if not the syndicate profiled in this account had the means, motive and opportunity to murder Litvinenko in London? Two days after Khodorkovsky lieutenant Leonid Nevzlin arrived at Newark airport on Christmas Eve 2006, Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika issued a press release identifying Nevzlin as a murder suspect in the Litvinenko poisoning and seeking his extradition. Litvinenko met with Nevzlin in Israel just weeks before his death.

The recent Al Jazeera investigation indicating that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat may have been killed by the same toxic substance as Litvinenko lends further credence to Gates’ suspicions. Rather than follow this obvious path of inquiry, however, the Israel-friendly media are far more likely to blame Putin for Arafat’s death.

Against Western Elitism: Not Against Western People

Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.

(Genesis 11, 4)

Introduction

To be opposed to or to dislike any particular people as a whole is defined as racial prejudice, since nobody can know a whole people. Thus, ‘anti-Semitism’, now usually defined as hatred of Jews, is racist. In the last century millions of Jews were slaughtered by anti-Semites in Western Europe. On the other hand, anti-Zionism is not racist; many devout Jews are anti-Zionists and Zionism was long ago condemned as racism by the United Nations. This is because Zionism is a political belief that Jews are a people superior, ‘exceptional’, to others. Similarly, to be opposed to Western people is racial prejudice; but to be opposed to Western elitism, the racist belief that Western people and values are superior to others, is not racist.

Indeed, Western peoples have always been the first victims of Western elitism, ever since it was developed as an ideology in the eleventh century. First to suffer were Western people in Sicily, then in England, Wales and soon after in Scotland and Ireland. Only after this came the oppression, by Western elitism, of Non-Western peoples. The first of these suffered at the very end of that same eleventh century. These were Jews in Western Europe and Muslims in the Middle East. After them, and throughout the second millennium, came new victims – in Africa and Asia, in the Americas and Australasia, in India and China. Our question then is twofold: What precisely is Western elitism and how should we react to it?

Western Elitism and Opposition to it

Western elitism is the result of a debased or secularised religious ideology. This developed firstly into Roman Catholicism, secondly into Protestantism, which withdrew religion from the public domain, promoting morality at home and secularism in public, and finally into atheist secularism. Western elitism founded a humanistic culture that is dehumanised because it is heartless and irreligious. It is secularist, materialistic, mechanical, idolatrous, acquisitive, individualist, rationalistic, intellect-bound, exploitative, capitalist, usury-bound, globalist. It has only a truncated, discursive, rationalistic and atheistic way of thinking. With only superior science and technology, it has cleverness, but no wisdom.

Western elitism thinks it is universal and looks on others as irrational, backward and superstitious. It has brought forth a way of life that is cold, calculating, soulless, faithless, rootless, immoral, mindless, cowardly, philistine, shallow, superficial, trivial, banal, artificial, frivolous, selfish, greedy, hedonistic, effete, fashion-addicted, corrupt, decadent, degenerate, promiscuous and money-grubbing. It is the essence of spiritual mediocrity and moral emptiness and has no sense of destiny, creative depth, ideals or lofty ambition. It has commerce, comfort and amoral pleasure, an idolatrous faith in its own creation, but not faith in the Creator. Godless, it has become proud, arrogant and full of hubris.

Western elitism, expressed in imperialism and colonialism, now called globalisation, has created many perverted reactions, ironically conditioned by forms of Western elitism such as Marxism. These reactions see the world in black and white, are violent, fundamentalist, terroristic and nationalistic. They regard not just Western elitism but all Western people as savage and barbarous. Such perversity defines the suicide bombers (kamikaze) of Shintoism, Hinduism and Islamism. The destruction by Islamist terrorists of the Twin Towers and mass murder of people of all races and all creeds working for global capitalism in the Capital of the American Empire is the most classic case of such anti-Western terrorism.

Conclusion

There is no justification for a racially, nationally or religiously exclusive attitude to the Western world, especially one involving violence and terrorism. Discerning opposition to the West is valid, never terrorism. Moreover, opposition is to be directed at Western elitism, not at victimised Western people, and opposition must be guided by Faith. Faith tells us that there is not only discursive, intellectual thought, but also non-discursive, noetic thought, the thoughts of the soul. Faith tells us that experience of reality is more important than mere rationalism, that the wisdom of a simple and pure heart and spiritual heroism are far mightier than any technology, that repentance is required for thinking that we are mightier than God.

Western elitism is not a civilisation because it has lost its spiritual roots and so a unified spiritual culture. It is without Faith or Tradition. It is neither authentic, nor profound, having no spiritual values or ambition to seek salvation and Paradise. The contemporary spiritually and morally aimless West needs an inclusive world view and way of life based on its own Orthodox Christian roots. This world view is noble, integral, holistic, organic, it has historical tradition, spiritual depth and health and understands inevitable suffering and death. Today’s Western world, dominated by Western elitism and its illusory technology, is called on to reverse history by repentance, returning to its roots in the Faith and the Tradition.

50,000 Antiochian Orthodox to Become Russian Orthodox?

The Russian government is considering granting citizenship to some 50,000 Syrian Orthodox from the Qalamoun region, after they issued a joint request to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In statements issued in the past few days, spokesmen for President Putin and the Ministry have confirmed that the highest Russian authorities are examining the request.

The Syrian Christians wrote: ‘This is the first time since Christ’s birth that we, the Christians of Saidnaya and Maara Saidnaya, Ma’loula and Maarun have been threatened with expulsion from our land’. The letter was full of praise for Russia which it described as a ‘powerful factor for global peace and stability’. However, its remarks about Western countries were less flattering: ‘The aim of the Western-backed terrorists is to eliminate our presence in our homeland. They use the most abhorrent methods to achieve this, for example, murdering ordinary people’.

Archpriest Nikolai Balashov of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Department for External Affairs, commented that Middle Eastern Christians ‘had known for centuries that no other country would look after their interests in the same way that Russia would’. To reaffirm the ties between Russia and the Churches in Syria, on 14 October the Russian authorities decided to erect a statue of Christ on a mountain in Syria which is home to the Orthodox shrine of the Mother of God of Saidnaya. Arab Orthodox pilgrims come to this shrine from all over the Middle East.

To express his concern for the Christians ahead of the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Patriarch Kyrill had already sent President Obama a letter, asking him to listen to the cries of religious leaders who unanimously opposed proposals for military intervention against President Assad. In his message, the Patriarch talked about ‘the threat of mass extermination or exile’ faced by Christians in the Middle East. He urged others to join Russia’s diplomatic efforts and make the most of the opportunities that opened up for a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

With atheist Communism dead and atheist Europe a poodle to the USA, Russia is reinstating itself as the protector of Middle Eastern Christians, as in the 19th century. The Russian Orthodox Church has strengthened its relations with the Middle East’s battered Orthodox Churches by giving significant financial help. Last August, it donated $300,000 to the Patriarchate of Antioch to help those in need as a result of the Saudi and Qatari-financed anti-Syrian war. In July, First Hierarchs and representatives of Middle Eastern Churches met President Putin in person during their visits to Moscow for the 1025th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus. Patriarch Kyrill was the last great foreign Christian leader to be received by Bashar al-Assad in Damascus back in November 2011.

See also:
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/world-news/detail/articolo/russia-rusia-medio-oriente-28944/

St Edwin

In recent years, God has revealed to us more about several saints of these Isles, most notably St Edward the Martyr, but there have been other miracles too, concerning St Alfred, St Edmund, St John of Beverley, St Botolph and St Birinus, for example. The Lord seems to be speaking through the local saints of old to a modern society that has utterly lost its way in unsaintliness. The latest in this series of revelations may concern St Edwin (584-633), whose feast day it is today according to the Orthodox calendar (12/25 October).

With the help of a professional archaeologist, a group from a village called Cuckney near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire may be about to find the true site of the martyrdom of England’s first Christian king. Cuckney could soon have a place in St Edwin’s story, with the possibility that this village, and not the town of Hatfield, located to the north east of Doncaster some 40 miles away, is the actual site of the Battle of Hatfield of 633. There have been clues before – at the time of the battle, the Cuckney area was known as Hatfield, while nearby Edwinstowe mean’s ‘Edwin’s shrine’. Then there is St Edwin’s Cross, which marks the site of a chapel erected in 1201, where a hermit prayed to Edwin, who had been proclaimed a saint by the people in the years after his death.

Tradition has it that St Edwin’s relics were taken from the battlefield by his own men and secretly buried to protect his remains from his pagan conquerors. But it was a discovery by a group of workmen at St Mary’s Church in Cuckney in 1951 that interested historians. As they dug down through the floor of the church to support the Norman structure against recent mining activity, they discovered skeletons. Not one or two, but hundreds – maybe up to 200, all laid out in rows, all with their feet facing east. Villagers who remember the discovery have described skulls being piled up in the corner of the church for weeks before their reburial.

This is the first problem for archaeologists and the Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society, who have joined up to try and prove that St Edwin was martyred in Cuckney and not in Yorkshire, as official history tells us. Andrew Gaunt, the director of Mercian Archaeology, who is working with the group, believes that the bodies represent the site of a massacre. He also believes that the most likely explanation for their current whereabouts is that they were simply put back where they were found. He said: ‘Often churches were built on the sites of burial mounds and it is reasonable to assume at this stage that the bodies pre-date the church. Where you get a lot of bodies buried together, it can suggest that they’ve been caught in a bottle neck during a battle, as people were typically buried close to where they fell’.

St Mary’s Church sits at the foot of a gentle valley, quite close to the river, and Mr Gaunt believes that the men were possibly driven down the hill in the battle and slaughtered, trapped between the invading force, steep hills and the river. A church at the site is mentioned in the Domesday Book in 1086, but the present building dates from the twelfth century. Joseph Waterfall, from the Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society, said: ‘We believe King Edwin was slain in the fields near Cuckney, hence the reason for the 200 or so skeletons. But the history books state that he was slain north-east of Doncaster, but no evidence was ever produced to support this claim’.

With modern carbon dating technology, access to the skeletons would allow archaeologists to date them to a specific period – perhaps dating the remains to the approximate time of King Edwin’s death. And more importantly, along with the other evidence from the local area, it may pinpoint the site of the death of England’s first Christian king to Nottinghamshire. ‘Edwin is England’s first Christian king and he was killed by pagans, so historically that makes him hugely significant’, said Andrew Gaunt. ‘We know from the records that bodies were discovered from about 18 inches down and they may have gone down to about seven feet deep. If we can gain access to the bodies and date those bodies to the time of Edwin’s death, then with all the other evidence around us, we can reasonably conclude that Cuckney is the actual site of the Battle of Hatfield’.

The Struggle for Holy Orthodoxy: Secularism, Nationalism and Nominalism

Introduction

‘The struggle for Holy Orthodoxy’ was a phrase of the ever-memorable Metr Laurus. No doubt the many who knew this saintly hierarch much better than us could speak more about how he used it. The phrase, however, is very apt to describe those who seem to be crashing onto the rocks around the Church, without ever attaining Her. Today Holy Orthodoxy is threatened by two external threats, but above all by one internal threat. Only by struggling against all three of them can we win the struggle. What are these threats?

Secularism

The first threat is symbolised by the recent announcement that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a pan-European group, has passed a resolution condemning circumci-sion of children as a violation of human rights. The resolution was passed a few days ago with 78 votes in favour to just 13 against. 15 abstained from the vote. This wave of anti-Semitism against all Semites, Jews as well as Arab Muslims, may seem to some Orthodox Christians not to be our concern. However, it is.

Now, as we have seen with the furore around the practice of homosexuality, all faith is under threat from Western secularism, which is being spearheaded by the EU. This ‘secularism’, in fact just another name for atheism, threatens the catholicity, integrity and freedom of the Orthodox Church. Today it is against Jew and Muslim, tomorrow it will be the banning of Orthodox baptism, which will mean that the prophecy of St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1949), that Europeans will be forced to go to Russia for baptism, will come true.

Without the sense of catholicity, integrity and freedom the Local Orthodox Churches are threatened by the development of personality cults, which we saw developing when the Russian Church was not free under the Soviet yoke; then those who did not want the Russian Church to be reduced to a personality cult, left for freedom. But when the personality in question died, those who had created the cult also left, for their only attachment to the Church had been the dead personality whom they had culted.

Without the sense of catholicity, integrity and freedom, the Orthodox Churches are also threatened by homosexualisation, the result of the lack of monastic life. We saw this with the notorious Archbishop German Aav in Finland in the 1920s and the ensuing ‘Finlandisation’ of many parishes there, which have still not recovered. We have seen similar problems in the recent past in the USA and today the horrible problems created by homosexual plotters in the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, who slandered and ejected their Metropolitan.

Nationalism

Nationalism anywhere is a spiritual danger. Nationalism in the Church leads to the ethnic religion of the narrow and self-centred cultural ghetto, the petty religion of the pharisee and the sectarian. It belongs to a primitive world of isolation, for it says that one’s tribal group is above Christ. Soviet nationalism, still infecting Russia, is a good example of this. However, this is also a generational phenomenon which does not last, because it is incapable of bearing fruit in the next generation, which rejects it, unable to bear its constricting narrowness.

We well remember at the end of the 1970s studying at St Serge in Paris and the views of the late rector, Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, on the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the very Patriarchate to which he belonged. Having suffered in the 1960s from that Patriarchate’s three-year long abandonment of his diocese, he had been to the Phanar and asked for proof that the Patriarch there really did have universal authority among the Local Orthodox Churches as he claimed and was not simply, as he put it, ‘a petty Balkan bishop’.

He did not receive any proof and so in the 1970s tried to bring his jurisdiction back to the Russian Orthodox Church. Today’s paranoid misreport in the ‘EU Greek Reporter’ (http://eu.greekreporter.com/2013/10/21/conflicts-in-the-orthodox-ecumenical-council/) says indeed that the Patriarchate of Constantinople missed its unitive vocation during the Cold War through its nationalism. The article confirms that petty nationalistic jealousy on the part of the US-run Greek Patriarchate is delaying the convening of an Inter-Orthodox Conference.

The political jealousy of the Phanar with regard to Russian Orthodox Ukraine, which it recently tried to take over with US and EU backing, with regard to Russian Orthodox missionary work carried out for well over a century in Japan, China and the USA (as also in Poland and Czechoslovakia) and with regard to Russia’s present vital role in the Middle East in supporting the now Arab-run Patriarchate of Antioch against American interventionism, is not conducive to inter-Orthodox co-operation.

Nominalism

Despite the external irritants of Secularism and petty Nationalism – and not only Greek – the real enemy of the Church is internal. It is called Nominalism. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as three visits to church per lifetime, for baptism, marriage and funeral. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as a fifteen-minute visit on Easter Night. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as a thirty-minute visit once a month to ‘listen to the choir’.

This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as belonging to the 80% who sometimes attend but do not contribute, and not the 20% who take an active part in Church life and without whom the Church would not exist. This is also the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as living the consumerist lifestyle of this world; the Church is a supermarket, from which the consumer is free to choose whatever they like, that is, only ‘the nice, comfortable parts’.

Such a consumerist distortion of Church life in particular affects the demographics of any country that has fallen to nominalism, including once Orthodox countries. There, a large family is considered to be a burden, even a curse, by the consumerist. They say: How can you ‘enjoy’ life when you have a large family? Thus the world has fallen to the greatest holocaust in human history, greater than that of Hitler, Stalin and Mao; this is the holocaust of abortion, the greatest genocide and suicide in history.

All the once Orthodox countries have been infected by this holocaust. Thus, Russia cannot populate its expanses; China will do it instead. It has been calculated that if the atheist Revolution had never taken place, Russia would today have a population of over 600 million. How then can it be that in such a country the prophecies of rebirth will come right? Those who ask this question forget that prophecies are always conditional on repentance. Even so, it is true that Russia may not have quantity, but it may at least have quality.

Conclusion

Today Europe has finished its history. By its own choice it has nothing more to say; so it is no longer a civilisational choice. As for the USA, it has, like its films, only technology, the ‘shock and awe’ of special effects. As for other lands, they have people and productivity, but their cultures, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Animist, have lost the original impetus that came from faith and have only nationalism or violence. Only the multinational Church of Rus still bears a creative civilisation. The world will choose that – or die.