Church and State: Lessons from History for the Present Day

This is the Ukrainian Orthodox Viewpoint ( from the Society of Orthodox Journalists), which most Russian Orthodox also probably agree with. It begs the question as to why the once multinational Orthodox Church of All Rus, including the once free ROCOR Synod in New York which used to resist Sergianism (erastianism), has become dominated by Russian nationalist politicians, instead of Orthodox Christians, theologians and pastors. Nationalism is not the Church, but schismatic!

https://spzh.eu/en/zashhita-very/87544-church-and-state-lessons-from-history-for-the-present-day

05 August 11:06

Author: Nazar Golovko

In the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Church often co-operated too closely with the State.

From Peter’s reforms to the Revolution of 1917: how state dependence affected the Russian Church – and what lessons the UOC should draw from this today.

Many today wonder: how could it happen that the devout Orthodox people, the “God-bearing nation” as Dostoevsky called them, suddenly rose up against their Church after the 1917 revolution? How could those who once went to their deaths “for Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland” destroy the faith, kill the Tsar, and tear down that very Fatherland?

Indeed, what happened after 1917 defies human logic. Tens of thousands of churches were closed or wiped off the face of the earth, thousands of monasteries and sketes were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of believers were executed, thousands of priests and hundreds of bishops were murdered, and millions were buried alive behind the barbed wire of the Gulag.

How could this happen? And, more importantly – why?

To answer this question – which remains deeply relevant today – we must turn to history.

When the Church ceases to be the Body of Christ

As early as the era of Peter I, the religious life of the Russian Church was subjected to harsh and merciless criticism. On one hand, the Church was attacked for excessive attention to outward ritual forms; on the other, it had fallen under overwhelming state control. Ivan Aksakov, a Slavophile and patriot well-versed in Church affairs, once wrote:

“Thus, in terms of administration, the Church now appears as a kind of colossal bureaucracy, applying – with the inevitable, alas, official bureaucratic falsehood – the methods of German bureaucracy to the salvation of Christ’s flock… Apparently, all the Church has been granted is outward order – a semblance of proper organization…

But one trifling thing is missing: the soul is gone. The ideal has been replaced – the Church’s ideal has been supplanted by a state ideal, inner truth replaced by formal, external correctness. A new measure has been substituted for the old – a governmental measure instead of a spiritual and moral one. Everything is now weighed and measured on the State’s official scale…

The worldview of the state has, like a subtle vapor, imperceptibly seeped into the mind and soul of nearly the entire ecclesiastical environment, with few exceptions, narrowing its understanding to the point where the living sense of the Church’s true mission has become barely accessible. Nowhere is truth so feared as in our Church administration; nowhere is there such flattery as among our hierarchy; nowhere is the spirit of Pharisaism so strong as among those who ought to hate falsehood the most.”

The Church and the Authorities: harm or benefit?

Indeed, it’s hard to deny that the Church of that era had surrendered itself to imperial will. For example, Peter I’s decree of April 22, 1722, required every cleric (including bishops) upon entering holy office to swear an oath “to be a faithful, good, and obedient servant and subject to the emperor and his lawful heirs,” to defend the emperor’s rights and dignity, “not sparing even their own life if necessary,” and to report any damage or threat to imperial interests – including “theft, treason, or rebellion revealed in confession,” as well as “any evil designs against the Tsar’s honour, health, or family.”

In other words, the secular authorities demanded that Orthodox clergy violate a foundational canonical rule: the inviolability of the sacramental confession. In effect, the Church became a mere “Department of Spiritual Affairs,” heavily influenced by the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod – a layman appointed by the Tsar.

As a result:

The Church in Russia was perceived as an extension of the state. And if the people’s hatred was directed at the state, the Church was inevitably caught in that hatred too – a sentiment that had been simmering long before 1917.

Prince Ivan Gagarin, who converted to Catholicism, wrote: “The Russian Church needs independence; it senses this itself.”

Understanding that the Church in Russia was inextricably tied to autocracy, Gagarin believed that an attack on the Tsar would inevitably strike the Church as well. Moreover, he saw the deepening schism with the Old Believers as another wellspring of discontent with autocratic rule. In his eyes, Catholicism could save Russia – because it had the spiritual freedom the Russian Church lacked. He famously wrote:

“Let us repeat: it is one or the other – Catholicism or revolution. The Russian Church is powerless; the Tsarist regime may only delay the explosion. The union of the schismatics with revolutionary movements becomes more and more inevitable. There is no time to lose. I see no other way to avert this threat than a national Russian-Catholic clergy.”

Thus, Gagarin understood that the Russian Church – having bound itself so tightly to the state – lacked the strength to confront the revolutionary currents rising among the Old Believers and even within the lower clergy.

Church and Revolution

Here is just a short list of well-known revolutionaries who came from clergy families:

  • Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), a major theorist of Russian revolution, son of a priest in the Saratov Eparchy; educated in a religious school and seminary.
  • Sergei Nechaev (1847–1882), organizer of the underground group “People’s Retribution” and a symbol of fanatical revolution; son of a deacon from Nizhny Novgorod province.
  • Nikolai Kibalchich (1853–1881), member of “Narodnaya Volya” and chief designer of the bomb that killed Alexander II; son of a priest in the Chernihiv Diocese.
  • Mikhail Novomirsky (Tikhomirov) (1850–1884), activist of “Narodnaya Volya”; son of a priest.
  • Alexander Mikhailov (1855–1884), one of the leaders of “Narodnaya Volya” and its Executive Committee; son of a rural priest.
  • Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) – came from a clerical estate.

Besides, let us not forget the failed seminarian Stalin.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of names of priest’s children who became revolutionaries. And many of them did not merely sympathize with revolutionary causes – they actively took part in terror and assassinations.

Why?

Because they saw the hypocrisy and servility that had become entrenched in the lives of their fathers.

Because they understood: the Church, subordinated to the state, had ceased to be a spiritual mother and had become a cog in the bureaucratic machine. And if that machine needed to be destroyed – so did its parts.

A Fatal Union

Thus, the revolution in Russia was not just a popular uprising. It was, in many ways, the outcome of an unhappy marriage between Church and state. A Church bound hand and foot by the government was unable to serve as the voice of conscience. In the end, it remained silent – or even offered its blessing – as the old order was dismantled.

For example, on March 5, 1917, just two days after Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication, the Holy Synod declared:

“The Holy Church of Christ greets the recent events as a mercy of God upon our people… May the Lord bless the Provisional Government and grant it strength to perform the work of serving the people.”

As a result, those forces that destroyed the Tsar turned their wrath on the Church as well. And the reason is clear: when the Church becomes part of the state, people see it as a target – not as the Body of Christ.

What about today?

Yes, the current situation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church seems unbearably difficult to many of us. We are forbidden to pray as our ancestors did for centuries. Our churches are being taken away. The authorities are doing everything in their power to erase the UOC from Ukraine’s religious landscape.

But—

Perhaps this is, in fact, a blessing from God. A blessing that the Church should be free from all state dependence, so that it may possess the inner liberty necessary to fulfill its true mission – the preaching of the Gospel.

It may seem that without the “roof” of state protection or official patronage, the Church is weak and exposed. But maybe this is precisely the path Christianity calls us to walk – not to please power, but to serve the people.

And perhaps, painful as it is, a Church free from State dependence is walking a blessed path.

 

Three World Wars For Nothing?

‘It’s not peace, but a twenty-year long truce’.

Prediction of Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France, about the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919

‘If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the later German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation’.

Prediction in the book The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes, about the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919

Introduction: Lives Destroyed By Futile Wars

I was brought up in a world shaped by the results of two World Wars. The lives of my parents, uncles and aunts (the men fought, several of the women, one was a victim of the London Blitz, were spinsters – there were too few men left to marry) had all been deeply affected by the Second World War, those of my grandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts (soldiers and spinsters) deeply affected by the First World War. They talked of little else, as their once peaceful and settled lives had been disfigured by the Wars. As for me I was born in the year of the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, when the USA planted the last nail into the coffin of the British Empire, and Soviet tanks entered oppressed Budapest. Looking back today, as once more the Western world is at war against Russia, I cannot help seeing the continuity of these wars. However, I also see their futility, as they merely put off the inevitable rise of Russia, even though it repeatedly attempted suicide in its history in movements of spiritual apostasy.

Three ‘World’ Wars To Destroy Russia

We use the term ‘World Wars’ to describe the global disasters that were in fact European Wars, or more precisely Wars for the control of Russia. Thus, the First World War (1914-18) began after the Austrian annexation of Bosnia, the Second World War (1939-1945) began after the German annexation of Poland, and what I here call the Third World War (2022-2025?) began after the Western annexation of the Soviet Ukraine. All these wars were in reality the attempts by the ruling classes of Austro-Hungary and its allies, Germany and its allies, and the USA and its European vassals, respectively, to gain control of the territory (‘Lebensraum’) and natural resources of the Eastern half of Europe (from the Soviet-fixed borders of the Ukraine to the Volga, Stalingrad and Astrakhan). All have essentially been wars directed against the three different Russias, Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, caused by the desire of the Western world to exploit and plunder its wealthy neighbour, which occupies the Eastern half of Geographical Europe and all Siberia as far as the Pacific.

Moreover, all these wars were underpinned and propagandised by a racist ideology which believes that Western Europeans, the Germanic and Latin, so-called ‘Aryan’, peoples, are racially superior to all others. This infers the racial inferiority of Slavs (Serbs/Poles/Russians etc), Jews, Gypsies etc to Western Europeans and their white descendants in the USA, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. In the Second World War this ideology came to be called ‘Nazism’, though its racist nature was already apparent in the First World War, but not by that name. Nazism conquered or subdued all of Western Europe in the Second War. In the Third World War all the Western countries, once more deployed against Russia, sometimes openly share this same ideology. It is most obvious with the SS-inspired armed forces in what is the Soviet Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, but also in the EU, where many of the main unelected Eurocrats and representatives like von der Leyen, Kallas, Baerbock or Metreweli, the head of the foreign spy service of the UK, are the grandchildren of Nazis.

This myth of racial superiority has been a constant throughout the last millennium of Western European history. The Russians first experienced it in a letter from Pope Hildebrand (Gregory VII) sent to Yaroslav of Russia in 1075, demanding submission. Next came the Russian defeat of the invading Teutonic Knights in 1242. It is precisely this hubristic conviction of superiority which lies behind the continual defeats of the West. These defeats, Napoleon’s, Hitler’s and Trump’s, all come from underestimating Russian realities. Thus, Russia is ‘only a regional power showing weakness’ (Obama, 2014) or ‘a gas station masquerading as a country’ (McCain, 2015). Its losses, according to Western propagandists, are ten times its real losses and ‘it has no more missiles, tanks, bombs, shells or troops’, who are being sent to Ukrainian lines ‘to die in human waves’. These people live in Hollywood and have grown accustomed to believing their own lies. The lies are written by Western PR scriptwriters, exaggerated by the Kiev Ministry of Propaganda, and then believed by stupid politicians.

The First War is called a World War only because it involved British colonial troops mainly from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, as well as Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and then Americans, and French colonial troops mainly from Africa, and also involved skirmishes with German colonial troops in Africa. The Second War is called a World War only because it also involved the same colonial troops as well as American troops and took place in the Anglo-German battle for the control of oil in the Middle East and the war of the USA and the UK against Japan for control of the Pacific. And the Third War can be called a World War only because it indirectly involves BRICS, notably China, India, Iran and North Korea, and its other supporters in ‘the Global South’ of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This is the first War in which the West is isolated and in a tiny and technologically weaker minority, it is the 10% against the 90%. Therefore, it has always been clear who will eventually win and clear that the West was made foolish by hubris to fantasise that it could win.

In other words, all these Wars began in Eastern Europe and involved failed invasions of Russia, which Western Europe wanted to take over and exploit. This had already been rehearsed before them in 1812 under Napoleon with his collective, multinational invasion of Russia by ‘the French and the twelve tribes’. (However, others like the Poles and the Swedes had tried and failed even before him and the Anglo-French had tried again in 1853-56). Thus, it can be said that all three World Wars were ‘Napoleonic’, that is, failed Pan-Western attempts to destroy Russia. Napoleon, Nazi and NATO – those three even begin with the same two letters. All of them had been prepared, for tensions between the European Powers had been brewing for years, especially in the Far East (1904-05) and the Balkans from 1908 on. And Germany had been preparing for war under Hitler since 1933. As regards today’s war, it began with the overthrow in Kiev in 2014, followed by covid (a US bio-war virus, backfired on it and its allies) and the threatened genocide by the Kiev puppet regime of Eastern Ukraine.

This full-scale physical and cultural genocide of Eastern Ukrainians, already prepared on a low level (nearly 15,000 men, women and children murdered in the Donbass, as well as in Kiev and Odessa) between 2014 and early 2022, had been programmed by NATO, of which the separatist Kiev regime was already a de facto member, for March 2022. This threat provoked the initially small-scale Russian intervention in February 2022 there, in what until 1922, exactly a century before, had been part of Russia. Once the Western Powers forbade their puppet-regime in Kiev to sue for peace with Russia in March-April 2022 under its envoy Johnson, this developed into a full-scale war against Russia by the Kiev regime proxies, Western-trained, Western-supplied, Western-informed, Western-armed, Western-biolabbed, and Western-financed. It is this Russian war to deSovietise the Soviet-established Ukraine which continues today, three and a half years later, with Russia and the BRICS world victorious. Western leaders officially deny it because on admission they would have to resign.

After The Three World Wars

Our question is what would have happened if the three interdependent World Wars, in fact Anti-Russian Wars I, II and III (like the preparatory Anglo-American-financed anti-Russian War, launched by their Japanese proxy in 1904) had not taken place. Would the situation of the world be any different today from it would have been without those Wars? Of course, no definitive answer can be given to this question – we shall never know, because the three World Wars did take place, with their fifty million and more dead in Europe alone. However, we can make some striking observations.

Inside Europe, in 1914 Germany dominated Western Europe economically, technologically and militarily, not only because of its heavy industry with iron and steel, but also through its advanced engineering, chemical, electrical and automotive industries. But this was exactly the situation at least until 2022. Then began the deindustrialisation of Germany, enforced by the US cutting off its energy supplies from Russia, and the end of a Germany which had been the engine of the EU, the heart of the EU economy.

In 1914 France played a secondary role in Western Europe, albeit a jealous, petulant and resentful role, as a result of its defeat at German hands in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. This is the role it still plays in Western Europe today. In 1914 the Imperialist British ruling class looked to its role overseas, outside Europe, especially to the USA and India. This is the role it still plays today, though today the roles have been reversed. The UK, its snobbish and arrogant, fantasy-driven ruling class, stuck in the past, paradoxically still not de-Imperialised, is in fact dependent on its former colonies, rather than they being dependent on the UK.

In 1914 Russia dominated Eurasia (Northern Asia, the vast area from Eastern Europe to China), as Tsar Nicholas had opened the Russian ‘Window on Asia’ by insisting on the completion of and inaugurating the Trans-Siberian railway. He considered that Siberia would be to European Russia what North America had been to Western Europe. In 1913 it was estimated by Edmond Thery, the French economist, that by 1950 Russia would ‘dominate Europe politically, economically and financially’. However, in 1914 there was the German-led War against the Russian Empire, a British-orchestrated Revolution through Russian traitors, Western invasions after 1917, a German-led invasion in 1941, murdering 27 million, and for several years after 1991 the plunder of the Russian Federation by the Western world, as a result of which millions died prematurely in mafia crime, starvation, suicide and alcoholism borne of despair.

Despite the present tragic, post-Soviet conflict, one of whose aims is to deSovietise the Soviet Ukraine and restore the real, historic Ukraine (Malorossija), the three generations wasted by Marxism meant that the Russian economy became the largest in Europe only in 2024, 74 years after the predicted 1950. And 74 years was exactly the period during which Russia was taken over by the idiotic Western ideology of Marxism (1917-1991), sent by Germany in the form of Lenin to contaminate the Russian Western-educated class, who also designed the absurd borders of the Soviet Ukraine. Nevertheless, by 2024 the Russian economy had at last become the largest economy in Europe, indeed the fourth largest in the world, just as it had already been in pre-Soviet, Imperial 1914. Thus, the Three World Wars had only delayed the inevitable and the development of the future deWesternised, but once more Imperial (but not Imperialist, as it is deWesternised) Russia.

Outside Europe, in 1914 the USA was trying to dominate Latin America (starting with its land-grab from Mexico in 1846), Hawaii (1893), the Caribbean (Cuba (1898)), the Philippines (1902), and the Pacific in general, in rivalry with Japan (1941-45). Nothing has changed, though its imperialist delusions of today, now embodied in the egomaniac Trump’s ‘Make Israel Great Again’ government, run by the fanatical Zionist Lindsey Graham, are ‘globalist’. This is the dream of planetary rule by infantile tantrum and protection racket bullying, salesman’s ultimatum and deadline. He is a man who deploys nuclear submarines because his social media comment was contradicted by a Russian politician! As for China and India, their role in 1914 was negligible, as they were then controlled by Western colonialism.  However, today they have returned to what they were before any Western colonisation, 300 years ago, becoming the greatest industrial powers in the world, China at No 1 and India at No 3, even according to distorted official Western PPP figures.

Conclusion: The New World Order

As a whole, the world is returning to the situation of before 1914, though only in the sense that the world then was multipolar, that is, it was being led by a concert of Great Powers, and not One Power. All that has changed is the names of the Great Powers. But perhaps they would have changed anyway, without all the bloodshed of Three ‘World’ Wars, of attacks to destroy Russia, which is what the EU foreign representative Kallas so ardently and publicly proclaims as her aim? (But then Kallas comes from a Nazi family). In so many respects these Wars form one continuous War, interrupted by long, but temporary ceasefires. Then the Great Powers were the now collapsed empires of Western Europe, together with Russia and the USA. Today there are the Four Great Powers of China, Russia, the USA and India, as well as countries from Latin America (Brazil), Africa (South Africa and Ethiopia) and the Muslim world (Indonesia and Iran). This is the New World Order which has already begun.

 

 

 

 

World War and Chaos, America’s Megalomania and Crises, Europe’s Depravity and Fragmentation

Introduction: Millennial Revolution

The world has always been torn by rivalries between nations setting up empires. But all empires collapse. Thus, the Roman Empire, based in pagan Rome, actually had to build a wall against unconquered Northern Britain and man borders in what is now Germany and the Middle East, and collapsed. Its imperial overreach meant that it was divided into two, even into four at one point, but still the Western part collapsed under the barbarians. In 1204 the same barbarians sacked the capital of the Christian Eastern part, New Rome, and that too then collapsed under the eastern barbarians, the Ottomans. The British Empire, which conquered a quarter of the world, collapsed too, broken by bankrupting imperial rivalries in Europe and outraged national feelings and consequent liberation movements in Ireland, India, Africa and elsewhere. So today the American Empire (1945-2025?), which wanted to conquer the whole planet according to its post-1991 ideology, is also collapsing under the weight of its own hubris and overreach. You cannot keep the peoples of the world under, they will revolt and throw off your alien yoke, shouting, ‘Yanks Go Home!’

Like its immediate predecessor, the British Empire, which it imitates in everything, the American Empire was never able to conquer Russia and China (though Britain tried very hard by invading Russia between 1854-1856 and orchestrating the 1917 ‘Revolution’, which only made problems worse for it, replacing Imperial Russia with Soviet Russia, and in China by stealing Hong Kong for 150 years. After 1991, become ‘the only Superpower’, the Washington elite dared plan its universal domination (‘hegemony’), the aim of the science fiction US imperialists, who had even planted the US flag on the moon. That elite decided to try and destroy all opposition in the Middle East, succeeding in Libya and Syria, but utterly failing in Iran. This was partly because they had already utterly failed in Russia, where it corrupted the soft underbelly of the treacherous and eminently bribable atheist elite of the Ukraine – though the US elite still has not accepted this obvious defeat there. As for China, knowing that it was next on the list, it fully supports both Russia and Iran, and is joined by 90% of the world, which is gradually uniting into the Russian-founded BRICS.

Some comment that with the humiliating defeat of the Western world in the Ukraine, the Western domination of the world is over, after 500 years, ever since Columbus’ voyage of piracy in 1492. Apart from the fact that 2025 is more than 500 years since 1492, that date in any case only symbolises Western expansion to the ‘West Indies’ and its genocide in the Caribbean. It ignores Western expansion and genocides long before this, those by Charlemagne, and then to Southern and Eastern Europe from the 1000s on, to Northern Europe from 1066 on, and to Asia in 1096 and North Africa soon after. In fact, the Western domination of the world is finished after 1,000 years. The preference for Russian values in what was the Marxist Ukraine signifies that the Western world can no longer impose itself by organised violence and exploitation, slavery and colonisation, bullying and superior technology, sanctions and tariffs, on the rest of the world. The West has isolated itself in a corner against the 90%, the vast majority of the Non-Western world, which rejects its perversions posing as ‘freedom’ and its oligarchy posing as ‘democracy’.

Trump

‘TACO (‘Trump always chickens out’) Trump’, with his absurd contradictions, much-mocked buffoonery, megalomaniac hubris, astounding ignorance and pathological narcissism is typical of all the emperors of collapsing empires. Like them, he is full of contradictions and never keeps his word. He promised peace in the Ukraine within twenty-four hours, even before he had been inaugurated, but six months later the conflict is ever more violent. The culprits are Trump’s overweening opinion of himself and his total ignorance of reality and of history, typical of a New York real estate agent. Indeed, instead of peace, Trump has sent the terrorist regime in the Ukraine more arms, sponsored Israel’s genocide against Gaza and its massacres on the West Bank, in the Lebanon and Syria, so far to the tune of $17 billion, even by official figures, with US aircraft, bombs, missiles and US-trained pilots. Thus, only two countries in the world refuse to recognise Palestine: Israel and the USA. On Israeli orders, Trump even started a treacherous war against Iran, while at the same time conducting peace talks with it. Even Biden had twice avoided that Zionist bait.

Trump continues his aggressive rhetoric against China, trying to make the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, South Korea and Australia into ever more Georgian-and Ukrainian-style proxies for the US. They too have to die for the USA ‘to the last Ukrainian’. His tariffs are not only against China – he has created worldwide chaos with tariffs, which can appear or disappear at will, as the fantasy-bound Trump comes under pressure from real-world economics. For some reason he appears to imagine that tariffs are a tax on other countries, whereas they are in fact an inflationary tax on impoverished US consumers. Living with his head in the US-dominated 1950s, he imagines that the USA can replace imports, not realising that the US has deindustrialised itself, its greedy investors industrialising East Asia, making itself dependent on other countries’ manufactures. In his six months of ‘reign’, the US has become an open dictatorship, with the silenced Congress and the Senate playing hardly any role. US debt has increased even more, growing by over $1 million every second, over $12 billion a day, over $360 billion a month. Multiply that by twelve and….

Trump soon lost the support of the debt-cutting and anti-woke Musk, who was loved by MAGA nationalists. Although Trump has proved that the Obama ‘Russiagate’ was a fake, which we all knew anyway, this has not distracted from the Epstein pedophile scandal, which was run by two pro-Israelis, Epstein and Maxwell. Trump’s cover-up here has betrayed his promises to his MAGA base. He looks increasingly like a depraved Roman Emperor, and as a result about Trump there are now the worst possible rumours, for he knew Maxwell (real name Hoch) and Epstein very well. For his one-time MAGA base, Trump is now part of the very swamp which he had promised to drain. Showing signs of mental confusion like the early Biden, many wonder if the 79 year-old Trump will last the course of the full four years of his term. Vance is waiting in the wings. He may be needed. At least he appears to have some grasp of reality, not least as regards the Ukraine. Some are now saying that this is the only hope, that Trump will be relieved of his duties because of his mental health. He is now being disowned by his most ardent supporters and former fans.

Europe

Meanwhile, Trump has largely forgotten about Europe, as he is preoccupied with the Middle East and, above all, with the country that has a greater economy than that of the US, China. And why should he remember Europe? Europe is no longer the centre of the world, as the European elite like Borrell still deludedly imagines it to be, ‘we are the garden and the rest are the jungle’. As a result, European panic is turning into hysteria. ‘How will we cope without the Americans and NATO? Why has Trump turned NATO into a 5% protection racket? Why has the Roman Emperor abandoned his favourite mistress’? Why? Because he is a ruthless real estate agent. The three generation-old NATO, 1949 – 2024, is ending. Hopefully, RIP, and that it will not finish in nuclear holocaust, as NATO with its ever-aggressive hysterical rhetoric threatens Russia with invasion. So we now see the fragmentation of Europe. The Germans talk about obtaining nuclear weapons – the Poles shudder. The UK signs a ‘defence treaty’ with Germany. Why, both are already in NATO? The ex-Catholic South of Europe refuses to do so. It has better things to spend its scarce money on.

The end of the US-created NATO also means the end of its economic arm, the US-created EU. Both have headquarters very close to each other in Brussels and work hand in hand. Yet Brexit has already taken place, others speak of Frexit, Dexit, Italexit etc. France is as usual upset by Germany. Germany used to be the economic engine of the EU and nuclear France the political and military engine of the EU. Now Germany is in recession and France’s military is a laughing stock, though not as big a laughing stock as its recent crop of incompetent Presidents. Whether they concern the EU or NATO, the divisions are profound. As for the UK, it probably has the weakest and most depleted military of all, with more admirals than ships, aircraft that are leased and do not fly anyway, and a rapidly disappearing army with only 40 working tanks, though it does have 500 horses. Belgium wants to buy useless US planes, which is what the US wants to sell to everyone, and so has upset France, which wants to sell its planes to its Belgian vassal. Italy and Spain are going their own way. Ireland is pro-Palestinian. Hungary and Slovakia block every anti-Russian decision. Unity?

What will happen to this fragmenting Europe? It is already dividing into three separate parts. Firstly, there is the hysterical and fanatical, mainly ex-Protestant, mainly North-West: the UK, Netherlands, Germany (but will AfD East Germany go along with this?), the three Scandinavians, Finland and the three Baltic statelets. Secondly, there is the supple and even Russia-flexible, mainly ex-Catholic, mainly South-West: Italy, Spain, Portugal, probably bankrupt France, once it is freed of its fantasy-President, and probably Poland, once it has signed a security treaty with Russia and given up its imperialist claims to Belarus. Thirdly, there is the half-Orthodox, traditional Catholic, Muslim and pragmatic South-East. They look eastwards to their neighbour, Russia, in the North-East, and beyond it to China. They want to be the terminus of the Chinese New Silk Road. This is the only way out for them, to forget the aggressive US and EU policy towards China and to reconcile with Russia. All this means integration into Eurasia, which is not just logical, but also beneficial. They are ready to forget the Ukraine, which they have only ever known as the worldwide hub for corruption.

Conclusion: A Non-Western World Order

Trump resembles a school bully. Having just threatened and bullied the cowardly pygmies of the EU into paying him protection money of 15% and promising to buy $600 billion of US arms, he has now gone to Russia, China, India, Brazil and India and threatened them too. However, he has not noticed that they are much bigger than him, Russia militarily and China economically, and all of them morally, intellectually, culturally and diplomatically. Moreover, he has not noticed either that the rest of the world stands behind them, not behind him, and they are mocking him as a clown. And for that matter he has not noticed either that a lot of ordinary Americans and a lot of ordinary people in Western Europe are accusing him of supporting the Israeli holocaust of the Palestinians and of hushing up the disgusting Epstein files, in which his name his mentioned. Nor does he seem to be aware that doubts have been cast about Macron’s ‘wife’, Starmer’s links with Ukrainian male prostitutes, Merz’s and Zelensky’s alleged use of cocaine and von der Leyen’s Nazi ancestry. Perhaps he should think twice before consorting with such people in the first place.

Trump’s concept of ‘negotiations’ with Russia is to continue to subsidise and arm the Ukraine, not to listen to, let alone understand, the Russian side, but to flatter them and then bully them, like some mafia gangster imposing a protection racket, operated by sanctions and tariffs: ‘Accept our terms or else’. The ‘or else’ means further bullying, which in his case is utterly futile, as Russia is stronger than the US, with far more raw materials, is the breadbasket of the world, has a much greater industrial base, and has far better and more advanced arms. Also, it is not bankrupt to the tune of $37 trillion of debt. It is becoming ever clearer that the three ‘World Wars’ (the Third One with its encirclement of Russia by US bases is now) were futile and just delayed the inevitable, which is that Russia, stretching from the borders of Poland via Belarus to the shores of the Pacific, twice the size of Canada, with the fourth largest economy in the world and the largest economy in Europe, is destined to dominate Europe economically, though without humiliating it, as did the Soviet Union, which was the invention of the failed ideology of Marxism, which was imposed on Russia by the West.

With Proxyland Ukraine gone and the Western world routed and isolated, because it has insulted, intimidated and argued with everyone else, the whole Western world has become an international laughing stock. With its NATO terrorism, bullying and threats mocked and gone, the whole world changes. To start with, the UN Security Council will be seen as a 1945 anachronism, which is what it is. It will surely come to have eight members: not just those of the three Great Powers, China, Russia and the USA, but also India, Brazil and members representing Africa, the Asian Muslim world and Western Europe. There will be no more anachronistic France and the UK. At last, the real world will be represented. China, India and Africa alone represent over half of the world’s population. Of course, the 54 countries of Africa, as well as the Asian Muslim world, from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan to Indonesia) and Western Europe, from Iceland to Cyprus, will have to negotiate to find adequate representatives. Beyond this, Western organisations, from the IMF to the IAEA, will be overtaken by BRICS, which is destined to replace the UN anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

Questions and Answers July 2025

The True Faith. The state of the various Orthodox jurisdictions in England today and fifty years ago. The moment when the Russian Church turned its back on Europe. The Oxford and London Russian parishes fifty years ago. Tsar Nicholas in England. The coming end of the war in the Ukraine. The consequent fall of the European elite and of its ideology versus Orthodoxy.

Q: What for you is the True Faith?

A: In my late childhood and early teenage years, I came to three conclusions about what must be the True Faith:

Firstly, the True Faith must be about Christ, as only Christ is God and man, combining East and West, North and South. The True Faith must therefore represent the spiritual reality of Him and not State manipulations of Religion and the Bible, based on nationalism, racism, imperialism, colonialism and all cultures of apostasy, like the White Supremacy Western world.

Secondly, the True Faith must be historical and not some recent invention, neither of the nineteenth century, nor of the sixteenth century, nor even of the eleventh century, for it must go back a thousand years before, to the Scriptures, to the Word of God Himself.

Thirdly, the True Faith must be universal, as is Christ. In other words, the True Faith must be for all races who seek it, accessible to all, that is, to all who are repentant and so seek Christ, and so is not some esoteric or obscurantist religion for one nationality, or for the select few or elite.

Q: Why did you not become members of the Antiochian Diocese when you left ROCOR in 2021, unlike the three Western riters who were purged by ROCOR and went to Antioch?

A: The short answer is that none of us twelve clergy, or any of our thousands of people, had ever been Anglicans, let alone Anglican vicars. You have to understand the Antiochian Diocese exists in this country for them. We have all always been Orthodox and have never known any other religion, so something for ex-Anglicans, however worthy and sincere they may be, has no interest for us. It is irrelevant to us.

Also, Antioch is not European, as we are, and cannot members of one of the four Arab families who operate it. The Church of Antioch here is tiny, consisting perhaps of only a thousand people, mainly ex-Anglicans or ex-Protestants, especially rather puritanical conservative evangelicals. (This puritanism is rather ironic given the behaviour of the former Antiochian Archbishop in the USA and also drives away normal Orthodox, who, like Arab Orthodox, are not puritans).

Another problem of Antioch being so small is that it is desperate to recruit clergy and people, with one recent disaster when they accepted a reject from the mainstream Churches, based in his front room in Liverpool, and another disaster, some years ago, in Belfast. I believe in the latter case that vicar-priest ended up in prison for fraud. Other Non-ex-Anglican clergy under Antioch eventually transfer back to the Local Churches they come from. They cannot take the Anglican mentality, however hard they try to deny their origins.

The long answer is that our first act after we learned, directly, (it was actually boasted of by the culprit!) of the ROCOR schism in April 2021 was to warn the ROCOR Synod of what was going on. As soon as we realised that the whole Synod in New York had been perverted into the new ROCOR, not leaving a shred of tradition and the old ROCOR, and misinformed, our second act was to report to Moscow. When they replied that, although they perfectly understood the insanity of the situation, for purely political reasons they could not receive us, our third act was to join the Paris Archdiocese under Moscow. This had largely been cleansed of liberal French intellectuals and we have many friends and family there.

After Paris was told by Moscow, which could not make up its mind at first, that it would not be allowed to keep us, as the Moscow aim was not to expand Paris but to close it down, our fourth act was to look at our other options. Although three different jurisdictions wanted us, the obvious and only correct option, which we adopted very quickly, was to go with our old friends in the Church of Romania. (Romania had been the original choice of the Paris Jurisdiction when they had quit Constantinople there years before, but occult forces had rejected that choice and it had joined Moscow. So we made the choice for them). The Romanian Church had been suggesting to us for years in case ROCOR turned schismatic and it was supported by Moscow for purely political reasons, we could transfer to them.

So we joined the Romanian Church with the tacit blessing of Moscow, and any other refugees who want to leave the schismatic ROCOR for the Romanian Church have been invited to do so too. We have simply paved the way for the others, who will follow us. The strangest thing about this was that there appeared a lie on the internet that the Romanian Church had not received us! There were actually people who believed this, though not in Moscow. But the lie only discredited him who invented it and those who believed it. Today the culprit for the lie is isolated, shunned and shamed as a liar.

Q: So Moscow is abandoning ROCOR behind their backs? Why did you not opt for the Russian or Greek Churches?

A: As I said, Moscow was not allowed to receive us for political reasons, even though it knew that ROCOR was engaged in its insane schism. As Moscow was not politically free (a very serious fault), it had to go along with the ROCOR schism. This was a turning point and next year, in 2026, all will see the significance of this. Later, Moscow was punished for this lack of principle and has since had to tolerate the recent horrible Russophobic attacks on the Moscow Patriarchate by both ROCOR bishops in Germany.

This is what happens when you compromise yourself with the positions of enemies of Church teaching, even if only once. It is a downward spiral, as you have to accept everything else they do later on. Moscow already regrets it, indeed it is the great loser in all of this, but that was its choice. It was clearly told what was going on, but Metr Antony Sevryuk suicidally rejected the warning and told us to join the Romanian Church. Thus, the Russian Church turned its back on Europe – I don’t think that even now he realises the scale and significance of his error. In one act he had handed over Western Europe, including the local Russians, to Romanian Orthodox jurisdiction.

As a result, the Moscow Diocese in this country is now programmed to become a small embassy ghetto, a dependency, with just its church in London and the small church in Oxford surviving, exactly as it was fifty years ago, the rest has literally been left to die out. Since the British Establishment, like the other Establishments in Europe, has blacklisted Moscow, Moscow has no hope of expansion or incarnation into Western society. Therefore, Moscow is for the time being closed down in Western Europe. There is no future for the Russian Church here. It has had to close its window on Europe, given European political hostility to it, and is looking towards Asia and Africa. It will take a generation for Moscow to turn back to Europe, if ever it does. 2022 will go down in Western European Church history as the moment when the Russian Church lost it.

As for the Greek Archdiocese, it has recently been renewed, as it was dying out. It now has several younger bishops, including one excellent one (if only he could be the next Patriarch!), still has excellent infrastructure and several big parishes in London and some outstanding priests, but it has huge problems. It is profoundly ethnically and politically Greek, compromised by its CIA Patriarch, and, like Antioch and the Moscow Church here, most of its priests are elderly and dying out.

As Archbishop Nikitas told us recently, he has 100 elderly priests to replace in the next ten years and only 3 candidates. It is now not possible to get lots of poorly-educated young archimandrites from Greece, like they did in the 60s and 70s. That source has dried up. Moreover, only one church, the newly-frescoed Thyateira chapel, actually belongs to the Greek Archdiocese. The others are all privately owned by Greek and Cypriot businessmen and restauranteurs, who do as they want.

Q: What then is the future of ROCOR?

A: In rejecting the mission of the Diaspora Church to gather all Orthodox together through its schism and racism towards Greeks, Romanians, Moldovans and rooted English Orthodox in particular, it refused to concelebrate with the mainstream and cut itself off from communion. It has instead concentrated on attracting extremists, the naïve, the vulnerable and the pathologically ill. This is the path of the sect and the cult. And that is what it has become.

Q: Did you know Fr Mark Meyrick and Metr Kallistos Ware?

A: Of course. I first met the then Fr Kallistos in September 1974. He was an old-style, upper middle-class High Church Anglican, with an incisive public school-trained intellect. I loved his lectures and learned a lot from him. But above all, he was a very kind and sincere man. I remember him and pray for him with gratitude, although I was on a quite different wavelength from him.

I first met Fr Mark in July 1976. The problem with Fr Mark, who came from a long line of Anglican vicars, is that he had chosen to live among Anglicans, cut off from the Orthodox mainstream. As a result, he had a tiny community in a Norfolk village, isolated from Orthodoxy. He mainly seemed to be interested in converting young Anglican men and encouraging them to grow extremely long beards! As I had no interest in either Anglicanism or long beards, that was not for me.

Fr Mark (later Archimandrite David), transferred from ROCOR to Moscow, I think, in 1981. This was because of the attempted Americanisation and sectarian fanaticisation of ROCOR, which began at that time and which ended in 2021 with the triumph of American convert ROCOR in Europe and its abolition as part of the mainstream. It is now an American crazy convert colony and has no future. Crazy convert Orthodoxy does not export, as it is culturally alien to Europeans.

Q: Are Orthodox bishops worse today than fifty years ago?

A: Absolutely not. Fifty years ago, I knew three of them. One was a homosexual bureaucrat who ordained his boyfriends. One of those he ordained became an alcoholic, another gave up the priesthood within two weeks. A second bishop was a lady’s man who spent time with his main mistress in a cottage on the south coast, or so I was told. I knew her. A third was an anthroposophist. So we decided to return to Paris, to people who knew the Tradition. Today’s crop of homosexuals and sociopathic narcissists created by being spoiled as children are no better, but also no worse.

Q: What do you remember of the University of Oxford in the 1970s and the Russian chapel, then inside the house in Canterbury Road in Oxford?

A: In those days (and I am told that it has not changed very much since then), there were three ways of getting into the University of Oxford as an undergraduate. In order of importance, these were: aristocratic privilege, wealth, and academic achievement. I was therefore automatically and distinctly third class from the outset. The first two types were there to complete their Norman education, so they could enter the Norman (British) Establishment.

Moreover, those aristocratic or wealthy types who had nearly always attended public schools were shockingly, to me an innocent aged 18, often suffered from Norman homosexuality, like William Rufus. Oxford was riddled with it. Another reason to keep well away. In any case, I was not there to enter the Norman Establishment, though many who had not been to public schools allowed it to happen to them, as they were venal careerists. I was there for exactly the opposite reason, to understand how to de-Normanise. By Divine Providence I studied in the Alfredian College, by tradition (even if not in reality), the only pre-Norman College in Oxford. All was right.

I attended the Russian chapel in Canterbury Road in October 1972 and again in February 1973, when I was sixteen, just before the modernistic, octagonal chapel was built in the garden. The old chapel inside the House is now the library, based on Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, which I helped put in there. That old chapel was charming.

On the other hand, the rather effete University chapel later built in the garden of 1, Canterbury Road was definitely not for the ordinary people of Oxford. The Serbs, who were ordinary people, kept well away, as did most of the Greeks. The few by then elderly Russian academics who were still alive went when they could to one or other of the two Russian churches in London.

Apart from the majority of normal people who went there, there were also wealthy Anglo-Catholic homosexuals, or else those who mistakenly thought that Church Tradition means the same as right-wing political conservatism.

Q: What was the London Russian Church in Ennismore Gardens like at the time fifty years ago in the mid-seventies? And the ROCOR Church?

A: The London Patriarchal church had been taken over by upper middle-class people from wealthy west London, owners of Cotswold cottages, villas in Tuscany or on Greek islands. These were intellectuals, Liberal Democrats, BBC directors, well-to-do academics, lawyers, journalists etc, so rich that they had the leisure time to be enthralled by ‘spirituality’, Orthodox or Buddhist, as spiritual tourists. In 2006 they left en masse for Constantinople, as their hero, Metr Antony Bloom, had died. He was the reason for them joining, so once he had gone, in 2004, it was all over. Their cliquish snobbery continues. Only five years ago I overheard one of these now elderly people saying about a very pious and simple Romanian man, who dared (once) to frequent his clubby (rented) church: ‘I hope he does not come back, but at least he has a degree’. Is that Christianity?

Fifty years ago the Emperor’s Gate ROCOR Church had twice as many people as the Bloomite church, but it was an old people’s home. Apart from two or three Anglican homosexuals, the average age of the parishioners, who were very nice, must have been about 80. The writing was on the wall. It was an ethnic club that had no future, as they had failed to pass on the Faith to their descendants.

Q: Is there anywhere you would go on to a pilgrimage to the Royal Martyrs in England?

A: There are two places: Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Sandringham in Norfolk. Of the two I much prefer Sandringham, which is connected with the Tsar. He is still present there and he dreamed of becoming a Norfolk gentleman-farmer, if ever he had to leave Russia. Things will happen here.

For your interest, here is a full list of the five visits of the Tsar to England, with places and dates:

In 1873 the future Tsar first visited Queen Victoria as a five-year old child. He arrived on the Imperial Yacht at Woolwich on 16 June, stayed at Marlborough House on the Mall, visited Chiswick House on 28 June and on 28 July left for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, staying at Albert Cottage. On 8 August he went to Cowes Regatta, leaving England on 13 August, having spent nearly two months in England.

He visited London at the end of June 1893, having been met at Charing Cross Station, and staying at Marlborough House again. He went to Windsor on 1 July, visited Hurlingham on 4 July and Buckingham Palace on 5 July, attending the wedding of the future King George V on 6 July. He left the next day, having spent just over a week in England.

He arrived on 20 June 1894 to meet the future Tsarina. He arrived at Gravesend in Kent and travelled to Walton-on-Thames via Waterloo Station. He also visited Frogmore, Bagshot, Sandringham, Kings Lynn, London, Eton, Slough, Farnborough, Aldershot and Richmond-on-Thames. On 19 July he left for Portsmouth to cross to Osborne House and Albert Cottage, visiting Newport. He left on 23 July, after over a month in England.

1896 was his first visit as Tsar, with the Tsarina and the Grand Duchess Olga. They arrived at Leith on 22 September and went to Balmoral by train via Ballater. Here he visited Braemar Castle. He then travelled by train via Preston and Oxford, taking the Imperial Yacht at Portsmouth on 3 October.

On Monday 2 August 1909 the Tsar and his family visited Cowes on the Isle of Wight for the Regatta. He stayed at Osborne House, visiting Barton Manor and leaving on 5 August, having given £1,000 to be distributed among the island’s poor.

Q: When will the war in the Ukraine end?

A: This US proxy war against Russia (as Marco Rubio has openly described it) is a war of attrition. First, the Russians ground down first the first Ukrainian Army, then the second Ukrainian Army with old Soviet equipment from Eastern Europe, and now it is finishing off the third Ukrainian Army, with its NATO equipment. Wars of attrition, like the American Civil War and the First and Second World Wars, can go on for years, but they always end very suddenly, as the Second War ended suddenly in Berlin.

We are now reaching that point in the Ukraine, as the Americans are getting rid of their actor-puppet Zelensky. He has got too big for his boots and is too corrupt, resists the puppet-master and has refused peace, which is want Trump wants. The end will come suddenly and, I think, fairly soon. This is why Trump gave him (not Putin) 50 days so Zelensky could be finished off. Either he will get out on a CIA plane or else he will finish with a bullet in his head. When will Kiev collapse? The German-led, Pan-European invasion of the USSR in the Second World War lasted three years and eleven months. So maybe the end to this war will come within the same time span. At present it has lasted three years and five months.

The only danger is that NATO may invade Russia, as it has threatened, then that will be full war. That is possible, if the crazies in NATO have their way. If so, they will be crushed, as NATO has already been demilitarised by Russia. Russia has defeated all the Western Coalitions that invaded it, that of Napoleon, that in the Crimea, that of Hitler, and now this American-led NATO one.

Q: What will happen to Western Europe, once it has been defeated in the Ukraine?

A: The consequences of the defeat of the Western puppet government in Kiev, created and used as a proxy battering ram against Russia, and so the defeat of the whole of NATO, will be tremendous. The West will never get its money back. Worse still, it will never get its prestige back. The West has gone, replaced by the multipolar BRICS world. This will feed through and the old governing elites in Europe will have to be replaced.

This is because all empires decline in depravity and perversion (from Roman emperors to the debauched King Edward VII and now the Mossad-Epstein orgies) or buffoonery (the leaders of Western Europe and Kiev today, if they are not also pedophiles and cocaine addicts). Decadence comes at the end and with it a total lack of sense of reality, as buffoons live in virtual reality, fantasy, just as Hitler did at the end. We can see this clearly in the last 35 years of US leaders, from Clinton-Lewinsky to Obama, ending with the demented Biden and the world’s greatest narcissist, the result of a materially spoilt childhood, Trump.

Q: Do you think that Europe could return to Orthodoxy?

A: Europe, no, but a small portion of Europeans, yes. In the Romanian Church we are preparing for this literally, as you will see next year. We already have ten bishops in the twenty-one countries of Western Europe and a flock of nearly five million. One of those bishops is French, all speak at least one Western European language, if not two or three.

Moreover, our bishops also have a conscience of the importance of the veneration of the local saints of Western Europe. This is unique. I remember the fierce and insulting opposition of the ROCOR bishops to their veneration until 2017, when they finally realised that the tide was too strong for them to swim against any longer and then they stopped persecuting me on that score at least.

It is clear that we are moving towards a post-American Europe, the post-1945 part of the history of Western Europe is over. The American invasion and occupation will soon end. Its old puppet governments, in the UK, Germany, France and elsewhere, will fall. And Eurasia, Russian, India, China, India and Iran, north, south, east and west, the centres of the Heartland, are now co-operating in BRICS. Thus, the Western world, which was formed in the eleventh century has after a thousand years made itself spiritually irrelevant.

Q: Are the media censored in the UK?

A: Yes. The name of the official censor is Ofcom, but censorship relies above all on editorial control. Here news editors are appointed to carry out the censorship duties imposed by the State/Establishment and journalists who are completely mercenary, ‘presstitutes’ as they say. The BBC is a classic case of such censorship, of deliberate non-reporting, deliberate misreporting, and diversion (reporting irrelevant local stories of no interest instead of reporting the actual news).

 

 

 

 

The Faith of Love Versus the Religion of Ideology

Empathy versus Pathology

The Church is based on Empathy, that is, on Love for all people in order to transform and transfigure us all. Empathy may be called an anti-ideology, for it follows the Word of God in the Book of Love. This is not composed of narrow human rules.

However, there is also Pathology, that is, that which is based on a self-justifying crutch which deforms and disfigures people. Pathology always hides behind an ideology, nationalist, political or psychiatric. That is composed of narrow human rules.

Pathological Bishops Replace Authentic Bishops

For example, in the 1980s there were three convert Orthodox archbishops in the Russian Church in Europe, two were sectarians, unable to accept the mainstream Orthodox Church, and the other an academic dreamer, only happy with his books, but who also pretended to be Russian. All of them were fake, ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’, on account of their inferiority complex of being born just before or when the Nazi regime came to power. Therefore, they had to seek a self-justifying crutch as their pathological ideology. They adopted the Russian Orthodox Church, behind which they tried to hide.

Today, we have to deal with bishops who suffer from a different pathology, that of being narcissistic closet homosexuals. Therefore, their actions are based on jealousy, filling them with hatred and vengeful punishment. As fakes, they always lose control, their jealousy of the normal become passive-aggressive, vindictive and spiteful, because of their sense of entitlement as ‘superior’, when in fact they are inferior. Once they have been seen through, they slander and malign, telling blatant lies. In denial of their reality, they choose the Orthodox Church as their pathological ideology, behind which they try to hide.

Theology not Pathology

The words of God are known as Theology. The words of man are known as Anthropology. But the words of sick men are known as Pathology. Those words do not belong to the Church, but belong to the psychiatric hospital. For from the pathological comes not healing, but the sickness of ideology.

Conversely, theology gives healing, as it answers the innermost questions of the soul, satisfying its spiritual needs. Only God can do this through His own, who reflect His Word like a mirror. For our task is to clean and polish the mirror of our souls, not to sully them with the sickness of ideology.

 

125 Years of Putting Off the Inevitable

Introduction: What If?

The First World War was triggered by great imperial rivalries, above all those between Britain and Germany, and financed by the big banks, centred in London and New York, and encouraged by greedy arms merchants. They were helped by French and Austro-Hungarian revanchism and the feelings of the oppressed small peoples, the Serbian, Irish, Polish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croat etc. The unjust outcome at Versailles in 1919 made the Second World War inevitable. And its injustices in turn made inevitable the collapse of the USSR, the wars in Yugoslavia and now in the Ukraine. Yet, peace could have been arrived at, perhaps in the Tsar’s Hague in 1900, without the needless bloodshed of tens of millions. For the unviable Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires would have collapsed anyway and the other colonial empires, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, German and Belgian, could have dissolved peacefully.

Towards Today’s World

Imperial Russia could have decentralised then, as it did in any case between 1917 and 1991. The world would then inevitably and peacefully have seen what we see today: an economically German-dominated Western Europe, a Russian-dominated North Asia (Eurasia), a Chinese-dominated East Asia, an Indian-dominated South Asia, an Arab-dominated West Asia (‘the Middle East’), and a US-dominated Northern America. In the Global South, Latin America, Africa and Oceania would all have gone their own ways, free of colonial tyranny and ruthless imperialist exploitation. Only because the banks and the arms dealers did not want it, did it not happen then. Just as today in the Ukraine, so then there plenty who did not want peace. However, none of this ‘what if’, suppositional, counterfactual history addresses the real situation today in 2025. How could the problems of the present be resolved, despite the huge errors of the past?

If there is to be peace in Europe, there can be no more Western support for the Fascist regime in Kiev, neither military, nor financial (nor for the Fascist regimes in the Baltics, Scandinavia, Germany, France and the UK). The ‘Ukrainians’ must be freed of the regime that has been massively killing its own men as proxies to die for the USA. Then the Russian Federation would be able to create a new, smaller, but historically-based, and not Soviet-fantasy Ukraine, with the nine provinces of Crimea and the south and east returning to Russia, the four and a half south-western provinces returning to Poland (two and a half provinces), Hungary (one province) and Romania (one province), and the remaining half of the old Soviet Ukraine becoming historic Kievan Rus. That could be its new name with a new flag, as the name ‘Ukraine’ and its flag, Austrian inventions of the century before last, are absurd.

If it created peace, the bankrupt USA could withdraw its forces from all over Europe and close its bases there, and the anachronism of NATO could at last disappear, saving the USA trillions of dollars. It should have disappeared on 25 February 1991, when the Warsaw Pact disappeared. Similarly, if there is to be peace in West Asia, there can be no more US (and UK) support for the Fascist regime in Israel (even if that means that those compromised by the Mossad Epstein, are outed). Israeli Zionism has largely bankrupted the US through the futile wars of the US and its defeats in those wars. Finally, Taiwan would at last be free to return to China, and so Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia could save hundreds of billions of dollars in needless offence (‘defence’) spending. And the USA could withdraw its troops and close its bases there too, saving it hundreds of billions of wasted dollars.

The Russian Church

If there is to be peace in the Church, a new Patriarch would have to be elected in Moscow. This would be he who would restore communion with the Patriarchate Constantinople, except with the invaders under it on Russian canonical territory, and begin talks with the Patriarchate of Alexandria about its jurisdiction in Africa. Then the ball would be in Constantinople’s court to elect a new and at last politically free Patriarch. The full Council of Bishops in Moscow could grant autocephaly to the twelve and a half provinces of Kievan Rus, also allowing the Kievan Church to control its Diaspora. Then it could grant autocephaly to Moldova, in concert with the Romanian Church, in exchange for the return of North Bukovina to Romania, retiring the four discredited Moscow bishops in Moldova, refrocking all those defrocked for political reasons and allowing the Moldovan Church to control its Diaspora.

Autocephaly could also be granted to the Belarusian Church, the Baltic Orthodox Church (covering Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland) and to the Hungarian Orthodox Church, which would be based on the 600+ parishes of the old Transcarpathia, the province transferred back to Hungary from the Soviet Ukraine. The already Autocephalous Orthodox Church in America (OCA) could at last rename itself OCNA (Orthodox Church of Northern America), in return receiving into itself the forty or so parishes in Northern America at present under Moscow, on condition that Bishop Alexander Belja head the new ‘Kievan and Russian Diocese’ of the OCNA. Moscow should dissolve the anachronistic and largely schismatic Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), with its Russian parishes in the USA and Canada joining the OCNA in two dioceses, of east and west. Those who refused would go off to sects, as usual.

The remaining ROCOR parishes, in Western Europe and Australia, and its few small communities still left in Latin America and the Caribbean, could be handed over to Moscow, as part of three newly Autonomous Metropolias, namely those of Western Europe, Latin America, and Oceania. Internally, Moscow’s Soviet-founded, ecumenist Department of External Relations could be transformed into the Department for Inter-Orthodox Friendship. Bishop-bureaucrats should either become diocesan bishops or else be ‘retired’. There would be no place for ecumenists and ‘cardinal-metropolitans’ in the truly post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church, which should drop the Soviet title of ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ for the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem.’ Finally, discredited bishops should be ‘retired’ and all priests and deacons absurdly defrocked for political reasons since 2022 should be refrocked and restored.

Conclusion: In the Church

As by far the largest Local Church, eight times bigger than the second largest, a de-Sovietised Russian Church has a special responsibility to the other at present fifteen Local Orthodox Churches, not least to a de-CIA-ised Constantinople. Only such actions as the above could help gather together all the other Local Churches in an Inter-Orthodox Council. Here there would be one overriding topic of discussion: the uncanonical Orthodox Diaspora situation, the inevitable resolution to which has been put off for over a century only by politics. The paralysis of the Church from the Soviet age, when Constantinople was used as a Cold War pawn against Russia, and today’s paralysis from the Second Cold War, also launched by the USA, must end. And the Soviet centralisation of the Russian Church must end. There is hope for the future, but only in a Church at last free of both Soviet and CIA mentalities and interference.

4/17 July 2025, The Imperial Martyrs

 

When the Church is Taken Over by the State and Faith Becomes Religion

Introduction: The Roman Catholic-Protestant Model of Church Administration

What exactly happens when the Church becomes part of the State? This has happened many times in Western history and shaped that history. There is not only the case of the Church-State, known as Roman Catholicism, whose head started wars, commanded armies and ordered mass campaigns of inquisition, repression and torture. There have also been the cases in Protestant North-Western Europe and wherever that model has been imitated. This is the State-Church, where Churches hand themselves over to State control.

Thus, the Protestants founded National (and nationalist, ‘flag-driven’) Churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, the Church of Denmark, the Church of Sweden, the Church of Finland etc. In the first and well-known case, the new Church was founded by a Welsh genocidal tyrant and wife-murderer, who stole huge numbers of monastic houses and their lands and handed out their immense riches to his cronies. As for the national riches he seized for himself, he wasted them on pointless wars against France, which he lost.

The Adoption of the Model by the Russian State

This Protestant model was imitated by Tsar Peter I in Russia. Between 1682 and 1725 he forced the Russian Church into the same Lutheran mould, abolishing the Patriarchate in 1700, appointing Lutheran-educated Ukrainian bishops, and an ‘Oberprokuror’ to rule over the episcopate, effectively creating a Ministry of Religion. Some of the ‘Oberprokurors’ were not Orthodox Christians, indeed, at least one was an atheist and worked to destroy the Church. This control, resisted by Tsar Nicholas who wanted to abolish it, was copied by the atheist Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks controlled the Church in a similar reformist (in fact ‘deformist’), way, appointing a Secret Police Commissar to control the bishops, working to destroy the Church, murdering hundreds of thousands of clergy and people and literally dynamiting churches or confiscating them for secular uses. It was in this way that over some 300 years since Peter I, a special ‘religiosity’ appeared among nominal Russian Orthodox, which has lasted to this day. What are the three characteristics of this particular form of religiosity?

  1. Nationalisation

A State takeover of a Church means confusing Caesar’s and God’s, despite Christ’s words in the Gospel which command us to separate them and not to confuse them. Since the Church does not by nature belong to the State, therefore when such a takeover occurs, it means that the Church unnaturally begins to resemble the State. This means the adoption of State attributes – a persecuting, nationalistic, militaristic and bureaucratic mentality. In this way, the Church begins to resemble the State, rather like Roman Catholicism.

Nationalism means an emphasis on a narrow, exclusive, racial identity and language. In the Russian context, this means Russification and the loss of loyalty of other nationalities to the once multinational Russian Church. Militarism means an emphasis on a literal uniformity, obedience and rigidity, which cancels freedom of thought, and also integration with the armed forces. Bureaucratisation means an emphasis on protocols, paperwork and administration against the sacramental and spiritual view of the world.

  1. Clericalisation

A State takeover of a Church means that the clergy become agents of the State, that is, State employees, who develop the careerist mentality of civil servants and their ranks of promotion, awards and pensions. This in turn means that the people are alienated from the clergy, who become a separate caste ‘behind the iconostasis’ and the people begin to consider that the clergy are ‘the Church’. This creates a passive, disengaged and irresponsible mentality among the people – ‘it is not for us to do this, let ‘the Church’, i.e. the clergy, do it for us’.

This passive attitude of non-participation means that professional choirs sing in churches and services increasingly become abstract concerts and spectacles. Even prayer is delegated to the clergy, as people stop praying for themselves and ask the clergy to pray for them, an attitude that can be called ‘pious consumerism’. This view of the clergy as State bureaucrats, civil servants, means that the people begin to look at the clergy as unable to resolve their real problems and so they turn to elders, ‘startsy’, who in turn are often charlatans.

  1. Ritualisation

This mentality leads inevitably to ritualisation, the understanding of worship as ‘ustav’ or rubrics, a series of outward rites, in which participation is passive, but which just have to be tolerated. Thus, communion becomes the privilege of the clergy who may control access to laypeople’s communion by weaponising confession. As a result, communion may take place perfunctorily only once a year (the obligation for all civil servants until 1917) and sacraments are replaced by semi-private services, which have nothing to do with the liturgical cycles.

These made-up services, contractions of historic ones, include molebens, panikhidas and akathists. The latter of these are popular because they are comprehensible, since they have been composed recently in a language closer to Russian than the less accessible Church Slavonic, which is seen as the private language of the clergy (‘the Church’). The primacy of private rites means weak parish life, little sense of community, churches are patterned by outward formalities. In turn, non-churchgoers then revert to superstition as their belief.

A Nominal Church and Real Church Life

Reading the above, some may be in despair. However, we have made it clear that all these trends are the norm for nominal Russian Orthodox. Practising Russian Orthodox resist these outward trends and are critical of them. We follow the lives of the saints, who emphasise prayer and the ascetic, inward struggle. The above three trends are not those of St Seraphim of Sarov and St John of Kronstadt, even less are they those of the New Martyrs and Confessors, of the Imperial Martyrs, St Tikhon and St Matrona. They are ours.

Firstly, Orthodox oppose Nationalism through cultivating the sense of the catholicity of the Church, meaning cultivating good relations with the other Local Churches, which work in other countries, where the Russian State has no control. Secondly, Orthodox oppose Clericalism through developing the solidarity between clergy and people, which is what Orthodoxy is, and this means the clergy no longer living as State functionaries. And finally Orthodox oppose Ritualism through inner life, the life of the spirit, as in real monasteries.

Conclusion: The Last Tsar and the Coming Restoration

The last Tsar opposed all three deformations of Church life, Nationalism, Clericalism and Ritualism. Thus, his intention, not fully implemented, was to open a Russian Orthodox church in every capital of Western Europe. This opposed Nationalism. As for Clericalism, he was always shocked by the spiritual emptiness of ‘educated’ bishops and priests and their careerist rivalries, for example that of Protopresbyter George Shavelsky. To them he opposed St Seraphim of Sarov, whom he had had canonised, and the Martyr Gregory.

Tsar Nicholas II also ardently opposed Ritualism and wanted to restore the architecture, iconography and Church music from before Peter I, as can be seen in his design of the Tsarskoe Selo Cathedral. Already in 1905 he had proposed the restoration of the Patriarchate. Careerist bishops, all wanting to be Patriarch, opposed him and the Tsar understood that they were not ready for restoration. Indeed, after his overthrow in 1917, this became very clear. Soon another Tsar will come and carry out the unfinished restoration.

When Will the Western Cultural Revolution End?

Most have heard of the Russian (Cultural) Revolution, imposed in 1917 by utterly incompetent generals and aristocrats, who overthrew the Tsar as they wanted power for themselves. Within a few months they had opened the doors to the Bolshevik Communist regime, which was mainly led by Non-Russians and indeed Anti-Russians. It was a suicidal act, which led to several million deaths and tried to annihilate the whole of Russian history and culture. It is difficult to say when the hysteria ended. Some would say 1941, when the Nazis invaded the USSR, others say two generations later with the self-destruction of the USSR in 1991. Yet others would say that the end has still not come. This will come only with a new Tsar, who will appear after the death of President Putin and restore what Communism destroyed and what had already been shaken before 1917.

Most have heard of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was imposed by Mao Zedong and his Maoist Chinese Communist Party for ten years from 1966 to 1976. Its aim was to destroy anything pre-Communist in China, from Buddhism and Confucianism to Capitalism and Western culture. It was a suicidal act, which killed most cruelly hundreds of thousands (some say more) of Chinese people, of whom Communism had already killed millions in the two decades before the Cultural Revolution was organised by Mao through his personality cult. The economic and cultural results of the Cultural Revolution were disastrous, just as they had been in Russia after 1917, when Russia lost some thirteen years of economic and cultural development, not to speak of the sufferings of Russia and the other peoples of the USSR.

Few have heard of the Western Cultural Revolution, though all know that it is real. Some say that this began with the first part of the European War in 1914, which killed sixteen million people in Europe and intensified with its Second Part in 1939, killing over forty million people in Europe. But its most active phase opened two generations after 1914, in 1964. Since then, the bloodshed of war in the tens of millions has largely ceased, only to be replaced by the bloodshed of abortion in the tens of millions. Reproducing the decadence and debauchery of Ancient Rome before it fell, it has debased not only art, but also human appearance, with an epidemic of obesity, tattoos, coloured hair, metal inserted into the face, ‘gender change’, woke perversion and widespread pedophilia. Where did this ‘Cultural Revolution’ come from? What does it all mean?

Just like the Russian and the Chinese Cultural Revolutions before it, the Western Cultural Revolution is in fact not Cultural, but Anti-Cultural. Indeed, it is suicidal, for it preaches the Culture of Death, in abortion at one end of life and euthanasia at the other end of life, and in lowering life expectancy. And then it wonders why depopulation is rapidly taking place in the Western and Westernised world, as a result of the refusal to have children and cultivate family life. Although this Revolution was started by suicidal Western Europe in 1914, it has in the last fifty years been led by the no less suicidal USA. Ruled by Oligarchy, which it falsely calls ‘Democracy’, it censors all opinions that differ from those that its mercenary Zionist media publish and all the Western countries pay homage to as vassals of their feudal master in the USA.

Do we stop here, with these words of despair? No, we cannot and we must not. Surely, the Western world can ‘walk it all back’? Of course, it can, but it will have to give up the idol of what it falsely calls ‘Western culture’, that is, it will have to give up its culture of ignorance and arrogance, its culture of imagined racial superiority and exploitation of the rest. The proud era of ‘The West is Best’ is long since over. The Western culture that created both Marxism and Nazism, the concentration camp and the World War, gender change and totalitarian liberalism, has been found wanting. It no longer has any spiritual foundation, for it lost that long ago. Only by returning to its spiritual foundations and teachings, which it began to reject already a millennium ago, can it revive. And that will take the miracle of repentance and humility. A miracle indeed.

 

Winner Takes All: The Self-Destruction of the Church of the Russian Emigration

In the years following the so-called Russian Revolution in 1917, the Church of the resulting Russian Emigration split into three parts. A few, very few, remained under the Church centred in Moscow, which eventually became known as the Moscow Patriarchate. Most of the emigres considered that that was a ‘Soviet Church’, a Communist-controlled organisation and, since members of their families had died fighting against Communism and they had been exiled by it, they would have nothing to do with its Church. This vast majority of emigres themselves split into two, a smaller group and a larger group.

The smaller group, centred at its Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and existing mainly in France, was founded and led by Saint Petersburg aristocrats who had overthrown the Tsar in order to introduce a pro-Western regime, either a Constitutional Monarchy or else a masonic Republic. The larger group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), centred at first in Germany and then in New York, and with parishes above all in Germany, the Americas and Australia, was founded and led by emigres who, whatever their politics, were united by a profound hatred of Communists, who had stolen their land and wealth.

Obviously, now 108 years on after 1917, both groups are dying out, even though the New York group was much reinforced by the anti-Communist Russian emigration of 1945. As a result, the last pre-Revolutionary Archbishop of the Paris group died in 1981, and the last pre-Revolutionary Metropolitan of the reinforced New York group was deposed by his fellow-bishops in 2001 and died in 2006. Since then both groups have staggered on, declining in every way.

Both groups have since then much contracted, largely having failed to pass on the Faith to the descendants of the emigres, who are now in their fifth generation. Those born in the Diaspora have overwhelmingly been assimilated and lost all their Russian heritage. All that has survived is the political liberalism of the Paris group and the political conservatism (sometimes extreme conservatism) of the New York group. In other words, despite their radical contraction and the radical changes in their composition, their political identities have survived. However, their spiritual identity has been greatly weakened.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, these political identities have largely become irrelevant, mere history. Moreover, both the ageing and ever-smaller groups were dwarfed by the post-1991 emigration of young people from the former Soviet Union, who automatically became part of the much-expanded Moscow Patriarchate. These young people found the two old émigré groups to be museum pieces and so irrelevant. As a result, both émigré groups had to join the Moscow Patriarchate, though keeping a measure of internal independence.

Today, both groups are being dismantled, or rather, are dismantling themselves, as both suffer from the same suicidal disease: a lack of bishops who know the canonical Russian Tradition and, as a result of this total lack of leadership and Christian example, a lack of money. The flock will not follow wolves. For example, after 1917 both groups built some churches, or much more often, converted buildings for Orthodox use, the majority of them very small, built for fewer than a hundred parishioners. However, they also inherited some splendid pre-Revolutionary church buildings, such as:

In Italy the two churches in Florence and San Remo, currently under ROCOR, but formerly under the Paris Archdiocese.

In Paris the Cathedral of the Paris Archdiocese.

In France the ruinous churches in Cannes, Biarritz and Pau. Although it is forbidden to enter the Cannes church, as it is too dangerous, the increasingly aggressive and increasingly small and impoverished ROCOR is paradoxically engaged in a court action against its own Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, in order to obtain property rights over this ruin.

In Switzerland the ROCOR churches in Geneva, Lausanne and Vevey.

In Germany, several ROCOR churches, such as those in Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Baden-Baden.

The two ROCOR convents in Jerusalem.

Most of these churches suffer from dwindling congregations and so dwindling income. Some are going to fall down, if they do not soon receive tens of millions of euros for repair and restoration. Clearly, in order to avoid this, only direct transfers of the buildings to the cash-rich Moscow Patriarchate can, as happened to the two former Paris Archdiocese churches in Nice and the former ROCOR church in Bari in Italy, solve the problem. In the matter of restoring historic buildings, the Moscow Patriarchate will be much aided by the Russian State, which is keen to recover pre-Revolutionary Russian historic monuments, even if they are in a ruinous state.

In this long game of chess between the 99%, the very large Mother-Church, and the 1%, the two tiny émigré fragments, there can only be one winner, the Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate. It will take it all. As we said, this has already taken place in Nice and Bari, but also in Indonesia, where in 2016 ROCOR voluntarily handed over all its sixteen mission parishes to the Moscow Patriarchate, admitting that it could not cope with them. Once one of the last old, Russian-speaking ROCOR bishops has left the stage, many of the churches in Germany will certainly transfer to the Moscow Patriarchate, as their clergy and people come almost all from the ex-Soviet Union.

As one Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan told me recently: ‘Their churches are like ripe fruit hanging from a tree which will fall into our hands’. In other words, the Patriarchate does not have to do anything, except to wait patiently for the Church of the Emigration to dismantle itself, as the Emigration self-destructs after the deaths of educated, Russian-speaking bishops, who are faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and not to weird old calendarist or new calendarist pseudo-theologies, or rather fantasies.

We have descended a long, long way from the hopes expressed by the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexei II in 2003 (yes, already nearly a generation ago!) that the Western European Metropolia of the Moscow Patriarchate would become the foundation of a future Western European Local Church. That is now a mere daydream to be forgotten in the cold light of reality, the incompetence, corruption and immorality of various bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate, the liberalism of a large minority in the Paris Archdiocese, who then left it, and the schismatic and sectarian isolation of the ROCOR bishops, who still have not left it and officially founded some weird pseudo-Russian old calendarist sect, which is what they are.

Anyone has the right to leave a Church which has broken communion with another Church. That is what was done when ROCOR broke communion with part of the Moscow Patriarchate. For anyone and everyone can leave a group which enters into schism. The floodgates are opened. Moscow went to the casino, bet all its money on the wrong number and the wheel has spun and chosen another. Russia has always been betrayed by the traitors of the fifth column. In the early 17th century, boyars betrayed it to the Poles, 1917 aristocrat-traitors destroyed the Russian Empire, in 1991 oligarch-traitors destroyed the Soviet Union, and today wealthy traitors have been allowed to undermine the Russian Church.

The results are the anti-Ukrainian, anti-Moldovan and anti-English actions of Moscow and its increasing centralisation, ritualisation, nationalisation and militarisation, as it has cut itself off from communion with other Local Churches. To return to even the situation of hope of 2003 will take decades. Just like the Patriarchate of Constantinople before it, Moscow has hit the ball into the court of others, who are busy constructing what Moscow failed to do. God gave Moscow an opportunity on a silver plate; it rejected it. Now it will have to deal with the suicidal consequences, exactly as we have been warning ever since 2003. The opportunity has been presented to others.

For the Orthodox Diaspora, does this matter? Probably not, because the policy of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Diaspora has increasingly become that of a nationalist ghetto. It lives in isolation from, and so is irrelevant to, the vast majority of Diaspora Orthodox, who are not Russian. The only hope is that the Moscow Patriarchate will cast off its present nationalist and racist isolationism, returning to communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church.

Only then will Moscow return to the glorious heritage of the two great Russian saints of the Diaspora, in the USA St Tikhon of New York and Moscow, and in Europe, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, the latter the greatest man of the Russian emigration. They did not listen to St John, they persecuted him, suspended him, put him on trial and have done exactly the same to his disciples. The price they are having to pay for that is already very heavy indeed. God is not mocked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Latest ROCOR Scandal – This Time in Australia

https://news-pravda.com/world/2025/06/29/1477487.html

It is with great sadness that we have heard from multiple sources (a google search confirms all) of the latest Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) scandal, this time in Australia. There it has made all the main newspapers and media, though of course it will probably not make the largely ROCOR-run, anti-Greek, and heavily censored ‘orthochristian’ website.

Indeed, the Australian story has done nothing for the American Synod (ROCOR), which had already been publicly shamed in a court case for its blatant lies about Fr Alexander Belya and his Vicariate, as shown by the very expensive court case which it lost, and also for its blatant lies about the ‘Colchester Diocese’ in England. Here ROCOR lost half its Western European diocese through its anti-canonical, anti-Moscow schism, racist and sectarian persecution, slander and greed.

As a result, in all the nineteen churches combined of its so-called ‘Western European Diocese’, it is doubtful if on an average Sunday there are even 1,500 people inside them, many of which it does not even own. The ROCOR scandal in Geneva, with the vicious persecution and expulsion of the most faithful of the old ROCOR, all disciples of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, also remains unresolved. The Old Pre-Revolutionary Tradition ROCOR has been killed off by the New Convert ROCOR. St John of Shanghai has ben put on trial and suspended by the American Synod for a second time.

Now in Australia, after the sentencing of the ROCOR pedophile priest from Bombala, publicly known about for over seven years, though in the 1990s they had wanted to make him a bishop (!), another cleric, Fr Boris Ignatievsky, has made a shocking statement typical of ROCOR clericalism: ‘The sheep must not judge the shepherds’. Several of the Russian ‘gyprocker’ clergy in Australia, have already been responsible for scandals, including alcoholism, infidelity and wife-beating. Little wonder that our dear friend in Australia, a priest of integrity, Abbot Sergei Shatrov, left monasticism and the priesthood and became a taxi-driver. (Fr Michael Boyko, another Jordanville graduate, also left the priesthood and became a miner).

It all comes after the arrest and court case involving the notorious Fr Seraphim (Scuratov) in England back in the 1980s (the one whom they also wanted to make a bishop!), and the equally disgusting sexual scandals in the USA, in Boston, Blanco, Jordanville, Platina and Virginia. In the latter case a ROCOR monk left after being approached by a pervert-monk, went to his ROCOR bishop to talk of his trouble and then got touched up by the no less pervert-bishop, who claims to be ‘canonical’. (The monk threw off his monastic garb and walked away in disgust). Is all their monasticism composed of pedophiles? The half a dozen still active bishops of ROCOR (a generation ago, there were twenty – there are several who have ‘retired’ with disgust at the manner in which the new American Synod operates) do not know what to do.

The American ROCOR Archbishop for Australia, a former traditionalist Roman Catholic, rebaptised into ROCOR, is now spreading traditionalist Roman Catholic-style anti-birth control booklets, also to the scandal of the faithful. Russians have no truck with this. The pastoral crisis is in full swing here too. The ROCOR policy of sending out convert American bishops, who have no idea of the Russian Orthodox pastoral and cultural realities outside US convert ghettos, to the ROCOR colonies overseas, has been shown to be a catastrophic mistake.

Meanwhile, at their headquarters in Moscow, certain senior metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church (I know two of them, who informed me so) are thinking of replacing the ROCOR bishops with their own. They wanted ROCOR to be an embassy Church for them to improve their image abroad. In reality, ROCOR has made their image worse. Moscow is just waiting for the key old one to die, for he ‘zasidelsja’, has stayed on for too long. Most of the increasingly small numbers of ROCOR laypeople who are left would follow Moscow bishops. As for many former ROCOR clergy and faithful, they are now scattered as refugees from gross injustice, in the Patriarchates of Constantinople or Romania.

Moreover, both Patriarchates are keen to take even more of those fleeing the anti-canonical and schismatic actions of the rebaptising and anti-family ROCOR Synod. Therefore, they will take them all without letters of leave, which have no value or importance, as the new ROCOR is a schismatic group, which continues to persecute, in the harshest of ways, faithful clergy and people.

Scandals always accompany the decadence that comes before the end. It is just another nail in the coffin of the corpse of what was even twenty years ago a Russian Emigration Church with a largely respected and even glorious history. Sadly, a Persecuted Church has over the last generation become a Persecuting Church. All we can say to all is: Keep well away from ROCOR, approach it at your peril, for the old ROCOR is dead, killed by crazy converts, with their sexual and financial scandals.

To repeat the words of Fr Boris Ignatievsky: ‘Condemnation is a form of pride’. But the American Synod has been condemning the good and faithful for decades. Now it condemns the parents of outraged sons, who denounce pedophile clergy. Presumably then, in their view, pedophilia is a form of humility?

One commentator has asked: How did the Bombala pedophile get away with it for so long? All I know is that he had a terrible reputation when he was in Jerusalem in the 1980s. And all I can say is that either the bishops concerned are stupid, poor judges of character, or else, less charitably, they operate just like the Roman Catholics, as a gay mafia, protecting their own. One or the other. Sad, but true. The need for an Inter-Orthodox Council becomes ever more obvious to us, though apparently not to the majority of the bishops.