The Murk Lifts as the Saints Come in Victory

Four years ago now we were informed by a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) that Fr Alexander Belya had been selected as a bishop by a majority of the old ROCOR Synod in New York. All had legitimately been signed off and sent to the Moscow for the final approval. Indeed, Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) had earlier personally spoken to us about Fr Alexander with great enthusiasm. However, the objections of a minority in the Synod were so strong that they launched what was in effect a coup d’etat, taking advantage of the late Metropolitan Hilarion’s dementia and cancer, creating a new ROCOR and beginning a campaign to discredit Fr Alexander’s candidacy. All manner of accusations were made, for which no proof has ever been offered.

Accusing someone of forgery and then spending two and a half years in the highest courts in the USA trying to avoid having to respond to evidence to the contrary does seem very strange. In any case, after losing its very expensive court cases against Fr Alexander Belya and awaiting the new one for defamation, the new ROCOR has lost yet another battle.  It can no longer resist the consecration of Fr Alexander Belya, already signed off by the old ROCOR under Metr Hilarion (Kapral). However, given the purging of the old canonical ROCOR by the dominant new ROCOR, the consecration will go ahead under the very unpopular and highly controversial Archbishop Elpidiphoros of the Church of Constantinople in North America. He has now called the bluff of very naïve, objecting bishops of other jurisdictions in Northern America and will proceed with the long-awaited consecration.

It is a great pity that few can trust Archbishop Elpidiphoros personally, but no doubt there was no other choice for Fr Alexander in the highly politicised American context. And so the vital forces of the Russian Church in Northern America are going under the Church of Constantinople, as the elderly who know the Tradition die out. We can only imagine the dissatisfaction with ROCOR in Moscow. A candidate for the episcopate and yet another set of good clergy and prosperous parishes lost by ROCOR and this time forced, however reluctantly, to join the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Moscow’s great rival. (Where part of the OCA also wants to go). The living elements of the old ROCOR, are fleeing its new marginality, in Northern America quite logically joining the largest jurisdiction there (the Patriarchate of Constantinople) and in Western Europe quite logically joining the largest jurisdiction there (the Patriarchate of Romania). In both cases all keep the old calendar and all other Russian liturgical customs.

All had been possible, but, according to some, on account of jealousy (Fr Alexander speaks and writes fluent Russian and Ukrainian, unlike those who oppose him), slander and sham ‘defrockings’, those who oppose him have lost nearly everything. First there came notoriety for receiving clergy without letters of release from canonical (= non-schismatic) Local Churches. (Letters of release are necessary to check on the moral conduct of clergy, not if the only objections to the clergy leaving are because they refuse schism, because of political disagreements or if they concern coveting of parishioners’ property on the part of those who do not wish them to leave.

The refusal to issue letters of release for purely political purposes or to try and obtain property illegally is not canonical. And there is no such thing as an oath of obedience to a schismatic bishop!). One Russian priest in London called ROCOR’s uncanonical suspensions ‘null and void’. And as another Russian priest said: ‘If there is no canonical crime, then it means that canon law is simply used as a mechanism of political repression’. (https://uk.yahoo.com/news/russian-orthodox-priests-face-persecution-062625884.html).

Thus, the clergy who left Constantinople for ROCOR were suspended by the Church of Constantinople. This is normal practice, as you do not ‘defrock’ clergy, if they are acting in integrity according to their conscience. Unless, that is, you are some sort of punitive, gaslighting, right-wing sect. Why did so many leave the new ROCOR elsewhere? The ROCOR schism from the Moscow Patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church (to which ROCOR supposedly belongs!) in Western Europe took its toll. This was because the Moscow group in Western Europe receives Catholic clergy in the same way as the rest of the Moscow Patriarchate and the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church, that is, not by rebaptism, like Greek Old Calendarists. This suicidal act of Russian old calendarism on the part of ROCOR cost it sixteen clergy and half of its Diocese in Great Britain. All refused to obey neophyte schismatics – see Canon XV of the First and Second Council. Now ROCOR in Great Britain will never be anything more than an irrelevant, tiny, closed marginal sect.

Then there was the use of electronic signatures, used in utterly vain attempts to bully, gaslight and intimidate. With these acts many have indeed discredited and isolated themselves from canonical Orthodoxy. How long will Moscow tolerate these losses and scandals? At a time like this, the already very isolated Moscow needs allies, not scandals. It has already suffered scandals in the tragic situations in Kiev, Riga, Amsterdam, Madrid, Vilnius and those that are rapidly developing elsewhere. There will come a point when Moscow, with its many parishes which use the new calendar, simply will not accept the threats made to it by the old calendarist American Synod. These threats involve boycotting the workings of the Moscow Patriarchate and are made by the New York Synod because it believes that it has Moscow over a barrel and can get away with anything. It is a dangerous game, because one day after the Ukraine is over Moscow will call its bluff and pull the plugs.

All this is a result of the ROCOR identity crisis. This began after its formal unity with Moscow in 2007, when it at last found universally recognised canonical status, for which we had battled for so long. However, instead of choosing to use this God-given opportunity to contribute to the positive and mainstream construction of new Local Churches in the Diaspora and show political independence from the secular Russian State, it chose negative and censorious self-isolation in an extreme right-wing ghetto and political co-operation with the secular Russian State. So it lost its Ukrainians – and many other normal families, purged by the alt right, long-bearded crazy converts it is introducing. It means that the only Russian Orthodox input into the inevitable new Local Churches in Northern America and Western Europe will come from the free Russian Orthodox, who belong to other Local Churches. Fringe groups with their extremism such as ROCOR will have no involvement. Just like all old calendarist groups, they have nothing to contribute.

Unless, that is, the few remaining Orthodox in ROCOR can at the last moment take back control of the Church from those who usurped power from the saintly, but very weak Metropolitan Hilarion (+ 2022) during the years of his dementia and cancer. This now seems very unlikely, unless the largely convert mini-Synod which took full control of ROCOR through its internal coup can be ousted. At present the new ROCOR is carrying out a purge of all its senior clergy of the St John tradition, all those who belonged to the old ROCOR and are being replaced by ‘Orthobros’ and incels.  Distracted by its loss of the Ukraine, Latvia etc and its desperate search for support in the Diaspora for the Russian State’s political and military battle against the USA in the Ukraine, the Moscow Patriarchate authorities have let things slide in the Diaspora. So badly indeed that the return of ROCOR to canonicity now seems virtually impossible. And that severely compromises Moscow’s own non-ROCOR existence outside Russia only more.

Interestingly, the news of Fr Alexander’s coming consecration was reported by the notoriously biased, American-run but Moscow-based, website ‘orthochristian.com’. This site is well-known for being backed by and publishing the works of very conservative ex-Evangelicals in Northern America. Some have even said that that website has been infiltrated by murky CIA/NATO assets, who started establishing themselves in ROCOR, Vlasovite and Russian-language publishing and broadcasting circles in the Diaspora in the 1960s. In any case that website never prints articles and comments that are critical of the practices of the MP and ROCOR or show up their hypocrisy and disrespect for human rights. It is surely being protected by someone important in the hierarchy in Russia, who knows the emigres well. According to some, he may himself, perhaps by naivety, have been turned and been involved in those murky dealings.

This is possible. After all, we should recall that the US Establishment is now divided between the conservative nationalist patriots of the CIA and the woke cosmopolitan neocons of the Washington State Department. And this situation is strangely very similar to that in the Soviet Union just before its dissolution in 1991. Then that was divided between pro-American liberal Euro-Atlanticists, who overnight transformed themselves from Communists into Capitalist oligarchs, and the patriots/nationalists, centred in the Soviet equivalent to the CIA, which was then called the KGB. And one of the latter was the present Russian nationalist President Putin, at that time a lowly KGB operative in provincial East Germany.

We should not forget that the former US President George Bush Senior (his son was not bright enough) was head of the CIA before himself being elected. Does a parallel between today’s patriotic CIA and the then patriotic KGB exist? Does the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991 indicate the coming collapse of the American Empire? We remember how in the 1970s and then the 1980s, the right-wing Washington ROCOR, of which some were CIA assets (once an asset, always an asset, as the late Fr Mikhail Artsimovich commented to me in 1992), was warmly welcomed into the Reagan White House and the coffers of the CIA generously opened to it. Now it is payback time, return on investment. We gave you then, now you will obey us. You cannot escape the murk, once you have joined it, you are signed up for life. You have sold your soul.

What is clear is that the new ROCOR is collapsing. It is not for families. We have often asked ourselves what the righteous people, priests and bishops of the old ROCOR, so many of whom we knew well, would have done. What would the ever-memorable St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, Fr Seraphim (Rose), Archbishop Antony of Geneva (who never defrocked anyone) and Metr Laurus (Shkurla) have done, given the present convert sectarianisation? Their Church has now been taken over by the descendants of those who suspended and put St John on trial in 1964, who persecuted Fr Seraphim in the 1970s and Archbishop Antony in the 1980s and 1990s and ourselves since 2007.

Surely, if they had still been alive in the years following 2007 and saw they risked losing control of the New York Synod to the murky mini-Synod, which had already begun forming as long ago as 2001 after the Metr Vitaly fiasco, they would have closed down the separate Synod in New York. Then, seeing the convert immaturity and uncanonical actions, Moscow would have taken ROCOR under its direct control. Moscow then would surely have proceeded towards the regionalisation and Metropolitanisation of ROCOR, as so many of us and the Patriarch Kyrill of the time had so much wanted, as he told us quite clearly in the Danilov Monastery in Moscow in May 2012.

This would have helped towards founding the coming foundation of the four Diaspora Local Churches, in Western Europe, Northern America, Latin America and Oceania. In this way the New York Synod could never have been diverted from its Christian path by insecure ‘One True Church’ converts and the other psychologically troubled with their murky connections. It is probably too late for this, for the Persecuted Church has become the Persecuting Church and the way back seems impossible. It is too late for any ‘Make ROCOR Great Again’. This is what happens when the spiritual is supplanted by the political and the financial. In history such people were ruled by a Sanhedrin and they were called pharisees.

However, we should not doubt in Divine Providence. The saints came to rescue us from the ROCOR schism and even now they are gathering together with St John of Shanghai. We shall see great changes in the near future, as the Holy Spirit takes over from evil men, their hearts full of hatred. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!

 

 

On the New Wave of Crazy Converts from the USA

https://www.euronews.com/2023/07/31/democracy-is-a-tool-of-satan-the-murky-world-of-orthodox-influencers?fbclid=IwAR3SVdG0HheZsBpX5IShclHxYEoYjkLyW4o-4MA2dTbLj45Yx5JbOhrjklU

Throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s, we had to battle against the liberals, modernists and ecumenists. Times have changed. Now, in North America the ‘Orthodox’ extremists are right-wingers, new crazy converts. Since 2017 they have been exported to the United Kingdom and even to other parts of Western Europe, where, tech-savvy, they have done immense damage, not least through their narcissistic and cultish podcasts and zooms. Poor Old Europe! These crazies are Church-Destroyers. What are their seven characteristics?

  1. Censoriousness

As narcissists and sectarian pharisees, these new crazy converts love to condemn others, punish them harshly and promise them hellfire, as if they were old-fashioned Lutherans or Calvinists (which some of them indeed are). They do not love their neighbour, because they do not love God.

  1. Right-Wing Politics

They confuse the Tradition of the Church, the collective and ongoing revelations of the Holy Spirit down the ages, with mere political conservatism and the Republican Party with Christ. The only ‘ideology’ of the Church is Love, not politics and especially not Nazi politics.

  1. Anti-Semitism

They are unable to understand that all individuals and all peoples are composed of good and bad. To suggest that evil is the lot of only one people is in itself evil. Or do they all, as some do, literally support Fascism and Adolf Hitler?

  1. Conspiracy Theories

All such extremists fail to recognise that there is only one conspiracy against humanity, that of the Devil. All other conspiracies are as nothing. However, the Devil does not rule humanity, God does, and in His Providence, all petty human conspiracies are as nothing. All the conspirators are dead or will die. Conspiracy theories are the domain of those who have little or no faith.

  1. Misogyny

The Church is a Patriarchy, it even has Patriarchs. However, the Church is also a Matriarchy. This is normal for a Church, where the first things that all see on entering our churches are icons, one of Christ and the other of the Mother of God. There is no place for misogyny and sexual exploitation in our Church. It is notable that many of these extremists are unmarried men, indeed, unmarriable, the children of dysfunctional families. They have never known what a mother or a wife is.

  1. Homophobia

The Church states that the practice of homosexuality is a sin. In this we only repeat the Gospel. However, the Church also teaches us to hate the sin, but to love the sinner. There is no place in the Church for hatred. The strange thing is that some of these extremists are in fact themselves repressed homosexuals. In other words, as well as hating God and their neighbour, they also hate themselves.

  1. Love of Money

According to the Apostle Paul, the love of money is the root of all evil. Such extremists are also noted for being in love with money. This is because as narcissists, they love their own material comfort, expensive clothing and food. This is because their souls are not with Christ.

It is our experience that the heartless hearts of these extremists are filled with hatred and not with love. This is one thing if it concerned just a few young men. Sadly, however, through utter lack of discernment some of them have been ordained to the priesthood and even a very few have been consecrated bishops. The disaster is here, as the crazies are filled with the narcissistic certainty that only they are right and that everyone else, especially those with pastoral experience and love for others, is wrong.

 

A Glimmer of Hope?

https://spzh.news/en/zashhita-very/75099-auditor-is-going-to-kyiv-on-the-arrival-of-phanar-delegation-to-ukraine

 

Five years ago, in December 2018, under US political and financial pressure, the once prestigious Patriarchate of Constantinople set out on a disastrous course of setting up a tiny new ‘Church’ of its own in the Ukraine. It called this the OCU. At once it created a schism with the Russian Church, to whom that territory had belonged for some 340 years, though until then it had been under Constantinople. There were no more concelebrations between the two and an extremist part of the Russian Church in the Diaspora began taking clergy and parishes from Constantinople without letters of release. (That extremist part then, in December 2019, created a schism with another part of the Russian Church, creating an internal schism, which problem has still not been dealt with by Moscow, but which has led to clergy leaving the schismatic part, in accordance with Canon XV of the First and Second Council). On top of this, in December 2021 the Russian Church then set up a Church on the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, allied to Constantinople, in Africa.

The spiral was out of control and now the only way of overcoming all these problems between Greeks and Russians is for Constantinople to repent for its initial action, which created the spiral in the first place. Today, having realised that the ‘Church’ that it set up in the Ukraine consists of villains, gangsters, men of violence and defrocked perverts, Constantinople has realised that it must do something. Metropolitan Savva of the Church of Poland, as well as all leaders of the other Local Churches which are politically free, has informed the Patriarch of Constantinople in conversations about this. Now comes the news that Metropolitan Emmanuel of Constantinople and a delegation of others are to visit the Ukraine to investigate the behaviour of those whom it has there promoted as the OCU. There is now a glimmer of light. If Metropolitan Emmanuel, who issued the ‘tomos’, the document that created its fake Church in the first place, were to rescind it, as is urgently and obviously required, the existence of this scandalous, fake American ‘Church’ would be over.

If, in a second phase, the Patriarch of Constantinople then reissued the ‘tomos’ and granted it to the authentic Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) under Metropolitan Onufry, that would solve all the problems. Metropolitan Onufry and his Church are canonical, they are not defrocked gangsters and perverts, they do not concelebrate with Roman Catholics and they observe the traditional Orthodox fixed calendar and not the Roman Catholic/Protestant calendar, as enthusiastically imposed on the fake OCU Church by US bureaucrats. Moreover, the UOC should have received autocephaly (independence) decades ago, and only because of Moscow’s Soviet-style imperialist centralism it did not. If Constantinople were to grant the UOC autocephaly, as it could do, other Local Churches would at once recognise it. Eventually, after all the others, Moscow would in turn be forced to recognise it as well. Thus, the machinations of both Washington and Moscow would fail. Furthermore, Constantinople would regain at least some of its lost prestige and Moscow would eventually have to end its schism with Constantinople.

Is it possible that this could happen? Does Constantinople have the courage to defy Washington? Does Constantinople have the courage to admit that it was deceived by the villains in the Ukraine in 2018 and made mistakes? We do not know, but what we do know is that man proposes, but God disposes.

 

 

Orthodox Catholicity: Overcoming the Russo-Greek Schism

Introduction: The Church Under Attack

‘The One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church’. Unity, Holiness, Catholicity and Apostolicity are the four characteristics of the Church and at various times in history one or another of them has been overlooked. As a result, the integrity of Church life has suffered – until the restitution of that particular characteristic. That the Faith of the Church is One, that the Church creates Saints, that the Church goes back to Apostolic times is in no doubt now.

However, at the present time, with the Church in crisis, in a state of worldwide administrative and jurisdictional schism, there is no doubt that it is rather the Catholicity of the Church that is being overlooked. This is the Universality of the Church, at all times and in all places. Catholicity is its Unity in Diversity, as at the first Pentecost and Coming of the Holy Spirit, as related in the Acts of the Apostles

Catholicity

The word Catholicity cannot be confused with Catholicism, which refers to Roman Catholicism, for the two words are different, However, there is a problem with the adjective ‘Catholic’. In English, as in all Western languages, this word is often confused with ‘Roman Catholic’, which is a contradiction in terms, as you cannot be universal at all times and in all places and yet attached to only one place, for example, Rome. This is very apparent when the Creed is sung or read in English or in other Western languages in our churches – ‘and in One. Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’. Here the word ‘Catholic’ can sound strange.

This is not the case in Greek, from which comes the original word ‘katholiki’. Here instead of using ‘Roman Catholic’, they prefer to say ‘Latin’ or ‘Papal’, so that ambiguities are avoided. And Slavonic and Romanian have completely different words for ‘Roman Catholic’ and ‘Catholic’. Perhaps in English we need to translate ‘katholiki’ by ‘Orthodox Catholic’ or perhaps ‘Conciliar’, in order to avoid this ambiguity? For we are Orthodox Catholics, not Roman Catholics, as we confess that the Orthodox Church is ‘Conciliar’, based on Councils. Their decisions come from the Eternal Spirit of God and so are for all time, and not based on some passing administrative figure like a Pope or Patriarch, who is here today and gone tomorrow.

Here we should be particularly careful. For the Papal temptation of Rome, that of an individually or collectively-imposed imperialist superiority, racial, linguistic, cultural or otherwise, of one Local Church over all the others, can be a temptation for any Local Church. Here we do not speak of Roman Catholicism, which by definition long ago succumbed to this, thus losing its Unity with the Church, its Holiness and its Apostolicity. Here we speak of the Orthodox Church, which has not succumbed to imperialism, though certain ‘Orthodox’ personalities are and have been tempted.

In history, and especially at the present time, we have seen this temptation inside the Orthodox Church in both individual personalities and collective groups, notably in the Patriarchate of Constantinople and in the Patriarchate of Moscow. The term for the temptation of ‘Eastern Papism’ is, after all, well-known among Orthodox. There is only one solution to this problem of the ambition, personal or collective, to dominate others and lord it over them, it is the Catholicity of the Church. Indeed, as we have said, a possible translation of the Greek original for Catholicity is ‘Conciliarity’ and for ‘Catholic’ ‘Conciliar’.

Conciliarity

For Catholicity is always revealed at Councils, which are a primary source of the revelations of the Holy Spirit in our post-Scriptural Age. It is precisely this that is lacking in Roman Catholicism, whose head is the Pope of Rome. Now, some will say that Roman Catholicism does have Councils. The problem here is that those Councils are not Orthodox, not free, indeed its First Vatican Council (1869-1870) proclaimed the dogma of Papal Infallibility. In Roman Catholicism the task of Councils is only to rubber-stamp decisions of Popes, for, according to their theology, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Popes, the Vicars of Christ. Councils do not have the same function there as in the Church, but take place only to confirm Papal decisions, being subservient to Popes.

This is not the case in the Church, although it is true that the Church in its bimillennial history has seen plenty of example of ‘Robber Councils’, or false Councils, the best known example of which was at Ephesus in 449, but the latest example of which was the 2016 pseudo-Council in Crete. How can such Robber Councils be avoided? Here we underline that in the Church no conference of bishops can be called a Council until after it has taken place, when its fruits, if there are any, can be seen and received or rejected by the people of God. A conference of bishops is merely a conference of bishops, but a Council of bishops is where the Holy Spirit is present. A conference of bishops is not a ‘Council’ because they forgot to invite the Holy Spirit to it and so can become a ‘Robber Council’. A Council implies the presence of the Holy Spirit, Who binds us together in Catholicity. For the Church is One at all times and in all places, only when She confesses the Holy Spirit.

Below are some suggestions of one who is not a bishop, not even a monk, merely a parish rector, though with nearly forty years of parish experience and having been a speaker at a Local Council (San Francisco, 2006) of the Russian Diaspora Church. There we defeated the spirit of pharisaic pride, made stubborn by psychological insecurity and political rancour. That spirit was rejecting both the repentance of others and Divine Providence, which was offering the long-awaited opportunity to restore canonical unity within the Russian Church.

Perhaps someone with influence may find the suggestions below, together with the many others, of interest.

Towards an Authentic Council

  1. Procedures

 

a. Unlike Crete, all Local Churches must be represented at a potential Universal Council.

 

b. Unlike Crete, no politically-imposed agenda should be presented at a potential future Council, that is, an agenda in the style of a secular meeting, programmed for one week in June 2016.

 

c. Unlike Crete, there should be no timetable to pressure delegates to make decisions within a very short period or to falsify the decisions reached with false signatures. The Seven Universal Councils were free to make decisions, often over many sessions and even months. The Holy Spirit is not limited by human timetables and pieces of paper.

  1. Where?

Like Crete, this Council should be held in a country where a majority of the people are at least nominally Orthodox, that is, there is locally some sense of the Tradition.

  1. Who?

Traditionally, meetings which became Councils were convened by the Emperor of the time. In the absence of an Emperor, they are called by the Patriarch of Constantinople in concert with the leaders of all the other Local Churches. If the Patriarch of Constantinople refuses for political reasons to convene a conference of bishops and many Local Churches still believe that such a conference (and potential Council) is necessary, then let them together call such a conference without the Patriarch of Constantinople. Then there can be a conference of bishops which may at least turn into a Local Council. Let us recall that apart from the Seven Universal Councils, there have in history been many Local Councils, which have reached important decisions, which have then had universal reception and application.

At present only 14 Local Churches are universally recognised. The OCA is disputed by some because it exists in North America, a territory shared by other Orthodox. And the Macedonian Church is disputed by some because of arcane arguments about its name. Perhaps these two Churches could at least be invited to send non-voting delegates to a conference of bishops, that could possibly become a Local or Universal Council, as any decisions reached could concern them very deeply.

Episcopal Corruption

As at Crete, we suggest that not all the world’s 1,000 Orthodox bishops be invited. This was never the case at the Universal Councils. Though attended by hundreds of bishops, they were never attended by all of them and some Local Churches such as the Roman Church, were represented by as few as two delegates. Conciliarity was and is expressed not by the presence of numbers of bishops, but by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Instead, let each Local Church be invited to send, say, a maximum of ten episcopal representatives, if they have that many bishops (a few smaller Local Churches do not). These representatives would have to be chosen beforehand by a Council of all Bishops (not just a Synod, let alone a mini-Synod) of their Local Church.

Here there is a problem, the elephant in the room, of which few speak. We know about this problem from the lives of St Photios (+ 893) and St Gregory Palamas (+ 1357), who were persecuted and whose teachings were opposed by Robber Councils before they were vindicated. We know about this also from the life of St Nectarios of Egina (+ 1920), who, instead of becoming a great missionary Patriarch of Alexandria, was slandered and cast out by jealous fellow-bishops, and from the life of the missionary bishop St John of Shanghai (+ 1966), who was slandered and suspended by his fellow-bishops, so did not become the Metropolitan of the Russian Church in the Diaspora and instead was hounded to an early death. The result was that that part of the Russian Church set out on a path of sectarianism, from which it has not yet been saved.

The world was unworthy of St John. His suspension in 1964 was related to me with great satisfaction 26 years later by one of his continuing slanderers, an extreme right-wing Russian racist from Los Angeles, to whom I had to listen in silence for two hours in a Paris traffic jam. He reminded me of the wise and prophetic words to me of St Sophrony the Athonite seven years before, forty years ago now, in 1983. In Essex Fr Sophrony warned me then of the cross I would have to bear, as he blessed me for my mission in the Russian Church, which he himself had had to abandon on account of persecution, to help work for unity with truth: ‘There are those in that group who lack love’, he said, indicating that we too would suffer like St John.

There is then the problem of the corruption of a significant minority of bishops. Why they are allowed to become and continue to be bishops and are not suspended or defrocked is not a question for us here, though it is a question of vital interest and concern to all responsible Orthodox and whose solution is long overdue. We suggest that delegates or bishop-representatives be chosen according to strict criteria in order to ensure that they are bishops who lead canonical lives.

Criteria for Presence

i. All representatives chosen by a Local Church must at the very least be in communion with all the bishops of their Local Church. Otherwise, they are uncanonical, de facto schismatics and should be suspended and sent to a monastery until they have repented or else defrocked.

ii. All representatives must take a solemn oath that they are bishops by free choice and not political appointees, like Patriarch Sergius of Moscow (+ 1944) (appointed by the Kremlin) or a generation later Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople (+ 1972) (appointed by the White House), as per the Canons of the Holy Apostles. This is to prove their canonicity.

iii. All representatives must take a solemn oath that they respect the three monastic vows of non-acquisition/poverty, chastity and obedience. The first vow means that they cannot be holders of, acquirers of or users of luxurious properties, objects and money, even if on paper, by subterfuge, the property, objects and money ‘belong to’ their diocese or are rented. The second vow means that they cannot be married or homosexual. The third vow means that they cannot be disobedient to the Church by being members of State secret services, masonic lodges or organisations that promote syncretism. This is to prove their canonicity.

iv. All representatives must be free of ongoing court cases for scandalous conduct involving, for instance, financial allegations; sexual allegations; allegations of slander of honest clergy; allegations of outbursts of rage and spectacular rudeness; allegations concerning persecution with threatening demands for more money, intimidation, bullying and even ‘defrocking’ for political reasons or reasons of personal hatred and jealousy of clergy, who have already been publicly accepted by other Patriarchates as legitimate, canonical and unjustly persecuted clergy, as they are faithful to Orthodoxy, but not to schismatic and uncanonical bishops. In other words, there must be no doubt as to the canonical life of the bishop in question (See Canon XV of the First and Second Council).

v. All representatives must be diocesan bishops, not ‘vicar-bishops’, whose status is not strictly canonical, as a bishop is married to his diocese.

vi. All representatives must have been diocesan bishops for at least ten years. Otherwise, they will lack experience.

vii. All representatives must be diocesan bishops of dioceses of at least 25 parishes (a parish being defined as a church where the Divine Liturgy is held at least every Sunday and is attended by at least 40 adult Orthodox each time. In other words, their diocese (whatever may be their pompous titles, ‘of All America’, ‘of Western Europe’ etc) actually has at least 1,000 practising adult Orthodox. (The average Orthodox bishop has a diocese of 200,000 nominal Orthodox). Otherwise, they will lack experience.

The selected representatives of each Local Church should attend the conference with any issues which their Local Church considers need resolving, following discussions and conferring with the other bishops, monks, priests and faithful in their Local Churches. Clearly, these issues would include the refusal at the present time of Russians and Greeks to concelebrate, who has the right to grant autocephaly and autonomy, and the universal recognition of uncanonically ‘defrocked’ clergy. However, other issues could easily arise.

After discussions and conferring with the other bishops, monks, priests and faithful in their Local Churches, bishops could reconvene for another session at a maximum interval of three months. This process could be repeated for as often as is necessary for decisions to be reached and be approved by all bishops of the Local Churches. There should be no pressure of time, just as there was not in the Councils of Church history.

Conclusion: Towards the Holy Spirit

In the light of the above, it would seem that the Crete Conference was in fact a warning, with Providential rewards, which always come to those who have suffered sacrificially from the treachery of those who behaved uncanonically. As with the case of the Tower of Siloam, the meaning was: ‘If you do not repent, you will all finish like this’. For the upshot of the Crete Conference of 2016 was the present schism between the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow.

This resulted from the former’s uncanonical actions in the Ukraine, apparently in revenge for Moscow’s non-attendance of the Crete Conference. This in turn led to Moscow’s uncanonical actions in Africa, technically the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. It is clear to all that only a Council can break this spiral of uncanonical actions and schisms, with their purely political and uncanonical ‘defrockings’, which everyone ignores. Here the Churches of Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, Poland, Albania, Czechoslovakia and Jerusalem can play an important role as mediators between the racial clash of Greeks (Greece, Constantinople, Cyprus, Alexandria) and Russians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sorry Tale of the Anglo-American Empire

Not allowing our imperial history to be rubbished is important because if indeed our imperial history was all that they say it was, namely a litany of atrocity, then the moral authority of the West is eroded.

The Oxford Professor of Theology, Nigel Biggar, interviewed on the Conservativehome website, 16 September 2020

The Western Gulag

No people has ever with greater brutality better prepared its economic conquests with the sword and later ruthlessly defended them than the English Nation’.

Adolf Hitler (1)

When Gandhi was asked in London in the 1930s what he thought of Western Civilisation, he allegedly replied: ‘I think it is a very good idea’. It is what we Orthodox Christians think too. Ask any Serb, who knows all about the effects of Western depleted uranium shells on unborn children and RAF bombs marked ‘Happy Easter’, murdering women and children on Easter Night. The Anti-Civilisation of Gulags is an inherent part of all four materialist Western ideologies: the Feudalist, the Communist, the Fascist, the Globalist.

How else can you enforce your millennial ideology of organised violence on the rest of the world? For the Western world, with its British ‘rule of law’ or its US ‘international rules-based order’, law is a medieval construct of regulated force, legalised violence, the high priest of Imperialism, the theft of land and resources from native peoples with bits of parchment and paper. Ask the medieval European serfs, herded into concentration camp ‘villages’ beneath the newly-built castles, inhabited by ‘evil men’, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wrote, such that English peasants thought that ‘Christ and His saints slept’. Ask the Irish. Ask the Native Americans. Ask the Africans. Ask the Asians. Ask the Aborigenes. Ask the Ukrainians about the feudal Blackrock corporation.

The USSR, like China, had its own State camp system, the Communist Gulag (the abbreviation ‘lag’ taken from the German Lager – camp – camps being the new castles), inspired by the latest Western ideology of Communism. But all the Feudalist empires had their Gulags too: Spain in most of South and Central America and Mexico; Portugal in Brazil and parts of Africa; France in West and North Africa and Indo-China; the Netherlands in the ‘Dutch East Indies’; Belgium in the Congo; Germany in South-West and East Africa; Austro-Hungary in Carpatho-Russia; Italy in Libya and ‘Abyssinia’.

And Britain had them almost everywhere, most notoriously and most literally in the slave plantations of the Caribbean and Virginia, in the Indian subcontinent and only five generations ago in South Africa. Camps, camps, camps – so much admired by Hitler that he copied Britain and made his own Fascist Gulag in Eastern Europe.  And after Hitler’s suicide, the British, perhaps flattered by his admiration, carried on their millions-strong Gulag in the late 1940s and 1950s, in Palestine (yes, Israel was a British invention, thank you Lloyd George and Balfour for your ‘contract with Jewry’, as you called it (2)), Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and finally Northern Ireland under the heartless Thatcher (3).

However, the USA also copied the British Gulag, at home (‘Indian reservations’ = concentration camps for Native Americans on the worst land), in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism of Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy (the latter got murdered for his), the awful British Empire survived and became the American Empire. First, there was Rhodes and then Milner, who wanted the US in. So in 1917 their followers engineered a coup to get the Russians out and a few weeks later they brought the US in. But in 1941, when Britain had gone bankrupt and could have starved, the US took over completely to keep the Germans down. The world was America’s and so they invented NATO to continue their out, in and down.

The American Empire

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without going through the process of civilisation.

Oscar Wilde

A piece of European snobbery, proclaims the American on reading the above. And probably rightly so, for surely it is not just America, but much of the Western world which did not go through the process of civilisation. For what is America, if not a European colony? After 1945 the British elite presented their Empire as a bastion of anti-Communism and so sold it to the US, knowing that that was how to pull the Americans’ strings. And so, economically, they held on to it, even when militarily they had become bankrupt pygmies.

Where did you think the CIA got its waterboarding from? It had been a small part of the long-perfected British ‘dilution technique’ of beatings and torture. And Guantanamo? Just a copy of illegal detentions in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Of course, the Americans never used the words ‘Empire’ or ‘Imperial’. Instead, they disguised the American Empire behind the words ‘Globalism’ and ‘Modernization’. And then the British copied them in turn, cottoning on to the slogan ‘Global Britain’ instead of ‘Imperial Britain’. Same thing. Just sounds better.

Yes, it is true that the hoodwinked Western peoples, at least outside the capitals and main cities, had little idea of what was being done abroad in their name by their elites. Most never went any further than a few neighbouring villages. They were told that it was all a ‘civilising mission to enlighten backward peoples’ – and they believed it, beneath the weight of the censorship and propaganda of the elite. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde approach (the novella was written at the height of Victorian Imperialism in 1886), the beast inside and underneath, was always the Western approach. Ditto for Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, the symbol of Victorian blood-sucking Imperialism.

It is also reflected in the novels of Agatha Christie (and countless other imitators, like the inventor of Cluedo), in which a nice, quiet, innocent, English village becomes the scene of dastardly murder, committed by a member of the elite. The village-murder meeting of opposites was noted by George Orwell, inspired by the British example of the wartime British ‘Ministry of Information’, in fact the Ministry of Disinformation. In his 1948/1984 world of Doublethink he commented: ‘War is Peace’. ‘Freedom is Slavery’. It had virtually been the feudal slogan of Hitler’s death camps: Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Liberates. The Americans reflected it all in their satirical film Arsenic and Old Lace. Two sweetness and light old ladies, whom we might well nickname Freedom and Democracy, have their mad brother burying their dead victims, the ‘backward’ outcasts of society, in the cellar. ‘They are so much happier now’.

Charming politeness and law-abidingness on the surface, pitiless and ruthless bloodshed underneath, in the cellar of the Western world, that part of the house the polite never speak about, but hypocrisy will not make it go away. The whole of Western double standards is satirised. ‘Sorry we murdered you. But it was for your own good’. Such precisely is the history of Western Imperialism and its aerial bombing ‘back to the Stone Age’ (aerial bombing – another British invention from the 1920s, faithfully copied by the Americans). If you do not believe me, look at today’s murder of the Ukraine. ‘It is all for their own good’, claim the neocons. ‘Why, once all those who resist are dead, they will be civilised – like us’. If anyone is left. After all, they do want to fight ‘to the last Ukrainian’.

The Narcissist Club

The Capital of that beacon of light, the USA, is named after a slave-owner. How many slaves did he own and exploit – 200, or was it 300? It is as if Berlin was called Hitlerstadt. They would complain about that name, but not about the Washington name. Isn’t it time to give Washington a native name? The same hypocrisy goes for the British arch-imperialist Churchill. He complained about Hitler murdering 5.4 million Jews, but what about the 5.4 million Bengalis that he allowed to die in the Bengal famine of 1943? It did not matter. They were brown. The Jews were not. And, besides, the Jews had plenty of money. Isn’t it time to take down Churchill’s statue in London? We have had enough of the apologists for Western crimes. They are after all no more than apologists for Hitler.

I love Old Europe, but not New Europe. Like Dostoyevsky I approach New Europe as the cemetery of a dear friend. In the first millennium Europe gave us those who, surrounded by death, preached the Divine message of Resurrection from death and so offered Eternal Life. These are the saints of Europe, the apostles and martyrs in Rome and such as St Irenaeus in Lyon, St Maurice in Switzerland, St Ursula in Cologne, St Eulalia in Barcelona, St Ambrose in Milan, St Martin in Gaul, St John Cassian in Marseilles, St Patrick in Ireland, St Genevieve in Paris, St Benedict in Umbria, St David in Wales, St Martin in Braga, St Columba in Scotland, St Gregory in Rome, St Willibrord in the Netherlands, St Boniface in Germany, St Eulogius in Cordoba, St Anskar in Denmark, St Edmund in England, St Olaf in Norway, St Stephen in Hungary, St Sigfrid in Sweden.

In the second millennium Europe gave us those who, surrounded by death, preached the humanitarian message of Resistance to evil and so offered cultural life. Despite all the surrounding evils, they gave us such as Boccaccio and Dante, Giotto and Chaucer, Van Eyck and de Vinci, Michelangelo and Rembrandt, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Moliere and Mozart, Blake and Keats, Beethoven and Goethe, Chopin and Heine, Dickens and Strauss, Dvorak and Grieg, Rodin and Renoir, Monet and Mucha, Verne and Wells, Orwell and Mann. Then Europe began to dry up, as in 1914 it started on its long, slow and bloody process of suicide or rather genocide of the peoples of Europe by the elites. And that suicide/genocide is ongoing. This time in Zelenskyland, in a conflict which implicates the whole spineless European elite. Europe lost its way, and so its culture, when it lost its foundations, and so its principles.

Here I am in France, yes, the independent France that existed until the CIA mounted its colour revolution against De Gaulle in 1968 and is now ruled by the effeminate banker ‘Micron’, as many call him. Here I was struck last week by the wording on the clothing of a little girl. I suppose she must have been about seven years old. She was wearing a T-shirt with words which surely she did not understand. They said, naturally in English: centre for self-love. And I thought how those words actually sum up the present-day Western world, with its Facebook and likes, me-time and iphone, Twitter and Instagram (‘I buy buy branded clothes, so I can take pictures of me wearing them and then post them on my Instagram account’). It is a selfie world, an ‘I-world’, an ‘I love me’ world, a world of narcissism. As such, it is therefore a doomed world. Creation only ever comes from sacrifice and suffering, whether from childbirth and concertos, never from egoism and self-satisfaction, from Tik Tok and Instagram. The century-long suicide of Europe continues, long ago exported to the rest of the West.

On account of its suicide/genocide, today we can no longer speak of Europe being able to stand alone, not even of Eurasia, but of Afro-Eurasia. It is Russia, Asia and Africa that can together still save the Half-Continent at the Western end of Darkest Europe from itself. (European Russia and Belarus already managed to save themselves from all four materialist Western ideologies of Feudalism, Communism, Fascism and Globalism – all variations on the same exploitative theme. We look to BRICS to save the North American Brave New World and to BRICS to save the Australian and New Zealand Brave New World. As for Europe, its only meaning now is, like Zelensky, to surrender and bear responsibility for the crimes of its millennial elites whom most Europeans obeyed. But first Europe must reject its aberrant Imperial history of pride and return to its roots of humility.

Notes:

  1. Mein Kampf
  2. Lloyd George, Memoirs 2: 721
  3. See, for example, Caroline Elkins’ excellent cataloguing of twentieth-century British Imperial genocidal crimes in her Legacy of Violence (London 2022). It confirmed everything we had long suspected and forms a suitable reply to the whitewashing of the British Empire by Lawrence James in his Rise and Fall of the British Empire, (was that part-funded by MI5?), or the absurd nonsense of Ferguson’s ‘the West and the Rest’ with his Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (paid for 2003 propaganda?) and Nigel Biggar’s pure Establishment Ethics and Empire project in 2017, in which like an extraterrestrial from Oxford academia he still appears to be clueless about the millennial reality. The West’s moral authority ‘eroded’? It never had any.

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘’Owing to personal ambition, Patriarch Kyrill has lost the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and other Churches in the lands of ‘Holy Rus’’’.

https://spzh.news/en/news/75027-after-odesa-cathedral-shelling-uoc-bishop-addresses-patriarch-kirill

The above are the words of my dear friend, Archbishop Victor (Bykov) of Artsyz, Vicar-Bishop of the Odessa Diocese of the UOC, on 23 July. They followed the devastation to the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odessa, which I knew so well and whose present ruinous state is so saddening. Vladyka Victor, who is a real monk, stressed that the Patriarch has repeatedly spoken about the unity of ‘Holy Rus’, which he ‘has utterly destroyed with his blessing and his actions’. ‘In my opinion you seem to have forgotten that, just as in Russia, so in Ukraine there are (were) your children, whom you consider as such, and you have blessed those who are now killing them’, wrote the Archbishop. ‘The words ‘Great Lord and Father’ do not come to my tongue when addressing you, for you are a father who has sacrificed his children to destruction and killing’. So sad and yet so true.

The problem is that the Patriarch has lost not only the Ukraine and Latvia, but probably also Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, England and probably all the lands of Western Europe and indeed, probably ultimately everything outside the territory of the Russian Federation. He has transformed himself from the Patriarch of All Rus into the Patriarch of All Russia. Three letters more tacked on to the word ‘Rus’ may sound like a minor change, but in fact it is everything. A once great multinational Church is rapidly becoming a minor nationalist Church. The multinational quality of the Church of the old Russian Empire (1721-1917) and then of the Soviet Union (1917-1991) has been destroyed by ambition, which led to the twofold disease of inward corruption and outward nationalism, exactly, to the letter, as in the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

When the Soviet Union collapsed into 15 different countries at the end of 1991, the Russian Church retained the chance of being multinational. Now that has largely been lost in this wave of militant Russian nationalism. True, the temptation of national exclusivism was always there, and in every part of the Russian Church, as we know only too well from fifty years of experience inside it, but we thought that the victory of that nationalism could be avoided. Great figures in the Russian Diaspora Church like Metr Anastasy, St John of Shanghai and Archbishop Antony of Geneva thought so too. Now it all seems to be too late! The only hope now is a wave of autocephalies, which could at least keep the Russian Church as the historic head of a family of ten, with nine fully independent, canonical Autocephalous Churches forming part of the new ‘Holy Rus’.

By Divine Providence, the list of Autocephalous Churches would start with the older Polish, Czechoslovak and Northern American (formerly OCA) Churches, but now would extend to new Ukrainian, Baltic, Belarussian, Central Asian, Japanese and African Churches. As regards the Russian parishes in Moldova and Western Europe, they will probably pass to the majority Patriarchate of Romania, which, by Divine Providence, already has Autonomous Metropolias there and a flock of well over four million with a thousand parishes and ten, and soon, eleven, bishops. If those on those territories directly or indirectly under Moscow did not join into the symphony of those future Local Churches, they would become uncanonical sects. Such a situation would still leave Autonomous Churches under Moscow in Latin America, South-East Asia and China.

The ideal of ‘Holy Rus’ can survive, but not in its old administrative unity. Its unity is what Patriarch Kyrill has destroyed, as Vladyka Victor said above. ‘Holy Rus’ can no longer survive in a centralised/Sovietised form, but only in the form of a Family or Confederation of independent adults. The Autocephalous Church of Poland, once within the Russian Empire and the Russian Church, proved a century ago that this is possible. Others must now follow its example. For the Holy Spirit cannot be regulated by pieces of paper and intimidating threats, as bureaucrats and young and inexperienced neophyte bishops imagine. In the words of Christ, the only Head of the Church: The Spirit blows where it wills. And it does not blow in the direction of Moscow (or Constantinople), of corruption and nationalism, it blows in the direction of Autocephaly and freedom.

 

 

 

 

After Odesa Cathedral shelling, UOC bishop addresses Patriarch Kirill

23 July 14:12

46803

Author: Elena Konstantinova

https://spzh.news/en/news/75027-after-odesa-cathedral-shelling-uoc-bishop-addresses-patriarch-kirill

The vicar of the Odesa Eparchy believes that Patriarch Kirill, “due to personal ambitions, lost the UOC and other Churches in the countries of ‘Holy Rus'”.

On July 23, 2023, after the missile shelling of the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa, Archbishop Victor (Bykov) of Artsyz, the vicar of the Odesa Eparchy of the UOC, addressed Patriarch Kirill and all members of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. His letter was published on the Facebook page of the St. Elias Monastery.

At the beginning of his address to Patriarch Kirill, Bishop Victor reminded that “at the Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on 27.05.2022, a decision was made that we, led by our Primate of the UOC, completely come out of Your submission” and stressed that the Patriarch has repeatedly spoken about the unity of “Holy Rus”, which he “completely destroys with his blessing and actions”.

The bishop also believes that it is precisely the “personal blessing” of the Patriarch that has led to the Russian military committing lawlessness and open warfare on the sovereign territory of the Ukrainian State.

“In my opinion, you seem to have forgotten that, just like in Russia, in Ukraine, there are (were) your children, whom you consider as such, and you have blessed those who are now killing them,” the bishop writes.

He noted that to his immense disappointment, during the last Bishops’ Conference in Moscow, Patriarch Kirill “did not say a single word about the need to stop this Cain-like war, to cease these killings and the destruction of peaceful cities and villages, to stop the bloodshed.”

“Your bishops and priests sanctify and bless tanks and rockets that bomb our peaceful cities,” the archbishop reminded.

“Today, when I arrived at the Transfiguration Cathedral of Odesa after the curfew, I saw that the ‘blessed’ missile from Russia flew right into the altar of the temple, into the Holy of Holies. I realized that there is nothing left in common between the understanding of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and yours,” Bishop Victor believes.

He is convinced that Patriarch Kirill “due to personal ambitions, has lost the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and other Churches in the countries of ‘Holy Rus.'”

“The words ‘Great Lord and Father’ do not come to my tongue when addressing you, for you are a father who has sacrificed his children to destruction and killings,” the archbishop writes.

The hierarch emphasized that for UOC believers, their “loving father and Abba” is Metropolitan Onuphry, who was elected by the Council of the UOC, and he demanded “not to ignore our Primate, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kyiv and All Ukraine”.

The bishop also requested the Patriarch “not to discredit our Church and not to destroy it with your own blessing”.

“As of today, neither you nor your representatives, such as Metropolitan Leonid or Archpriest Andrey Novikov, who fled the Odesa Eparchy, supposedly persecuted by the SBU, are doing anything to support us as your brothers,” the hierarch says.

Moreover, he believes that these people, “in their internet posts, only tarnish the name of the Holy Church without showing any respect for its Primate and the voice of our Ukrainian Church”.

“How can you call us, faithful children of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and its Holy Council those who ‘follow the path of schism’?” Archbishop Victor asks, continuing that this schism, mentioned by Patriarch Kirill and his clerics, is voiced by individuals such as Metropolitan Leonid and Archpriest Andrey Novikov.

“Today, you and all your followers are doing everything to destroy the UOC within Ukraine. There is no understanding of oikonomia in relation to the UOC,” the hierarch writes.

“Today, we (speaking on behalf of many hierarchs of the UOC) condemn this senseless aggression of Russia against our Independent country. We condemn the barbaric seizures of our eparchies in the East and South of Ukraine. We condemn the repressions and persecutions carried out by your authorities in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine!” declared the hierarch.

He demanded, “Stay away from our Church, our hierarchs, and our Primate,” emphasizing that “we have our own path, which was chosen by the Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church”.

“Sincerely, I ask you to stop. Every missile that comes to Ukraine’s territory is perceived by its inhabitants as your ‘blessing’ to your children,” concluded the vicar of the Odesa Eparchy, calling himself a “faithful obedient servant of his Primate”.

As earlier reported, His Beatitude expressed condolences regarding the shelling of Odesa.

 

When Will the Russian Orthodox Church Emerge from its Spiritual Ruins?

1992-2022

After the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church began to emerge from the physical ruins of 75 years of atheism. Tens of thousands of surviving churches lay half-destroyed, only a few monasteries survived, its senior clergy were accustomed to being minded by the KGB, its other clergy, often very poorly educated, were tiny in number, its potentially huge flock was unbaptised and uncatechised, prey to the ignorance of unbelievable superstition and magic ritualism. The situation was catastrophic.

However, physically and miraculously, the Church did gradually re-emerge, though still only half the size of what it had been in 1917. Tens of thousands of half-ruined churches were renovated after their return from a bankrupt State, others were built from scratch, nearly a thousand monasteries were opened, new clergy were taught the basics in dozens of reopened seminaries, a 100 million and more were baptised, though mainly without instruction, billions of church books were published and factories began issuing a billion icons and huge quantities of church furnishings and millions of sets of vestments.

However, a disease also appeared. As the money of oligarchs fed restoration, their disease fed into the Church. Bishops made for themselves luxurious palaces and began living like oligarchs themselves. Instead of monastic bishops, there appeared large numbers of young homosexuals in cassocks, called ‘bishops’, who hardly knew what a monastery looked like. Popularly people spoke of ‘priests in Mercedes’. Sadly it was true, as mere careerists became priests, often in return for ‘gifts’ of money to bishops. Very expensive black Western cars appeared in monasteries. Moreover, even more alarmingly, this same disease spread abroad all too quickly and infected clergy in the Russian Church outside Russia who copied very precisely the vices inside Russia.

The list of resulting clerical scandals and injustices with properties and money is too long to list. But it was clear that virtually overnight atheists had been made bishops and priests and they continued to live as atheists. Bishops, heterosexual or homosexual, who spent money on depravity and drugs, priests who beat their wives or cheated on them, other priests who had self-sacrificingly restored properties with their families and a handful of faithful saw them stolen by their bishops and themselves suspended or defrocked for ‘disobedience’, that is for having a conscience and denouncing criminal injustice.

This was not the Church that we had fought for during the era of Soviet persecution. The Persecuted Church, which we had sacrificed our lives for as confessors, had become a Persecuting Church. We had no place in it. We shook the dust from our feet and left it in disgust.

2022 – 

Then in February 2022 came the war in the Ukraine. This led to a wave of Russian nationalism, which meant that the vast majority of parishes outside the Russian Federation and Belarus left the Russian Orthodox Church altogether – about a third of the parishes in all. The Russian Orthodox Church had moved from being a broad, multinational Church to a narrow, nationalist Church. Why should Non-Russians belong to it? Especially affected were all the churches in the Ukraine, in the Baltics, especially in Latvia and Lithuania, in Moldova and elsewhere, from England to the Netherlands, from France to Spain. Many left the Russian Church, with large numbers leaving the nationalist Russian Church Outside Russia in Germany for the Ukrainian Church.

Politics had taken over and those who had always sought the spiritual were abandoned and persecuted. Divisions took place. However, the sad thing was not the divisions, but the corruption of the clergy, especially of the episcopate, which had made the divisions inevitable. The war in the Ukraine made a great and long overdue cleansing of the Church inevitable. The Russian Church, just like the Church of Constantinople before it, had to rid itself of those who had put politics and nationalism above Christ, and rid itself of atheists, careerists, mini-oligarchs, thieves, ecumenists, homosexuals, secret service agents and minders in cassocks, all whose only interest was money and not the salvation of souls.

I have always supported the Church and always will, putting it above the State, any State. Christ comes above politics. However, many members of the senior hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church are living in the oligarchic, money-money-money 1990s. And the State has a multinational vision, not the new nationalist Church. I have a very good friend in the Russian Ministry of the Economy who is deeply involved as a senior figure in building BRICS and who is close to President Putin. He has told me that for the Russian government the ‘Church’, that is its senior hierarchy, stuffed with the financially corrupt, homosexuals and FSB-minded, is a laughing-stock among them.

Once the conflict in the Ukraine is over, the Russian government will have to turn its attention to rebuilding the Church as a multinational and non-corrupt entity. The injustices will have to be reversed and many bishops defrocked. I have told my friend that it may be too late to reverse the damage done by the corrupt. I hope I am wrong. The fact is that the Russian Orthodox Church must now emerge from its spiritual ruins, just as thirty years ago it had to emerge from its physical ruins. Divine chastisement is a terrible thing, for God is not mocked.

As regards the situation in the Diaspora, we left the Russian Church after fifty years, and I left after nearly forty years service as an unpaid cleric. There has not been a day when we did not feel relief and gladness at our decision. The crazy right-wing converts and others whom we left thought they were special, better than others, like pharisees: such was their hubris. Now those embittered persecutors are in court on criminal charges. It is payback time for them. We, however, are not on trial, because we refused to compromise the Faith, for we do not belong to the Persecuting Church and never will. But they did and do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Seventh Bishop for our Metropolia

Our three million-strong Autonomous Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe of the Patriarchate of Romania now has seven bishops with the addition of the newly-consecrated Bishop Nectarie of Brittany (western France). The eight bishops who will meet in their local Synod are: Metr Joseph of Western and Southern Europe, Bishop Mark of France, Bishop Nectarie of Brittany, Bishop Silouan of Italy, Bishop Athanasie (Italy), Bishop Timothy of Spain and Portugal and Bishop Theophil (Spain).

The Church of Romania also has a second one-million strong European Metropolia, of Central and Northern Europe, consisting of three bishops: Metropolitan Seraphim of Central and Northern Europe, Bishop Sofian of Germany and Bishop Macarie of Sweden. We knew Metr Seraphim quite well when he was a young priest in Paris in the 1980s and he came to our home in Paris several times.

Talk now is of the need for an eighth bishop, a Bishop of the British Isles and Ireland, to join our Metropolia. A candidate will be considered at the autumn Synod in Bucharest. This question is going to become increasingly important, as more and more Moldovan clergy and people in their parishes all over Europe transfer to the Patriarchate of Romania.

 

ROCOR shaken by yet another scandal of exactly the same sort, this time in the USA

Here is a letter that we could have written ourselves, word for word, It is the same playbook, elaborated by the same centralised secret document, the same intimidation, the same jealous persecution of the married clergy especially, the same aggression, the same bullying, the same threats, the same attempts to seize the properties of the faithful, the same basic ignorance of the Gospel of Christ, of the Liturgy, of Church history, of the Tradition, of ROCOR tradition, of pastoral sense, of the canons, the same arrogance – ‘I know everything and I am always right’, the same motives, the same Soviet mentality which demands obedience, not to the Gospel, but to the would-be oligarchs who seek property and income, the same imperialism, the same GI swagger that forbids you to speak your native language, the same racism, the same individuals, the same refusal to listen, communicate and consult those who are experienced, the same sectarian and cultish mentality, the same half-baked newcomers to the Church who never studied at seminary, who never knew the old ROCOR, or anything of the wider and deeper Orthodox Tradition.

We have seen it all before, all this voluntary Sovietisation which makes even those inside Russia blush, for it is all more Soviet than Soviet. It is clear that it has been orchestrated from on high, this is not a coincidence. The old and loved ROCOR of St John of Shanghai, Bishop Sava of Edmonton, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, Archbishop Seraphim of Brussels, Metr Lavr and the tragically ill Metr Hilarion, this latter usurped by coup d’etat, all of eternal memory, no longer exists. Those bishops were authentic Archpastors who were indifferent to money, they were not isolationist ideologues interested only in money and property. The new ROCOR, ruled by the well-known multi-millionaire family, is intent on chasing out all the educated priests and people, faithful to the old ROCOR, those of us who lived Church life before they were born, us who have a conscience and pastoral sense, until there is nothing left. They say: Bow down to Mammon. But we prefer Christ to Mammon, so we have no place there. As the y say in the US: ‘Money talks’, Thus, in England two years ago, 16 clerics and thousands of people left schismatic ROCOR for canonicity . None of us returned – a return to schism is unthinkable.

Who is paying them to commit spiritual suicide in this way? Redbank, House Springs, Geneva, Miami with its absurd accusations (there was never any forgery of documents by Fr Alexander Belya), Colchester and now Fr Tikhon, to name but the main cases, the tip of the iceberg. Thank God, in the USA all the conscientious will probably have to go to the Greek Archdiocese (since the OCA refuses to wake up from its weakness and so misses the opportunity to unite all Russian Orthodox in North America). In Western Europe we shall probably all go to the Patriarchate of Romania and its Moldovan sections (since the Paris Archdiocese, with which ROCOR created a schism nearly three years ago, was forbidden by Moscow to take us in February 2022 and they were too weak to stand up to Moscow because of internal traitors).

This is the ignominious end of ROCOR, replaced by the new Soviet ROCOR of the pretend oligarchs. Did they really think they could get away with this? Did they really think that we were so naive that we did not know what was going on? Did they really think we could not defend ourselves? Did they really think they could destroy the real Russian Church? Did they really think we wanted to belong to the Persecuting Church and not the Persecuted Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors? Did they really think they could destroy our life’s work? Did they really think that they could conceal from the world that they had entirely discredited themselves? If so, then what hubris on their part!

 

The Hermitage of The Holy Protection, 333 Weymouth Rd, Buena NJ 083I0

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

As the days of Holy Paschal joy are with us, we see that the Lord, as always shows us His love, and leads us out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of prudence. The anniversary of the blessed death of our First Hierarch Metropolitan Hilarion is also approaching, let us spend this day in prayer and quiet joy for Vladyka.

My name is Abbot Tikhon (Gayfudinov). For 10 years I was the personal assistant of the late First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral). And for the last 8 years and up to the present, I have been entrusted as Abbot of The Hermitage of the Holy Protection (the Skete) in Buena, (in the village of New Kuban) in southern New Jersey. Since Passion Week there has been a wave of hatred directed against us, unfounded threats, lies, and accusations have rained down upon us. I consider it my duty to clarify the situation that has developed at The Hermitage of The Holy Protection.

The original Sviato Pokrovski church in New Kuban was left abandoned and in disrepair for more than 20 years. There are pictures of the Church and the cemetery, which shows the terrible condition in 2015, when the ever-memorable Vladyka Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) transferred the neglected property to the Hermitage of the Holy Protection. Metropolitan Hilarlon appointed me, a sinner, to be Rector. At that time, Vladyka blessed that the property of the Hermitage of the Holy Protection would be administered by trustees: Vladyka himself, and I, as the Rector.

By 2015, The Church in New Kuban, was in a deplorable state. The cross on the main dome had rotted and fell off, the roof was leaking, there was even a hole in the floor inside the church from rainwater damage over the years. From the outside, the plaster on the walls of the church had fallen off, the windows in the refectory were chipped and sealed with adhesive tape. There were no basic church utensils, liturgical vestments or books. Everything was abandoned, the cemetery was overgrown with bushes and trees. There was no proper care for the ownerless graves. Most importantly, there were no accurate records maintained for the graves of the deceased. I wondered how in the USA, without atheistic persecution of the Church, in our time, could an Orthodox temple be left in such desecration.

Over the course of 7 years by the prayers of our First Hierarch, Metropolitan Hilarion the life of the small Hermitage flourished. The number of parishioners increased. The church property, cemetery, and the church house were returned into functioning order.

The liturgical life was established. Colossal work was performed to return the holy place into its proper honorable state. In order to save money, I performed most of the labor myself. Initially, I lived in the church basement. Eventually, I turned the basement into a usable refectory; installed a bathroom for parishioner use with a new industrial septic system; but back in 2015 there were mountains of construction debris lying around; the wind was blowing through the broken windows and there was terrible dampness and mold everywhere. All the years I worked for free.

In 2019, Metropolitan Hilarion blessed the Fund for Assistance (FFA) to carry out a fundraising campaign for the needs of the Hermitage of the Holy Protection. Vladyka Hilarion appealed to donors through a film about the Skete for financial assistance. Vladyka requested that the donations be sent through the Fund for Assistance and many caring Christians responded to Metropolitan Hilarion’s request and signed up for monthly automatic transfers of funds or made one-time donations to the Hermitage. I deeply thank all the donors who generously gave to the Skete.

After the death of our beloved Archpastor Vladyka Hilarion in May 2022, the Fund for Assistance unexpectedly stopped sending funds from our donors to the Skete, but the automatic transfers from the donors’ accounts did NOT stop. When I asked Metropolitan Nicholas why donations through FFA ceased coming to the Skete, he replied that: “Metropolitan Hilarion has died, and now the Synod has more important projects to finance.” Over the ensuing months, the Treasurer of the Hermitage, as well as, our lawyer, sent letters to the administration of the FFA, to Metropolitan Nicholas, and other Bishops of the Synod of ROCOR with a request to audit the FFA and find out why the directed funds to the Hermitage of the Holy Protection were not being forwarded to the Skete? There was no reply from anyone.

In December 2022, I was invited to meet with Priest George Temidis, Diocesan Secretary and Archpriest David Straut. I was asked to sign the deed of the Hermitage to the Eastern American Diocese (EAD) as per the request of Met. Nicholas. I inquired if this was optional, or an order, but my question was left unanswered. I explained that I cannot speak on behalf of all of the Hermitage trustees, but that I would raise this issue at our annual meeting.

On December 28th, the Board of Trustees of the Hermitage met for their annual meeting. I raised the issue of Metropolitan Nicholas’s demand for us to transfer all Skete property to EAD. We decided that everything should remain the same, as blessed by Metropolitan Hilarion. Our decision was based due to our respect for the will of Metropolitan Hilarion, who founded and blessed the Hermitage. The Skete remains exactly as Met. Hilarion organized it to this day. It is the practice of many parishes and monasteries, which are canonically part of ROCOR, to own church property via incorporation outside of the diocese. These parishes and monasteries are responsible for covering maintenance, all repairs, utilities, heating, air conditioning, insurances, etc.

On March 21 of this year, at the meeting of clergy in the Holy Trinity Monastery of Jordanville, I was invited to meet with Metropolitan Nicholas, his vicar Bishop Luke, the Secretary of the Diocese, Priest George Temidis, as well as Archpriest David Straut, and Archpriest Serge Lukianov. The atmosphere was heavy. The topic of discussion was that I had to sign over the deed of the Hermitage to the Eastern American Diocese. If the property of the Hermitage of the Holy Protection is not transferred to EAD, that I will be banned from serving; I will not be able to perform my liturgical and pastoral activities.

Metropolitan Nicholas said that there would be no compromises on this issue. Bishop Luke insisted that I was neither a monk, nor a priest, that I did not have the proper humility and obedience to fulfill the will of the new First Hierarch. The Secretary of the Diocese said that in his opinion, I should have been banned by now. Arch priest Serge Lukianov demanded that I provide a precise and unambiguous answer: whether I will transfer the property of the Hermitage to the EAD or not. Arch priest David Straut was silent.

I tried to explain that I am not solely responsible for making this decision, as there is a Board of Trustees. Amongst other things, we needed to consider the blessing of our dear Metropolitan Hilarion, who had created the Hermitage and appointed the trustees. Metropolitan Hilarion, himself became the founder and trustee of the Hermitage together with me. Metropolitan Hilarion gave his blessing in 2015 to transfer the abandoned parish to the Hermitage of the Holy Protection. Is it possible to question Metropolitan Hilarion’s adequacy and foresight? They didn’t want to listen to me; they just wanted to take away the property, and threatened me to be banned from serving for no other reason. I was put against the wall and was left with no choice. I bowed to the ground to the new First Hierarch of ROCOR, and after spending a long time at the grave of dear Vladyka Hilarion in tears and prayers, I left Jordanville.

On March 23rd of this year, the Board of Trustees of the Hermitage of the Holy Protection discussed the evolving situation. The Hermitage’s future was at stake. EAD wanted to take the property away from the lawful Rector and eliminate the board of trustees, and ban the Abbot from serving.

Therefore, the Hermitage Board of Trustees, having assessed the situation, made the only decision possible to turn to the Chairman of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America, His Eminence, Archbishop Elpidophoros, Head of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. We asked to be received under the omophorion of His Eminence, Archbishop Elpidophoros.

Archbishop Elpidophoros showed us not only his Archpastoral wisdom, but also his fatherly love. He learned about our situation and accepted the Skete under the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, as evidenced by the decree of His Eminence and the Holy Antimension issued to us for Divine service.

The Greek Orthodox Church was founded by the Apostle Andrew, the First-Called and has kept the canons of Holy Orthodoxy pure for many centuries. In July 1993 Patriarch Alexey II of Moscow said this about the Patriarchate of Constantinople: “In Constantinople, as the Russian people called the “City of King” with love from ancient times, the Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Princess Olga received the grace of baptism; her grandson, the holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir sent there his ambassadors, looking for the right faith. There are no words that could express the feelings of gratitude experienced by the Russian believing people to the Holy Church of Constantinople, which brought the saving Orthodox faith to Russia, which determined all spheres of life of Holy Russia”.

Since ancient times, the Patriarch of Constantinople has been the highest authority in the Orthodox world, where disputes, or interpretations regarding the canons of the Holy Church, or its administrative questions were resolved. The spiritual authority of the Patriarchate of Constantinople is still recognized by Orthodox churches throughout the world. Therefore, the Skete, in order to protect itself from uncanonical actions on the part of the new leadership of the Eastern American Diocese, had no other choice but to seek protection from Archbishop Elpidophoros. Dear brothers and sisters! I was and remain a faithful child of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. We remain a Russian Orthodox Hermitage, under the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. We preserve our liturgical traditions and our habitual way of life. Access to the Hermitage of the Holy Protection and its cemetery is still OPEN for everyone.

We honor and value the memory of the blessed venerable First Hierarch of ROCOR Metropolitan Hilarion. We pray for him and believe that he is with us, and will not leave his Hermitage in a difficult moment. We will not allow the Hermitage of the Holy Protection to be closed, we will not betray the works and prayers of Vladyka Metropolitan Hilarion, and with God’s Help, as planned, we will mount the sculpture of the blessed, reposed First Hierarch Metropolitan Hilarion at the Skete.

 

I remain faithful, with deep love and respect to the Russian Church Abroad. I know what great people stood at its origins, shaped its cultural and moral uniqueness, and what a colossal spiritual inheritance that the Russian Orthodox Church has left for all of us. I hope this legacy will not be forgotten. May God be merciful to all of us at the Great Judgement. The Paschal joy and the words of our Savior console us: “Blessed are you when they reproach you and persecute you and slander you unjustly in every possible way for Me. Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven; so, they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:11)

Christ is Risen! With love in Christ,

Abbot Tikhon, Rector of The Hermitage