Questions and Answers on the Third Day of Pentecost 2023 After the Ukraine: Religion, Faith, the Orthodox Church and the Diaspora

Religion and Faith

Q: What is the point of religion?

A: Religion is pointless.

Q: What do you mean? You are a priest!

A: Religion is manmade and man-inspired. It is an invention, an institution, devised for use by States in order to manipulate their populations. This is the opposite of Faith, which is God-made and God-inspired. Unlike Religion, Faith is not devised by men, but revealed by God. The point of Faith is to know and acquire God, Who is Love. All words and phrases such as ‘salvation, going to church, praying, acquiring the Holy Spirit, repentance, redemption, overcoming sin, defeating death, venerating the saints, grace, the sacraments, understanding the Scriptures’, mean precisely this – knowing and acquiring Love.

Faith is then the opposite of religion, whose aim all too often becomes knowing and acquiring hatred. We can see this very clearly in the institutional Religion of the anti-Faith pharisees in the New Testament, who hated and then murdered Christ, the Son of God/Love – they murdered Love. And the modern pharisees, full of the same old hatred, just go on doing this today, as we have seen very recently! If Christ came back, they would most certainly crucify Him again, as the Greek author Kazantsakis wrote 75 years ago.

Q: Why then are there different faiths?

A: All faiths agree that humanity and all creation are at the bottom of the mountain and God/Love is at the top of the mountain. Faith is to help us climb the mountain, resisting all the temptations against Love. We all start at the bottom and inevitably take different paths up the mountain. At the bottom we can find many paths that lead upwards, but how far do they go and how will we best fight off the attacks from the demons who sit along those paths? What is the best and easiest path? Many paths seem to peter out quite soon or end in insurmountable heights and obstacles. And do they all lead upwards anyway? Or do they just go round and round the mountain? Do the other paths join the Orthodox Christian paths at a certain level?

Personally, I have no need to condemn others for taking other paths, as others inevitably do. All I have is my own spiritual experience, that the Orthodox saints have got to the top of the mountain on their paths, despite the enemy of humanity, the devil and his minions. Therefore, I try to follow those paths. As for those who take other paths, it is none of my business. I am not an insecure neophyte who needs to condemn others in order to justify himself.

The Ukraine

Q: Do you support the Russian side in the war in the Ukraine?

A: As a priest, I am on the side of all the suffering and on the side of peace. I cannot be anywhere else. I cannot support killing by anyone. This conflict was begun by the USA through its puppet government which it installed by violence in Kiev in 2014 with the support of its EU/NATO vassals. It is tragic and unnecessary. And sadly, as they say, those who sowed the wind are reaping the whirlwind. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died so far, then there are the hundreds of thousands of maimed, psychologically crippled and bereaved. Let alone the millions of Ukrainian refugees (2 million in Russia) and millions of others in Europe, especially in Poland. And then there are the Russian dead (see below).

Q: Some American converts to ROCOR say that they support the Russian side against the Ukraine because that conflict is a battle for Holy Rus. What would you say?

A: The phrase ‘Holy Rus’ refers to the ancient past. After the ravages of Soviet atheism, it no longer exists – it has not been reconstituted. Today Russia still  has twice the abortion rate of the West and very high rates of divorce and alcoholism. Today, instead of ‘Holy Rus’, we use expressions like the Orthodox Christian world, Orthodox Civilisation, the Orthosphere. And if you kill others, you do not belong to the Orthodox world.

Q: What will happen to the ‘Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’, the OCU, so recently set up by Constantinople with US money?

A: It will die out and disappear because it is a temporary passing phenomenon, born out of the US State Department’s plotting imagination and the refusal by Moscow to give the Ukrainian Church autocephaly – which it almost did in the 1990s. The UOC was only ever a purely political organisation, born of the US-controlled Ukrainian State and the US-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Q: If you are neutral in this war, why are you convinced that Russia will defeat the Western-backed government in Kiev?

A: Quite simply, because I am a political realist, have sources in the Ukraine, and do not listen to tabloid/BBC/CNN type propaganda, which simply repeats the lies of the Kiev Department of Propaganda, which itself is run by American PR companies.  Look at the facts:

First of all, Russia will win, perhaps even in several months’ time, because this conflict is existential for it, but not at all for the Western elite. In other words, it is everything for Russia. It cannot lose. It has military, economic and diplomatic superiority, the backing of most of the world. It is not repeating the mistakes made by the Russian Empire in 1914, which naively thought that Britain and France were on its side, when in fact they fomented both the German attack and the overthrow of the Tsar, using internal traitors, lack of censorship and malcontents. Russia has learned from its mistakes then, it has at last lost its illusions.

Secondly, so far this is not even a war from the Russian viewpoint, let alone an ‘unprovoked full-scale invasion’, as the propagandists call it. The Russian Army has not yet even fought directly in it. The ‘Russian’ side is composed of the pro-Russian Ukrainian people’s militias from Lugansk and Donetsk (the Donbass), who are fighting for their freedom, Chechen volunteers and the 50,000-strong Wagner Company, which is composed of about 75% ex-convicts and about 25% of professional volunteers, the latter often officers recruited from the Russian Army. It is backed by vastly superior drone-guided Russian artillery, missiles and units from the Russian Air Force and the Black Sea Fleet. The always weak Kiev Navy no longer exists, its last ship was sunk last week, and the always weak Kiev Air Force has been virtually wiped out. Now, in modern warfare, the winner is always the one who has air superiority and can mount a naval blockade.

So far, since February 2022, it seems that some 20,000 pro-Russian Ukrainians and Chechens, 13,000 ex-convict volunteers and 4,000 Russian volunteers have died on the Russian side. Total casualties on the Russian side are therefore about 37,000. However, it appears that the Kiev Army has lost at least 300,000 dead, not including wounded. The ratio is 1:8 or even 1:10. Why? Because of the superiority of modern Russian technology (the Kiev forces have mainly used old Soviet arms or old NATO arms) and its vast quantity. The greatest Kiev defeat so far, greater even than Mariupol, was in Bakhmut, which fell on 20 May 2023 (this defeat was censored by the Western media, like so much else) after nine months of fighting in this horrible war of attrition. The town of Bakhmut, where some 70,000 people once lived, is in ruins. Whole blocks of flats were dynamited by the fleeing Kiev forces, just as they did in Mariupol.

The first NATO-trained Kiev Army was defeated in March 2022 and the war could have ended then. However, the second Kiev Army, rearmed with equipment from the former Soviet, now NATO, bloc in order to prolong the conflict, was defeated in the autumn of 2022. Now the third Kiev Army, armed to the teeth and trained by the US/NATO, is also being defeated. I would give it a maximum of another eleven months, simply because this is a war between Washington and Moscow, being fought on the battlefields of the Ukraine till the last Ukrainian cannon fodder is dead.

Since February 2022, the pro-Russian forces (and even Russia itself, in minor and suicidal incursions by Kiev forces, carried out for propaganda purposes) are being attacked from ever deeper inside Kiev-controlled territory. This means that pro-Russian forces, and probably eventually the million-strong Russian Army itself, will in turn be forced to penetrate ever deeper into Kiev-controlled territory and possibly (and unwillingly) even go as far as the Polish border. After it has set up a government in the New Ukraine, centred in a Kiev independent of the USA, it will withdraw.

Small parts of the old Soviet-established Ukraine (yes, the West is defending a purely Soviet creation in the Ukraine, 32 years after the disappearance of the Soviet Union) may be transferred to Poland, Hungary and Romania. There persecuted minorities have long laboured under Kiev’s dreaded secret police, the CIA-trained SBU. As for the south and east of the Ukraine, whose unhistoric borders were set by the USSR, probably including Odessa and as far as Transdnistria, they will go to Russia. An independent Ukraine, free of the US, will exist. Russia has no desire at all to occupy it, just to neutralise it as a threat to itself and free the Russian areas, part of Russia until 1954 or 1922.

Thirdly, the vast majority of the world either supports Russia (e.g. China, Iran etc) in this operation, or is neutral (e.g. India, Africa, Latin America etc) and does not support the West, which is only 12.5% of world population and whose GDP is quite outmatched by BRICS, even without the rest of the world, which is also dedollarising. Dedollarisation has been caused directly by sanctions against Russia, which have undermined all confidence in the dollar. The debt-ridden West is isolated in its G7 ghetto, its only weapons are boomeranging sanctions, which have caused huge inflation in their own countries, and plots to overthrow popular governments, as recently in the now chaotic Pakistan. The EU head of diplomacy, the unelected Josep Borrell, has admitted twice that the whole conflict in the Ukraine could end in days if the West stopped arming Kiev. By arming the Kiev forces against their own people, the West is simply prolonging the agony. Every death should be on the conscience of the Western elite.

The huge error of the Western elite in all this is its hubris in believing its own delusional propaganda. Russia is a Superpower, with advanced arms the USA simply does not have.

The West has yet to learn to respect different civilisations, which it has not been doing for exactly a millennium, when it definitively began to reconstitute the incredibly cruel pagan Roman Empire and adopted its techniques of ruthless organised violence to conquer and exploit the world (See Note 1 at the end). That organised violence began with its Crusades in the 1030s in Iberia, Sicily, England (in 1066), then in the Middle East and later in southern France, then developed into colonialism and imperialism, continuing to this day. This is clearly not Christian, but pagan.

Even today, what was once called Orthodox Christian Civilisation, however far it is from the actual practice of Orthodoxy – and it is far from it – is radically different from Western-Secularist Civilisation through its cultural values alone. And the fault-line between Orthodox Christian Civilisation and Western-Secularist Civilisation passes through the extreme west of today’s Ukraine, the part that used to belong to Catholic Poland and before that to Catholic Habsburg Austria and, frankly, it should return there.

The Future of the Russian Church

Q: So, after what you see as a Russian military and political victory, do you see the Moscow Patriarchate taking over the whole of the Church in the Ukraine?

A: No, not at all! Whatever the outcome, and regardless of whether I am right or wrong in my view that the Russian State will win against Washington’s war in the Ukraine, the great loser in this whole affair is the Moscow Patriarchate. It is a catastrophe for it, though it still does not seem to realise this.

First of all, the Russian State and the Orthodox Faith (unlike the Moscow Patriarchate) are two very different things. The Russian State wants to destroy anti-Russian Nazism in the Ukraine, so it will gain national security and US bases, biolabs and missiles aimed at Moscow will not exist on its borders. The Russian State wants a militarily and politically neutral Ukraine, like Austria and Finland used to be, before they were forced to join NATO. As regards the Orthodox Faith, it is obvious that the still largely atheist Russian State has no ability or desire to enforce churchgoing in the Ukraine in the future. People in the New Ukraine that may take shape a year from now, perhaps with a population of 10-20 million, will be free to go to any church they want. For most of them that will mean not going to any church at all (as in Russia, where also only about 2-3% go to church regularly).

However, churchgoing Ukrainians will certainly not go to Moscow Patriarchate churches after the conflict in the Ukraine is over, as they see in it an anti-Ukrainian Russian nationalist organisation. For example, just two weeks ago we were in Bari, where we concelebrated at the Liturgy for St Nicholas Day. It was interrupted by about 10 Ukrainians, including a Constantinople OCU priest, who shouted ‘Satanist’ at us. They were shouting not at us Romanians, Moldovans and English, but against the bishop who was from the Moscow Patriarchate. That is how they feel. The level of hatred is that great.

I think that Churched Ukrainians will only attend a future de facto and de jure autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metr Onufry. In other words, Moscow will have to give autocephaly. The present de facto autocephaly may even get recognised by other Local Churches before Moscow actually gives it, exactly as happened with the Polish Orthodox Church in the 1920s (2). The UOC already gets great sympathy from other Local Churches, which see the Moscow Patriarchate as enslaved to the Russian State. The same is true for Russian churches in many other countries, where the Moscow Patriarchate, as a Soviet-era institution, is still in the grip of Soviet centralisation and, as a post-Soviet institution, is in the grip of oligarchic Business. Most Russian Orthodox churches outside Russia also want freedom, autocephaly, from the now nationalist Moscow Patriarchate, not just those in the Ukraine.

All those that received autocephaly from Moscow in the last century, in Poland and in Czechoslovakia and in the OCA in North America (even if the last case is disputed), are pleased to be outside Moscow’s control. So are most Orthodox in Latvia now, even if its autocephaly was uncanonically given it by the Latvian government (again, exactly as in Poland in the 1920s (2))! In Lithuania and Estonia, Orthodox are in great difficulty, as both have schisms, and, as in the Ukraine, this is because Moscow refused to give autocephaly in time, in the 1990s. One post-Revolutionary émigré fragment of the Moscow Patriarchate, the very Moscow-critical, very independent and very Western Archdiocese of Western Europe is also in great difficulty, because it does not have autocephaly and is at present trying to get another three bishops consecrated, but it needs Moscow’s approval. It may not get it.

Another post-Revolutionary emigre fragment, ROCOR, in New York, has done exactly the opposite to the above Archdiocese group, in quite suicidal fashion. Between 1927 and 2007 it had total independence, de facto autocephaly, from Moscow and canonised the New Martyrs and New Confessors. That was an act of spiritual courage and of independence, though it was not strictly canonical, as Moscow had not granted it permission to be autocephalous and canonise saints on its territory.

However, in 2007 an act of canonical unity between Moscow and ROCOR was agreed and signed. I was there. That was good, because it legitimised ROCOR independence and its acts, which previously had been disputed. However, tragically and dramatically, instead of using that de facto and de jure independence and freedom, ROCOR renounced it and came to enslave itself to Moscow. After exactly a decade of missed golden opportunities, since precisely 2017, the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, that spiritual unity has become a purely political union with the Moscow Patriarchate, exactly as Patriarch Kyrill quite specifically described it to a Russian Metropolitan friend in 2018.

As a result of this spiritual surrender six years ago, ROCOR decided to agree to anything that Soviet Centralising Moscow and post-Soviet oligarchic Business Moscow wants. The dollar above Christ. ROCOR has been bought out by money. The more gifts that were accepted, the less freedom it had. Even more tragically, it was not forced into this sell-out by Moscow, it was its own voluntary choice after ten years. What happened? Sadly, seeing how luxuriously the bishops lived in Moscow, they wanted the same. So they sold themselves. At one time ROCOR bishops lived as poor and humble monks. They, all gone now, must be spinning in their graves. How are the once (spiritually) mighty fallen….

Thus, ROCOR has lost its heritage of spiritual freedom and independence. And therefore it will not last much longer, for God is not mocked. Its sectarian extremism and nationalism, that is, the exclusion of all other Orthodox, including Ukrainians, will not last long where it is, outside Russia, in the Diaspora. The Diaspora is unkind to inward-looking, racially exclusive and extremist ghettos. The old humble ROCOR of saintly confessors has been replaced by the ethos of a right-wing American missionary sect, remarkably similar to the Mormons. This is completely alien to others and to all normal Orthodox, Serbian, Bulgarian, Moldovan, Romanian, Greek, who simply ignore it, which is not difficult, as ROCOR is so small. Byzantine-rite Mormonism only attracts the few, the wrong sort, the right-wing sectarian, the negative, not the many, the positive, on whom you can build. Such sectarianism does not export to territories outside the USA, where ROCOR is dying out in one suicidal act after another, from France to South America, from Indonesia to England.

Q: You sacrificed fifty years of your life for the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church, so how do you feel now that you are outside it and it is falling apart?

A: Well, that is not true. I am not outside it. I am in spiritual unity with the suffering Russian Church of the Saints and the New Martyrs and Confessors. I am only outside the Soviet-style administration, which, by the way, has always admired the immensely rich Vatican, like the Statist Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, whom we remember dying in the arms of the Pope in 1978. This is because it has always admired the mentality of the State-Church or rather the Church-State. Power and riches. Such a view of the Church as a mere political administration based on power and riches does not have any canonical authority, just as forced episcopal signatures have no canonical authority.

As regards sacrificing my life, more exactly I have given fifty years of my life for the Orthodox Church in the Diaspora. In the 1970s and early 1980s I saw the Church of Constantinople reject a future for Orthodoxy by preferring nationalism and politics to transmitting the Tradition to others and to future generations. Now I have seen the Russian Church do the same, with its nationalism and politics, and so it is falling apart. If it continues, the only clergy that will be left are money-minded careerists who have little or no faith. Too bad for them. You cannot impose freedom on those who prefer tyranny, as we know from Dostoyevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. There are those who do not want the Truth to set them free….

However, the Russian Church can fall apart positively, in the sense that it can unburden itself of its Soviet-style centralist administration and instead become a Family or Confederation of free Churches. Fortunately, there are other Orthodox, those of the spirit of the persecuted St Seraphim of Sarov, of the persecuted St Nectarios of Pentapolis, of the persecuted St John of Shanghai, of the persecuted Elder Nikolai (Guryanov), of the New Martyrs and Confessors. Long ago we committed ourselves to them and we will not renounce them and their spirit. We belong to the Persecuted Church, not to the Persecuting Church.

Q: But aren’t you frightened of what those Russians have tried to do to you?

A: St Paisios the Athonite, whom I met on Athos in 1979, said: ‘Believe in God and fear nothing’ (Πίστη στο Θεό και να μην φοβάστε τίποτα). That is what I have always done, come grasping greed, secret atheists, nationalist bureaucrats, modernists, ecumenists, freemasons, covid lockdown enforcers, perverts, spies and schismatic right-wing neophytes. We have seen all these enemies of the Church in power in Her administration from Judas until this very day, but the Church has always triumphed and will always triumph against all these extremists. Fear not!

Q: So does the Moscow Patriarchate have any future?

A: No, as such it does not. It has become a straitjacket and several conscientious priests are leaving it. As I said, the great loser in the conflict in the Ukraine is undoubtedly the Moscow Patriarchate, regardless of who wins militarily. It has lost credit and those clergy who have backed war have lost face. They are seen as militant nationalists, whose spirit is that of that very strange, nationalist, khaki-painted Cathedral of the Armed Forces of Russia, near Moscow (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/20/orthodox-cathedral-of-the-armed-force-russian-national-identity-military-disneyland).

The Moscow Patriarchate has already lost a range of territories, the Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and is now losing Moldova and its Western Diaspora, and in a few years’ time most probably Belarus and Central Asia too, all through politics. It has not followed the Gospel. If you do not follow the Gospel, you will die spiritually. That is the spiritual law. It happens to them all. I have seen it so often over the last fifty years and recently here too. It is spiritual suicide not to follow the Gospel and to attack those in the Church who have integrity.

However, here we have to distinguish carefully between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church. The former is a purely Soviet and post-Soviet institution, like the émigré fragments in Paris and in New York, whose existence was also shaped by the Soviet Union, though by reaction. It is a historical blip, a temporary administrative arrangement that began in 1925 after the death (by poisoning?) of the holy Patriarch Tikhon, whose signatures were also forced. In 50 years’ time, the Moscow Patriarchate will no longer exist. In fact, I do not think any of these three fragments will exist even in 25 years’ time. In fact, I sometimes wonder if they will still exist even in two years’ time, in 2025. On the other hand, the Russian Orthodox Church with its thousand-year history of saints most certainly does have a future. It will continue to be by far the largest of the to-be-extended family of Local Orthodox Churches, even though autocephaly must go to its parts in the Ukraine, Central Asia (based in Kazakhstan), Moldova (if it is not too late – see below) and the Baltics, at the very least. The number of Local Orthodox Churches could then hit 20.

The Diaspora

Q: If they happened, how would such a series of new autocephalies affect the Diaspora?

A: We can already see the effect. The UOC has opened over 40 parishes in Western Europe and will open more. Why? Because Ukrainian refugees refuse to attend churches where Patriarch Kyrill is commemorated. Those Ukrainians who cannot go to their church in London come to us, as we are politically independent, unlike the Moscow Patriarchate and its ROCOR branch. If the Ukraine becomes autocephalous, Orthodox from Moldova and the Baltics will surely also open their own Diaspora churches.

On the one hand, this fragmentation is negative, because it further fragments the Diaspora, destroying the once multinational but now nationalist Moscow Patriarchate Exarchate of Western Europe, based in Paris (whose members are mainly Moldovan, Baltic or Ukrainian anyway). On the other hand, once the Diaspora is cleansed of the US-driven politics of Constantinople and the politics of the old-fashioned Soviet Centralist Moscow and post-Soviet oligarchic Business Moscow, some kind of Diaspora unity can be achieved, a unity which could never have been seen before. Diaspora disunity only ever existed because of politics. Diaspora unity will only ever exist because it will be free of politics.

Both the Greek and Russian Patriarchs are elderly. We await the new generation. God willing, there will be a reversal of policies and a great cleansing from the corruption and perversions which come from power and the love of money, with that taste for luxury products and big black cars.

Q: As you have so many Moldovan parishioners and clergy, how would the existence of an autocephalous Moldovan Church outside Moldova affect you?

A: Politically, Romanian-speaking Moldovans do not want to join Romania, despite the very unpopular US puppet government there. If it joins the EU (as long as the EU still exists), it will join it as an independent country. However, I think it is much more likely that Moldova, together with Turkiye, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania and Montenegro, followed by Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus once freed from the EU, will join BRICS, the Planetary Alliance of Sovereign States (PASS), or whatever it will be called by then.

This would make a south-east European bloc within BRICS, reuniting that group of countries economically. This will pave the way for the other European countries to leave the doomed and collapsing EU, a temporary post-1945 organisation, and also enter BRICS. We have to go towards the future, not the past. This means economic integration and so political co-operation between Europe and Asia, Eurasia, led by Russia, China, Iran and India, which is inevitable.

However, whatever the politics, given that the Moscow Patriarchate refuses outright to give the Moldovan Church autocephaly, ever more Moldovan parishes are now leaving the Moldovan Church of the Moscow Patriarchate for the Moldovan Church of the Romanian Patriarchate. This latter group, for now called the ‘Metropolia of Bessarabia’, carefully observes all Moldovan customs and keeps the old calendar. It now has some 25% of all Moldovan Orthodox in Moldova. Its bishops are monks.

The movement to it is accelerating rapidly because of the conflict in the Ukraine, because of Moscow’s centralisation, because of corruption, and because of the mistreatment of Moldovans in the Diaspora under the ever more Russian nationalist Moscow Patriarchate. Nobody wants to be treated as a second-class citizen, neither Moldovans, nor English.

The only areas of Moldova where there is loyalty to the Moscow Patriarchate is the almost wholly Soviet Transdnistria and the autonomous pro-Russian Gagauz region (the total population of both regions is about 500,000, with an area similar to a large English county). These will join the Russian Federation anyway.

What is possible is that the many Moldovan parishes and their clergy (70 in Italy alone) in Western Europe may leave the Moscow Patriarchate and open some kind of autonomous Moldovan/Bessarabian Archdiocese under the Romanian Church in the Diaspora. The Romanian Orthodox Church outside Romania is now the largest Diaspora Church, with well over five million people, nearly 1500 parishes and over 70 monasteries and convents. Whatever its weaknesses, it dwarves the Russian and the Greek Diasporas, let alone the other Diasporas, which are relatively very small. The Romanian Diaspora is not dying out like them, but is full of young people and children. If the Moldovans join this Diaspora, as an autonomous old calendar Archdiocese under the Romanian Church in the Diaspora, it will grow even bigger.

However, a word of warning. In my lifetime I have already seen two Churches die out. The first was ROCOR in England. I remember how 40 years ago its large London Cathedral (it now has a very small church instead) was full, with 400 people every Sunday; however, the average age was about 80. They have all gone. Today, apart from a few strange converts, ROCOR is populated by those from the ex-Soviet Union who have no ROCOR tradition, the old emigres have all gone. It died out because the old emigres totally failed to hand on their faith to their descendants.

Now, 40 years on, I see the same in the Greek Church. One parish in London that used to get at least 800 people every Sunday even 30 years ago is now down to 30. The average age is also 80. The same problem. Almost the only children in Greek churches in London are Romanian/Moldovan. However, what will happen in 40 years’ time to the Romanians and Moldovans? Will their children and grandchildren fill their churches or will they too be virtually empty?

The Romanian language does have two advantages:  It is a Latin language and it uses the Latin alphabet. As such it is much closer to Western languages in terms of vocabulary and alphabet than Greek and Russian. But that is not enough. The faith has to be transmitted to the next generations. I already do baptisms completely in English for the children of Romanians and Moldovans who came here as children twenty years ago. I have spoken to our bishop, Metropolitan Joseph, about this reality, but as a pastor he is already well aware. For the moment in England there are only four Non-Romanian priests, those of our group. In France and Belgium, however, he has in his Autonomous Metropolia one French bishop and 15 French priests. So there is hope.

 

Notes:

  1. Below are quotations from an account of the history of the Roman Empire some 2,000 years ago. Do they sound familiar? The contemporary oligarchic American Empire comes immediately to mind…..

Might is right and military power is the only international law. The …… had no problem demolishing whatever stood in their way.

Those who opposed ……. domination, and who tried to defend the traditional values of their own people, faced a double enemy: the one without and the one within.

Robber, slaughter and plunder they misname ‘Empire’; they make a wilderness and call it peace.

They were offered …. citizenship, so long as they had enough money and an urban residence.

The unsuspecting Non- ….. spoke of these new habits as civilisation, when in fact they were only a feature of enslavement.

In this way, the 10% of ….. who lived in the cities exploited the 90% who lived outside.

The name of …… citizens, at one time not only greatly valued but dearly bought, is now repudiated and fled from, and it is almost considered not only base but even deserving of abhorrence.

When it came to institutionalised cruelty on an industrial scale, the ……. could teach the others a thing or two.

He makes it quite clear that ………’s objective was the enslavement of the world.

The ideology of that Empire was an ideology of power and world dominance.

….. established its Empire by destroying other civilisations.

……. lived behind frontiers, and what lay beyond was dangerous. That applied as much to their mental world as to their geography.

The Empire was, by this time, an economic basket-case. The machine had to keep feeding itself with plunder.

It’s surprsing his name is not better known in the West. But then, in the West it is only the ….. version of events that counts, and that does not include successful enemies.

….. needed to build an ideology that encouraged people to see their rulers not just as overlords, but as the defenders of civilised values, and they knew a thing or two about propaganda.

…… emphasised its transcendent magisterial authority, its right to judge the living and the dead and to determine people’s fate for all eternity.

  1. https://www.rocorstudies.org/2023/05/30/autocephaly-and-principles-of-its-application-with-reference-to-the-church-of-poland/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=demo-newsletter_1

 

 

 

 

 

The Attempted Reign of the Crazy Converts

 

I first heard the term ‘crazy convert’ in the USA, specifically from California, in the 1970s. Apparently it was a disease there even then. In 2006 in San Francisco a priest explained to me that there is an American saying that: ‘When God made America, he tipped it up on the east coast, so all the oddballs would run down to California’. That is an American saying about a minority, but it certainly prepared me for what happened later.

We live in the age of reaction to all that is woke. As a result, we in the Orthodox Church are often mistakenly contacted by young men who are anti-woke. Not just anti-woke, but usually from a Protestant fundamentalist background, extremely conservative (sometimes Fascistic and in love with guns), anti-vaxxer, often racist and followers of some guru, often through podcasts, if they are not themselves gurus. Some of them suffer from what has become known as ‘the Jerusalem Syndrome’, the convert syndrome which leads them into phariseeism and judgementalism. Only sectarianism and schisms attract them and they demand to be rebaptised, sometimes more than once.

This small minority are usually ‘incels’. This new word ‘incel’ means an ‘involuntary celibate’. This is not true, since, as they are usually anti-woman, it is not involuntary at all. They are also often homophobic, though they themselves can be repressed homosexuals or even pedophiles, which is why they are so misogynistic. Such young men may also suffer from the beard syndrome. It is all very well to have a long beard, but if you are not under monastic obedience, you are not a monk. Married men do not have long beards, it displeases their wives, if it is a happy marriage. And married men who love their wives should please their wives, just as their wives who love their husbands should please them.

In other words, the above are not theological converts, like the apostles, but are psychological, and even pathological, converts, who suffer from the temper tantrums of spoilt brats, demanding absolute obedience and showing intolerance and the censorious and punitive spirit of the narrow neophyte. On top of this, they lack any emotional intelligence and basic knowledge, especially of theology and history, but also of different languages and cultures (though all must obey them in everything). They are young and inexperienced, refuse to listen to advice (as they are always right, why should they?) and demonstrate all the arrogance of infallible and narcissistic popes who give no pastoral care.

In love with their vain selves, they love money and their own appearance. These are the crazy converts and they are being put into positions of ‘authority’, as never before, even though they have no authority at all and only discredit themselves and their string-pullers. The results are desperately sad – for them. The rest of the Church, the 99.9% sails serenely on, leaving them behind on their self-made desert islands.

The Spiritual Significance of the American-Inspired Conflict in the Ukraine

Introduction: Two Civilisations

The tragic Moscow-Washington war which is currently starting to come to an end after nine years on the battlefields of the Ukraine, where very many Ukrainian men are dying in futility, will continue for another year. The Western arming of the Kiev regime which has prolonged the war by years is the result of the attempt by the Western world to expand eastwards in yet another ‘Drang nach Osten’. Once more the West crossed over the civilisational line which runs through the far west of what is at present called the Ukraine, more exactly Galicia, formerly part of south-eastern Poland, formerly part of the ill-fated Habsburg Empire, centred in Lemberg/Lviv/Lvov. That line separates Western Secularist Civilisation from Orthodox Christian Civilisation. It is a civilisational line which should not be crossed. When France and its allies crossed it by invading what was then the Russian Empire in 1812, it led straight to the downfall of Napoleon. When Austro-Hungary crossed it by invading Serbia in 1914, it caused World War I and, ultimately, the tragedy of 1917, when a Western atheist ideology was imposed by Non-Russians on the former Russian Empire and killed tens of millions.

When Nazi Germany crossed that line by invading what was then the USSR in 1941, it led it to its suicidal downfall, the destruction of Berlin, and to lose World War II. After Washington crossed that same line by overthrowing the democratically-elected Ukrainian government in 2014, Washington suicidally signed the death-warrant of its own US-run, dollar-driven, unipolar Western world. For the centre of Western Secularism is today the American Empire elite  in Washington (however much it disguises itself with euphemisms like the EU, NATO, the G7, the ‘free world’, the ‘international community’, the ‘rules-based order’ etc). And the centre of Orthodox Christian Civilisation (however far it has fallen, lapsed and been deformed and divided) is still in Moscow. Whenever Western Secularism, as ever inspired by the Pagan Roman example, has tried to expand eastwards in order to steal land and exploit resources, whether it was under Charlemagne, the Teutonic Knights, the Poles, Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler or Biden, it has failed. Such is the case again today. Some people never learn.

The Double Tragedy

Nevertheless, however much we reject Western Secularism, that does not mean that today’s post-Soviet Orthodox Christian world or post-American Orthodox Christian world are to be accepted. Far from it. They are both deeply compromised and flawed, politically dependent on Non-Orthodox Christian mentalities. For a long time those in the Western world who found their spiritual home in Orthodox Christianity and wished to join the Orthodox Church would join one of two Local Churches, either the Russian, whose centre is the Patriarchate of Moscow, or else the Greek, whose centre is the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Neither is very attractive today because neither is free of a secular mentality.

The tragedy of today’s Patriarchate of Moscow is that it has voluntarily become politically dependent on the post-Soviet mentality. Although much of what it does is Orthodox in intention, it still operates in a Soviet way. Hence the strange mixture. Thus, it has gone from being a multinational Church in a multinational country (the USSR) to becoming a multinational but also nationalist Church? That inherent contradiction is killing it. It is less and less attractive to all Non-Russians. The tragedy of today’s Patriarchate of Constantinople is that its leadership has gone from being an Imperial Church to becoming over the last three generations a subsection of the US State Department mentality. Whatever that orders, the politicised Patriarchate in Istanbul agrees with. It is less and less attractive to Non-Greeks.

The Fall Into National Politics

Politicians were put in charge of the Church on earth. Not Churchmen. As a result, several of the Local Orthodox Churches are today riven by territorial, = political and national, disputes. However, the main dispute is that between precisely the Patriarchate of Moscow and the Patriarchate of Constantinople and concerns the territory of the Ukraine. Sadly, the two Patriarchates are not arguing about a territory where successful new missions have been working, they are arguing about a traditionally Orthodox, but today largely lapsed, territory. Sadly, neither are they arguing about who will restore to the Faith the largely lapsed people of that territory, but about to whom ecclesiastical jurisdiction over that largely lapsed people belongs. Meanwhile the actual Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufry, to which the faithful belong, is crushed by both sides.

That territory is also claimed by two different forms of Roman Catholicism, Greek and Latin, and a variety of Protestant sects. Little wonder that those two Patriarchates, that of the Russian Federation and that of Constantinople, are engaged in a conflict on Ukrainian territory. This Russo-American proxy war has been allowed by God as a punishment. All are unworthy of the Faith, so there is war, not peace. The conflict is meant to bring both sides, Ukrainian and Russian, back to their senses, for both sides suffer from the same disease of centralisation. This has infected these lands since the 17th century, when the Russian State began persecuting the Old Ritualists in order to impose conformity even to the point of tiny ritual detail. This disease worsened greatly during the Soviet period and since then both the post-Soviet Russian State and the post-Soviet Ukrainian State (the Ukrainian State is a purely Soviet invention) have persecuted minorities.

Nationalism

Today this centralisation essentially results in extreme nationalism. Thus, the Ukrainian State has as its slogan ‘Glory to the Ukraine’, not ‘Glory to God’. And the new nationalism of the Russian Orthodox Church, so far from the old multinational Russian Church of the Tsar’s age in which we were brought up, seems to be intent, consciously or unconsciously, on expelling from itself Non-Russians, and is even proud of such actions. Orthodox Russia has not been restored since the fall of the USSR. There is only post-Soviet Russia. The great tragedy is that the Russian Church, free from State interference, appears to want to take on itself the persecution of those who see a multinational future for the Church. However, a persecuting Church repels, whereas a persecuted Church attracts.

For example, one well-known Metropolitan of the Russian Church openly mocks the Ukrainian language as ‘a dialect’. As a result of such attitudes, even if the Russian State conquered the whole of the Ukraine (which it does not wish to do in any case), Ukrainians would still not attend churches where the name of the Patriarch of the Russian Federation, which is what he has become, is commemorated. Church-going is voluntary. No Non-Russian in the Ukraine is voluntarily going to attend a Russian church any longer, especially if his country has been at war with Russia and his compatriots, however misled, have been killed. In Latvia that Patriarch is already no longer commemorated – by order of the State. In Lithuania several priests have left the Moscow Patriarchate, as in Estonia nearly thirty years ago. How long before Western countries also ban churches which commemorate the Patriarch of Moscow?

Decentralisation

https://spzh.news/en/news/73915-cypriot-hierarch-moscow-should-have-granted-autocephaly-to-uoc-long-ago

Centralisation is voluntary; the Russian State did not force the Church administration to centralise. The two main parts of the Russian Church both had the freedom to proposed a decentralised and multinational future, both in the former USSR and outside it, and openly rejected it, choosing a sectarian future. What we have said also applies equally to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, whose stifling centralism caused so many divisions in history and already in ancient times was in part responsible for the departure of the Copts and the Armenians, as well as the peoples of Western Europe, from the Church. The Church is not a centralised State, but a Family or Confederation of Churches. The Apostle Paul wrote not to a Centralised Church, but to different local Churches, in Corinth, Thessalonica, Philippi, Ephesus, Rome etc. This follows the principle of the Incarnation, that the Church is incarnate locally.

Indeed, several Local Churches have been or still are involved in disputes about the territories they control. These territories include all the former Catholic and Protestant countries of Europe, except for Poland, but including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. However, these territories also include the Ukraine, Moldova, possibly still North Macedonia and potentially Belarus. Here we do not mention Africa, the Americas, Oceania, as well as Asia, outside the Russian Federation, Georgia and the territories of the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem, which are also in dispute. Essentially, none of these disputes are about geographical problems, but spiritual problems. In reality, those who have spiritual food to give to the people will control any territory in question, not those who pretentiously claim and bully.

Conclusion: The Holy Trinity

In this month, when the post-Soviet Russian State has at long last handed back the Icon of the Holy Trinity, painted by St Andrei (Rubliov), to the Church, surely it is time to begin implementing the unity in diversity, which is the Holy Trinity, into Church life. We await the liberation of the Church from narrow nationalism, in order to lead the whole Orthodox Christian world into freedom, cleansing and deposing unworthy clerics – money-minded businessmen, protocolish bureaucrats, embittered homosexuals and convert schismatics, and rejecting their purely political decisions, which they cloak in their purely political interpretations of the canons

The latter appear for the moment to have taken over the administration of these two Local Churches of Moscow and Constantinople because there has been no-one, no international Synod and no Council, to keep the order of Catholicity. This is apocalyptic, for if this situation continues and no-one brings order on earth because we continue to be unworthy of it, then Christ Himself will come down again from heaven, just as He promised, and end it all. Then there will be a new heaven and a new earth, because of the best efforts of Satan to close churches and destroy mankind, which are so apparent just now. But our God is great because He works miracles.

 

 

The Inevitable But Avoidable Transgender Epidemic

After separating from the Church in the eleventh century, the corruption of the Roman Papacy in the Middle Ages was such that the inevitable happened and in the sixteenth century the Reformation took place. The Reformation was an all-male affair, under Luther, Henry VIII, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox etc, as were the wars that resulted from it, which dragged on for 150 years in what is now Germany, England, France and Ireland in particular. Millions were murdered in the Name of God. One of the results of this all-male Reformation was the belittling of and even blasphemies against the Mother of God. The consequences of this were the loss of respect for all women which, among the strict or puritanical Protestants especially, led to the Protestant witch-hunts and the reduction of women to possessions, baby-factories and virtual slaves. There were even doubts as to whether women had souls. This had already been the case in Pagan Rome, which was so much admired and imitated by the Victorians.

Inevitably, the pendulum would swing back against such extremism, once the old male Protestant yoke was thrown off, which gave way to full secularisation. Thus, the word ‘unisex’ first became prominent in the Western/post-Protestant world in the 1960s. People would make mistakes because they could no longer tell the difference between young men and young women, especially because of unisex clothing and hairstyles. By the 1970s the ideology of ‘feminism’ had become rampant in those societies. Thus, fifty years ago ‘feminism’ was promoted there not as the promotion of the unique female and feminine identity, but as ‘equality’ and therefore as good. In the name of this ‘good’ the propaganda went out that there should be no more social conditioning to reinforce the two Biblically-founded, separate ‘kinds’ or genders. Girls should dress like boys, women like men. It was the beginning of gender blurring and so confusion.

In reality, this sort of feminism was not at all equality, but tyranny and slavery. Women had to become men, or rather imitations of men, and not just in terms of clothing and hairstyles. They had to become income-earners, ‘useful’ economic units, rather than ‘wasting’ their time being cared for and protected by men, allowing them to create homes and bring up children. This ‘equality’ was just another form of aggressive, male-imposed social conditioning. It was also the end of the family, as this had been understood up till then, the combination of the male and female principles, of a father and a mother. The belittling of the female sex as inferior to the male sex and the dismissal of traditional female roles as mothers and homemakers in Western societies has led directly to the present transgender epidemic among teenage girls, the ‘need’ for them to become boys, dressing as boys, binding their breasts and even undergoing physical alteration through surgery.

There was no equality here. For women were obliged to go out and make themselves ‘economically useful’, as well as to be at home and work there. The result was double work. On top of this, some husbands could be bad husbands and bad fathers, were drunkards or beat their wives, were no longer attracted to their working wives and were unfaithful. Seeing this, young girls said: ‘Why should I have to go through all that and be mistreated in that way? I don’t want to bear the double burden of my mother. I am going to be a boy, then I will be able to do exactly as I want. I will not have children, therefore my childbearing organs and my breasts are useless, I will get rid of them’. The bad example of fathers thus destroyed the daughters. More than this, sensitive sons, seeing the example of bad fathers and pitying their mothers, were pushed towards homosexuality. One such son  began persecuting normal families from his jealousy.

In any case, apart from the ever more widespread cases of male homosexuality as a result of family breakdown, whereas ten years ago there were a handful of cases of gender confusion and gender identity problems among teenage girls each year, now there are thousands of cases and this appears to be growing into tens of thousands. Encouraged by the conformist pressures of media and social media, government-fostered anti-female sexism and ‘sex education’ and the traumatic isolation caused by recent government-enforced covid lockdowns, why should denigrated and despised teenage girls want to grow into women? Why not become boys and men? The contemporary epidemic of self-harming, suicides and gender dysphoria among teenage girls and young women are the clear results of the anti-female and anti-feminine culture which first appeared massively in Western countries in the 1960s.

Women were imposed upon by men: they had to become like men in all ways, they had to dress like men, they had to work outside the home, they had to have abortions, they had to be childfree, they had to become economically viable, they had to drink, smoke and swear like men, they had to do sports like boxing and  football like men, they even had to be priests  – they had to become imitation men, second-class men, instead of first-class women. And all this was presented as ‘emancipation’ and ‘liberation’ and as a ‘good’. Thus, in the name of ‘equality’, the female sex had to be destroyed. The transgender epidemic became inevitable, ever since the female principle in Western religion and culture, the veneration of the Mother of God, was destroyed in the sixteenth century and the path to an anti-Christian civilisation was chosen. True, it has taken centuries to create that anti-Christian civilisation, but now it is here.

Most Holy Mother of God, save us!

Arguing With Culty Fundamentalists

We reproduce the below, as it is a clear common sense outline of the danger posed by so-called ‘Orthodox’ convert cults, which all come from the USA. These are now so prevalent in marginal, schismatic groups. Locally, we are now getting more people who have seen through one such group in London and are coming to us, refugees from that schism and cult.

 

Written by Fr. Lawrence FARLEY (Orthodox Church in America) on 07/05/2023

There are stupider things to do than arguing with a culty fundamentalist.  As the late great Jim Croce reminded us, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, and you don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger.  Arguing with a culty fundamentalist is, I admit, not as stupid as any of these things, but it is pretty stupid nonetheless, for it is a waste of precious time and utterly futile.

By “culty fundamentalist” I mean someone from a group which divides the entire world into a very small “us” and a very large “them”.  This “them” usually constitutes the entire world outside the boundaries of the group.  The group has very strict and well-defined boundaries, and they are very clear that they are the only people in the world who are truly saved, who know what’s really going on, and who know and have experienced God’s grace.  Outside the boundaries of the group there is nothing but darkness, danger, and damnation.

Obviously not all fundamentalists are culty fundamentalists as defined above.  The culty ones are characterized by their unshakable conviction that they alone possess salvation and that therefore leaving their group would be spiritually and eternally catastrophic.  All groups which make truth claims (groups like the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, and the Baptists) are of course sad when their members leave them, believing their departure to be a mistake.  But these groups do not claim that those departing are thereby damning their souls or leaving the light for the darkness.  Culty fundamentalists do, and that is why they so greatly lament the departure of their members and describe that departure in apocalyptic terms.

I include in these groups organizations like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (schismatic Mormons), and some Old Calendarist jurisdictions.

These groups are characterized by a fear of the modern world with all its complexity, nuance, and ambiguity.  That is why they regard this world not only as fallen and in the grip of deception (the historical Church has always believed that), but also as sufficiently dangerous as to warrant as much separation from them as possible.  Though such groups may not always retreat to a well-defined geographical space (such as a ranch or compound), it is still well-isolated from outside influence.  The invisible drawbridge is always pulled up to protect the group from outside contamination which real inter-action with society would inevitably bring.

I remember arguing with adherents from one such group when I was much younger.  They approached me by knocking on my door when I was home, asking if they could come in and share their message.  Being much younger than I am now, I imagined that I could provide a voice of reason and sow a seed of doubt in their mind about their delusion and maybe even rescue them.  Alas, no dice, and those hours are ones I can never get back.

That was not because (I fancy) there was anything wrong with my argumentation.  It was because I was from the wrong tribe and so everything I said was of course wrong.  They were hardly listening to my words, much less trying to understand them.  What I said was of no consequence because I was not one of them.  Before they had even knocked on my door, they had neatly divided the entire world into Us (who of course had all the truth), and Them (who of course were deceived, pathetic, and had nothing valuable or true to say).  If they could not refute my arguments, contradict my history, or fault my logic, that all just proved how clever the Devil (i.e. me) really was.  They didn’t worry that my arguments were better.  They knew that whatever arguments I could muster, I must be wrong because I belonged to Them.  I never had any credibility.  I scarcely had a name.  I was simply another lost soul unaware of its pathetic plight.  I was the Enemy, Babylon the Great.  In other words, I was a part of The Wrong Tribe.

In the world of the culty fundamentalist, theology is entirely a tribal activity.  Their tribe is right, and other tribes are wrong because they are other tribes.  If someone from their tribe said the same things as I did, it would be immediately received as wise because it originated from their (i.e. the correct) tribe.

This means, of course, that real scholarship is never found among such culty groups.  Real scholarship involves humility and the willingness to learn from everyone and anyone.  Thus (for example) if the late Fr. Robert Taft provided good liturgical scholarship regarding the Byzantine Liturgy (which he did) it did not matter at all that he was a Roman Catholic Jesuit and not an Orthodox.  Truth is truth, and real scholars are willing to learn from anyone who seems to know what they are talking about.  Labels—that is, tribes—are irrelevant.  All that matters is competence.

We see this in non-theological matters quite easily.  I cared less than nothing that the doctor doing cataract surgery on my one good eye was not a good Orthodox.  All that mattered was that he was a good eye surgeon.  It is the same for matters of scholarship.  Real scholars are tribally-blind:  they will learn from any source as long as it is a good source.  For culty fundamentalists, tribe is everything, and so they remain suspicious of any information or learning that does not originate from their tribe.

That of course makes the world in which they live a very small and lonely one.  And (allow me to say) usually a stupid one as well, since they have rejected almost all scholarship that originates from another tribe or challenges their own.  If you doubt this, peruse any copy of an Awake! magazine.

Why do apparently intelligent people embrace culty fundamentalism?  Generalizations are always tricky, but I suggest that the attraction of culty fundamentalism is that it provides a safe haven in a confusing and dangerous world.

The spiritual edifices that such groups build are erected upon a foundation of fear:  they believe that if you are wrong in your choices, God is waiting to smite and damn them, and He will only restrain Himself if you belong to the “correct” group.  Once you join that group, you have the assurance of safety—but only if you remain within the group.  If you remain within the group, you have nothing to fear, including the necessity of living in a confusing world and grappling with nuance and grey areas—an arena in which you might make a wrong choice and thus incite divine wrath.

One can see immediately why arguing with such people is futile and a waste of time:  you are asking them to risk their eternal salvation, to emerge from their psychological bomb shelter and forfeit their assurance of safety.  For them, that assurance is paramount, and they will not risk losing it just because your arguments seem to be better than theirs.  The world of gray areas and nuance in which you live is just too scary for them.

What then to do with our culty fundamentalist neighbour?  For of course whatever his exasperating flaws, he is still our neighbour, and we are commanded to love him.  I suggest three things.

First (and most obvious) of all, pray for them.  If they have closed their hearts and minds, only God can open them.

Secondly, resist the temptation to imagine that if only you are learned or persuasive enough, you can bring them to sanity and sense.  It almost certainly will not happen.  Your learning and persuasiveness count for nothing so long as you remain in the wrong tribe.  Remember the words of Solomon about how we should leave a fool because we will not find knowledge in his presence (Proverbs 14:7)—or at least remember Christ’s words about Pharisees and blind guides—our Lord told us to leave them alone (Matthew 15:14).  In other words, don’t waste time in long arguments with them.

Finally, deal with their challenges and errors plainly and directly, giving an alternative vision and version to their distorted and narrow one.  If their arguments are left entirely unanswered, it may give tender and vulnerable souls the mistaken impression that the culty fundamentalist assertions are true.  This last task is mostly the job of the Church’s teachers and representatives.

As long as the world remains a dark place, the temptation will abide to sweep away the uncertainty, nuance, and grey areas with a culty fundamentalist vision.  The Church is not a cult, and so while it boldly and clearly proclaims the truth, it also knows how to discern nuance and grey areas as well and to live with it.  That is because the Church, being the body of Christ, is not afraid.  The spiritual edifice the Church erects is built on the assurance that God loves us.

Source: No Other Foundation

 

 

How To Be an Anti-Pastor in Twenty Simple Rules: The Anatomy of a Classic Case

A bishop then must be blameless…of good behaviour…not greedy of filthy lucre…not covetous…Not a recent convert, or he may be puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil (I Tim 3).

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, fierce, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, having a form of Godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away (2 Tim, 3, 1-5).

 

  1. In general, live according to your motto: ‘Money, Property, Power and Prestige’. Remember: You are a prince, not a servant, of the Church.
  2. First of all, as you have been sent there by an Imperialist, occupying power, be as aggressive, conflictual, controlling, intimidating and insulting as possible to the local people. Do not respect them, their language, their geography, their history, their culture, their customs. After all, you are superior to them in every way, so you can force them to speak your language and ban theirs. Gag them and censor them. Impose yourself and crush them by demanding blind obedience, even in very minor matters.
  3. Cultivate your elitism, ensuring a top-down approach, putting on your show of the purely outward, even if they see through it at once, as most of them did. Have nothing to do with the ordinary people by listening to them or confessing them. Speak in monologues to them. Remember: As a true anti-Pastor you are innately superior to the people. Be as exclusive, arrogant and authoritarian as possible, threatening any contradictors with suspension. This will ensure that the Church does not expand and so becomes ever more sectarian, ensuring your total control.
  4. Be as divisive as possible. Taking a party political line will help you greatly in this. Exclude all who know more than you. Espousing extremist politics will help you alienate others. You must make sure that you are unpopular. This will help you to power, following the old adage of ‘divide and rule’. Of course you will end up in a very, very small pond, but at least this will make you a very, very big fish.
  5. Be spectacularly rude. Threaten, bully, humiliate and cultivate injustice at every opportunity, but above all accuse others of precisely your own faults, especially as you are so in love with money. Trying to make them feel guilty will help you create disunity, making you feel very good about yourself.
  6. Remember: Your aim is to alienate others, discrediting them and slandering them. You will thus isolate yourself, painting yourself into a corner. With very few friends, you will, very satisfyingly, have created a real sect and a small cult of sick and feeble-minded admirers around you who want to imitate you.
  7. Develop this personality cult, charming all with words, but not actions, manipulating the new and naïve around you. True, they will sooner or later see through you, but by then you will have found more new and naïve to replace them. Once they have seen through you, you can discard them too like old rags and replace them with new favourites. This favouritism will help greatly in discrediting you. Remember with both those above you and those below you: Manipulate, manipulate, manipulate!
  8. Make false accusations. Especially accuse people who have given all their money and lives to the Church of stealing money from the Church. This will entirely discredit you.
  9. Remember: Feelings of jealousy towards others divide. Develop these feelings in yourself, for they will destroy you, not those at whom they are directed.
  10. Never listen and never consult, especially despise age and experience. Remember: You are always right despite your youth, inexperience and lack of knowledge and training. Threaten any who challenge you with retirement, suspension or defrocking because of your personal hatred, intense jealousy and mood swings. This will ensure that you will make as many mistakes as you possibly can. Remember that when you are told that it is make or break time because of your tyrannical behaviour, you must ignore it.
  11. Reject any monastery that is offered you for free. You do not want any rivals.
  12. Refuse to open any new churches which have been bought or built and are fully equipped. The faithful must not have churches, so ignore their petitions. Remember that you must deprive the people of the opportunity to go to church. Deprive priests of myrrh and make sure they do not do too many baptisms. Therefore try and steal any church properties that exist. The devil will thank you.
  13. Doctor Diocesan Council minutes in your favour to impress your superiors. They will then offer no supervision of a chronically inexperienced individual who makes mistake after mistake. If complaints do arrive, you can then investigate yourself and report back that you are wonderful. Then you will be able to give yourself a perfect bill of health and you will be able to punish those who told the truth by warning of the coming catastrophe. This will soon turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is also important to create your own websites, writing articles about how wonderful you are, while pretending that others have written them.
  14. Lack of supervision means that you will threaten zealous clergy who justly dare to warn of the impending catastrophe with harsh and uncanonical punishments. True, you can defrock anyone you want at the drop of a hat simply because they do not agree with you. However, no laypeople, clergy or other bishops will pay the slightest attention to your hate-filled papers. Be aware of this.
  15. Surround yourself with weak, servile and fawning subordinates and use authoritarian rule, using yes-men, only marginally less ignorant than yourself. They will safely shield you from reality and all your errors for years, until what you have done blows up in your face, as it eventually will.
  16. Attempt to divide the Church and divide families, setting father against son. You must destroy happy and united families. They represent strength and opposition to you. In the same way you must also attempt with large bribes of money to set up altar against altar in the same towns.
  17. Demand money from often very poor faithful in order to fund your lavish lifestyle. This will cause great scandal among the faithful.
  18. Remember: Your principal task is to destroy, not build up.
  19. Remember your slogan: ‘Don’t save souls, invent protocols’.
  20. Remember: Quench the Spirit at all times. Be careful to crush any sort of zeal for the Faith and any talent. You must in particular destroy anyone who is more popular than yourself. This will ensure your failure.

 

All the above will be tolerated for some years by your victims, as they have already tolerated such behaviour for years before you, but as the inevitable result of all the above you will end up by creating a schism in the Church. This will be a step too far, the last straw, because it is not just against the people, but also against the Church. Your alien schismatic and sectarian mentality will cause a scandal, however much you bully the weak into supporting you. If you do all the above, you can be guaranteed that sooner or later there will be consequences, for your sins will find you out. And from that point of suffering on, you will have the God-sent opportunity to repent and so at last start becoming a Christian.

 

 

Nationalists or Christians?

Introduction: Two Generations Ago

When I at last (I had been waiting for five years) managed to find an Orthodox church to attend, exactly fifty years ago, it was a Russian church. This was because in those days there were very few churches and all of them, except some of the Russian churches, were completely closed to other nationalities. Hardly any English people had any attraction to Greek, Serbian, Ukrainian or Romanian churches. (There were no others at that time). They were all, in other words, nationalist ghetto churches. Moreover, the Greek churches were well-known for being compromised politically through the alliances of their bishops with Western politicians and freemasons. However, there were a few Russian churches which were open to others. Moreover, at that time the Russian Church was very attractive as it was the Persecuted Church, the Church of the Martyrs and Confessors. For any who sought food for their souls, here it was.

Failure

Despite the large number of churches here fifty years on, the situation is in some regards even worse. Here is what the internet reports about one very senior Greek bishop.

His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of America Delivers Historic Address to the US Intelligence Community at The National Intelligence University in Washington, DC – Ορθοδοξία News Agency (orthodoxianewsagency.gr)

Of course, we draw no conclusions about ordinary churchgoers and clergy of Greek churches, but this is what one, among others, of their ‘leaders’ does. It does not bode well.

Some would say no change here as regards the Greek Church run from Constantinople, but the various branches of the Russian Church have now also fallen. The Russian Church is no longer the Persecuted Church, but the Persecuting Church. Who wants to support that? Unprincipled yesmen and careerist clergy on the make? In Russia they have now ‘defrocked’ Archdeacon Andrei Kuraev. We never agreed with his ultra-liberal, almost eccentric and really unspiritual views. But that is not the point. ‘Defrockings’ now take place because of different opinions. However, you cannot take grace away with bits of paper. The bishops who issue such bits of paper only defrock themselves. They alone lose grace by their own political actions. This is all control freakery.

Given the behaviour of Greeks and Russians alike, persecuting the humble, the devout, the zealous, the apostolic, today the biggest Orthodox jurisdiction has increased in size again. It consists of those who do not go to any church. Why should they, when Greek and Russian bishops behave like this?

Success

However, not all is black. Here is a report from one parish:

‘Our life in … is unfolding in a surprisingly peaceful way, despite the upheavals of the last year. Perhaps a quarter of a century of stubborn insistence on openness to all cultures, services in many languages, welcoming minorities and so on has achieved some modicum of success: we managed to alienate all the partisans of various national ideas, who fled and that left an open field to those interested in Christ and the Gospel’.

This repeats our own experience, except that we have been doing the same thing not for a quarter of a century, but for nearly forty years. And the partisans of various national ideas have fled. Thank God!

Conclusion: Real Bishops

Today the Church is dominated by bishops who choose to live in posh suburbs in the rich world (sic), loving bling and power, constantly trying to grasp property and demanding with threats and slander from their faithful clergy and craving ever more money. They try and close down churches like vulgar Communist commissars, despise and mock women and children (for obvious reasons – it shows what sort of ‘men’ they are), and cannot be bothered to listen to the confessions of the faithful. We know such bishops only too well. The Persecuted Church has indeed become the Persecuting Church. But we the new New Confessors fight against them, and unto blood if it takes that. We are not afraid of you, for God is with us.

There is a story from seventh-century Orthodox England of how a certain bishop, known now as St Chad, used to visit the faithful on foot, not on horseback, and had to be lifted onto a horse so he could continue his ministry more effectively. Such was his humility.

In our own sad twenty-first century, it is related how just a few years ago the late Patriarch Irenei of Serbia, who was presiding a Synod of his bishops, took a look out of the window and saw a car park full of expensive cars. When he asked who they belonged to and was told that they belonged to his bishops, he said to his bishops: ‘Just think what sort of cars you would have had, if you had not taken a vow of poverty’?

Such are the times we live in. Corrupt and persecuting bishops are now begging Antichrist to come into the world. We know your names. So does he.

 

 

 

Q and A April 2023

Q: Why are women not allowed to become deacons or priests in the Orthodox Church?

A: Please read the Bible and do not listen to the secular world! Christ chose men as His disciples and future apostles. Since He Who overturned all the regulations of the pharisees in the greatest revolution in human history, but did not overturn the natures of man and woman, which, after all, He Himself had created, it is clear that a male priesthood is Divinely ordained. Women have another role. That role is set by the Mother of God, veneration for whom is quite absent among Protestants, from where this fantasy of a female priesthood comes. Indeed, they disrespect her and blaspheme, claiming that she had several children.

This whole story of wanting a female priesthood comes from clericalism, the false concept that somehow clergy are superior to laypeople. This is absurd for real Orthodox, though it is true among heterodox.

Q: Do you agree that the Second Vatican Council threw out the baby with the bathwater?

A: I do not agree at all. The problem of the Second Vatican Council was precisely that it threw out the baby, but kept the bathwater. It rejected the sense of the sacred under the weight of American Protestantism/secularism, but hung onto the bathwater of anti-Biblical absurdities like the filioque, papism, compulsory clerical celibacy, indulgences etc

Q:  I know an ex-Catholic who was received into the Church by chrismation three years ago, but now wants to be received by baptism. How would you answer him?

A: Firstly, he should read the Creed: ‘I believe in one baptism for the remission of sins’. Secondly, he should consider whether he is not blaspheming against the communion he has been receiving for the last three years by demanding what would in effect be rebaptism. This is because whatever was missing in the rite of baptism he underwent as a Catholic, it has been made up for by the grace of reception into the Church and holy communion. Finally, thousands of Catholics are received into the Church by chrismation every year and with the blessing of Orthodox bishops. They are quite happy with this and always have been. Why is he different? In general, I think this very insecure man who is so attached to external rites needs to see a psychologist, not a theologian. My decades of experience tell me that all such people end up outside the Church because they do not want to belong to the Church, but to a proud sect.

Q: How do you receive old calendarists into the Church?

A: In principle we have to recognise that old calendarists existed primarily because of the apostasy and compromises of ‘canonical’ bishops. They are the ones responsible for scandalising these little ones, those of simple faith. Therefore, old calendarist laypeople are received by confession and communion because they have been misled and lied to, taken into sects, hoodwinked and exploited. As regards old calendarist clergy, a bishop must decide how he will receive them. Most of the laypeople have been misled by clergy. As for clergy, there are various issues. Some are careerists and want titles, depravity or money, which they could never get in a canonical Church because there they had been seen through and could not ‘rise’ any further. Others are very proud pharisees. Others are sincere and have just been misled. Bishops will decide.

Q: There are more Russian Orthodox in England under Constantinople, Romania, the Ukrainian Church or under old calendarists than there are under the Russian Church. Why are there more Russian Orthodox in England who are not under any of the three parts of the Russian Church than are under them?

A: I am not sure about your statistics, but you may be right. Apart from the two London churches, one of which is very small, the Russian Orthodox Church is now virtually inexistent in these islands apart from the chapels in Oxford and Norwich and a few tiny communities of a dozen or so elsewhere.

The answer to your question is that people in England do not accept tyranny. Those who follow the reflexes of German-style dictatorship, Russian-style subservience or American-style sectarian intolerance (‘since I can’t have complete control as I want, I will throw everything out of my pram and destroy everything’, just like arrogant and destructive spoilt-brat GIs in Vietnam or Iraq) are alien to us. Look what happened to the Normans, Cromwell, Thatcher and Johnson. Tyrants do not prosper here. Freedom is the culture of England and we will not renounce it because of foreign tyranny.

In our own case, the few people who left us last year, most of them occasional or hobby Orthodox, all left because of their nationalism. They used to come to church to speak their own language, not for communion with Christ. Their departure amounted to a cleansing of the Church.

Q: In what cases can you leave a bishop?

A: There are three cases: Either when he openly preaches heresy, or else when he creates a schism by breaking communion and refusing to concelebrate with another canonical Church or even part of his own Church, or else when he behaves immorally (stealing money, homosexual practice or any other uncanonical activity, such as freemasonry). In any case, there is no point in the bishop being told (perhaps by a gay mafia of fellow-bishops) that he must investigate himself after such a charge has been made and allowing him to intimidate and bully everyone. Strangely enough, he will find himself perfect and that everyone is very happy with his conduct. This is why such bishops are given the title, ‘His Disgrace’.

Q: How do schismatic bishops who ‘defrock’ canonical priests of other Local Churches sleep at night?

A: Sadly, they sleep very well because they do not have a conscience. But woe betide them on that day when their conscience is awoken. Especially if that day is the Day of the Last Judgement. They will find that they have defrocked themselves, that is, deprived themselves of grace.

Q: Do you have a favourite film?

A: I think there are several films that I like. I always liked ‘The Sound of Music’, which is about a family of singers who escaped the clutches of Nazis by fleeing over the mountains. It is a bit personal, since we escaped the Nazis by escaping to the Romanian Carpathians and thus our churches were saved from closure, just as in the Ukraine today churches have to be saved from Nazis and be saved from closure.

Q: What does it mean when people are called controversial?

A: In the UK ‘controversial’ is code for ‘opposed to the Establishment’. (In the USA the Establishment is known as the ‘Deep State’). Thus, people are dubbed ‘controversial’ or TV programmes or views are called ‘controversial’. In history by far the most ‘controversial’ person is Christ, for he rejected the scribes (intellectuals) and pharisees (corrupt and hypocritical high priests), the men of law (who had no love) and the banksters (‘the moneychangers’).

Q: What is your suggestion to solve the territorial disputes between the Local Orthodox Churches?

A: The following answer is just my suggestion. Obviously, I have no influence whatsoever.

At the end of 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved into fifteen independent republics. The Moscow Patriarchate (MP) remained, however, undissolved, not just inside those different Republics, but all over the world. Over thirty years on, it is clear that such a highly centralised and therefore basically nationalistic structure, which was essentially a Soviet product, is not designed for long life. Already there are schisms from it in Estonia, Lithuania, the Ukraine and serious tensions in Latvia (where, curiously, the State has forced the Church to become ‘autocephalous’) and in Belarus. The politics of Russian and local nationalism play the major roles.

The more sinister-minded say that decentralisation has not occurred because the Centre in Moscow wanted to retain its size, power, prestige and money. Others say that it was simply because Orthodox in the countries outside Russia were not ready for independence. We consider that such polemics are not really relevant here. Let us stick to the facts. All we know is that following the parallel dissolution of the Russian Empire in 1917, almost exactly 75 years before the dissolution of the USSR, Orthodox in Poland and Czechoslovakia also eventually received autocephaly and Orthodox in Finland received a sort of autonomy. And after 1945 groups exiled from the Ukraine and Belarus uncanonically gave themselves a long-unrecognised autocephaly. All we know is that disputes about territories are unbecoming for Christians. It all seems like childish disputes about toys. We do not recall disputes between the apostles about whose church belonged to whom.

Certainly, a decentralised MP, renamed the Russian Orthodox Church, still with at least 100 million baptised faithful, half of all Orthodox Christians on the planet, would remain as the Church of the Russian Federation. But outside it, there could surely be set up fully independent (Autocephalous) Churches on territories where Orthodoxy is well-established and which are not shared with other Local Churches, and independent (Autonomous) Churches, led by a Metropolitan, on territories which are shared with other Local Churches and where the Faith is less well-established. It is our suggestion that there should be another five Autocephalous Churches, whose territories and traditions have for centuries been part of the Russian Orthodox world (approximate numbers of baptised given in brackets) and which all already have at least four bishops:

Five New Autocephalous Churches:

Ukrainian Orthodox Church (20 million?). Its exact territory is yet to be established, but it would include at the very least half of the pre-2022 Ukraine.

Belarussian Orthodox Church (6 million?)

Moldovan Orthodox Church (3.5 million?)

Central Asian Orthodox Church, covering Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (3 million?)

Baltic Orthodox Church, covering Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland (500,000?). All parishes in Finland which wish to celebrate Easter on the canonical Orthodox Paschalia could join this Church.

(Orthodox in the two remaining former Soviet Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan could be cared for by the Georgian Orthodox Church).

This would bring the total number of universally-recognised (if we include the Macedonian) Autocephalous Local Orthodox Churches from 15 to 20, with the approximate present size of their baptised flocks given in brackets:

Russia (100 million), Romania (18.8 million), Greece (10 million), Serbia 8 million), Bulgaria (4.5 million), Georgia (3.5 million), Constantinople (3.1 million), Antioch (3 million), Macedonia (1.3 million), Cyprus (0.65 million), Poland (0.6 million), Alexandria (0.5 million), Albania (0.2 million), Czechoslovakia (0.17 million), Jerusalem (0.13 million) and the above five.

There could also be 6 New Autonomous Churches, making 8 in all. These could be founded by the Russian Church, but their numbers would be small until they could achieve full potential growth to include Orthodox of all origins on their shared territories and have at least four bishops. Only then could they receive autocephaly, which would have to be granted in concert by all the Local Churches concerned. The figures given in brackets show only their initial potential, if they could unite all baptised Orthodox already living on the territories concerned. Their later potential is huge, but that would demand genuine missionaries, not politicians:

Eight Autonomous Churches – together with the Japanese (10,000) and Chinese (100?), which already exist:

European Orthodox Church (potentially 7 million?). This would cover 23 territories: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Andorra, Italy and San Marino. This could in time become the fifth largest Local Orthodox Church after the Serbian.

Northern American Orthodox Church (potentially 5 million?). This would cover USA, Canada, Greenland, Bermuda and would initially replace the present OCA, ROCOR and MP North America parishes.

Latin American Orthodox Church (potentially 2 million?). This would cover the Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries of the Americas and the largely Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

Oceanian Orthodox Church (potentially 600,000?)

African Orthodox Church (potentially 500,000?)

South-East Asian Orthodox Church (potentially 25,000?). This would replace the present South-East Asian Exarchate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bullying Again

The UK Vice-Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, has ‘resigned’ as a result of many complaints into his bullying – see extracts from the report into his behaviour below. It is clear that he did not behave as a Christian. The fact that he is Jewish is not the point. We know so-called ‘Christian’ bishops who bully in the same way and even worse and are actually supported by other clergy for their bullying! As for us, we have always belonged to the Persecuted Church and will never join a Persecuting Church.

Key report details 

Raab was ‘persistently aggressive’ in meeting

One complaint highlighted in the report centred around allegations that Mr Raab acted “in a way which was intimidating, in the sense of unreasonably and persistently aggressive” during a work meeting while foreign secretary.

“His conduct also involved an abuse or misuse of power in a way that undermines or humiliates,” the report added.

The report said Mr Raab went “beyond what was reasonably necessary in order to give effect to his decision and introduced a punitive element”.

Raab described work as ‘useless and woeful’

As justice secretary, Mr Raab acted in an “intimidating” manner when delivering critical feedback on work on a number of occasions, the report found.

The report cites one example where Mr Raab described some work as “utterly useless” and “woeful”.

The report concluded that his conduct was “abrasive” on some occasions which “feels intimidating or insulting to the individual but is not intended to be so”.

His conduct was not “abusive” and behaviour was not “intended and specifically targeted”, it added.

Raab’s gestures ‘not intended to be threatening’

It was claimed Mr Raab extended his hand “directly out towards another person’s face with a view to making them stop talking”. Loud banging on a table and finger-pointing were also among the complaints.

Mr Tolley KC concluded there was “significant scope for misunderstanding” over the physical gestures and he was not convinced Mr Raab used them in a threatening way.

Disciplinary threat ‘intimidating’

Mr Raab whilst at the Foreign Office, was said to have suggested those involved in a project had breached the Civil Service Code, so would have been in breach of their employment contracts.

Senior diplomat Sir Philip Barton told the investigation he had an informal meeting that he should threaten staff with the code.

The report found it had a “significant adverse effect” on a particular individual and Mr Raab’s conduct was “a form of intimidating behaviour”.

Mr Tolley concluded he did not intend to threaten anyone with disciplinary action, but should have known how his comments would be interpreted.

Style

  • Mr Raab’s style was, in his own words, “inquisitorial, direct, impatient and fastidious”

 

 

 

 

Beyond the Three Romes: The People’s Orthodoxy

Part One: The Three Temptations of Roman Imperialism

The Temptation of the First Rome

Seeing the oppression of the Church by barbarian chiefs in Old Rome and by unworthy Emperors in New Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, which was later called Constantinople, in the 11th century the leaders of Old Rome took a decision. This was to make their part of the Church, in what is now called Western Europe, into a State. The leader of their part, or Patriarchate, of the Church, called the Pope of Rome, would be placed above all leaders and dubbed ‘the Head of the Church’ and ‘the Vicar of Christ’. Their new filioque ideology would claim that the Holy Spirit, the source of all truth, authority and spirituality in the Church, proceeds from their Popes.

In other words, the solution to the problem of State oppression as proposed by Roman Catholicism is that the Church becomes greater than any State. It becomes a worldwide Super-State, inherently secularising and centralising, more secular than the secular. This was, put simply, a power grab. This ‘easy way out’ was, is and always will be, a spiritual suicide. Christ did not call on legions of angels to protect Him when He was under arrest (Matt. 26). He accepted His Cross and said: ‘Put away your sword’. And that is what He still says to all those who attempt to impose the outward ways of the Church by intimidation and violence.

Naturally, in the 11th century, the remaining Orthodox Christians, at that time, the vast majority of Christendom, at once rejected this novel ‘theology’, or rather ideology. The latter became known, contradictorily, as ‘Roman Catholicism’ – for you cannot be Roman and Catholic (universal). Today Roman Catholicism remains a ‘Church-State’, an example of papoceasarism, a very secular form of Christianity, and has split into a myriad of sects protesting against the centralism which the hundreds of millions of sectarians condemn as ‘Papism’. However, those sects, now dying out through secularisation, are also subject to the ways of the world and even more deeply than Roman Catholicism, which they have rejected for the last 500 years.

The Temptation of the Second Rome

The problem of State interference in Church life remained for the rest of the Church. This is clear from the later history of New, or the Second, Rome, Constantinople, which finally fell in 1453. The elite of Emperors and State-appointed bishops was always ready to sign away their souls, and those of their flocks, in exchange for military aid from Roman Catholic Western Europe. The history of the Council of Florence and the resistance to the imposition of the Western ideology by such Christian heroes as St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) and his spiritual successor St Mark of Ephesus (c. 1392-1444), by the monasteries and unmercenary parish priest-pastors and the faithful, demonstrates our principled opposition to the corruption of the elite, always ready to compromise the Faith of Christ.

In more recent times, several Constantinople Patriarchs have appeared to want to imitate the centralist Popes of Rome, envying and admiring their power, riches and prestige, and so their policies are sometimes called ‘Eastern Papism’. As a result, a whole series of Local Churches, protesting against Constantinople centralism, has been born, in Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Macedonia in what is literally a Balkanisation of the Church of Constantinople. However, unlike the saintless Protestant sects which rejected the First Rome and justified their separations by changing the teachings of the Church, these Local Churches have in no way changed or compromised the teachings of the Church and have kept the Faith, as proved by their many saints.

However, like the National Protestant Churches, these new Local Churches have been oppressed by the national, or rather nationalist, ideologies of the States which they represent. They have accepted the Cross of Christ. Today, the Second Rome in what is now Istanbul remains, but as a shadow of its former self, for the last three generations as a tiny, compromised and highly politicised puppet of the US State Department. Its leaders have been highly engaged in unionist talks with Old Rome. No surprise here: birds of a feather flock together. Most recently, its subjection to US politics has been used to foment a violent Church schism in the Ukraine. This is the fruit of Constantinople Papism.

The Temptation of the Third Rome

This story has been repeated in the Third Rome, Moscow, which after persecution by Emperors and Empresses, especially in the 18th century, fell in 1917. And then the Third Rome became the Third International and the Gospel of Christ was exchanged for the Gospel of Soviet atheism – ‘the easy way’ to establish paradise on earth. Only the promised paradise was more like hell on earth because that ‘paradise’ was without and against Christ. The Third Rome, in Moscow, remains very large on paper, but it has a stubbornly nominal flock, who resist and resent the exploitative business model of the Church proposed in post-Soviet times.  As its righteous, like Matushka Alypia, prophesied: ‘Their golden domes will shine, but it will not be possible to worship in those churches’.

Just like Constantinople, Moscow to appears to want to imitate the centralist Pope of Rome, envying and admiring his power, riches and prestige. Its leaders have been highly engaged in unionist talks with Old Rome. No surprise here: birds of a feather flock together. This Muscovite Papism first appeared under Metropolitan, and later Patriarch, Sergius of Moscow (1867-1944), who considered that any compromises with the atheist State were justified because he had to ‘save the Church’, that is, to preserve its material assets, whatever the cost. This error became known as ‘Sergianism’ and was condemned, since it appeared to deny that Christ is the Saviour and that the Church does not need saving, only people need saving – and by the Church. This Sergianist Papism is still the model admired there today.

As a result, a whole series of National Churches, protesting against Muscovite centralism, has been born, in Poland, Czechoslovakia and today, being born in agony, in the Ukraine and in many other countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and very probably elsewhere. For the Russian Church too is compromised, but this time by the post-Soviet (and often purely Soviet) mentality, that is, the Church is compromised by the not very Orthodox State heir to both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In other words, the spectre of the centralist Roman Empire haunts both centres of the Orthodox Church. And until there is repentance everywhere, the return to Orthodoxy everywhere, there is little hope of seeing a properly functioning Orthodox Christian world in either the Second or Third Romes, let alone in the First Rome, which wandered off from the Holy Spirit 1,000 years ago.

Part Two: The People’s Orthodoxy

The Third Way

What remains? Is there an alternative? Where is there authentic Orthodox Christianity? Is there another way? Of course, there is, and none of the Roman Imperialism of the Second and Third Romes, let alone of the First Rome, is necessary. There is the other way, beyond the superficiality and pomp of the Three Romes, the path of the People’s Orthodoxy, of authentic monasteries, parish pastors and simple faithful, the way between and beyond the Imperialisms of Constantinople and Moscow. We can call this the way of the Orthodox Commonwealth, or of ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy, of ‘Carpathian’ spirituality, though this simply means the Orthodox Christian way, the royal way. We can use this expression because the Orthodox of the Carpathian mountain range live in Carpatho-Russia (currently mostly in south-western Ukraine and miscalled ‘Transcarpathia’), south-eastern Poland, eastern Slovakia, south-western Ukraine and northern Romania and ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’ spills over easily into Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria and northern Greece to Mt Athos.

As examples, two contemporary righteous Churchmen come out of this Carpathia, the Carpatho-Russian-speaking Metr Laurus (Shkurla) (1928-2008) and the Romanian-speaking Metr Onufry (Berezovsky) (1944- ) of Kiev. They are heirs of the Orthodox Renaissance of hesychasm (unceasing prayer), our Christian reply to the neo-pagan Western Renaissance. Hesychasm was spread into this huge area by a very international group of fathers from the Holy Mountain of Athos by St Gregory of Sinai (c. 1260-1346), a contemporary of St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), and his many followers, such as St Kallistos the Patriarch (+ 1363) in what is now Greece, St Roman of Tarnovo (c.1310-1363) and St Theodosius of Tarnovo (1310-1370) in Bulgaria, St Romil of Ravannitsa (+ 1376), St Athanasius of Meteora (1305-1383), St Sisoes the Sinaite (+ c. 1400), St Gregory of Gornjak (c.1300-1406) and others in Serbia, St Sergius of Radonezh (1314-1392) and his Thebaid of followers in Russia, and St Nicodemus of Tismana (1320-1406) in Romania. In the 18th century, this ‘Carpathian’ spirituality gave birth to the Ukrainian-Moldavian St Paisius (Velichkovsky) of Neamt in Romania, in the last century to St Alexis of Carpatho-Russia (1877-1947) and in our own times to St Job of Ugol (1902-1985), Fr Cleopa (Ilie) (1912-1998) and the Romanian elders of Moldavia in the living tradition.

There is nothing new in this Real Orthodoxy beyond the Romes, which could be termed ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’. It began with St John the Baptist in the Palestinian desert, it blossomed in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine in the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries, was taken to both Constantinople and then northwards to the Balkans and then to the forests of Russia and Siberia, but also to Gaul and then to the wild coasts of Ireland and the Hebrides in the 6th and 7th centuries, from where it was taken to both England and Iceland. It is also this spirit of Orthodoxy that was once so alive in the Russian emigration, though now all but dead in the dead hands of the State mentality and the property-thirsty princes of this world. Carpathian Orthodoxy is simply Christianity in life, the uncompromised Christian way of life, Orthodox spirituality. Carpathian Orthodoxy is not Constantinopolitan or Muscovite, not Imperial, but ours, the people’s, that of families, guided by spiritual fathers, by our monasteries and hermits.

The Attack on ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy by the Sergianism of the Russian Emigration

The 2001 usurping of power in the emigre Russian Church, ROCOR, and the expulsion of its leader, Metropolitan Vitaly, gave rise to a series of schisms in 2007, which were only limited in Australia and Germany because those in power had made as sure as possible that local church properties belonged to them. Elsewhere the losses were far more serious, especially in South America, North America, France and England. There followed the sidelining of the next ‘Carpathian’ Metropolitans of ROCOR, Laurus and Hilarion, who succeeded Metr Vitaly, and were turned into mere figureheads by the clique that had taken charge.

The clique appeared to have little interest in Church life, in real and, not token, monasticism and pastors and prayer, only in being ‘princes of the Church’ (one of their favourite expressions), in power and riches, property and prestige. Church was no longer about the salvation of souls, but about the ‘salvation’ of property by bishops, who wanted to take property away from monastics, pastors and the people. Thus came about the quite unjust 2016 expulsion from London of an excellent priest, the 2018 excommunication from Geneva of lifelong devoted ROCOR Orthodox trustees who had controlled the Cathedral, the closure of a parish near Saint Louis in the USA in a property dispute, and the loss of the church in Miami (it too did not belong to the ROCOR administration), in yet another property dispute.

There followed in exactly the same way the attempt to destroy Church life in parishes in England and close their churches (those properties too did not belong to ROCOR bishops). None of this left anyone in any doubt as to the utter ruthlessness of the US-financed business clique in charge of the Russian emigration Church. And the situation is continuing in the USA today, as more leave. All of this was caused by the desire of the ruling clique to imitate the Sergianism of the Church inside Russia, of the Third Rome. That clique too was going to ‘save the Church’, that is, to seize and preserve power and riches, property and prestige. In their worldliness they too confused the salvation of the soul with the preservation of empty buildings beneath golden domes and soulless property portfolios.

The Failed Attempt to Close Down the People’s Churches in England

In our own cases, after insisting on keeping our church open, despite covid regulations and aggressive and bullying intimidation, we were at various points in 2020 and 2021 the only Orthodox priests in England celebrating normally. For this defiance of death and our will to keep our churches, bought with the people’s money, open, the elite clique in charge had to punish and try to destroy us. As a result, they initiated a schism with the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Moscow Patriarchate in December 2020. As the senior priest in the Diocese, I, with all the others, was forced to seek canonicity away from schismatic bishops. We applied Canon XV of the First and Second Council under St Photius the Great and 317 other Fathers, that those who ‘have been diligent to rescue the Church from schisms and divisions’….’shall be deemed worthy to enjoy the honour which befits them among Orthodox Christians’.

Ironically, as we have said, this Archdiocese of Western Europe with which the clique began a very public schism, is under the Moscow Patriarchate. However, the then ROCOR First Hierarch, Metr Hilarion (Kapral), was far too ill to contain the sectarians of ROCOR and its mini-Synod which had for 20 years been running everything. Therefore, individuals with power in New York refused to listen to what was happening and rejected our request for stavropegia in early 2021, using the electronic signature of the ‘Carpathian’ Metr Hilarion to justify themselves. We had known Metr Hilarion since 1988 and he came to us twice, ordaining clergy and celebrating in our church before he fell ill. Persecution of us was not his will. After his illness came the end. After this and the rejection of our application to join the Moscow Patriarchate, which was frightened of New York, we had to move to another Local Church.

We had to find canonicity against the schism of the bullies and to protect our churches from their attempts to close them. They accused us of being ‘criminals’, of stealing money (!), slandered us, tried to put us on trial and then sentenced us uncanonically and illegally behind our backs. They repeated all the oldest tricks in the book, using their naïve, new followers and yesmen. This was the Golgotha that the new Sanhedrin had prepared for us. God was testing our patience and humility. So we accepted our Cross and so God led us to spiritual freedom in another Local Church and so they lost everything. The New York schism endures to this day, but many clergy and people have left ROCOR. Though we have gone to the Church of Romania, several others, controversially, have joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople, especially in the USA and the Netherlands (as also in the Ukraine and now Lithuania), and a few elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the USA all free churches are continuing to leave ROCOR one after the other.

Part Three: Survival and Victory

The Orthodox Way

Certain Greeks wanted us to join their local Archdiocese. This was not Divine destiny. We believed that the Constantinople leadership is compromised by its modernist history of ecumenism, new calendarism and other practices, and especially by its treacherous activities in the Ukraine and the persecution of our dear friends in the Czech Lands. True, Moscow has also acted uncanonically in Africa, just as Constantinople has done in the Ukraine. However, the Greek vengeance on simple Africans who want to see an African, and not Greek, Orthodoxy, with the help of Moscow has been quite as vicious as the New York vengeance on us and as the Moscow vengeance on those seeking political freedom outside the controls of Soviet nationalism, whether in the Netherlands, Lithuania or elsewhere.

Then, we have many parishioners from the much-suffering Ukraine. They are faithful to Metr Onufry of Kiev, who has been so mistreated both by Constantinople and by Moscow. This double persecution from both extremes, from Constantinople and Moscow, is a sure sign of his righteousness. True, in the US, there is a (Russian/Ukrainian) Slavic Vicariate for persecuted refugees from ROCOR, but in the US context, with others refusing to take refugees from ROCOR, there may be no alternative to this. We are free to do otherwise. Similarly, we do not judge those seven priests in Lithuania, forced to join Constantinople because of their mistreatment by Moscow. We are free to do otherwise.

Others called us to old calendarist groups. However, for us, schisms and sects of any sort are the unthinkable. That is the precise reason why we left ROCOR – because it suffers from the sectarian, old calendarist illness of schism. Being on the old calendar is very different from old calendarism, just as being on the new calendar is very different from new calendarism. For within the Romanian Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe, our ex-ROCOR group of six parishes is on the old calendar. We are following the Third Way between and beyond the Second and Third Romes. For we are turned towards St John of Shanghai (as also is the Romanian parish in Birmingham) and the New Martyrs and Confessors, and the local saints of the early centuries, to Moldovan spirituality and the heritage of St Paisius (Velichkovsky) (1722-1794) and Fr Cleopa Ilie, the great Carpathian elder (1912-1998), as well as to contemporary Ukrainian figures like Elder Iona of Odessa (1925-2012) and Metr Onufry of Kiev (1944 – ).

‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy Survives in England

Thus, in February 2022, 6 parishes, 16 clergy, including 7 priests, and 5,000 laypeople moved away from the local ROCOR diocese. Nearly all went to the Patriarchate of Romania and not a single one returned to serve in ROCOR. The departure of over three-quarters of the ROCOR Diocese in England to the Patriarchate of Romania, left ROCOR with mainly a few new and untrained Non-Russian-speaking convert clergy, a tiny group of about 100 core faithful and 1500 nominal Orthodox. Moreover, our move took place eight days before the present phase of the conflict in the Ukraine in 2022 and the further tragic politicisation and disruption of Russian Church life.

A spiritual son of, and ordained priest by, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor in that see to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, I believe that the positive heritage of the old ROCOR has to be saved. It was Archbishop Antony who had stopped the spread of sectarianism in ROCOR in the US already in the 1970s. We followed him. We are ever loyal to the memory and practices of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and his successor Archbishop Antony, to the Presov Rusyn Metr Laurus (Shkurla) and to the west Ukrainian Metr Hilarion (Kapral) (1948-2022). We see in the politically free Autonomous Romanian Metropolitan of Western and Southern Europe, with nearly 3 million faithful, 700 parishes and several monasteries, the greatest hope for a future Local Church of Western Europe.

After nearly fifty years of faithfulness to the Russian Church and over 36 years of unpaid service at the altar, this marked a new beginning, but one to which all had been moving in the recent period of the Sovietisation of ROCOR, which sees the Church as a Business. We twelve, five priests, two deacons and five readers who joined the Romanian Church, are an international group, profoundly opposed to the sectarian trends coming from the new ROCOR in the USA. We do not want to belong to the ghettoes of egomania or the sects of pathology. They are not the way forward. These trends were exported to England during the critical illness and loss of control of ROCOR by the ever-memorable Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral). He was the last ROCOR First Hierarch able to keep ROCOR unity, before being struck down by his dementia and cancer well before his repose in 2022. We honour his memory, as also that of Metr Laurus.

Our Parish and the Future

On 20 May 2022, in one of her last acts, the late Queen Elizabeth made my native town a City. Its coat of arms, depicting St Helen and the three crowns of St Edmund, declares: No Cross, no Crown (of martyrdom). Our churches in the City of Colchester, the main one dedicated to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, and the other dedicated to All the Saints of these Isles, have become a spiritual centre for Moldovans, Ukrainians, Romanians and all patriotic, but non-nationalist, Russians. We consider that we have only one passport and under ‘Nationality’ that passport says ‘Orthodox Christian’. We have trilingual services and an emphasis on personal confession and communion and the prayer of the heart, as well as rejecting the money-making mercenary spirit of marble and gold, so evident in so many churches, especially in London and other capitals.

For us the Patriarchate of Romania, which is in communion with all Orthodox, is the royal way forward, between the extremisms of Constantinople and Moscow, which are scandalously out of communion with one another, both effectively in schism with one another. Ignoring politics and nationalism, the Colchester parish has good relations with the Greek monastery at Tolleshunt Knights, where I often met the now St Sophrony in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the monastery was still poor. Attended on Sundays by between 200 and 400 faithful, communions at St John’s number between 100 and 300 on Sundays, with between 50 and 100 children, making it one of the three largest Orthodox parishes in England. We are followers of ‘Carpathian’ spirituality. The Carpathians are on the Western edge of the Orthodox world. So are we.

We continue in the path of the everyday spirituality of the people, of Carpathian Orthodoxy, outside the Romes, with their Spirit-quenching politics, soul-destroying bureaucracies and anti-spiritual ‘protocols’. This is the same as Hebridean, Ionan and Lindisfarnian spirituality of old, practised in these isles some fourteen centuries ago. It is the one and the same ‘Spiritodox’ world, the world of ordinary families who go to their pastors, monks and hermits for spiritual orientation, making pilgrimages to Mt Athos, Moldavia, Diveevo and Ekaterinburg, and St Spyridon and St Nicholas. This is not some sort of ‘neo-hesychasm’, for hesychasm never died. Last year at the Ascension the large icon of St John of Kronstadt in the Colchester church began to give off a fragrance, noticed by all, and the Icon of Christ on the iconostasis gave out a large droplet of myrrh. So does heaven reply to the persecutors of the Church, with Love, not with the aggressive bullying and attempted intimidation of the pharisees. We pray for them all, that they may be relieved of their burden of hatred and come to know Christ.

Part Four: The Future

Rejecting the Temptation of the Romes

There are those who ask how the present stand-off between Constantinople and Moscow, the Second and Third Romes, will end. Those pessimists who see only the acts of sinful men should know that there will not be an everlasting schism. Political personalities come and then they die. True, too many harsh words have been said and too many injustices have been committed by both sides. The use of ‘defrocking’ for purely political, and not canonical, purposes is absurd. All political ‘defrockings’ are reversible, as they have been reversed so many times before, when the injustices of previous regimes are overturned, just as the tables of the money-changers in the Temple were overturned by the Saviour, Who said: ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves’ (Matt 21, 12-13). Bishops who misapply the canons, those who themselves receive clergy without releases but then condemn others for receiving clergy without releases, because those selfsame bishops have instituted schisms, and in places as far apart as the USA, the Netherlands, England, Lithuania and Africa, only discredit themselves and make themselves into laughing-stocks.

There will have to be negotiations between them on territory. Moscow cannot go on behaving as though countries like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, like Finland, Poland, the Czech Lands or Slovakia, are any different from the other countries of Roman Catholic and Protestant cultural background in Western and Central Europe. Those countries too are de facto shared territory like Western Europe. On the other hand, as regards Africa, perhaps Hellenist Alexandria will have to return to holding only the territory of Egypt and Libya, as a century ago, and leave the rest of Africa to missions from the Russian Church. And Hellenist Constantinople will have to abandon the domain of the East Slavs, Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, to the jurisdiction of the Russian Church – for a moment.

For the coming political takeover of the Ukraine as a result of the Russian military operation against the US on the battlefield of the Ukraine and the conferring of the status of a pro-Russian Protectorate on the New Ukraine, will make no difference in the Russian Church sphere. Though the Russian State will surely win militarily in the Ukraine, as it is already winning, the Russian Church is already the great loser. It has lost through its involvement in politics and is discredited outside the Russian Federation, its churches in Western Europe often reduced to little more than embassy churches. If other Local Churches recognise the self-declared autocephaly of the canonical Ukrainian Church, this will hasten the inevitable end. The Russian Church will have to cede long-overdue autocephaly, both to the New Ukraine and then to Belarus. The three brother-peoples will belong to three Sister-Churches.

Thou Hast Conquered, O Galilean

As for us, we continue to stand in the centre. Some will say that we in East Anglian England are provincials, ‘rustics’. Well, we are provincials – but we are not ashamed of it. Though standing in the centre means that we are attacked by both extremes, this is the only valid position, for Christ was also crucified between two thieves. However despised provincial Galilee was, it was Galilee that defeated the Capital of Jerusalem, with its Sanhedrin of high priests, scribes and pharisees. Why? Because in fact Galilee was the centre, just as a cave in Bethlehem, not the Senate in Rome, was also in its time the centre. The People’s Orthodoxy is controversial to the Imperial elite, just as Christ was controversial to the scribes and pharisees. But woe unto them.

And so our ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy stands at the centre. We stand outside the politics of capitals, old and new. We reject the Three Romes and their Imperialism and Papism, both Phanariot and Muscovite, which are supported only by their readiness to compromise on everything with States. We reject both the Church-State of Old Rome and the State Churches of the Second and Third Romes. It is Imperial Orthodoxy, not ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy, that is marginal, because the Imperial Church is not the Faith of the people, of pastors, parish priests and monasteries, but of intriguing oligarchs, hard-hearted politicians and self-tortured ideologues.

In the 4th century the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363), born in Constantinople and finishing his poisonous life in what is now Iraq, returned to persecuting the Church. He became known as ‘the last Pagan Emperor’, though, alas!, that is not true. Julian wrote an attack on Christianity, ‘Against the Galileans’. The trickery of the ‘Galileans’—his usual term for Orthodox Christians – had nothing divine in it, he claimed, it appealed to ‘rustics’ only, and it was made up of fables and irrational falsehoods. Here can be seen his intellectual snobbery, like that of our present persecutors, who claim to have some worldly academic qualifications. Julian’s plan to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem had to be abandoned. He lost his fight against Christ, humiliated by ‘the rustics’. It is said that his last words were: ‘Thou hast conquered, O Galilean’. The provincial Galileans had even then won.

Towards a Local Church

Our Church is already a Local Church. Indeed, other Local Churches already exist. They begin not in capitals, where there is a separate church for each nationality, often de facto embassy churches, but in the provinces, where Orthodox of all nationalities are brought together and have to be together, living with one another. In the greater picture beyond this, there is the whole problem of Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania, where the absence of four Autocephalous Local Churches is absurd, despite over a century of Orthodox presence there and despite the presence there of some 10% of the Orthodox episcopate of 1,000 bishops.

We have always opposed those who tried to undermine the inevitability of new Local Churches in these Diaspora lands. They ruin all hope for them through extremism, whether of the modernist/secularist/new calendarist, or the pharisaic/ghettoist/old calendarist, variety. If your only selling-point is that you are like the whole secular world around you, whose values you share, then you have nothing to give to create a new Local Church. But if your only selling-point is your differences, or, worse still, that your differences make you ‘superior’ to all others, then you are a pharisee and you too are working against a new Local Church.

A Church of and for ‘incels’ and right-wing pharisees is not a Church. A Church of military rigidity, of the straitjacket and Stalinist conformism is not a Church. A Church of and for intellectuals is not a Church. A Church of wokeism, of anything goes, swimming with the tide and secularist conformism is not a Church. The Church is for all who accept Her as She is, the Church for all generations and all nationalities, for all who wish to live better lives and know that this is possible only through Christ. Our Church is the Church of the spiritual, not of the material and its obsessions with power and riches, property and prestige. Our Church is not the Church of politicians and businessmen, but the Church of the Saints. We too say: No Cross, No Crown. And again we say: Christ is Risen!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

City of Colchester, England,

Eastertide 2023

(The above is available as a printed brochure)