In the Week of St Gregory Palamas

Gregory Palamas was born in Constantinople in about 1296, where his father was a courtier of Emperor Andronikos II. When Gregory was still a child, his father died and the Emperor took part in the education of the orphan. He hoped that the gifted boy would devote himself to imperial service. Instead, he chose monastic life on Mt Athos and the Christian tradition of unceasing prayer, known in Greek as ‘hesychasm’.

Gregory received a good education and even studied the pagan Greek Aristotle, but in 1316 he left to become an Athonite monk. In 1326, aged thirty, because of the threat of Turkish attacks he and others took refuge in Thessaloniki where he was ordained priest. Spending his time in prayerful service to the people, he also founded a small community of hermits near Thessaloniki in Veria. The cave where he lived and prayed can still be visited.

Later Fr Gregory served for a short time as Abbot of Esphigmenou on Mt Athos. Here he was asked by monks to defend the tradition of unceasing prayer from the attacks of a Catholic-trained Greek called Barlaam. Gregory wrote a number of works in defence and stood up for the practice of unceasing prayer at six different Councils in Constantinople. Like all later Greek Catholics, Barlaam asserted that it was impossible to determine from whom the Holy Spirit proceeds and Gregory naturally viewed Barlaam’s argument as agnostic. In his response titled ‘Apodictic Treatises’, Gregory proved that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, but not from the Son.

In response to Barlaam’s attacks, Gregory wrote nine treatises entitled ‘Triads in Defence of Those Who Practise Hesychia’ (Unceasing Prayer). The first Triad was written in the second half of the 1330s and was based on discussions between Gregory and Barlaam. Gregory’s teaching was affirmed by monks of Mount Athos, who met in a Council in 1340–1. In early 1341, the monasteries composed ‘The Tome of the Holy Mountain’. This was a presentation of Gregory’s teaching and it became a textbook of Christian theology.

As an apostate Orthodox without spiritual experience, Barlaam viewed any claim of the real and conscious experience of God ‘as a heresy’. He also rejected the Christian teaching on the uncreated nature of the Divine Light, the experience of which is the result of unceasing prayer. Deprived of the Holy Spirit, he regarded that experience as ‘heretical and blasphemous’. The Divine Light was maintained by Christians to be identical to the Light seen by Christ’s disciples at the Transfiguration.

The second Triad quoted some of Barlaam’s writings. In response to this, Barlaam composed a treatise called ‘Against the Messalians’, which linked the hesychasts to a proud, materialist, Protestant-style sect called the Messalians, thus accusing Christians of heresy! In the third Triad, Gregory refuted Barlaam’s charge, showing that Orthodox Christians are not anti-sacramentalist and do not claim to see the essence of God. Gregory oriented the Orthodox teaching against Barlaam on the issue of pagan intellectualism, that is, the Hellenism of such as Aristotle, which he considered to be the main source of the heresies of the Scholastic Barlaam.

Six Patriarchal Councils were held in Constantinople between 1341 and 1351 to consider Barlaam’s attacks against Orthodox Christianity. These are accepted as having universal status by many Orthodox. Some call them the Fifth Council of Constantinople or the Ninth Universal Council. The Council of May 1341 condemned Barlaam and the Patriarch insisted that all Barlaam’s writings be destroyed. Barlaam realised that he could not promote his errors among Orthodox Christians and went to Italy, where he was soon appointed Roman Catholic Bishop of Gerace.

After Barlaam’s departure, a pro-Catholic Aristotelian intellectual called Gregory Akindynos became the chief critic of the Christian teaching on unceasing prayer and the Divine Light. However, the second Council in Constantinople in August 1341 condemned Akindynos and affirmed the findings of the earlier Council. Nevertheless, Akindynos and his supporters gained a brief victory at a rogue Council held in 1344, which excommunicated Gregory. Here his opponents spread slanderous accusations against him and in 1344 the corrupt Patriarch John XIV imprisoned Gregory for four years.

Nevertheless, the last of the Six Councils in 1351 supported Gregory and finally condemned his opponents. This Council ordered that his enemies, the Metropolitans of Ephesus and Ganos, be defrocked and jailed. All those who were unwilling to accept Christian teachings were excommunicated. A series of anathemas were pronounced against Barlaam, Akindynos and their followers. At the same time, a series of acclamations was made in favour of Gregory and the adherents of the Christian teaching, which he had expressed.

In 1347, when a new and non-corrupt Patriarch was appointed, Gregory was released from prison and consecrated Archbishop of Thessaloniki. He probably reposed in 1359 and his last words were: ‘To the heights! To the heights!’ He was canonised only nine years later, in 1368, and his life was written and a service was composed to him. His feast is celebrated twice a year, on 14 November, the anniversary of his repose, and on the Second Sunday of Lent. This is because St Gregory’s victory over Barlaam is a continuation of the victory of the Church over heresy, which is celebrated on the first Sunday of Lent. St Gregory’s relics are venerated in the church dedicated to him in Thessaloniki. In 2009 Gregory’s mother and four siblings also embraced the monastic life and the whole family was canonised.

Persecution is the norm for those in the Church who oppose politically-motivated corruption and intimidation. Christ was slandered and crucified. St John Chrysostom was deposed and twice exiled. St Gregory Palamas was excommunicated from the Church, slandered and imprisoned. In the last century St Nectarius of Pentapolis was slandered and exiled by jealous Greek bishops of his own Synod. St John of Shanghai was slandered, put on trial and suspended by jealous Russian bishops of his own Synod. Today, nothing has changed. Those who propose the Gospel model of the Church and not the corrupt one, which is all about money, power and so links with States, are also persecuted, just as we have been persecuted for 2,000 years already.

 

 

 

 

 

A Parable: The Icon

Over 2,000 years ago God came down to Earth from Heaven to visit His Creation. This much needed His help, as it had chosen all the wrong ways and was in great turmoil. God stayed for several years, left many words of wisdom that were written down. He was much persecuted, though He performed extraordinary miracles and even the miracle of Resurrection, conquering Death. As a farewell gift he left everyone an icon of Himself. Since then people have done various things with the icon:

  1. Some sold their icon in order to make some money.
  2. Some did not take care of the icon and lost it.
  3. Some did not like the icon and painted over it.
  4. Some let the icon get very dirty, so now you can hardly see it.
  5. Some put the icon in a big frame and took great care of the frame, but forgot the icon itself.
  6. Some painted foreign words on the icon and said that it showed their national god.
  7. Some used the icon as a weapon and starting hitting people over the head with it.
  8. Some kept the icon and revere it exactly as it is.

Which group do you belong to?

 

Converts and Envelope-Converts

 Foreword

First I must explain the title of this essay. The Russian word ‘konvert’ means an envelope. And there is an old joke, told me about 30 years ago by a ROCOR bishop from America, that ‘the problem with ‘konverts’ is that sometimes they are empty and sometimes they come unstuck’. Beyond jokes, the real question is why can converts to the Faith sometimes be empty and why can they sometimes come unstuck? In other words, what is the difference between ‘converts’ and ‘envelope-converts’? Below we attempt to answer this question.

Introduction: Converts 

The psychology of converts is universally the same. I remember about 40 years ago meeting a Jewish man who had married a woman who, some years before meeting him and converting to Judaism, had already converted to Catholicism. When she had been a Catholic, she had been a traditionalist, a Latin masser. The husband complained to me about his wife, who had become Jewish in order to marry him, and had then started to impose very strict, zealot Jewish observances on him. Since he had always been a very secular, non-practising Jew, he found it very troublesome and it was breaking up the marriage. From his wife’s behaviour, I realised that convert psychology is universal. Someone who has psychological problems will carry them over into any religion. There is no theology here, only psychology and, worse still, pathology. Beware.

For instance, a few years ago I met an Englishman who had chosen to become a Muslim. What he had been before, I have no idea. Of course, as a recent convert he forced himself to dress like a Muslim from Afghanistan, had changed his name from Bob to Mohammed, grown a long beard, insisted that Muslim women wear a veil and interspersed his cockney speech with badly-pronounced Arabic words. He was the opposite of the other Muslims around him, all immigrants, whose only desire was to conform to English models of behaviour, to integrate and not stand out. In other words, Bob was what is popularly called a ‘beardy-weirdy’. I later heard that he had gone to live in the Middle East. Someone even said that maybe he had gone to fight with ISIS.

Some Eastern European Examples

In Russian the word for ‘convert’ is ‘neofit’, a neophyte. Since virtually all Orthodox in Russia are converts from over the last 30 years, there are also pastoral problems with some of them, who, for example, collect Orthodox books (they must have all of them, read or unread), dress in black and go off and live in forests or caves and then think they are being Orthodox. In fact, they are destroying their lives and those of their children. I have seen the same thing with Greeks and Romanians, those of an intellectual type. Baptised Orthodox as babies, they had all gone through some deep experience in their twenties (one Greek man had become a Buddhist) and then returned, chastened, to Orthodoxy. However, in countries with millions of Orthodox, such eccentrics are very, very few.

There were already such repentant spiritual tourists in the Russian emigration. Thus, Metr Antony Bloom had been an atheist until he was 14. And twenty years before him Fr Sophrony Sakharov had become a Hindu and was deeply attracted by the concepts of gurus, ashrams and mantras. Before him there had been the case of Fr Sergei Bulgakov, who had been a Marxist revolutionary. All joined, or rejoined, the Church after experiencing life. There is nothing extraordinary here. After all, all the apostles were converts. We recall how fishermen decided to follow Christ, and then a tax collector followed them. It is all related in the Gospels. As for the Epistles, these are simply letters written by converts to groups of converts in various parts of the Roman Empire. If you read those letters, you will find that some of those converts got up to some very strange things (they were ‘envelope-converts’), which is why they received instructions on how to behave and what our Faith actually is. Perhaps the most famous case of a convert is the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9).

As for the Fathers, many of them were also ‘converts’, who had studied in some pagan school, for instance in Athens, and then got baptised. The Three Great Hierarchs, St John Chrysostom, St Basil the Great and St Gregory the Theologian, come to mind at once. And yet nobody would think of calling the apostles or these Fathers ‘converts’. Let alone ‘envelope-converts’ who were empty or who came unstuck. So what is the difference? Why do some simply become Orthodox Christians and others cause tragedies to themselves and to others? Below I describe why converts become ‘envelope-converts’.

Joining the Church and Becoming Orthodox

Regularly, about six times a year I am phoned by someone who wants ‘to join the Church’. Having read something, usually on the internet, or seen a youtube video or, even worse, a podcast, they are attracted. However, they are not attracted to Orthodox Christianity, only to the idea or theory of a marginal form of Orthodoxy. My answer to them is always the same: ‘Come to the service next Sunday’. Of course, they never come. The point is that they have no desire to know that Orthodox Christianity is about living a way of life, at the heart of which are the Church services. That would mean them changing their way of life. They may as an idea wish to join the Church, but they do not want to become Orthodox. And that is no use at all.

In general, it can be said that there are two sorts of candidate to join the Church. Those who want to join the Church and those who want to become Orthodox; those who come with baggage and have expectations, and those who do not; those who want to change what the Church is and those who accept the Church as it is. This is rather like some young people who think they have fallen in love, but want to change the characters of the objects of their infatuation: ‘Oh, I know he did that, but I’ll change him’, says the silly young woman who is full of her imagined abilities to change a criminal, and, ‘She’ll change once we’re together’, says the silly young man, who is pretentious. It always ends up in tears. If you love someone, you love their faults too. And if you don’t love their faults, or do not know what their faults are, or, worse still, imagine that they do not have any, you are in for a big surprise. As the old joke says: ’The only time a woman changes a man is when she changes his nappies as a baby’.

It can be said that these two sorts of candidates are either those who love themselves (they tend to egomania and weird ego-trips of garden shed Orthodoxy) and those who love God and love others. The first want to impose their pride and their proud theories because they do not love God and love others. The second accept in humility and learn. Love is the key. The first lack love, and can be singularly unloving, the second show love and so readiness to learn. This explains why so many ‘envelope-converts’ never become Orthodox Christians, but come unstuck and lapse, either into what they were before or else into some new obsession. These are the serial lapsers, who demand baptism umpteen times and drift from one ‘religion’ to another. They are empty, they take but do not give, they destruct but do not construct.

Pride

I remember serving at a Russian church in Brussels about thirty-five years ago. There were perhaps 250 people there. I immediately spotted two converts among the crowd. How? One was a woman dressed in what seemed to be ballgown with a huge headscarf/tablecloth on her head and the other was a man dressed all in black and with a huge beard. All the other women were dressed normally in knee-length skirts or dresses, most had no head covering at all. As for the men, they were all clean-shaven and I do not think any of the clergy had a beard anything like that of the convert.

This obsession with externals is typical of the ‘envelope-convert’. Eccentric dress, beards and long hair for men, wearing prayer-knots around the wrist, lapel or even pectoral crosses, icons, incense, books, fasting. Just so as you know: This disease of convertitis will not save you. This confusion between means and ends is a kind of idolatry, as it confuses creation with the Creator. No externals will ever save you, even if, when accepted in humility, they can help you. Only humility will save you. I always say to such strange dressers: look at the others in Church. They have been Orthodox for decades, for their whole lives, as their ancestors for centuries before them. None of them dresses like you. Dress like them. None of them bothers about fasting from vertebrates and invertebrates (what are they anyway?), none of them reads the ingredient labels on foodstuffs. Stop being different. Salvation is not there. Salvation is in humility.

The root of this idolatry, as that of all fantasies, is the same: pride. It is pride which is behind all envelope-converts. This can be seen in their open self-justifications for weirdness: ‘I am better than the others’; ‘I am not like them’; ‘they haven’t read the books that I’ve read’; ‘they don’t understand’; ‘they haven’t been to Mt Athos’. (These are all actual quotations). These are the people who want to be ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’. And they all end up being less Orthodox than the Orthodox, that is, they all end up outside the Church. Such converts always want to give advice to others, as they know everything. Yet they know nothing, apart from externals and their desire to condemn others. It is sad.

More Pride

Such envelope-convert laypeople, sometimes married with families, want to imitate monastics. However, to live in a monastery, you first of all need obedience. And that is precisely what they do not have. I remember one such family in France. They went off to live in the Cevenne mountains, living in a ruin, getting water from a stream and without electricity. The nearest shop was six miles away. After a time the fed-up wife left the fanatical, hippyish husband who spent his time ‘meditating’ and had forced her and the children to live back in the Middle Ages. (Apparently, he thought this was ‘Orthodox’). As for the children, they left with her and never set foot in an Orthodox church afterwards. The husband died a few years ago, a lonely and embittered old convert. And precisely a ‘convert’, because he had never actually become Orthodox.

Convert pride is often manifested in idealism, as was the case above. Never think that idealism is good. It forces others. Lenin was an idealist. So was Hitler. Beware. Convert pride makes the convert think he is ‘special’ and ‘different’. This is not only in outward appearance, but also in speech, in the use of words such as ‘a temple’, instead of ‘a church’, or they will tell you that they are ‘under the omofor’ of someone. Ordinary lifelong Orthodox never tell you that, indeed they often do not even know whose diocese they are in, still less, care.

Then there are the converts who go on and on about their ‘spiritual father’ or, worse still, ‘starets’, who is probably just a very ordinary parish priest. But they want to belong to a cult. Here we encounter the problem of ‘guruism’. Twice in my life I have come across converts, one English and one Russian, who wanted me to become their ‘spiritual father’. I refused to play at being a guru. They both went elsewhere and ended up outside the Church, one lapsing completely, the other joining a cultish sect from America. The pride here is that they want a guru so as to make a saint out of him and can then flatter themselves that, as their guru is a saint, they too must be saints. ‘I am special, I have a spiritual father’, is their secret mantra.

Yet More Pride

The obsession with books can also play a role here. The ‘envelope-convert’ must have an ‘Orthodox library’. When asked to recommend an Orthodox book to read, I always reply the New Testament. This really puts them off, as what they want is some piece of exotica (because they are ‘special’, ‘not like other men’ (Lk. 18, 11)). If they reply that they have already read the New Testament, I answer: ‘You may have read it, but you haven’t understood it’. The difference between Protestants and real Orthodox is that the Protestants have read it and not understood it and therefore do not live it, whereas the real Orthodox have generally not read it, but understood it and therefore live it.

Pride is not just unpleasant, it is also extremely dangerous. Some may have read the warnings given by St Ignatius (Brianchaninov) and St Theophan the Recluse, both of the century before last, about pride. For example, there is the convert who became crazy through the prayer of the heart. How is this possible? Simply because he said the prayer without love and humility. His intention in repeating it thousands of times a day was to become a saint, that is, to become ‘better than others’. It was not to become humble. He became mentally ill not through a prayer, but through his deluded pride. The source of most mental illness and all delusion is precisely pride. I have seen this happen. This is real. If you have no love and humility, this can happen.

Some may be shocked by this, but think about what the Apostle Paul wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. ‘Whoever shall eat this bread and drink this cup of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord…For he that eats and drinks unworthily, eats and drinks damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you and many sleep’ (I Cor 11, 27-30). They become ill not through holy communion, but through pride. The danger is when such ‘crazy converts’, as the Americans call them, or ‘novices’, as the Apostle Paul calls them, become clergy. And yet the Apostle is clear: ‘A bishop then must be…not a novice, unless being lifted up with pride, he falls into the condemnation of the devil’ (I Tim 3, 2-6). Such clergy create whole cultish sects full of their clones.

Conclusion: Conversion Without Pride

Christ speaks of ‘envelope-converts’ in the Gospel, the ones he calls pharisees and proselytes: ‘Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites! For you compass sea and land to make one proselyte and when he is made, you make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves’ (Matt. 23, 15). The problem is not of course with converts who have really converted, but with non-converts, those who claim to have converted, when they have not. I have met such people who, even after fifty years, have not actually converted. Some are indeed ‘children of hell’. When someone says that he is a convert, I always ask him: ‘A convert to what?’

Every time we go to confession is a conversion. Indeed, if you do not go to confession, you will not be converted, but will always remain at that selfsame primitive level of: ‘I haven’t done anything wrong’, or, ‘I haven’t done anything different from everyone else’. I have met several Orthodox like this. Every Sunday for decades they have taken communion, but have never ever been to confession. And this from lifelong Orthodox in their fifties. There is nothing wrong with conversion. On the contrary, there is everything wrong with unconversion. But conversion is not a point, it is a process. In order to become (Orthodox) Christians, we have to convert every day. Otherwise, we shall just remain ‘envelope-converts’, empty through lack of zeal, or else come unstuck, as the Apostle writes, through ‘zeal not according to knowledge’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Two Questions on Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and Russia and the Ukraine

Q: I am Catholic, initially because I was born into a Catholic family of Irish origin. But I have been going to Orthodox churches and travelling in countries where there are lots of Orthodox for twenty years. I have also read a lot, starting off with Timothy Ware’s The Orthodox Church. I am familiar with all the Orthodox views about the Catholic Church. I am myself against the filioque and against compulsory celibacy for clergy, though I have remained Catholic. I also know about the pedophile scandals in Catholicism.

I have a question, but will you have the courage to answer it and then publish it? If you will, I shall respect you, but if you do not, I don’t think I will ever read anything Orthodox again. Now I come to my question:

In the last six months I have read about a pedophile Orthodox bishop in Canada, who was sent to prison, a Greek Orthodox bishop in France involved in homosexual orgies and an Orthodox bishop in Britain who spent the night in a hotel with his boyfriend, but did not know that the manager of the hotel was Orthodox and so was caught out. None of this is hearsay, it is all facts. I have checked them several times. So what is the real difference between Catholics and Orthodox? Do not mention the word ‘filioque’ in your answer.

A: The difference? Simple:

In Catholicism corruption is systematic, institutional, ingrained among the clergy. True, there are many ordinary Catholics, including some priests (usually secretly married) who are very good people, but this is because they defied the system. The Hungarian Fr Gabriel Patacsi, who was a teacher of mine in Paris 44 years ago, was an example, though he later joined the Orthodox Church.

On the other hand, in the Orthodox Church corruption among the clergy is personal. For every bishop you find like those you mention above or who is a CIA spy, and I have come across them all and so can confirm what you say, you will find another who is not only normal, but also pious.

In Russian there is a popular saying that when a man is ordained, and even more so, when he is consecrated bishop, a demon enters into him. Some are shocked by this saying, because theologically it is the Holy Spirit that enters into him. However, there is profound truth here. The theological fact is that when a man is ordained/consecrated, whatever is inside him gets reinforced because of the presence of the Holy Spirit – or else because of that man’s resistance to the Holy Spirit, in other words, because of demonic activity in him. If he is pious, then piety will become stronger. If he is wicked and can only think about money or perversion, then that tendency will also get worse. Here is the great danger of ordaining/consecrating the corrupt or the perverted.

Thus, we know of one bishop who loves trying to close churches, which are the fruits of decades of missionary work. All the people who visit those churches which have remained open despite him, and there are thousands of those people, are disgusted with him. But because he is a careerist and was never interested in authentic Church life, he does the devil’s work instead.

If you read Fr Tikhon’s best-selling books, Everyday Saints (when he asked me before it was translated what the English title should be, my suggestion was Saints and Sinners), there is the story from the Prologue about an awful bishop. When people asked as to why he was a bishop, the answer was: ‘Because we could not find anyone worse’. Here is the reality. Here is why the main task of pastors today is to protect the flocks entrusted to them from wolves in sheep’s clothing and also from wolves in shepherd’s clothing.

Q: Does Russia have a future after what has happened in the Ukraine? Surely the Russian Patriarch Kyrill is finished?

A: Your question seems to confuse three different things, Russia, Patriarch Kyrill, and the Russian Orthodox Church.

As regards Russia, I think it ultimately has a great future, unlike Europe, which is in a huge mess, even more since the US sabotaged its economies by blowing up the Nordstream pipelines and forcing it to impose on itself suicidal sanctions against cheap Russian oil, gas and cereals. Russia, China, India Iran and, frankly, nearly all of Africa, Asia and Latin America, seven-eighths of the world together, can be unbeatable. The sooner Western Europe abandons its exceptionalism and joins them, the better for it.

As for Patriarch Kyrill, let us leave persons aside. He is only a Patriarch, not the Church, so that is not important and any views just end up being speculative. Let us look at the third matter, the Russian Orthodox Church, which is a different matter from Russia.  Here we have to go back into history.

The Russian Church has been betrayed for over 300 years.

Read about what Peter I and the German Catherine II did to the Church 250-300 years ago. Then the Patriarch was replaced by an Erastian, State-worshipping, Protestant-style, German-named minister, who sometimes was an atheist or a freemason, nearly always anti-monastic, anti-Tradition, anti-Patriarchal and so anti-canonical. That Church enslavement to the Russian State was typical of the situation for 200 years, until 1917. They betrayed the Church.

After 1917 Russia was for a few months dominated by the ‘Whites’. The first and main ‘Revolution’ in February 1917 was a palace revolt, carried out by Great Britain with help from other Western countries, above all by incompetent, aristocratic ‘White’ Russian traitors, ones who today would be called oligarchs.  The Whites, for the most part so-called Whites, betrayed the Church. Perhaps 90% of them committed atrocities in the Civil War and abandoned the Church. The 90% were only really interested in getting back their properties and their wealth. They betrayed the Church – and the Tsar and therefore the people, whom he represented. Incompetent, they lost power to the ‘Reds’.

The Reds took everything that was anti-Russian before the two 1917 Revolutions and multiplied it by ten. They betrayed the Church. The second ‘Revolution’, in October 1917, was a Bolshevik mob takeover, carried out by atheist Jews like Trotsky, financed from New York, and they were even more anti-Russian, killing millions of Russians (though a lot fewer than the CIA claimed), destroying Russian churches and Russian values for decades.

After the collapse of all that in 1991, for thirty years, post-Soviet Russia was created and ruled by Western-controlled, money-grubbing Russian oligarchs and traitors. They betrayed the Church, but from inside, through oligarchs in cassocks.

Only since the turning-point of 24 February 2022, exactly 100 years since the USSR was established and exactly 300 years since the foundation of the Russian Empire, has change begun. Then traitors began to flee abroad to their masters and post-Soviet Russia at last began to crumble. For the West’s actions in the Ukraine since 2014 has made all Russians at last face up to the question, which question they wanted to avoid answering, so they could continue living in the illusions of their fools’ paradise. This question was:

Do you support the real Orthodox Russia or do you support the anti-Russian West?

Now this Western-imposed question is a providential sword which forces all Russians to take up a position. And that includes the Russian Church. Here the question is:

Do you side with historic Orthodox Christianity, or with the Western-created decadence of post-Soviet Russia with its adoration of the CIA values of money and luxury, with centralised bureaucracy and nationalism, superstition and ritualism, homosexuality and modernism, mindless ignorance and heartless formalism, which sees the Church as a mere Business.

If you side with the latter, then the Church will return to what it was before the Revolution. And if this is so, then there will be another Revolution. Only in the first case does the Russian Church have a future.

All this is quite independent of the Ukraine problem, which is only a symptom, not the cause. Let me explain:

Since 2007 I have travelled a lot in the Ukraine and in Russia. My last visit to the Ukraine was in October 2021. I have seen both saints and sinners among the clergy. So much is superficial there, all about careerism, awards and money. Buy yourself a mitre, make a nice present to your bishop and after ten years of priesthood, he will award you the mitre, even if you are a rascal. That is so typically Ukrainian, though common in Russia too. I remember at one concelebration with about forty priests in the Ukraine, where I was by far the oldest priest, half of the priests had mitres. The average age? About 40. How can a Church like that survive? It is all so superficial. God is not mocked. Here there is simply a lack of love, it is a Church for show.

The point is that you cannot be a ‘post-Soviet’ Church, just as you could not be a ‘Soviet Church’ or, for that matter, ‘a ‘CIA Church’. If so, then you are siding with hell on earth and that means that you are bent on self-destruction. I am not talking about some personal theory. I have seen this. It is factual.

Or else post-Soviet can mean ‘pre-Orthodox’. And that means that a Tsar is coming and he will cleanse the Russian Church of its wicked clergy. Which way will it go with the Church? I do not know and I have been saying that since 2007. If a Tsar is not coming, then Antichrist will come instead. And that is exactly what is happening in the Ukraine now. That is why I say that is a symptom, not a cause, a symptom of the lack of faith. The war is there because God is not mocked. They mocked Him, so there is war.

In the end the apostles, prophets and fools for Christ who preach of the Holy Spirit will win against the bureaucrats and formalists, against Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, who have no love, who only have self-interest in their careers and bank accounts, in the ‘system’, like the pharisees of old. They always do win. Here is what I mean by the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The war in the Ukraine is the Judgement of God. The Russian Church in Russia and in the Ukraine is being judged NOW for the heartless formalism of its Spirit-quenchers, just as it was in 1917. This judgement is happening now at the Front in the Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have died over the last year. Now is the Judgement of the Nations. The outcome? Don’t ask me, I am not a prophet.

 

 

On Those who Betray the Church and Those who are Faithful to the Church

Tell everyone that the evil that is in the world will grow even stronger,

but that it is not evil that will triumph, but love.

Tsar Nicholas II 

The Tsar and the Tsarina thought that they were dying for Russia.

In fact, they died for all mankind.

Pierre Gilliard

The misfortune that has befallen Russia is the direct result of grievous sins and her rebirth is only possible through cleansing from them. However, so far there has been no real repentance.

Bishop (now St) John of Shanghai

I have been asked many times from North America and from far distant Australia, to explain what seems to them the unexplainable, the spiritual catastrophe that took place here over the last five years, when what once was the Persecuted Church became the Persecuting Church, and how we avoided it. We explain to you that the Church has and has always had only one parts, but that there are two parasitic parts which outwardly mask it:

The Quenchers of the Spirit

These are young, inexperienced, often homosexual, lovers of money and power, slanderers, but above all narcissistic lovers of themselves. They are swimmers with the tide, agreeing with any who have power and belonging to them and their intrigues. They love worldly success and titles for they have sold their souls for material things. They have no future and will die out because they have no principles and nothing spiritual to give. As our Metropolitan said of them: Such always end up outside the Church.

The Sectarians

Although there are many good, sincere, simple and naïve among them, they have been misled by leaders who are pharisees and who love wealth. They love to condemn others and isolate themselves. As a result, they create and live in inward-looking ghettos. They say: ‘We don’t want many people here. It is cosier together’. They are dominated by the elderly and, sooner or later, they will die out.

The Faithful

These love the Saints of all nations and of all times. With the Saints they are the World Resistance Movement. Although they are hated and persecuted, they are always victorious, like the Saints and like their Master Christ, Who says: ‘Fear not, little flock’!

Here is what we believe:

Our Creed

We believe that we now stand at a parting of the ways in world history with the millennial failure of the Western world and Western religion. Therefore, we live for the restoration of the integrity of Orthodox Christendom. Although some are betrayed by the young Judas with his hand in the money bag, riven by nationalist subservience, compromised by money-oriented careerism, strangled by bureaucratic centralism and reduced to sectarian ritualism, we follow the Orthodox Christian way, the way of the New Martyrs and New Confessors, the way of the Saints of God. For the King is coming and we must be ready to meet Him.

I have lived in several European countries, not only in Russia. Just as I recognised neither the Soviet Union and post-Sovietism, nor do I recognise the European Union and post-Europeanism. The latter Union was born just a few days after the funeral of the former Union, as the demons that had haunted the USSR for exactly 75 years from December 1916 to December 1991 crossed westwards and found another corrupted and rotting corpse to infest and consume.

I was brought up with Tsar Nicholas II, the man who is maligned far more than any other in history, and with the murdered Alexander Pushkin and Ivan Turgenev, but also with William Shakespeare, Johann von Goethe, Alphonse Daudet and Knut Hamsun. I listened to Piotr Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rakhmaninov, but also to Johann Strauss, Edvard Grieg, Charles Trenet, Amalia Rodrigues and Albert Ketelby. I lived in Saint Petersburg, but also in Oslo, Paris, Thessaloniki, Lisbon and Vienna, passing through Belgrade, Geneva, Berlin, Prague, Madrid, Rome, London, Helsinki, Budapest, Bucharest and some very obscure but far more significant places inbetween, for their significance is mystical.

There is a birch forest and dusty summer tracks just outside Ekaterinburg in the Urals, a log peasant house outside Great Novgorod, a village on the Slovak border with the Ukraine where they have never spoken either Slovak or Ukrainian, the whitest sandy beach in the Gaelic Outer Hebrides by a ruined monk’s cell, a special old farmhouse with an apple orchard in Suffolk, a fragrant pine forest on the ambered Baltic coast of Latvia, a dark backstreet in Porto where I did a funeral service, the woods of Thassos in the azure-blue Aegean, a secret, lilac-filled courtyard in north-east Paris, left over from another age, a path by Lake Balaton in Hungary and a path by Lake Naroch in Belarus, and a little wooden chapel in the Romanian Carpathians that belongs to hermit-shepherds. They have all played a part. All these places, and many others, form one continuous story. But that is the little epic of a family with branches scattered across Old Russia and Old Europe and which is yet to be told. The tale of that Resurrection is for another time and another place.

In all my wanderings through Russia and Europe I have always believed that Russia must return to its roots and identity in order to refind itself. Since 2014, by Divine Providence, this has been happening. However, I have always believed that Europe too must return to its roots and identity in order to refind itself. This can be so through the example of Russia’s return, but it will be very radical and it will hurt a lot. Just as it hurt and hurts Russia. Humility, like the Church, always hurts.

Nevertheless, all can still come right, injustices can still be righted. The thirst for justice and for restitution can still triumph over the conspiracies of the past. It is always the same sevenfold story: Repentance, return, redemption, rebirth, restoration, restitution and resurrection. They form one continuous story. But that is the great epic of all the families with branches scattered across Russia and Europe and which is yet to be told. The tale of that Resurrection is for another time and another place.

Our Life

 

Our one road is the road God made

And all that we gave is repaid.

And as we follow this chosen road,

We know the blessing for what we sowed.

And as we tread, so do we fight,

In this great war beneath God’s light.

For we know that the Night will cease,

And like a shining white-robed priest

Coming forth all bright from the East,

The streaming Dawn will break and sing

That God, our Wisdom and our King,

Will grant us Life and Light and Spring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heresies, Schisms, Divisions and the Consequences of the Ukrainian Tragedy

The misfortune that has befallen Russia is the direct result of grievous sins and her rebirth is only possible through cleansing from them. However, so far there has been no real repentance.

Bishop (now St) John of Shanghai

Death is the enemy of Life; and he has many friends among men, in all those authorities in whom a debased sense of Life is linked with temporary power.

Introduction: On the Misuse of the Words Heresy and Schism

The words heresy and schism have been much misused and even abused, for self-justifying nationalist and political reasons. For example, Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky) (+ 1936) was accused of ‘heresy’ (heresy is a Greek word meaning a wrong choice) for stating that not only Christ’s Crucifixion, but also His Agony in Gethsemane played a part in our Redemption. Those who unreasonably accused him of ‘stavroclasm’, that he had rejected the centrality of the Cross, either misunderstood his words or else deliberately distorted his words out of personal dislike or, more often, because of differences in political views. Or there is Patriarch Sergius of Moscow (+ 1944), who was accused of the ‘heresy’ of ‘Sergianism’, a ‘heresy’ named as such by a priest who was a CIA operative and freemason! Of course, that Patriarch sinned through cowardice, abject lies, subservience to militant atheism, careerism, bureaucratic centralism and ritualism. The same misuse and abuse have happened with the word ‘schism’. (A Greek word meaning a split). This word has been misused to describe parishioners who left a (corrupt) priest for a non-corrupt priest, or who left a schismatic bishop for a non-schismatic bishop. The only schism was that of the bishop they had left! The same is true of political ‘defrockings’ (See below).

For example, over the last century the Russian emigration and the Patriarchal Church inside Russia were at each other’s throats for generations and accused each other of being ‘heretics’, ‘schismatics’, ‘without grace’ and ‘defrocked’ one another’s clergy. However, when the time came for reconciliation a few years after the fall of the USSR, they suddenly both withdrew all charges, stating that they had all been politically motivated. In other words, both sides had been lying the whole time! No wonder that there are priests who have been ‘defrocked’ by the KGB or the CIA and are considered to be confessors and not defrocked at all. Such ‘defrockings’ are of course all reversible, unlike what is stated on a Kremlin-funded, English-language ‘Orthodox’ website, which carefully censors all disagreement with itself. There is nothing new here. St John Chrysostom (+ 407) was also ‘defrocked’ for political reasons, St Nectarios of Pentapolis (+ 1920) was suspended because of jealousy, slandered, exiled and later canonised. As for St John of Shanghai (+ 1966), in the early 1960s he was suspended by his own ROCOR Synod and put on trial as a common criminal by his fellow-bishops. Later they canonised him! Nothing has changed.

Heresies

In the fourth century the Church became established, that is, it became closely linked to the State. There were many advantages to this, such as not being persecuted, being able to do missionary work freely, or receiving State financial aid to build churches. However, there were also many disadvantages, for example, officials were nominated as bishops by the State as part of an attempt at command and control, with centralisation, bureaucracy and protocols, clergy lined up in rigid ranks like soldiers, churches which were nationalist ghettos and not parish communities, and money charged for sacraments, all amid ritualism and superstition. St Basil the Great (+ 379) complained about bishops who had this mentality as not real bishops, they would side with anyone. Some of them did indeed know very little about Orthodox Christianity, some of them were probably atheists, or at least they behaved as the worst atheists. In any case, they compromised the Faith by their way of life, even though on paper they did not renounce the Creed, or Symbol of Faith, and so by inertia remained Orthodox Christians, but only nominally and formally, that is, only outwardly, and only for a time.

However, as usual, when you start living in a way that differs from the Creed, you fall into heresy. Now a heresy is a teaching that contradicts the Creed, which was drawn up at the two Universal Church Councils at Nicea in 325 and Constantinople in 381. Those who follow heresies are called heretics. The contents of the Creed, agreed on by all for all time, are dogmas of the Church. To apply the words ‘heresy’ and ‘dogma’ to anything outside the spiritually-revealed Creed is a misuse or abuse of the term. So a heresy is a separation from the Church for a dogmatic reason and leads to new dogmas and a new way of life, opposed to the Church. Many of the above nominal Orthodox Christians duly became heretics, called Gnostics, Arians, Nestorians, Sabellians, Donatists, Monophysites, Monothelites, Iconoclasts etc. Generally extremely proud and self-justifying, they all essentially denied that God is the Holy Trinity or that God had become man. All of these groups therefore denied some part of the Creed. Some of their naïve adherents, ‘heretics’, did return to the Church, but others, not naïve, did not.

The Roman Catholic Example

As an example of heresy, it was out of the situation of a State Church that in the eleventh century a new heresy (a heresy because it changed the Creed) called ‘Catholicism’ was born. This is a religion which is actually a State in itself. Its promoters who were greedy for power (unlkei its unconscious victims), wanted all the advantages of being a State Church, without the disadvantages. They did this by creating a ‘Church-State, that is, they put themselves above the State, making their institution into a Superstate. At the origin of this was their alteration to the text of the Creed, adding the word ‘filioque’, which implies that their Pope of Rome replaces Christ and the Holy Spirit. Thus, Orthodox Christians in Western Europe were forced to leave the Church by the invention of this new ‘Roman Catholic’ religion. Those who were conscious of this change were heretics, as they replaced Christ, present through the Holy Spirit, by mere men, with the title of Pope of Rome. The consequences were almost immediate.

At once bloodthirsty military campaigns were organised to obtain power, conquering lands and resources. The Popes of Rome promised the men who took part in them that whatever they did, murder, rape, theft, pillage, they would go to heaven because they were doing it in the name of the new Roman Catholic god. These expeditions were called ‘Crusades’ and started in what is now Italy, Spain and England (in 1066) and were then taken to Palestine, southern France and Eastern Europe (in the thirteenth century). These then developed into internal crusades with the bloodthirsty Inquisition and were spread in the sixteenth century to what is now Latin America. Certain Roman Catholics were still murdering and pillaging in Croatia and the western Ukraine only three generations ago and were still being promised a ticket to heaven by their Roman Catholic clergy for their Fascist deeds. This is what happens when you replace the Holy Spirit with some manmade teaching. In other words, false teaching always becomes a heresy and so leads to an evil and deformed way of life.

Schisms

A schism is a permanent separation from the Church for a non-dogmatic reason. Often these reasons are nationalist and sectarian, though there is also the risk of schisms becoming heresies. For instance, from an Orthodox Christian viewpoint, Protestantism is a schism from Roman Catholicism. Although Protestantism confessed the same heresy as the Roman Catholicism through the same filioque deviation from the Creed, it did not agree with Roman Catholicism in other respects and so split away from it. Therefore, in the sixteenth century dissident Roman Catholics separated, calling themselves Protesters. Then, as is always the case with schismatics, they disagreed with each other and have since separated into a myriad of sects. For sectarianism, usually accompanied by personality cults, is the result of schisms. Of course, apart from this classic case, there have been a multitude of other schisms. And just as heresies lead to an evil and deformed life, so schisms also result in hatred, jealousy, lies and slander.

For instance, in Russia in the seventeenth century there took place the ‘Old Ritualist’ schism. This was about minor changes in ritual, but because the changes were imposed by the State, they led to a schism, which soon became violent and split into multiple schisms, just as in the Protestant model. A more recent example is in the last century when those in Greece who did not want to accept the dating of the Western calendar for the fixed feasts, as the Greek State was insisting under pressure from Western governments, operated schisms from the Orthodox Church. They called themselves ‘old calendarists’ and they in turn also split into a multitude of sectarian groups that hated one another. As the calendar is not a dogmatic issue (the Creed never mentions it), separation on this basis is a schism, not a heresy. And finally there is the case of the nationalist and Sovietised US-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russa (ROCOR), which instituted a schism from the multinational Archdiocese of Western Europe. Although they are both groups under one and the same Moscow Church, yet they are now not in communion with one another.

Divisions

Finally, there are divisions. These are neither heresies, as Church teachings are not involved, nor schisms, as they are not permanent. These are temporary separations from the corrupted administration of a Church, usually for nationalist or political reasons. In other words, a division is due to differences of opinion between bishops or groups of bishops. Divisions have existed and exist within the Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds. For instance, Liberal Methodists separated from Tory Anglicans and so far only some have returned, and various groups of Traditionalists have separated from liberal Roman Catholics and, again, so far only some have returned. The danger here, as with all divisions, is the risk of them developing to schisms, that is, they become permanent, and so full of nastiness, hatred, jealousy, lies and slander.

In the Orthodox Church there have also been several divisions for nationalist or political reasons, especially over the last two centuries. For example, the Bulgarians separated from the Constantinople Greeks, the Macedonians from the Serbs, three different groups of Russian emigres separated from the Church inside the USSR and Serbian emigres separated from the Church inside Yugoslavia. Most of these issues were resolved, divisions overcome, even if it took decades and generations, almost a century in some cases. Despite these generally positive resolutions, today there is a new cause and outbreak of such divisions and they risk turning into schisms, that is, becoming permanent. These divisions are all centred around one single subject: the highly centralised and profoundly corrupt ex-Soviet (and not very ex-Soviet) multinational Republic of the Ukraine

The Ukraine

The first new and serious division here (there had been old divisions) took place in 2018 between the most powerful Local Orthodox Churches, the Greek (7% of the baptised, or four Local Churches) and the Russian (70% of the baptised and one Local Church). This left the vast majority of the Local Orthodox Churches (23% of baptised and ten Local Churches) in shock. When in 2018 the Greeks set up a new Church on Ukrainian territory, which has been under the Moscow Church for nearly 350 years – shocking enough – the Russians replied by refusing to concelebrate or co-operate with the Greeks – just as shocking. Then the Russians in turn set up a Church on the territory of Africa which, apart from Egypt and Libya, had been Greek Church territory for nearly 100 years – more shocking. Thus, a separation in the Ukraine had spread to Africa, a territory which the US and China with Russia are directly battling for political influence in. The consequences of this division are now escalating even further.

It seems that power does indeed corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. For of course, behind this division lies power politics, the desire for control of territory and so for money. The small Greek Churches are heavily financed and even controlled by the US, and the much larger Moscow Church is heavily financed and even controlled by the Russian State. Yet another new escalation took place one year ago in February 2022, as a result of the war that had begun between the US-controlled Ukraine and the Russian Federation in 2014. This had followed the violent US-organised coup which overthrew the democratically-elected Ukrainian government. The result was the present highly centralised, puppet regime in Kiev, financed and armed by the West, and threatening to complete its genocide of those of Russian language and culture in the east of the Ukraine. In response, in 2022 Russia sent in troops to protect those of Russian language and culture in the east of the Ukraine. A war had begun.

The Tragedy of the War

After Russia’s vastly superior forces had defeated the Kiev forces within a few weeks, the Kiev regime was about to conclude a peace agreement, but it was forced by the US to break off negotiations. Thus, in a second escalation, the US made its vassals send old, mainly Soviet, military equipment to re-equip the Kiev forces. By summer 2022 Russia had destroyed that equipment too. Then, in a third escalation, the US-led West began sending huge sums of money ($150 billion in twelve months so far), huge amounts of its own military equipment, training Kiev troops and also paying tens of thousands of mercenaries to fight on behalf of the beleaguered Kiev regime. Russia will destroy that too, but of course it will take even longer and even more will die. The proxy-war is being fought until the last Ukrainian and the last mercenary who wants to fight is dead. It is a giant war crime.

The result is that today Kiev dead number between 160,000 and 300,000 (including several thousand foreign mercenaries). Russian dead number 19,000. And this does not include the hundreds of thousands of physically wounded and psychologically wounded (traumatised). This does not include the damage to the infrastructure of what was already one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in Europe, which is still the battlefield for this proxy war between Washington and Moscow. This European war is unspeakable in its horror. Nor have we mentioned the millions of refugees who have fled to Russia and to various countries in Western Europe. Millions of lives have been disrupted and there are hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans. How could anyone possible approve of this tragedy? And yet…..

The Tragedy of the Moscow Church

The tragedy here is that the Orthodox faithful both in Russia and in the Ukraine used to belong to one united Church. The Church, centred in Moscow, used to be multinational, with faithful not only in the Russian Federation and the Ukraine, but also in Belarus, Moldova and Kazakhstan, and with millions of others in over sixty other countries around the world, especially in the Western world, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, the countries of Western Europe, Northern America and Australia. However, almost the whole episcopate of the Moscow Church inside Russia has failed to condemn what is now a nine-year long civil war, in which nominal Orthodox are killing nominal Orthodox. The result is that the once multinational Moscow Church is rapidly becoming a national, not to say, nationalist, Russians-only, Church. Why would Non-Russians want to belong to a Russian-controlled Church, where they cannot even express their own opinions? Most don’t, not to mention many Russians themselves, for whom the Church should have nothing to do with war. The Russians will surely win the war in the Ukraine, but the far, far greater challenge was to win the peace. Sadly, that seems to have been lost already and inevitably an independent but canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church will be born there.

Thus, left-wing liberals in the USA and the Roman Catholic politician Cardinal Koch have accused the Russian Patriarch of ‘heresy’ for saying that ‘the Russian World’ (wherever there are concentrations of ethnic Russians) must be united and that the Russian soldiers who die to unite Orthodox will go to heaven. (The accusation by Cardinal Koch is particularly hypocritical, since for its whole existence Roman Catholicism has claimed that those who murder others to make them Roman Catholic will go to heaven). Although clearly not heretical but just nationalistic, the Russian Patriarch’s words do invite profound disagreement, and not only among fringe liberals. Few, if any, agree with the Patriarch. These words are his personal opinion. They are especially strange, given that the leader of what used to be a multinational Church is seen to be promoting militant nationalism, just as his Greek Orthodox enemies do through their nationalist racism, which they call phyletism. Where is the difference between Greek and Russian leaders? Six of one and half a dozen of the other?

The Break-Up of the Moscow Church

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of both sides in the war and of its final outcome, the result is that everywhere, outside the tightly-controlled Russian Federation and Belarus, the faithful have been leaving the once multinational Russian Church. Either they have left for other Local Orthodox Churches or else they have declared themselves ‘fully independent’, as in the Ukraine and Latvia. Most recently there has been the case of five Orthodox priests in Lithuania, four of whom are ethnic Lithuanians. Not surprisingly, as Non-Russians, they find that they cannot agree with the Russian Patriarch and do not want to belong to the same Church as him. The result of this is that they were ‘defrocked’ (forbidden the priesthood) by the Moscow Church, even though they are not in Russia or Russians. However, they have now been allowed the priesthood by the Church of Constantinople, which had jurisdiction in Lithuania some 350 years ago. (Ironically, Constantinople, today called Istanbul, is now the largest city in Europe and with a population of Russians probably fifty times greater than its Greeks).

Apparently, these priests are not allowed the right to freedom and self-determination, they must obey what has become a foreign, since no longer multinational, Church. This situation is unthinkable in a Western country which has a culture of freedom. And of course, you cannot be defrocked for a difference of opinion about nationalism or politics! Real defrocking happens only when a priest behaves immorally, for example, he steals money or he is involved in sexual impropriety. Clearly, ‘defrockings’ like those in Lithuania are not canonical, they are purely political, and are not recognised by anyone except the present Moscow authorities. The irony is that those who defrock in such cases, though not in this one, are often guilty of real causes for defrocking! For instance, over the last fifty years in North America and Europe, only very recently in the Antioch jurisdiction, we have seen priests ‘defrocked’ for being whistleblowers because:

Their bishop was a pedophile.

Their bishop was heretical or schismatic.

Their bishop was homosexual.

Their bishop was committing fornication.

Their bishop wanted to sleep with the priest’s wife.

Their bishop was jealous of a priest’s church and tried to steal it from him.

Their bishop wanted a priest to spy for a secret service.

Their bishop was an atheist and ordained atheists.

Their bishop was a careerist and ready to commit any crime in furtherance of his career.

In each case the priest left his bishop and was duly ‘defrocked’! Of course, the ‘defrocking’ was completely ignored and the priest continued to serve, transferring to a normal bishop. As a result, the persecuted priest gained respect and his ‘defrocking’ bishop lost all respect, together with much of his flock – and also his career.

Conclusion: The Dogmatisation of Personal Opinions

As we can see, these new divisions are not at all theological, but nationalist and political. Here we are in the world of personal (political) opinions, the world of intolerance. Differences in personal opinions have nothing to do with heresies and schisms. Personal opinions are here being treated as dogmas. The Faith is the same. When Church authorities intolerantly impose nationalist and political opinions, they automatically divide their flock, as we see today in the Ukraine. Thus, the Moscow Church has lost moral authority in most of the Ukraine, not to mention in most of the rest of the world outside the Russian Federation and, one day, in Belarus too. The Moscow Church is rapidly ceasing to be the multinational Russian Orthodox Church and becoming a mononational Church. You cannot be a multinational Church and be a national (and nationalist) Church at the same time. You must decentralise yourself, as the USSR was decentralised (but astonishingly the Church was not decentralised), and grant other nationalities freedom and independence.

Only two bishops of the present Moscow Church have remained traditional, that is, multinational Russian Orthodox, by diverging in their opinions from the authorities. One of them, Metr Hilarion (Alfeev), was disgraced and exiled to a church in Budapest, the other, Metr Jean Renneteau, a French national, has courageously expressed his total disagreement (1). As far as they are concerned, through unequivocal support for the war in the Ukraine the Moscow authorities have confused the Church with politics, thus discrediting the Church which they represent, as well as themselves. These divisions are only about nationalism and politics. A dispute about territories and whether they belong to or do not belong to a Local Church has nothing to do with the creed and heresy and schism. Through their centralisation the Church authorities have dismissed the right to freedom and self-determination. And sadly, despite constant warnings, the centralisation of these Church authorities is not a case of Resovietisation, as there never was any Desovietisation.

Afterword

Reading the above there are those who will fall into despair. They are mistaken to do so, for they have forgotten Church history. Now is the Gethsemane of the Church, that is, the moment not of Her defeat, but of Her victory has begun. Christ is deserted by His disciples, who have fallen asleep, but as time and time again in Church history, when cast aside and deserted, this is the moment when Christ has overcome the world. The arrogance, narcissism and sense of impunity of the crazies who, even in complete freedom, sell their souls for a mess of Soviet pottage, accepting brainwashed ‘obedience’ for the sake of their careers, more Soviet than the Soviets, are cast down. Throughout the Russian Church, exactly as St Seraphim of Sarov prophesied, there will be a great cleansing from corruption, a generational change among the episcopate. From that will follow the repentance and restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church (which, it seems, now no longer exists) and the resurrection of the Russian Lands. But first they must go through this Great Tragedy, the Crucifixion of the Ukraine, the war that has happened on account of the apostasy of those who denied the Church of God. They reduced it to the sins of cowardice, abject lies, subservience to militant atheism, careerism, bureaucratic centralism and ritualism. Did they really think they could get away with it? We follow another way, the way of the New Martyrs and New Confessors. For the King is coming and we must be ready to meet Him.

 

Note:

  1. See: https://www.svoboda.org/a/mitropolit-dubninskiy-ioann-my-idem-po-krovi-nashih-muchenikov-/32276466.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

News from Lithuania

Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople has announced that his Synod has unanimously reversed the defrocking of five priests in Lithuania who were defrocked for disagreeing with the conflict in the Ukraine and the apparent support for it by the Russian Church authorities. As the vast majority of Orthodox bishops agree, defrocking cannot take place because of a difference of political opinions. This is a question of basic human rights. The priests in question have been received into the Patriarchate of Constantinople, meaning that there are now two jurisdictions in Lithuania, as there have been for nearly thirty years in Estonia. Of course, in Western Europe there are multiple jurisdictions and have been for over a century. The five priests also expect that others in Lithuania will follow their example.

Some will object that the priests in question did not receive letters of dismissal to leave from their Russian bishop (they were defrocked after they had already asked to leave). However, it is the common practice of at least one part of the Russian Church, ROCOR, to receive any number of clerics and parishes from the Patriarchate of Constantinople without letters of dismissal. This seems to be because ROCOR claims that it can receive clerics without letters of dismissal when there is an issue of conscience. And yet when clerics are leaving for reasons of conscience a ROCOR schism, as, for instance, the clerics who left ROCOR because of its schism with the Paris Archdiocese of the Russian Tradition (part of the same Local Church!) and were received into it without letters of dismissal (merely because ROCOR refused to write them!), ROCOR still defrocked them after they had been canonically received. Here we have the same situation and practice in reverse, from the Russian Church to Constantinople.

Further developments are expected.

On the First Anniversary

The following wide-ranging compilation of nearly 4,000 words provides answers to several questions posed over the last twelve months by various correspondents. Here those answers are made public on this, the first anniversary of our life within the Patriarchate of Romania and among its saints.

 

Q: Was it difficult for all your parishes to transfer to the Romanian Orthodox Church on 16 February 2022?

A: No, it was very simple, very straightforward. The negotiations with the Metropolitan and the Patriarchal canonists took only four hours. The letters of reception were issued two days later and are available for all to see and the antimensia singed by Vladyka were issued ten days later. All was clear and the correctness of our reception was only confirmed by the contrary reactions and astonishing untruths told by certain individuals in ROCOR and even in the MP after our departure in the two weeks that followed, namely that we had not in fact been received! Metr Joseph was very shocked by that. Those untruths totally discredited their authors and the websites they operate.

I am afraid to say that ROCOR now does not have a good reputation among the Local Churches. Other Local Churches know what it has become and are happy to accept persecuted clergy and churches from ROCOR, providing that the vast majority of the people in the parishes want such a transfer. Our vast majority was 4,853 for and 15 (very naïve) people against. Of those 15, most only came to church from time to time and were not listed as parishioners. Tragically, one was persuaded not to come because a certain bishop, under political control, told her not to come here. The result of this is that she has deprived herself of Church life.

Q: Has anyone come back after leaving you?

A: Only one person. She said that she had been misled and was very regretful. But we welcomed her back with open arms and do not mention her mistake to her.

Q: Has the loss of 15 people affected you financially?

A: Collections have increased by over 20% since they left. This is probably because they have been replaced by 47 new parishioners. In order of numbers and nationality these are Russians, Moldovans, Romanians and Ukrainians.

Q: Had you thought of transferring to other Local Churches other than the Romanian?

A: We had not, but they had! We received various offers, but there was only one place we wanted to go after being forced to leave the Russian Church, and that was the Romanian Church, which is outside both Greek/American Democrat politics and Russian/American Republican politics.

Q: What fundamentally forced over half of the English Diocese of the Russian Church Outside Russia to leave it after decades of faithfulness? Was it a question of keeping your property, as some have said?

A: The last straw was its uncanonical actions and schism even with part of the Russian Orthodox Church. Now all that is left is the London Russian parish and a tiny set of mainly convert-run groups outside London with a total of under 200 people in them all told.

Q: Who forced you to leave the Russian Church?

A: Our departure happened through, but not because of, our old family friend, the then 78-year old Metr Jean Renneteau in Paris, although he himself very much wanted to keep us, as he has confirmed in several phone-calls over the last six months. He was very sad to lose us and wants us back. It was all against his will. Let you remind you that it was Metr Jean, whom we backed to the hilt, who finally brought 57%, the non-masonic part, of his Archdiocese, the part where we always had family, close friends and allies, out of schism back to the Russian Orthodox Church. His feat has gone down in history and we greeted it enthusiastically at the time in 2018, as you can read on this site.

However, to get back to the answer to your question, the problem was his superior, who is younger than our three eldest children! It was he who forced Metr Jean to abandon us against the interests of the Russian Orthodox Church, for purely political reasons. When he was informed that if he forced all 16 clerics and their parishes out, we would all go to the Patriarchate of Romania, he replied: ‘Too bad for them’. He had no interest in keeping us because we were not Russian. That is very significant.

For it means that the Russian Church in its present form does not want to do missionary work, does not respect or want to keep its clergy and people, even after a lifetime of unpaid service. It wants to disunite and scatter, rather than to gather together, to destruct rather than to construct. This is suicidal on its part because it means that there is no point in anyone joining or being part of the authentic millennial Russian Orthodox Church, especially those who follow its real Tradition, speak fluent Russian and are its greatest friends!

This is the end for the Russian Orthodox Church anywhere outside Russia and, for the moment, Belarus, for many years to come, depending on the new Patriarch. The Church as it is now will only attract the naïve, who will soon fall away once they see through it, or else right-wing converts with illusions. They were not even born when we were living Orthodoxy in the times of Martyrdom for the Faith and Confession of the Faith in the Soviet Union.

Q: 16 February marks the first anniversary of the transfer of the ‘mini-diocese’ of which you are part, from the Russian Church to the Patriarchate of Romania. Apart from no longer being in schism, what are the differences you have noticed?

A: I think I can sum it all up in just one word: Freedom. For example, in order of the least important to the most important:

Firstly, we can now use our own liturgical English and do not have to use American. So we are no longer being forced to use a foreign language and can carry on using the same liturgical language as we have always used for the last fifty years before others were even born! So we are not being forced to renounce the Tradition, as was definitely the case before.

Secondly, all our websites can operate freely, without censorship. Censorship and threats to free speech are over.

Thirdly, we can now do missionary activity, we are no longer prevented from doing so, with the result that we have already opened two new parishes in the past year and have hopes of opening others elsewhere, especially in the Midlands. Our main problem is lack of funds, so here we appeal to all those who support us to help with fund-raising.

Fourthly, we can now follow in everything the legacy of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who ordained me to the priesthood in 1991 after seven years serving as a deacon and which represents the old multinational ROCOR, the ROCOR of Orthodox Tradition, the Russian Orthodox Church, and not some administrative divisions of it made up over the last century. We so knew and loved the real Russian Orthodox Church so well, but it no longer exists. Archbishop Antony had under him the then only Romanian parish in Paris, which of course was on the new calendar. (In those days, there were several new calendar Orthodox parishes in ROCOR, even in the USA, and that raised no problems).

Now the favour is being returned with what is basically a multinational Russian/Moldovan deanery under the Romanian Church. This means that we are on the old calendar, but if some want to do services on the new calendar, that is possible. Though it does not interest me personally, I can understand that for some it may be important and I say: Please go ahead. It is a pastoral matter. We have Vladyka Joseph’s blessing. All this expresses the spirit of the future Local Church, and not of some ghetto-sect. There is no room for micro-management in such situations, you have to be broader-minded.

In general, I think this freedom to live as normal Orthodox comes from the fact that we are no longer held under by converts, who have only been Orthodox for a few years and are so insecure in the faith that they hold to rigid manmade rules, which nobody else holds to, including in the Moscow Patriarchate. One of the things that recent and inexperienced converts do not realise is that Love is much greater than narrow manmade rules, which are only guidelines.

Their disease is called convertitis, you know that defensive narrowness and headborne dryness of spirit that can also come from doctorates. That disease belongs to the pharisees, who think too much. It has become common in parts of ROCOR, where before it never existed, especially since about 2016. It is what Fr Seraphim Rose fought against in California – for that was and is where the evil began and is spreading from – in the 1970s, quite rightly calling it ‘super-correctness’. It is sounding brass. Now we are in communion with all and are not threatened by the sectarian trends and schismatic pressures of before.

Then, of course, already by Divine Providence in the Romanian Patriarchate, we avoided all the politics connected with the American-Russian war in the Ukraine, which reflects so badly on the Russian Orthodox Church because of its political involvement through its centralisation. At the time several of us said that we had ‘got the last flight out of Kabul’. We have Russians and Ukrainians in our churches, as well as many other nationalities. We can welcome all to our churches. You don’t have to belong to the grim and depressing, right-wing, Protestant-style, pseudo-Russian group of people who do not speak Russian.

Another thing that worries me is that aggressive Western governments may ban the Russian Church in their countries, as those governments have already done in the Ukraine and Latvia, where the local Orthodox have accepted a de facto (though highly providential) autocephaly of the Church, an independence from the highly centralised Russian Church, even though it may not officially be called ‘autocephaly’. If such a ban does happen in the future, at least we are already out of the mess and so will have been saved from such unpleasant problems and political manipulations. God saved us before time.

Q: What do you think the Russian hierarchy should have done on 24 February 2022?

A: Today is the feast day of St Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to the-Apostles. His icon is one of the twelve on the Colchester church iconostasis. He is the key. When in 1904 Japan, armed to the teeth by the Russophobic Western Powers, attacked an unprepared and unmilitarised Russia, Bishop Nicholas, a Russian living in Tokyo, simply locked himself away and prayed for peace. Here is our model. The Russian Church has to return to its multinational itself.

Q: Do you regret anything in the events around you and ROCOR?

A: For us, not at all. All this was the best possible thing that could have happened in those circumstances and all on the eve of that terrible war. For ROCOR, however, I regret greatly.

After the reconciliation with the rest of the Russian Church in 2007, which I witnessed and I had worked towards for decades, ROCOR for a period of about ten years enjoyed unprecedented global prestige in the Orthodox world. We were the Church which had canonised the New Martyrs, the Church which had been the politically-free voice of the Russian Church during its Soviet captivity, we were the Church of the Faithful Confessors, of St John of Shanghai, we had returned to communion with all and were welcomed and thanked for our witness. We received grace. The potential to help develop missions and work towards Local Churches, co-operating with other politically-free Orthodox, was there. Icons gave off myrrh in those days. Today it is a very different story. The acquisition of grace, which St Seraphim of Sarov explained is our aim, has been replaced by the acquisition of money, power and property.

Instead of nurturing that grace and co-operating with others, the grace was step by step misused and abused amid the sectarian spirit of exclusivism. This excluded even the then First Hierarch Metr Hilarion, well before his dementia. As a result, ROCOR is now mainly becoming a historical footnote as the American Synod, which is being even further discredited by the Belya affair, yet another affair of forged signatures. ROCOR has voluntarily Sovietised itself. It is very important to understand that this was all voluntary, it was never forced on ROCOR by Moscow. Certain figures are not so much interested in humility, fasting, poverty and prayer, as in power, luxury, money and property. The problem is lack of pastors. Some have been replaced by bureaucrats, ‘effective managers’, as the Russian jargon goes.

Its hope of survival in Northern America today is in being absorbed into the Moscow-founded OCA, which is about five times bigger. That is what Moscow wants and it is logical. Outside Northern America, ROCOR hardly exists in Latin America, where forty years ago it had, if I remember rightly, six dioceses. As for the thirty or so parishes of Australian ROCOR, they will now have to follow the fate of the Indonesian Mission which ROCOR handed over wholesale to Moscow. It abandoned its mission there, the same as it did here, only here to the Romanians. Australian ROCOR may as well become part of a new Autonomous Church, but under Moscow and linked up with its South-East Asian Exarchate.

Q: What about the ROCOR churches in Western Europe? There are still nearly 90 parishes or small communities there.

A: In Western Europe ROCOR is only really present in Western Germany and Switzerland. In the other Western European countries there is only a handful of parishes and communities, one, two or at most three in each country, if any at all. There is nothing in Scandinavia and Portugal has now been abandoned. In Spain there is one tiny convert group, in Italy there are two parishes on the French border and hardly anything is left in the Netherlands and France. Logically, the ROCOR parishes in Germany, which are in any case mainly peopled and clergied by expatriates from the ex-Soviet Union (and a few convert groups, with often fewer than 10 or at most 20 members) should join Moscow.

This is what Moscow asked for five years ago in exchange for its parishes in the Americas to be given to ROCOR. Sadly, ROCOR refused, missing the boat, the once in a lifetime offer, which will probably not be made again. Then it claimed that it will not join up with Moscow for 50-100 years! Moscow was very angry with the individual who said that. Moscow looks on Western Europe as its territory, as an integral part of Eurasia.

However, the situation has become very complex in Western Europe since the war in the Ukraine, as most of the Moscow parishes are themselves peopled by Ukrainians and especially Moldovans, as in Italy (70 out of 72 parishes). With over thirty new canonical Ukrainian parishes independent of Moscow in Western Europe founded in the last nine months and the possible mass defection of Moldovans to the Romanian Church, as is beginning to happen in Moldova itself and has in fact happened in England, it is difficult to see a future for the Moscow Exarchate. Russian nationalism rules and that means isolationism, being in communion with no-one. It is returning to the times of its tiny Exarchate of Soviet patriots of the 60s and 70s and the war in the Ukraine has isolated Most of the faithful have left its new Cathedral in Paris. Security men frisk you as you go in, as in an airport. I am told that congregations number about thirty. Even my friend Nikita, the very Russian nephew of the late Archbishop Basil Krivoshein, has left.

Q: Surely you regret having to leave the Russian Orthodox Church after nearly fifty years?

A: You misunderstand. We never left the Russian Orthodox Church, that is, we never left the spiritual world of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is part of the whole Orthodox world. All that happened is that we were forced to leave the administrative world, the bureaucracy, of the Russian Church. We are exactly the same as before and continue as before. Nothing has changed. When the administrative world with its protocols frees itself of politics and the spiritual world takes over once more, as it will, and sooner than some think after President Putin, then we shall see what will be decided. The mess will end and the injustices will be sorted out, but not yet. Then those who swim with the tide will swim in the opposite direction, as we have seen so many times before. In Russia they still have many things to suffer in repentance for the Soviet period.

Q: Did you know that your faith would be challenged in this way?

A: In September 2020, we went to Mt Athos to see the clairvoyant Fr Evthimios, the closest disciple of St Paisios the Athonite, whom I met in 1979 together with the ever-memorable Fr Ephraim of Arizona. We met him at the skete where he had built the first ever church dedicated to St Paisios and asked him what we should do, given the internal persecution against us. He said he would send me an answer. In May 2021, after the ROCOR schism had begun, I received a message from him and that was: ‘Do not fear the courts of men. Your case will be decided in the highest court’. And this is exactly what we did and exactly what has happened.

Q: You set up a church in Norfolk and two churches in Cambridgeshire for the people there. So effectively the Colchester parish is for Orthodox in Essex and Suffolk, your home counties, the other two counties in the East of England. Do you still visit Orthodox outside these counties?

A: Of course, I do. I visit my parishioners in many parts of the country among all those rendered Churchless by the absence of Church life which pervades the spiritual desert of modern England. Not just the new and young, but also the old, including the grandchildren of those who came here after 1917, who as adults had known the old Russia. Their parents departed over the last generation, so these grandchildren of emigres are now themselves elderly. These are the people who, like me, knew the traditional ROCOR priests like Fr George Sheremetiev (+ 1971), Fr Alexander Trubnikov (+ 1988) and Fr Mikhail Artsimovich (+ 2003). (Fr George was the one who advised the late Timothy Ware not to join ROCOR because it was being ‘taken over’.

Like them, my godfather, Nikolai Mikhailovich Zernov (+ 1980), however much I disagreed with him, would never have accepted the present situation. Even someone like the equally liberal, non-ROCOR Metr Antony Bloom (+ 2003), despite his well-known human weaknesses which scandalised so many, must be spinning in his grave at what is going on in the Russian Church today. Several of his disciples, for example in Amsterdam and Madrid, have actually left the Russian Church or been suspended by it and his disciple Metr Hilarion (Alfeev) has been exiled to Budapest. He would have been exiled also. As for the equally liberal, late Metr Kallistos (Ware), you can imagine….

In the days of the traditional ROCOR, there were no converts who wanted to rebaptise everyone. You know, the ones who are more Orthodox than the Orthodox, but have no idea that Orthodoxy is Christianity, just an exotic sectarian cult with its cultish podcast and zoom gurus. In the old days, there were few ill-educated, ritualist clergy with superstitions, money-grubbing, politics and phariseeism with as much spiritual refinement and subtlety as a Soviet tank, incapable of confessing or preaching. Lumps of cast iron against antique timepieces.

I recently visited and gave communion to just such a Russian daughter of White emigres in Esher in Surrey, who gave a lot of money in the 1990s to help build the church in Chiswick (like the late Golitsyns), but received bad treatment there. I knew her mother in Paris and have known her and her family for 35 years. Like so many rather aristocratic Russian émigré women, her mother, a child in pre-1917 Russia, became a seamstress in Paris in the 1930s. After the war she had opened her own fashion house and had the Audrey Hepburn elegance, style and class that no longer seems to exist anywhere today, though her daughter has inherited it:  ‘Elegance is the only beauty that never fades’. No botox and tooth-whitening for such people, unlike several Orthodox bishops and priests of all jurisdictions in California.

A spiritual daughter of the wonderful Fr Alexander Trubnikov from Tsarskoe Selo and Meudon, but now deprived of the Church, she talks to God in her garden. That is where she can pray. There are churches, but she cannot go to them, some people who control them are unChristian. But she remains Christian, Orthodox Christian.

Q: Were you hurt by the slanders against you?

A: No. Our first reaction was one of astonishment. Next came laughter at the attempts to manipulate the naive and ignorant who did not know us. These were so ridiculous. The came sadness that people who called themselves Christians could do such things, their souls full of hatred, covetousness and above all jealousy. All this only discredited their authors. It is called the boomerang effect. They reflect very badly on those who issued them. Did they really think that such novel New World manipulations could work among experienced Orthodox in old Europe?

Q: How would you sum up what happened to you last year?

A: I would say that ROCOR fell into a trap of its own making, it was put to the test and failed. In 2007 it was given an opportunity to behave like Christians, but instead, the culprits revealed who they are (both the ones in ROCOR and the few others elsewhere who repeated the untruths of ROCOR). We know their names. The internet knows their names. And above all God knows their names.

It is a tragic warning that if you desert God, He will desert you. And that is what is happening to it through its self-discrediting. The waste of potential is enormous. God gave them everything and they squandered it. What must St John of Shanghai be thinking of this spiritual suicide? Like the apostles, we have shaken the dust off our feet and moved on. May God grant them to know love for others before they reach their death-beds. I tremble in their place. But this is how the Church is cleansed.

Q: Do you feel as though this chapter is closed and you can slowly retire?

A: Now you make me laugh! That chapter was closed a year ago, but slowly retiring?! You haven’t seen anything yet. There is so much more to do. If God grants me life to do it all. The pastoral catastrophe in this country is such that I need another fifty years to contribute towards remedying it just in my little corner. I have only just started!

16 February 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Belya (and all the other defamation cases in the long pipeline) versus ROCOR

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/court-wont-revisit-ruling-allowing-priest-sue-church-defamation-2023-02-08/

Court won’t revisit ruling allowing priest to sue church for defamation

February 8, 2023

By Daniel Wiessner

Split court says lawsuit doesn’t implicate religious matters

Dissenting judge says ruling will destroy church autonomy

(Reuters) – A sharply divided U.S. appeals court on Wednesday declined to reconsider a ruling that said a former Russian Orthodox priest could sue the church for defamation without interfering with its internal governance.

The Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 6-6 vote denied en banc review of a three-judge panel’s September ruling, with the dissenting judges claiming the decision would eviscerate church autonomy protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The panel had rejected the Russian Orthodox Church’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit by Alexander Belya, who claims church officials’ false accusations of fraud and forgery led to him losing an appointment to become the bishop of Miami.

Lawyers for Belya and the defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The panel, affirming a New York federal judge, had held that because the lawsuit focuses on “neutral principles” and not matters of faith or religious doctrine, the church was not shielded from Belya’s claims.

But in a dissenting opinion on Wednesday, Circuit Judge Michael Park said church autonomy applies not only to religious matters but issues involving internal governance.

“It is difficult to see how a court could assess [Belya’s] claim without considering the reasons for the church’s decisions, including whether Defendants correctly determined that Belya was never elected Bishop of Miami and whether they acted in good faith,” Park wrote.

Park, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, was joined by four other Republican appointees and Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes, who was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton.

In an opinion backing the denial of en banc review, Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier said Park had improperly implied that Belya purposely styled his lawsuit as a defamation case to get around the doctrine of church autonomy.

“At this stage, Belya’s claim is a genuine defamation claim that, as the dissent’s refusal to take it at face value suggests, would not implicate church autonomy,” wrote Lohier, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.

Lohier was joined by fellow Obama appointee Circuit Judge Denny Chin and four appointees of President Joe Biden.

The case is Belya v. Kapral, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 21-1498.

For Belya: Bradley Girard of Americans United for Separation of Church and State

For the defendants: Diana Thomson of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

 

Case 21-1498, Document 297, 02/08/2023, 3465457, Page 2 of 12

“First, the Dissent writes that “[t]his case arises from a minister’s suspension

by his church,” and that the lawsuit “is styled as a defamation claim.” Dissent at

  1. The suggestion is that this case is not really a defamation case, but instead

seeks to intrude on a church’s autonomy by subjecting Defendants “to litigation

over religious matters.” Id. at 10. In fact, this is a defamation case and not a case

over religious matters. If Belya’s allegations are true — and we must assume they

are for now — this is, as the first amended complaint (the “Complaint”) declares, “a

case of egregious defamation.” J. App’x at 87. If the allegations are true,

Defendants made public accusations that Belya forged and fabricated certain

documents, including accusations that Belya forged the signature of the “ruling

bishop” of ROCOR onto two letters, that he fabricated or otherwise improperly

obtained official letterhead, and that he falsely affixed to the letters what appeared

to be the ruling bishop’s official seal. See id. at 95-97. The allegation that Belya

committed forgery was posted on the church’s social media site by one or more of

the Defendants and was re-posted and circulated by religious news outlets and

publications. Id. at 98.

 

Case 21-1498, Document 297, 02/08/2023, 3465457, Page 3 of 12

“Simple, non-ecclesiastical factual questions are presented: Did Belya forge

the letters in question? Or did the ruling bishop actually sign the letters? Were

the letters on the ruling bishop’s official letterhead? Were the letters stamped

with the purported signatory’s official seal? Or were the purported letterhead

and stamps a fabrication? These are factual questions that a fact-finder could

answer without delving into matters of faith and doctrine.

Significantly, the Complaint seeks only damages (and attorney’s fees and

costs) and not injunctive or declaratory relief. The Complaint does not seek an

order declaring that Belya was in fact elected to the position of Bishop of Miami or

an injunction requiring Defendants to install him into that or any other position;

nor does it seek to vacate Belya’s suspension from the church. See Belya v.

Hilarion, No. 20-CV-6597, 2021 WL 1997547, at *4 (S.D.N.Y. May 19, 2021) (district

court noting that “Belya does not ask this Court to determine whether his election

was proper or whether he should be reinstated to his role as Bishop of Miami”).

Rather, the Complaint asserts only three defamation claims and a fourth claim for

vicarious liability related to the defamation claims, and it seeks only damages.

This is, indeed, a defamation case.”

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca2-21-01498/pdf/USCOURTS-ca2-21-01498-5.pdf

https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-ca2-21-01498/USCOURTS-ca2-21-01498-2/context