Regrets and Hopes in 2025

Q: In the New Year we tend to look both forwards and backwards. Can you tell us what regrets you have about the past? And what hopes do you have for the future?

A: I have three regrets, but a hope that far outweighs them all!

My first regret is the killing off of the Western European Archdiocese of ROCOR. We always used to concelebrate with everyone, with Constantinople, with the Serbs etc. We also had parishes on the new calendar with us. There was no problem with any of this and we were pleased to live like this. This was our tradition of being on good terms with all the Local Churches, faithfully handed down to us without change from pre-Revolutionary Russia. It used to be the norm for the whole Russian Church.

However, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who ordained me and whose spiritual child I am, was attacked by sectarians from the USA for keeping to this tradition, just as his predecessor, Archbishop John (Maximovich), was suspended and put on trial by those very same CIA-financed sectarians in the USA. There are narrow and racist, politically-minded pharisees, who cannot tolerate openness to other nationalities, unlike St John and his successor.

In 2007 we finally defeated the US fanatics, we ‘drained the swamp’, as they say, and brought ROCOR back into canonical communion with the rest of the Russian Church. However, ten years later, the CIA, working hard through its Cold War-founded select but powerful network of clerical agents in New York and elsewhere – their names are well-known to us, for many of them were recruited long ago – subverted our victory. They did this by having collected ‘dirt’ on individuals (they especially like to recruit homosexuals, who are then compromised and in debt to them), for, as they like to say, ‘every man has his price’, often literally. In this way they infiltrated the Church and created what they had long wanted – sectarianism and schism.

I realise that the New York group was desperate to find bishops, but there is a minimum level. They should exclude CIA agents by thoroughly vetting and training candidates for the episcopate in seminary and monastery, and also exclude homosexuals, narcissists and money grubbers, before they consecrate anyone. The liturgical, historical and legal ignorance of the CIA generation of recruits should not be such that they get arrested twice in one day in two different countries! Candidates should also understand the canons, especially those of the First and Second Council under St Photios. And they should also be equipped linguistically, which is so important in Europe. Communication by google translate has made a laughing-stock of that jurisdiction.

Then came the shock of 2017, a very recent convert, knowing little apart from American culture, which he tried to impose on everyone together with his American language. This was teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. Lacking all respect for local traditions, the new convert made nasty racist attacks on all Orthodox nationalities, Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians and Moldovans, demanded ever more money at every stop, persecuted the faithful, tried to close our churches, flew off into hateful rages, insisted on ‘protocols’ and micromanaged bureaucracy, and set himself up as a guru, just like the invaders of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan had done before him. ‘I’m American, I know everything and you owe me complete obedience’. That was the attitude. There is nothing Christian in any of this, just neophyte arrogance.

In December 2020 he went into schism. That was the last straw for all of us. Despite his guru claims, he was not followed. Clergy in Western Europe ignored him and continue to concelebrate with others, including with the Moscow Patriarchate, from which he had also gone into schism. But for us who have always fought against sectarianism, this was the end. We will ever uphold the traditions of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and of his successor Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who would have supported us. We will never, on principle, support schism and sectarianism. As St John Chrysostom said: ‘The sin of schism cannot be washed away even by the blood of martyrdom’. We pray for him that he will repent before the end.

My second regret is that so much time has been wasted by others. I have been held back. I could have done so much more, but was not allowed to, for reasons of racism, jealousy and politics. I hope I have a long life because there is so much more to do towards building the Local Church of Western Europe. Thirty-six hours a day would not be enough. Parishioners are praying for me that I live to 100. They want me to baptise their grandchildren. Of course, maybe I won’t live until next week, I don’t choose. As God wills.

My third regret is that the Moscow Church administration, with all its vast potential, fell into exactly the same nationalist and racist trap as the Greek Church administration. It began to exclude Non-Russians, not just Ukrainians, but even their own children, from their once multinational Church, despite the warnings of my dear friend, the late Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, who died in mysterious circumstances in Moscow in 2020, aged just 52. This ‘Russian world’ concept is exactly the same racism as Hellenist nationalism. They have lost everyone outside themselves, Ukrainians, Moldovans, those from the Baltics, those from Western Europe, isolating themselves from the mainstream, just like the Greeks.

As a result, the responsibility for building the Local Church of Western Europe has fallen to the Romanians, together with the old calendar, Russian-speaking Moldovans and those of other nationalities, including canonical Russians, who are likeminded, like ourselves. Will we manage to do it, overcoming nationalism, keeping our hundreds of thousands of Western European-born Romanian and Moldovan children in the Church through a new Local Church? We shall do our best to do so.

And this is my great hope, far greater than all these details of history, that I shall live to see our Local Church emerge from the hundreds of thousands of Orthodox children, not just Romanian and Moldovan, but those of many other Eastern European nationalities and of those whose ancestors have lived in Western Europe for generations and centuries, including our own six children, six sons and daughters-in-law, and twelve grandchildren so far.

Thus, we hold firmly to the tradition of the Western European diocese of ROCOR, of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church. Nothing will be lost. This year we have an important project towards this. It is all under way and hopefully it will be completed and revealed before the end of 2025. Unity, not sectarian schism, is the way forward and that is our way and always has been!

Thank God for the Romanian Church. Through our Church we have been able to keep Russians and Ukrainians together (only a few nationalistic and ritualistic Muscovites did not stay with us), just before their conflict hotted up on 24 February 2022, not to mention Moldovans, Romanians and others. I know that we are very grateful to Metr Joseph and he is grateful to us, as he wants to build a multinational Church. In a few days’ time our new Archbishop Athanasy, a Russian-speaking Moldovan, will be enthroned for us. Glory to God!

 

Even Dragons Have Their Ending

Even Dragons Have Their Ending

The Addresses of His Majesty King Alfred II, His Excellency President J. D. Vance and His Majesty Tsar Nicholas III at the Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Tolkien and the Unveiling of His Statue in Oxford, England, 3 January 2042

 

His Majesty King Alfred II

Your Majesty Tsar Nicholas, Your Excellency President Vance, ladies and gentlemen.

The day before yesterday I was crowned the first English King of England for a thousand years. By the grace of God, the English monarchy has returned for the first time since the half-Norman came here in 1042 and through weakness betrayed this land and all these islands into a millennial catastrophe. After French, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch and German Kings, I was crowned King Alfred II. This crowning came after a particularly disgraceful, ignoble and scandalous period in the history of England and all these islands. This was the period of the end of the delusions of empire.

The British Empire essentially ended in 1956 through the betrayal of the United States. And yet after this, one British Prime Minister after another tried to foster British imperial delusions by supporting the same American Empire, however immoral and illegal its acts. That shameful age is over. When that Empire came to its end as a result of its defeat in the then Ukraine, the British elite, known by its Norman name of ‘The Establishment’, ended with it. Since then a new government has formed, come up from the people of this new but very old land, who had been oppressed for a thousand years. Last year Ireland was at last reunited and Scotland and Cymru reclaimed their lost independence.

England has at last been freed from the British elite after a thousand years of captivity. England has become an independent country once more. Our royal capital has left Norman London and returned to Winchester, our political capital has left Norman London and moved to the New Witan, set up in Atherstone. This is a small town on the borders of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, in the very geographical centre of England. Its very name reminds us of Athelney, where King Alfred prepared the triumphant English resistance.

British history with all its injustices against the English, then against the Celtic peoples and then against many other people of the world, in Asia and Africa especially, is over. But it also committed injustices against both the American people under the German kings in the eighteenth century. And against the Russian people from the nineteenth century on under a Germanic queen and kings, overthrowing Tsar Nicholas II through Establishment plotting. That age is over. We ask forgiveness of all these peoples for the iniquities visited on them by the greed and evil of the Norman British Establishment.

Two days ago the history of England began again after its millennial interruption. The new and old royal capital of Winchester is in Hampshire, which like Tolkien’s Worcestershire and neighbouring Warwickshire and Leicestershire, are all shires. The real England is the England of the shires, of the Shire, which was John Tolkien’s inspiration. It is our renewed focus on this real England which is now our hope for the reconstruction of our land.

John Tolkien is one of our inspirations in our battle against the dark, satanic mills of which our poet William Blake wrote. Here I do not mean the dark, satanic mills of industry which still disfigured this land and created the ‘Black Country’, as it was then called, in the childhood of John Tolkien and which he portrayed in the evil of The Lord of the Rings. They are gone. What I mean is the dark, satanic mills of the mind. In this New England, which has finally broken through the rusted old shackles of the British Establishment, we are looking to the inspiration of such as Blake and Tolkien.

We are a Nation now seeking restoration, just as King Alfred I, Alfred the Great, Alfred the Truthteller and Alfred the Wise, England’s Lawgiver, England’s Shepherd and England’s Darling, restored England after the Viking invasion. Like him, we too have suffered a Viking invasion, that of the Northmen in 1066, which then turned into a millennial Viking Occupation. We are now freeing ourselves from this, not only politically and so socially, but, even more importantly in my view, spiritually and so morally.

This means arranging new and friendly relations with the rest of the world, with whom the old British Establishment always cultivated conflictual relations. This means firstly with the Celtic peoples of these islands, and then with the peoples of the new Confederation of Western Europe, of which we are one of the now twenty-four Sovereign Nation members, with the Confederations of North-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which are today so closely and amicably tied to the Russian Tsardom, their obsessions with the Soviet past healing. And it also means new and friendly relations with the wider world of the New Fellowship of the Ring, the Alliance of Sovereign Nations, which grew very swiftly out of the Russian-founded BRICS and so quite replaced the old and quite discredited post-War UN.

This is why we are honoured to welcome here today the heads of state of the two largest nations of the world, of the Tsardom of Russia and of the Confederation of Northern America. In three years’ time we in England are looking forward to the military band of our English Army marching in the Great Centenary Victory Parade on Red Square in Moscow to the music of our national flag, The Standard of St George, composed by the genius of Alford. This will be the commemoration of the Victory of the Peoples over Fascism, which victory was won mainly by the East Slav peoples at such huge sacrifice. We honour the victory of your peoples, Tsar Nicholas.

We hope that John Tolkien, who felt so deeply English and so loved the Old England and also its Old English language, those of our national champion and saint, King Alfred the Great, will inspire all of us. John Tolkien once wrote: I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull and for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. And that is exactly what happened. We want to continue to strive against the dragon darkness of Mordor of our recent past and towards the beacon brightness of the Fellowship of the Ring of the Nations of our future. Today we recall the courage of John Tolkien, who one wrote: Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens. Our New England is not faithless.

As another John, our national poet, John Masefield, put it 100 years ago: We are called to re-establish the England ‘of the uplifted heart, that has so often borne beauty, of the idea of holiness, of the brightness that endures, of the truth that blesses, of the peace that burns away all self…The moving of the world with the glory of the English spirit is now the one thing left to us. That is also the vision of our John Tolkien and it is also our vision.

Thank you all for your attention.

 

His Excellency President Vance

Your Majesties King Alfred and Tsar Nicholas, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you for inviting me here on this historic day in this historic city in this historic land. It is a privilege and an honour.

Over the last seventeen years we have witnessed extraordinary transformations in the arrangement of our world. The old post-Second World War organisations like the UN, EU, NATO, G7 and G20, which today’s children have never even heard of, are gone. Having long ago outlived their purpose, they have been replaced with the Alliance of Sovereign Nations (ASN), which has its roots in the Russian-founded BRICS and ultimately in the international peace proposals of His Majesty Tsar Nicholas II at the end of the century before last.

Today, we see the Big Four, consisting of the Tsardom of Russia, the Empire of China, the Republic of Bharat, formerly known as India, and my own Confederation of Northern America, working together. The expanded group, the ‘Big Ten’, represents the whole world, consisting as it does of Russia, Northern America, China, the Confederation of Western Europe (now twenty-four nations in number), Bharat, the Confederation of South-East Asia, which includes Australia and New Zealand, Latin America, Japan, the Confederation of West Asia and the Organisation of African Unity.

The beginning of these changes came in 2025, when my predecessor, President Donald Trump, sat down to talks with President Vladimir Putin of the then Russian Federation to end the tragic conflict in the old Soviet Ukraine. Those talks ended within twenty-four hours, with the granting of self-determination to all the peoples of the then Ukraine, the south and the east voting to join Russia, others returning to Romania and Hungary, and the formation of a truly independent Kievan Rus in the north and west. Then came at once the dissolution of the warmongering and Nazi NATO, which had caused the conflict. Then President Trump headed to Beijing and the potential conflict over Taiwan was also swiftly resolved, when Taiwan returned to China as an autonomous island-province of the then People’s Republic of China.

The issues in these two areas of contention were easily overcome, compared to the conflict in the Middle East. It took President Trump his full term of four years and involved a third assassination attempt on his life in order to reach a deal. But with the unanimous co-operation of the Big Four to make peace arrangements there, with the formation of a small and peaceful Jewish State, centred on Tel Aviv in the north of the old Israel, a Palestinian State in the south and west of the old Israel, now rebuilt by Chinese Empire, and the status of Jerusalem as a neutral Capital under the control of the Big Four. This was itself an organisation formed in 2025 to put an end to the conflict and stagnation of the old Security Council of the UN, which you may recall.

Donald Trump, who had the same first name as my father and whose name is also my own second name, was born in 1946. Born after the Second World War, which was won mainly by Moscow, he put an end to the long outdated post-Second War settlement. This had become archaic, with its EU, NATO, IMF and alphabet soup of exclusive and aggressive political, military and monetary organisations, which did not represent anyone except the Globalist elite. Donald Trump saw the need for the peoples of the world to decide their own fates and leave the anachronistic post-1945 elitism behind us, as it in no way represented anyone outside that elite.

For these deeds, the then Globalist elite branded Donald a ‘populist’! What greater compliment could there have been! What they considered to be an insult was the guarantee of his success and the success of the people whom he represented. I am one of them. My Scots-Irish family roots go back to the Appalachians, one of the poorest places in Northern America. I got out of it and in this I was greatly aided by Usha, the First Lady, my dear wife, who is here too. It was her Indian wisdom that has always guided me and I wish to thank her publicly today.

It was only after the presidency of Donald Trump, in the early 2030s, that the world scene was really transformed, with the founding of the Confederation of Northern America, the CNA, following the dissolution of the old USA, Canada, Greenland, with just under 400 million people, some 4.5% of the world population. Thus, we saw the unity of our American sphere of influence, just as we saw the unity of the Russian sphere of influence around Russia. Soon after the unity of Northern America came the collapse of the EU, replaced by the Confederation of Western Europe (CWE) and the Confederations of North-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.

Then came the founding of the Confederation of South-East Asia, which includes Australia and New Zealand, and also of the Confederation of West Asia. Both the CNA and the CWE then set about paying off their massive debts, which had almost bankrupted both of them. It was in this way that the world witnessed the birth of the Security Council of the Alliance of the Nations, popularly known as the ‘Big Ten’, at last a Council representative of our planet.

I speak of all this today because the transformations that we have witnessed over the last seventeen years were envisioned and longed for by the great man whose 150th birth we commemorate today. John Tolkien, born exactly 150 years ago, on January 3, 1892 in what is now South Africa, was a man who had experienced the horrors of the First World War. I have long admired him and especially his work The Lord of the Rings. That was the work which inspired my path towards Catholicism when I was a young man.

John Tolkien’s portrayal of the goodness and innocence of the people of the Shire of Tradition, of my Appalachians, in their struggle for their Sovereignty against the utter evil of Globalist Mordor was key in this. It is my belief that, whatever his personal weaknesses and mistakes in the past, my predecessor President Trump was he who made Gollum fall into the Fire, taking the Ring with him, and when the Ring was destroyed, Sauron lost all his power. For me that is the triumph of our President, whose forebears came from the Hebrides and the Bavarian lands, for he destroyed the Ring of evil which so threatened world peace until 2025 and cast it into the Fire. As John Tolkien wrote and those words are now inscribed on the plinth of his statue outside this very Theatre: Even dragons have their ending.

Donald’s mother, the Gaelic-speaking Mary Anne MacLeod from her very poor home on Lewis, by the white-sanded shores of the remote Outer Hebrides, where they praise Mary and Brigid and Columba, was so proud of her son. She named him Donald after her grandfather. Had she lived to see his work as President from 2025 on, she would have been even prouder of him. Today I say to you together with the Gospel: Blessed are the peacemakers.

Thank you.

 

His Majesty Tsar Nicholas III

Your Majesty King Alfred, Your Excellency President Vance, ladies and gentlemen.

First of all, I would like to thank the Reform Government of the newly independent English Nation and the governing authorities of the University of Oxford for inviting myself and Tsarina Alexandra here today, and also the staff of the Randolph Hotel for their wonderful hospitality. There was a time, and not so long ago, when Russian leaders were not at all welcome here. Glory to God, that dark age is over.

Since the coronation of His Majesty King Alfred in Winchester Cathedral on 1 January, we have been revisiting places in England visited by my most noble, martyred predecessor, Tsar Nicholas II. He was a great anglophile and once dreamed of living in Norfolk as a gentleman farmer. Yesterday I was in Sandringham and Kings Lynn, where we prayed at the consecration of the new church dedicated to Tsar Nicholas and his August Family on land generously donated to us by the Council of Kings Lynn. White and fair, it is called on to become an inspiration to the people who live there in that old Hanseatic town. This evening King Alfred has invited us to a banquet at Buckingham Palace. Tomorrow, we go to the Royal Palace in Winchester in this renewed Kingdom of England, and then on 5th January to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, before we return to Saint Petersburg and our Orthodox Christmas Feast there.

Like President Vance, I too have long been an admirer of the work of John Tolkien, who, as a Christian, was profoundly aware of the great gulf fixed between good and evil. That was the origin of his deep moral sense, which he displayed so fully in all his works and in all his life. At the end of that life he also made a donation to our Russian Orthodox church in Oxford.

John Tolkien began writing in 1917, that fateful year, which was so disastrous in the history of my own country, after the overthrow and then martyrdom of my ancestor Tsar Nicholas II and His August Family. That overthrow was prepared here, only a few hundred yards from where we speak in the Sheldonian Theatre, plotted at University College, which, ironically, by legend, though only by legend, was founded by the sainted King, the Great King Alfred I. That overthrow, or ‘regime-change’ as they used to call it, was plotted by a depraved British Prime Minister, British spies and a renegade Russian prince, a traitor and a transvestite of base morality, typical of the worst fabulously wealthy Russian aristocrats of that age. Today history has turned full circle and exorcised that terrible past.

After 1917 my country was thrown into the Fire of Mordor, so vividly portrayed by John Tolkien, who had passed though that same Fire on the killing fields of the Somme, when the European elite bowed down in worship to its cannibal gods. The massacres which that elite had been performing in its far distant colonies, not least in the Belgian Congo, were revisited on its lands as retribution.

John Tolkien understood that death is the enemy of life, that the kingdom of death is called hell and that it is the devil who keeps the laws in hell. And he portrayed that hell in his books. After 1917, my own forebears suffered directly in torture and death, repression and camps, and then the catastrophes of exactly fifty years ago, after the collapse of the atheist regime, and not least my dear mother, who, as you know, was a Romanov. In those days I was much comforted by the words of John Tolkien:

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

Thus, I can say that my whole country also went through a Somme, but a Somme which lasted with varying degrees of intensity for 110 years, until 2027. On a theological level, we too were faced with the monumental struggle between the Shire and Mordor, between Life and Death, between what in Russian we call Православие and Кривославие, between Orthodox Christianity and Twisted Christianity, of the Orthodox Church and a pseudo-Church, a Church of a Political Ideology and Corrupt Business. That has been cleansed, not least through the zeal of His Holiness, our Patriarch John of New Jerusalem and All Russia, who has swept away all that filth, which is such a shameful stain in the annals of our Church.

As regards our judgement of the past, we ask all our ancestors what they lived and died for? Did they live and die for Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland, or not? By Faith we mean Faith in the Redeeming Power of Love; by the Tsar, we mean just Christian government; by the Fatherland we mean all those parts of the world which identify as Russian. Gone is the time of the dead hand of State Religion; of corrupt and merciless Government; and of the Imperialism which oppresses other nations and exploits their resources.

Our task for the last fifteen years, since 2027, has been to rebuild and heal our Russian Shire. Seventeen years ago, the world stood on the brink of World War III. Only that visit to the doors of death softened the hearts of pride. By the prayers of the saints the world drew back from the brink, and with the help of several leaders, real statesmen who stood head and shoulders above the pygmy politicians of that time, we avoided planetary tragedy. Statesmen had learned the lessons of the disastrous World Wars, which had brought to ruination twentieth and early twenty-first century Europe. They steered Europe to Renewal and Resurrection.

The statesmen had not been prejudiced by the propaganda which justifies acts of evil. They had understood the futility of empires, which rise in blind enthusiasm, but always fall in decadence. In particular, they learned this lesson from the fall of the last empire, the American Empire, which had exhausted and bankrupted itself in futile wars and invasions all around the world and which ended in vulgar materialism and frivolous infantilism, in greed and selfishness.

Today we have seen how the world which faced Sauron and Mordor has drawn back from the Ring, which bound them all in Evil. John Tolkien understood that peace on our Middle Earth can only come through the co-operation of the Nations, a Fellowship of the Ring, now called the Alliance of Sovereign Nations, a rebuilding of the many Shires, the best in every nation and people, in ‘sovereignty and freedom, justice and humanity, mercy and compassion’, as my predecessor put it. So too do our statesmen. And so too did our saints.

I would like to end my address to you this day by quoting from the Akathist service to one of those saints, who was also called John. This is St John the Wonderworker, whose lifespan covered much the same years as those of John Tolkien. Born into the Maximovich family in what is now Kievan Rus in 1896, he was exiled and lived in Belgrade and Shanghai, in Western Europe and Western America. We praise him because he was ‘filled with love for his fellow-men and did all possible for their salvation’, because he was the ‘righteous accuser of impiety and false teaching’, because ‘his love knew no bounds of land or race’, because he ‘destroyed lies and exalted truth’ and ‘kept his faith and courage amid unjust persecution’.

And was this not also what John Tolkien tried to do? On this the 150th anniversary of his birth, we thank God for him and for all those who do good, bringing peace to the Nations and Hope for humankind. It is our task to remake this broken world a little nearer to the heart’s desire, knowing that this world is only a shadow of the glory of the world to come, but that Help and Hope are always near.

Thank you for listening.

3 January 2025

 

 

Prehistory, the Flood and History

Dating

Radiometric dating methods currently reckon the age of the Earth to be some 4.5 billion years and the age of the Universe to be nearly 14 billion years. However, scientists modify these figures more or less every generation according to the latest theory. The accuracy of such methods, for example carbon-14 for recent dates, or potassium-argon for long ago, is dubious. Carbon-14 sometimes gives the most contradictory dates for anything more than about 2,500 years old and even before that it can err by up to two or three centuries. As for potassium-argon, it can date a rock formed by lava from a volcanic eruption a few years ago as being 200 million years old.

This imprecision comes about because these dating methods presume that depletion of the element in question is constant. It may not be. Given this inaccuracy, suppose we suspended our disbelief and regarded such dating systems and ‘scientific’ mythologisation regarding Creation as a cultural error? What if we took literally, and not symbolically, the traditional Christian Roman dating system, as used by the Orthodox Church? Whereas the old pagan Roman calendar dated everything from the foundation of pagan Rome in 754 BC, the Christian Roman calendar dates everything from the Creation, dated to 1 September 5509 BC.

In other words, in order to convert to the Christian Roman calendar, we must add 5,508 to the current year, if it is between January and August, and 5,009 to the current year, if it is between September and December. Thus, in December 2024 the Christian Roman date from Creation is 7,533. (Fundamentalist Protestants use the much later Jewish text of the Old Testament and generally date Creation to 22 October 4004 BC, making today 6,028 years from Creation). Most Orthodox Christians treat the date for Creation and the Six ‘Days’ of Creation as purely symbolic, and none of this is a dogma. However, if taken literally, it would have some very interesting implications.

From Prehistory to History

The acceptance of such dating would completely change our understanding of what is known as ‘Prehistory’, more precisely ‘pre-literary history’. For Prehistory was transmitted only orally, as it is the period before writing systems were invented –which was soon after the Flood, as dated  according to the Septuagint (see below). Therefore, taking the Christian Roman calendar, Prehistory would have lasted not billions or millions of years, but only about two millennia, from 7,533 to 5,291 years ago (Genesis 1-5), as the Church’s Septuagint text of the Old Testament dates the Flood to 5,291 years ago, 2,242 years after Creation.

We know little of Prehistory because of the Global Flood of Noah’s time which literally washed it all away, including the corpses of the relatively few people (a few tens of thousands?) then living. However, we do know what was later written down by Moses from the oral tradition passed down from the survivors, the much-mocked Noah and his family, who alone had not consorted with demons. And we should recall that since people lived for hundreds of years (for example, Adam = 930 years, Jared = 962 years, Methuselah = 969 years) oral traditions were basically stories handed down from ancestors, whom they had personally known. Thus, Adam was Noah’s seven times great-grandfather. (For comparison, one of my seven times great-grandfathers was born fewer than 400 years ago, not 2,242 years ago).

For instance, the first Book of Moses records that between the Fall and the Flood people, often called ‘neanderthals’, at first lived primitively in caves and wore animal skins, becoming hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists (see Genesis 3, 23-24 and 4, 1-3). What is clear is that those who had such long lifetimes must have become very skilled and technologically sophisticated, especially because of the presence of half-demon giants (nephilim) with their immense strength (Genesis 6, 1-4). From this period we also have folk memories, recorded universally in folklore with its giants (Genesis 6, 1-4), monsters, dragons, demons (elves, goblins, gnomes etc), angels (fairies), wizards and witches. With a lifetime of many centuries to experience, learn and think, many things became possible. Their civilisation was surely advanced.

In recent years there have been discoveries of complex stone structures now hundreds of feet under the sea, which may indicate that such technological progress took place. Some have interpreted these as confirming the many legends of vanished advanced civilisations, now flooded worlds, such as that of Atlantis. In any case, Genesis 4, 17-20 records the first settlements and towns. Genesis 4, 21 records the first musician. And Genesis 4, 22 records the first use of bronze, dated to about 5,300 years ago by archaeologists, and the use of iron, again showing the progress from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age. Why was it all destroyed by the Flood? Because the Earth had been demonised and, apart from Noah and his family, there was no further possibility of salvation. The existence of the Earth had become senseless until it had been cleansed.

The Flood

In Chapters 5-9 the Book of Genesis records the Universal Flood of 5,291 years ago. This Flood would have formed all geological layers, or strata, of rock, formed for instance from crushed clay (shale), chalk and seashells (limestone) sand (sandstone), mud (mudstone), trees and vegetation (coal) and other geological materials. The Flood, providentially for us, formed ‘petroleum’ (literally ‘rock-oil’), that is, oil, as well as gas from buried sea creatures and coal from buried forests. This also created fossils of animals which drowned instantly and were crushed, for there was no time for decomposition, as with animals which die slowly and naturally. (Fossilisation has hardly ever occurred in recent millennia). The future fossils were buried immediately beneath the floodwaters and the silt they carried – 4.5% of all fossils are of plants, and 95% are of marine creatures, which are also found on mountain peaks. Only 0.5% are of birds, animals and mammals.

The Flood formed the continents and islands, more or less as we know them today, as the original single land mass or ‘Pangea’ (Genesis 1, 9) was separated out as moving tectonic plates divided them. Continental drift began, as mountain chains rose up thousands of metres high from plains through very violent volcanic activity and the movement of the tectonic plates, when ‘the fountains of the great deep burst forth’ (Genesis 7, 11). Meanwhile, mainly in the far north of Europe and North America, there began the Ice Age, the result of floodwaters, heated by volcanic eruptions, condensing and freezing. The volcanic eruptions would also have blocked out the sunlight in those areas and killed the mammoths by asphyxiation through dust particles, which is how they died out. This Ice Age lasted for several hundred years over northern land areas, but it continues today in the Arctic and the Antarctic, though the ice there has been contracting for at least two centuries.

All animals and mammals, including the many which are today extinct, are descended from those in the Ark and developed into different species. They had obviously been selected and entered the Ark when they were very young. These did not include any fish, like ‘the leviathan’ (recorded in Job and the Psalms) and the sea monster (the Book of Jonah, where it was mistranslated as a ‘whale’). However, they would have included ‘dinosaurs’, recorded in the Old Testament as ‘the behemoth’ (Job 40, 15-24) and ‘dragons’, (see especially Daniel 14 in the Septuagint and the Psalms), as also in all folklore. (Did St George later kill the last ‘dragon’?). As Genesis 8, 4 tells us, the Ark was deposited on the mountains of Ararat, in the far west of today’s Turkey near Armenia.

People moved down from here along the rivers and settled in what is now called Mesopotamia (the land between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates) in today’s Iraq. The Flood is also recorded in garbled legends, like that of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, and the other 300 ‘creation myths’ of different peoples worldwide. All humanity is descended from the 8 people, 4 couples, with their huge gene pool of all humanity, who were saved in the Ark. Indeed, genetics tends to confirm the origin of humanity from those eight people. This means that all human-beings are much, much closer to one another than according to the ‘scientific’ version, which dates human-beings back hundreds of thousands of years. In the Septuagint version we are all cousins, descended from only 5,291 years ago through only 200 or so generations.

History Begins

Now we enter recorded history and parallels with the Old Testament. Interestingly, according to archaeologists, the earliest known writing systems appeared about 5,250 years ago. This was just after the Flood, as dated by the Septuagint. At that time Noah planted the first vineyard (Genesis 9,20) and in Genesis 10-11 we read of the building of a great Tower (of Babel) some 5,150 ago. After its collapse, people were scattered (Genesis 11,9) to the ends of the earth, in a confusion of tongues, which led to the development of today’s more than 7,000 languages. People moved north, west, east and south, founding new civilisations in the course of time. Thus:

Stone Age monuments in Europe, like Carnac, Stonehenge, Silbury, Avebury and Skara Brae in Orkney, date back to about 5,100 years ago.

The Indus civilisation began about 4,500 years ago.

The first Egyptian pyramids were built some 4,500 years ago and African civilisations developed, gradually spreading further south. Thus, the Bantu moved into Central Africa some 4,000 years ago, finally arriving in South Africa some 2,400 years ago.

Genesis 11,26 records the birth of Abraham some 4,145 years ago.

The first Chinese dynasty appeared some 4,100 years ago.

The African-looking Olmecs settled in Central America some 3,200 years ago.

Civilisation began in Japan some 2,700 years ago.

The first people reached Tahiti some 2,500 years ago.

Amazonian civilisation began about 2, 500 years ago.

In Australia civilisation appeared some 4,000 years ago.

The Cahotian, Aztec and Inca civilisations in the Americas appeared about 1,000 years ago.

The first people settled in Hawaii some 1,000 years ago.

Finally, people reached New Zealand and Easter Island some 800 years ago.

Most will not be able to suspend their belief in the customary secular system, which since the last century has dated the age of the Universe at billions of years. They will regard the above as fantasy. But if they took it seriously, then very different perspectives would open up before them.

 

A New Year’s Message: Battling Antichrist and His Antichurch

A buffoon will destroy the Ukraine

1992 Prophecy of St Gabriel (Urgebadze)

  1. The Antipoliticians: The Collapse of the Western Political Establishment

The once apparently inexorable march towards the Brave New World of Globalism, that is, towards the One World Dictatorship of Antichrist, has been restrained. The restrainer is President Putin. However, he has been supported and followed by the whole Global Majority, those who represent the seven billion plus of the world against the one billion plus who are formally, and only formally, represented by the Western elite, whom we call Antipoliticians. For they are the forerunners of Antichrist, he who replaces Christ is adored by those who replaces politicians.

The Global Majority would not submit to the Globalists. Even though the world was intimidated by the mainstream media’s covid hysteria, outside the Western world the majority refused to conform. Then the same thing happened in the Western war against Russia, which has been taking place in the Soviet-established borders of the Ukraine. The vast majority rejected the West’s fairy-tale ‘narrative’ of lies, with which the Western elite has deluded only itself. Now that it is apparent that the Globalist elite and its hireling media are losing their war on Russia in the Ukraine, they are collapsing in desperation and panic. Thus:

In the American Empire the Globalist and bankrupt regime of Emperors Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden is dying out in humiliation and dementia. The American Empire first tried and failed to assassinate twice its new rival, Trump. Now it is desperately fighting in its last days to cling on to power and cause maximum worldwide destruction, as in Syria. But it has been voted out of power by the American people.

In the military dictatorship of South Korea, established by the US decades ago, the corrupt President faces impeachment for trying to take over the country in a coup d’etat and trying to give away its stockpiles of US arms to the Kiev regime.

In Japan more and more voices are calling for independence from the occupying and bankrupting US regime.

In Israel the US-financed and supported leader has been placed on a list of wanted war criminals for his genocide in Gaza, followed by his genocides in the West Bank, the Lebanon. He is now illegally invading Syria – again. So where are the Western sanctions against Israel? Double standards again.

In Canada the hated woke Trudeau regime is collapsing. Future President Trump has even joked that the US should take over Canada as its fifty-first state. But his joke was taken seriously by many Canadians who welcomed it as the solution to their national problems.

In the bankrupt UK the authoritarian Starmer regime, chosen by only 20% of the electorate, is collapsing, together with the economy, the military, and Establishment pedophile Anglicanism. According to some, Elon Musk is to give $100 million to the only Opposition, the fast-growing and anti-Ukraine war Reform Party. President Trump, it is said, will clamp trade tariffs on the UK, if Trump’s friend, Farage of the Reform Party, is not made at least the new UK ambassador to Washington. Instead Starmer wants to appoint a very sinister individual, Mandelson, a Non-British homosexual, known in the UK for over a generation as ‘the prince of darkness’. A senior aide of Trump has called Mandelson (Mendelsohn) ‘an absolute moron’. The old EU technique, practised as long ago as the Maastricht Treaty in the 1990s, of cancelling or repeating elections that you risk losing may soon be imitated by the Starmer regime in the UK.

In bankrupt and deindustrialising Germany the hated Scholz regime has collapsed. Early elections will take place in February 2025.

In France the anti-democratic Macron regime, elected last summer by only 20% of the voters, and clinging on to power against the will of the people, has collapsed. It is expected to collapse again.

Thus, the Western European Big Three, the UK, Germany and France, all face a choice between Trumpian candidates and Brussels candidates. (Brexit has never been implemented in the UK – the British Establishment did not want it, and Starmer is the Brussels candidate). All three yesmen (Starmer, Macron, Scholz) are resisting the Trumpian candidates (Farage, AfD, Le Pen) on orders from Brussels. It labels all opposition to it as ‘far right’, regardless of whether they are on the left, on the right, or in the centre.

In fact, the unelected Commissars of totalitarian Brussels, several of them the grandchildren of Nazis, behave as if they were members of an International Fascist Party. Therefore, they refuse to implement any democratic decisions. All three main countries of Western Europe are bankrupt and suffer from collapsing infrastructure, but all three have been giving tens of billions to the equally bankrupt Ukraine. All three are desperately anti-Trump and anti-Russian and look at countries like China and India as racially inferior. Thus, they all despise and oppose three of the world’s four largest economies, China, India and Russia. Do not look for logic here. The only logic is the determination of the Western European elite to commit suicide. It is an Antilogic, for they are Antipoliticians.

In Romania, where the patriotic, Orthodox (he is a priest’s son), and therefore anti-Zelensky and anti-EU, candidate was expected to gain 63% of the vote according to polls, the imminent elections were cancelled by the Biden regime. Only their candidate, on 37%, was supposed to win.

They have not yet been able to cancel elections in Hungary and Slovakia – the only free countries left in the Western half of Europe, even though they tried to assassinate the Slovak Premier six months ago. It is widely expected that Hungary, Slovakia and Non-EU Serbia will join BRICS as soon as possible. Italy, Spain and Portugal may follow them in time, as the EU collapses.

In Georgia, US/EU-financed protests against the anti-US/anti-EU election victory over the defeated French President have failed miserably. The US/EU threat is now to call new elections because the results of the first elections were ‘wrong’.

In Moldova, despite massive election fraud by the EU, the US/EU victor has in practice no majority.

China looks on in astonishment at the Western chaos. One day it will soon just walk back into Chinese Taiwan, unopposed, as the West s so distracted by the chaos it has created.

Meanwhile in Moscow, General Kirillov was assassinated. Why? It was he who exposed the British-planned fake chemical attack in Syria. Next he exposed the Skripal attack, when the British failed to murder Russians with Novichok poison, which almost uniquely in the whole world, is kept eight miles away at the sinister British chemical weapons centre at Porton Down. He then exposed the US bioweapons factories in the Ukraine. His assassin? An MI6-trained Uzbek terrorist paid by the Ukraine.

Throughout the world, it is at last being recognised that so-called democracy in the Western world is a myth and was long ago replaced by authoritarian oligarchy. The West, like its puppet in Kiev, is ruled by the rich. There is no democracy here.

All this leaves the existence of the seriously divided NATO and EU in serious doubt. The deluded and racist Western fantasy that it has the supreme right to control and oppress the rest of the whole world is over.

  1. The Antipastors: The Collapse of the Western Spiritual Establishment

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, despisers of those that are good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

2 Timothy 3, 1-5

The millennial Western institution of the Vatican is now in crisis and is threatened by a formal split. Some say that the present 88-year-old, wheelchair-bound Pope, is the last one. He appears to many pious Roman Catholics to be more concerned with the secular world than with the spiritual world. Many of them are scandalised by him.

After his fall in a pedophile cover-up scandal, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called by some ‘The Archbishop of Woke’, resigned and the survival of the Church of England is in doubt. Thousands of its churches are empty, most of its members are elderly. Those who appointed this Archbishop wanted him because he had been an executive in an oil company before he became an Anglican cleric. They appointed him because they wanted a manager, as they think of the Church as a Business. Next time how about appointing someone who actually believes in God? Managers will not help churches. Only pastors will help churches.

However, the foundation of the Antichurch is not some uniquely Anglican or Roman Catholic problem, it concerns all Christians. There are individual Antipastors, who are not just Roman Catholic and Protestant, but also Orthodox. The Orthodox concerned have been infiltrated into the Church by the CIA and other such agencies, with the predatory and debauched spirit of Capitalism.  Their only interest is creating from the Church a Business. The most prominent among them is Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, notorious for setting up with a large amount of US money ($25 million?) the ‘Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’. This is a fake Ukrainian nationalist organisation, not a Church at all, but a gangster mafia which steals church buildings from the Church by violence.

This elderly Patriarch Bartholomew, almost as old as the Pope of Rome, publicly declares that he wants to apostasise from Orthodoxy and become a departmental manager in the Vatican in 2025. Let him. Real Orthodox will not follow him. All those who consider that the Church is a Business – including some clerics of the Russian Church, anti-Russians, who are contributing to building the Antichurch, “the character of their relations with their nearest circle and their way of life incompatible with their status of monk and cleric”. They are building an institution worthy of the Antichrist, whose path as his forerunners they are preparing.

These forerunners are the Antipastors. They are opposed to the people, just as their brother and sister Antipoliticians are also opposed to the people. They practise the faith of the State, even though the State has long since abandoned them. They operate the dead hand of bureaucracy and protocols of the State. Among them are sexual perverts and crooks. These bureaucrats are the servants of the father of lies, the prince of this world, which is why they consider themselves also to be princes (‘princes of the Church’).

It matters not if the Antipastors use left-wing or right-wing politics to fulfil their aims, it matters only that they use politics. For politics, the anti-spiritual masquerading as the spiritual, is their realm and they are expert in it. They have never heard that we must ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s’.  A Pastor is he who unites the faithful with love, but an Antipastor is he who divides the faithful with hatred.

The task of the Antipastors is to eliminate all pastors, who have given their whole lives to the Church and built and rebuilt churches without payment, gathered together the scattered people, built parishes, and whose devotion is unquestioned. The Antipastors declare that the Church must be converted into a Business. There is no room among them for Faith in Christ, monastic life, sincerity and compassion. The Antipastors are ruthless in trying to destroy anyone who is sincere. The Church must be destroyed as a Christian society. Therefore, the Antipastors betray and slander the pastors, so they can replace them with their own fake pastors, their handpicked yesmen, the careerists and businessmen, who can make money for them. The Antipastors are experts at lying, for they are the faithful servants of their father the devil.

Just like the Pope of Rome – birds of a feather flock together – they try to close all the churches where the spiritual is practised, they either sell them to make money, or else they put in new ‘managers’ for their ‘Church-Business’. They may even open churches, but only those where the Faith has been transformed into a mere rite, outward, money-making ritualism, playing on superstition, without any inner content. This too is in order to raise more money for the Antipastors, who are wolves in shepherd’s clothing. They still do not know that ‘though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal’.

Now they have achieved their aim. Once they have destroyed their part of the Church, they will move on to their next victims, flattering and cajoling to make their next career move.

What will happen to them?

They will all be swept away in the coming Great Cleansing and will face the Judgement of the Coming King. For now is the time of the fulfilment of the prophecies. Let us pray and tremble!

«Antichrist will make Church life possible, he will allow her services, will allow fine churches to be built on condition that they recognise him as the supreme being and worship him. There will be a mass falling away from the Faith, as many bishops will betray the Faith and in self-justification will point to the flourishing situation of the Church. The search for compromise will be the characteristic mood among people. Straightforward confession will vanish».

St John of Shanghai

 

 

 

Clericalisation Comes From Corruption

Photographs of many Orthodox services from around the world more and more show pictures of services at which virtually only clergy are present. This clericalisation was not the case previously. Although it is more obvious among minor groups in the Diaspora, especially among those who have difficulty in recruiting members because of their schismatic rather than unitive ethos, such photographs can be seen in very many places. Since such clericalisation is clearly an effect, not the cause, where has it all come from? Let us first look at Roman Catholic clericalisation.

The Case of Roman Catholicism

In the case of Roman Catholicism, the clear cause of its clericalisation was institutionalised obligatory clerical celibacy, which is another way of saying corruption. Introduced by force and even violence from the second half of the eleventh century on, obligatory clerical celibacy was inherently divisive and created a class or caste of woman-hating men who were different from and, as they imagined, superior to ‘the people’. Clericalisation, that is, the claim that the clergy are ’the Church’, which is a widespread peculiarity of the Western world, had the counter-effect of creating anti-clericalism and anti-episcopalianism. This in turn gave rise to congregationalism and eventually to Protestantism. In reality, the Church is the whole body of the faithful, clergy and people together and not apart.

However, even worse, obligatory clerical celibacy also gave rise among Roman Catholic (and Anglican) clergy to widespread bisexuality, homosexuality and pedophilia. I remember being advised by an old Russian priest in France some 35 years ago that if ever I had to meet a Roman Catholic priest, I should first ask him outright, though discreetly, if he was married or not. In France, at least, nearly all the best Catholic priests are married – about 20% of them. They have to keep it secret, of course, but, frankly, as Roman Catholicism is dying out in France for lack of priests, even if their bishops found out that they were married, they would probably turn a blind eye, as they have long done in Southern Europe, Latin America and Africa.

With Anglican clergy one must also be very careful. As we know, the British Establishment (not just the Anglican Church) has been full of pedophiles ever since William Rufus, and the Anglican Establishment full of them, like the notorious Bishop Ball and all the other criminals who have been protected by Anglican bishops, as did the scandalous former Archbishop of Canterbury. As regards Anglican clergy, even the married ones can be bisexual, especially in the so-called ‘High Church’. The Church has to be very careful about receiving Anglican clerics. Having said that, many are fine, some are admirable, but you have to check very carefully for misogyny etc.

The Orthodox Church

Wherever clericalisation is found in the Orthodox world, the cause is always the same: the lack of monastic and pastoral life, which is also another way of saying corruption. I have always thought that no man should be considered for the Orthodox episcopate until he had spent at least five years living under obedience in a monastery and/or five years living as a parish priest. This would be a ten-year long apprenticeship for the episcopate. Instead of contact with monastic and pastoral reality, what do we inevitably get? We get the same phenomena as in Roman Catholicism:

Firstly, there is homosexualisation (thank God, pedophilia is very rare among the Orthodox episcopate – I only know of two cases). Here are the bishops of many nationalities who like to visit with their ‘subdeacon’, as one senior cleric told me. He could supply a full list of names. Secondly, I have noticed that closet homosexuality also tends to go hand in hand with alcohol abuse. Thirdly, alongside the homosexual bishops are the overdressed, lickspittle careerists, who love bureaucracy and protocols. Petty bureaucracy makes them feel good, as it gives them power, the ability to humiliate others, who are often far senior to them. These careerists love centralisation and encourage it, because that gives them even more power and, above all, even more money.

All know about the Greek metropolitan who had to move from one city to another because of his notorious frequentation of gay bars (this was back in the 1970s). All know about the ultra-conservative and schismatic CIA ROCOR bishop and his sex-obsessed and money-obsessed son, ‘the six million-dollar man’, as he was called in the 1990s. All know about the recent Antiochian Archbishop of America. He is one of many – and far from the worst. The scandal is that he was defrocked, not because of his mistresses or because he was extremely rich (how?), but only because he took his own Church to court about money. All know about that Metropolitan-oligarch, who was so keenly and publicly denounced by Metr Antony of Sourozh already twenty years ago. But they are merely the tip of the iceberg, there are many others, whom we have seen, both fifty years ago and recently. But they are all absolutely alien, indeed absolutely unthinkable to real Orthodox.

We are the generation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, ready to die for the Church of God. Now instead of arkhimandrity, as they say in Russian, we have arkhibandity. In the old Soviet times, the Church was infiltrated by the Party with its atheist ideology. Now it is worse. The Party is still there, but it does not come from outside, the new Party and the new ideology, born in the 1990s, are inside the Church and they are called ‘Business’. Christ called it Mammon (money) and yet those ‘churchmen’ who are involved are told specifically by Christ that they cannot serve two masters. Sadly, the clergy involved are soldiers who owe utter obedience to corruption, for part of the episcopate has been militarised. And yet the Church is not an army, but a voluntary organisation. Here is what happens with clericalisation – militarisation of the clergy.

As one Russian told me, ‘I need no managers between me and God’, thinking of the old Protestant slogan, ‘I need no mediators between me and God’. Sadly, there is now a collective narcissistic mafia, as nobody is allowed to reveal the truth about this pharisee class of ‘effective managers’. We believe with the prophets and fool for Christ that Orthodox Russia may yet become the last bastion of Orthodoxy against Antichrist. However, this is clearly not the case now, for Orthodox Russia does not exist. What exists now is Nationalist Russia. For now the last bastion of Orthodoxy is the hearts of all the faithful, who resist Antichrist, who wants to come here and be enthroned. He will not be in our hearts.

Some who reject the new Party and its ideology make the great mistake of giving up the fight against clericalisation and corruption by joining the enemy and appearing on CIA-financed radio and television to scandalise and criticise, painting the whole Russian Church black. This is quite untrue and it is also either naïve or else foolish. These critics are playing into the hands of the CIA-financed politics of those who persecute the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and discredit their cause and themselves, for they have chosen an episcopate no less corrupt than the one they left and one no less political than the one they left.

They too, consciously or, as I would like to think, unconsciously, become traitors to Orthodoxy. This is not the way. You cannot defeat politics with politics. We have to be aware of politics, but we do not get involved in political intrigues. Just as we are aware of the demons, but we do not get involved in demonic intrigues. Just wait, those who have compromised themselves morally and financially in military-style clericalisation and corruption, whether inspired by the ‘Church as a Business’ ideology or by CIA money, are coming to their end. Desperation and panic are their sign. Their time is clearly up.

 

Fourth Edition of Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Now Online

Fifty years since the first of the essays in Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition was written and nearly thirty years since the first edition was published, we have been asked to reissue the anthology, as the third edition has sold out. We have now reissued this work as an e-book under Resources on the Orthodox England website.

http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/oe4/e-books/

From the homepage it is the last item under the resources dropdown menu.

Between Greeks and Russians and Towards Christ: Towards an Inter-Orthodox Church Council

Foreword: Memories

In 1981 we were a young Orthodox couple living in a small town in Cambridgeshire, struggling financially with a baby daughter and expecting a second. We were so naïve that we actually thought that all Orthodox bishops were Christians. That’s how naïve we were. But let us go back long before that, to a day in 1917, when my future grandparents with a baby daughter and expecting a second were travelling down the Colne Valley Railway and then for several miles on foot. They were going from south-west Suffolk to north-east Essex, in search of work amid the crisis of the Great War. At the same time as these minor family matters, events a hundred million times greater and more tragic were happening internationally.

Introduction: The Past

In three fateful months at the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917 the British elite through its ambassador Buchanan and his spies in Saint Petersburg orchestrated the overthrow of the Orthodox Tsar by atheist Russian aristocrats, generals, bankers, lawyers and journalists. Since then the Church, that is, the whole Confederation of the Orthodox Church, has descended into chaos, struggling under persecution from ‘East and West’, that is, from Communists and freemasons. Moreover, since the fall of Communism in 1991, this strife has not ceased and we are still dealing with the consequences of that twentieth-century struggle.

Indeed, instead of overcoming the old Cold War divisions, the divisions between the extremes of once Communist, now nationalist Moscow, and once masonic, now globalist Constantinople, have continued. These have paralysed the Church, thwarting all solutions to the clear canonical irregularities which we all suffer from, especially in the Diaspora. This situation has left all who are between the Russian and Greek extremes thwarted.

Perhaps, one day, there will be a Patriarch Tikhon II of Moscow and of All Russia (by then of All Russia, but no longer of All the Russias). Perhaps one day there will be a Patriarch Maximos VI of Constantinople (by then residing in Thessaloniki and not in Istanbul). Each could take up the unfinished tasks that were so tragically interrupted, one by British-orchestrated Russian aristocrats in 1917, the other (so very soon afterwards because without a Tsar they could do such things) by the masonically-orchestrated Patriarch Meletios (Metaxakis) in 1921 and later by the CIA-installed Patriarch Athenagoras (Spyrou) in 1948.

However, even before any such possible future, a new generation of Patriarchs has by the hand of God appeared and are forming a new Centre, outside the paralysing extremes of Russians and Greeks. Those extremes have caused the Church to stagnate in the distant past. In today’s global world, when Orthodox live all over the planet and use the internet, it is time to overcome these absurd anachronisms. There are over 50 Orthodox bishops in the USA and over 25 in Western Europe, but no Local Churches, and yet there are tiny Autocephalous Churches in Eastern Europe with only a handful of bishops.

What if the heads of the ten Non-Greek and Non-Russian Local Churches, Patriarch Daniel of Bucharest, Patriarch Daniel of Sofia, Patriarch Porphyry of Belgrade, Archbishop Anastasius of Albania, supported by the Patriarchs of Georgia, Antioch and Jerusalem and the Metropolitans of the Polish, Czechoslovak and Macedonian Churches, a majority of the whole Church, were to call an Inter-Orthodox Conference, perhaps at the National Cathedral in Bucharest? What could the agenda be for such an Inter-Orthodox Conference, which could, if blessed by the Holy Spirit, become a Church Council?

An Agenda of Autocephaly and Autonomy

Even if Russians and Greeks did not have new leadership and/or continued to block canonical resolutions to their problems, Constantinople, Moscow and Alexandria could be called on by the Non-Greeks and Non-Russians at such an Inter-Orthodox Conference to make peace as Christians. They could come to compromises and put forward concrete proposals. For example:

Constantinople could be called on to give up all of Moscow’s territory in the former USSR, including in the Ukraine and Estonia. But Moscow in turn could be called on to cancel and apologise for its uncanonical ‘defrockings’ and ‘suspensions’ of clergy who were obliged to join Constantinople and all those clergy could return to Moscow, if they wished. However, concessions to Moscow would depend on concessions it made to others (see below). As for the canonical dispute between Moscow and Alexandria regarding the territory of Africa, we suggest a compromise solution, which is explained below.

In return for this concession by Constantinople, it would receive several benefits. Firstly, the Church of Greece could be called on to reintegrate the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople, provided that the centre of this Patriarchate were transferred to Thessaloniki, near Mt Athos, which is already in the Constantinople jurisdiction (and not to the political capital of Athens).

This would end the political pressures on Constantinople of the Neo-Ottoman Sultanate, the Vatican and the CIA, after a disastrous period of such political pressures and centuries of bribes and corruption. The Greek Orthodox would at last have their own canonical Patriarch for Greece and for all Greek speakers in the Diaspora. To those who object to this, there is no reason why a title has to be geographically accurate. For example, for generations, the Patriarchate of Antioch (now a town in Turkiye) has been in Damascus. There would then be thirteen, universally recognised Local Churches. Other benefits could follow – see below.

Together, the first act of these thirteen Churches could be to confirm the autocephaly (full independence) of the (North) Macedonian Orthodox Church, but allowing the Greek Churches to call it by another name among themselves, if they preferred, for example, The Autocephalous Church of Ochrid. Canonical autocephaly was already granted it by the Serbian Orthodox Church, on whose canonical territory Macedonia is situated. This would make fourteen, universally recognised Local Churches.

Together, the first act of these fourteen Churches could be to confirm the creation of a united Autonomous Moldovan Orthodox Church, established jointly by the Russian and Romanian Churches. This would come under the jurisdiction of the Romanian Orthodox Church, with guarantees for all Russians and Russian customs on the autonomous (and politically independent) territory and for guaranteed pastoral care for the Moldovan Diaspora under the Romanian Orthodox Church. The Russian Church would also cancel all its political ‘defrockings’ of clergy, who were formerly under the Russian Church and who have joined the Romanian Church.

Together, in return, the second act of the fourteen Churches could be to confirm the two other Autonomous Orthodox Churches, the Japanese and Chinese, established by and under the pastoral care of Moscow. For the Patriarchate of Constantinople (now centred in Thessaloniki), there would be compensation in the form of Russian concessions to Constantinople on the territory of the former USSR, Northern America, Latin America, Western Europe and Oceania (see below).

From Fourteen to Eighteen and to Twenty-Four Local Churches

Together, the fourteen Local Churches could confirm the autocephaly of four new Local Churches, established by Moscow and Constantinople and confirmed by the other Local Churches. This would see the Church of Moscow becoming less populous, reducing it to a membership of about 100 million, half of the present total of the whole Orthodox Church. These four new Local Churches would be on the territory of the former Russian Empire/Soviet Union: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church; the Belarusian Orthodox Church; the Central Asian Orthodox Church (centred in Kazakhstan, but covering all five former Soviet ‘stans’); and the Baltic Orthodox Church, for all Orthodox in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland.

Together, these eighteen Local Churches could confirm the autocephaly of another six new Local Churches, to be established by all the Local Churches which have Diasporas. These would be multinational Churches, with several dioceses for each nationality, separate but together, models of unity in diversity. These new Churches would at last neutralise the vain, century-long battle for influence between Moscow and Constantinople in the Diasporas through the mediation of all the Local Churches concerned. These new Local Churches could be:

The Western European Orthodox Church, for all Orthodox residing in the at present twenty nations of Western Europe: Portugal, Spain, Andorra, Italy, San Marino, Malta, France, Monaco, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Ireland, United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden. Although a clear majority of Orthodox living here are Romanian, all would be represented freely and fairly in this new Church.

The Austro-Hungarian Orthodox Church, centred in Uzhhorod and with dioceses on the territory of Carpatho-Rus, but with two more dioceses, one centred in Budapest and the other in Vienna. Carpatho-Rus was formerly under Austro-Hungarian control, but later called Subcarpathian Rus under Czechoslovakia and then miscalled ‘Transcarpathia’ by Ukrainian chauvinists. These Orthodox were formerly persecuted by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then came under the canonical protection of Serbian Church before coming under the Russian Church. However, these people are neither Ukrainian, nor Russian, but Rusyn. Taking over Orthodox leadership of the territories of Hungary and Austria, Rusyns would guarantee that Orthodox of other nationalities, such as Serbs, Greeks and Russians, would be represented freely and fairly in the Church administration.

The Northern American Orthodox Church, replacing the OCA, whose autocephaly on a shared territory was never accepted by the vast majority, and including all Orthodox residing in largely English-speaking Northern America, that is, in the USA, Canada, Greenland and associated islands. This move could be agreeable to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, since Greeks make up the largest ethnic group in Northern America. Although a clear majority of Orthodox living here are Greek, all would be represented freely and fairly in this new Church. As the first Orthodox here were Alaskans, it would be fitting if an Alaskan could be found and appointed Metropolitan.

The Latin American Orthodox Church, for all Orthodox residing in the Latin-speaking countries of South and Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. The Patriarchate of Antioch, which has many faithful here, could play an important role in appointing a Metropolitan.

The Oceanian Orthodox Church, covering all Orthodox residing in the Continent of Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific Ocean. Although a clear majority of Orthodox living here are Greek, all would be represented freely and fairly in this new Church, but perhaps a suitable Greek Metropolitan could be found to lead this Church.

The African Orthodox Church, to be established by the Patriarchates of Alexandria and Moscow, though possibly leaving Egypt within the jurisdiction of Alexandria. All political ‘defrockings’ made by Alexandria are to be cancelled. This compromise between the two Patriarchates would free African Orthodox from both Greek and Russian national, almost colonial, politics and give them autocephaly and appoint an African Metropolitan.

Conclusion: The Affirmation of the Church

Although administrative and not at all dogmatic in nature, the above propositions, if made and if accepted by Moscow and Constantinople in humility, which is the only way to overcome national pride, would establish twenty-four Local Orthodox Churches. This would reconfirm the nature of the Church of the Seven Universal Councils – that the Church is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. This means that:

The Unity of the Church would be affirmed by an Inter-Orthodox Conference/Council, bringing full communion and agreement between all the Local Churches. Perhaps this could lead to an agreement to fix a Yearly Paschal Conference of the Heads of the twenty-four Local Churches. Such a Conference could be held under the rotating chairmanship of different Local Churches.

The Holiness of the Church would be affirmed by the common canonisation of saints of many nationalities at such an Inter-Orthodox Conference/Council. These saints might include Romanian, Russian, Serbian and Greek New Martyrs, for example, or the common celebration of still little-known local saints, models of piety for our times, such as St Olga of Alaska, introducing them into the mainstream.

The Catholicity of the Church would be affirmed by the Conciliarity of such a Conference/Council, which works against divisive nationalism, which is the enemy of our Catholicity. Perhaps this could lead to an agreement to fix a Five-Yearly Conference of five bishops from each Local Church, of 120 bishops in all. Such a Conference could be held under the rotating chairmanship of different Local Churches.

The Apostolicity of the Church would be affirmed by the missionary nature of the establishment of ten new Local Churches in territories where there have not been any Local Churches before. These are the vast Continents of Africa, Northern America, Latin America, Oceania and the half-continent of Western Europe, with their teeming billions. This would leave the existing Local Churches to establish in due course new missions and then Local Churches in the rest of Asia outside China and Japan, though there too much missionary work has still to be done, for example, in South and South-East Asia.

May God’s Will be done!

 

On the Present Divisions in the Russian Orthodox Church on Account of the Ukraine

Foreword

We have never had the slightest doubt that the Russian Federation, one of the World’s four Superpowers and the fourth largest economy in the world, would emerge militarily victorious in the conflict in the Ukraine. It is common sense, its military-industrial base is far greater than that of the Collective West and its military technology is far ahead of the Western, which is stuck at least one generation behind in the 1990s, as shown by its burning backward tanks in Russia and the Ukraine. On top of that, it is supported by the whole Non-Western world, including China, India, Africa and Latin America, all who have been and are victims of Western colonialism and exploitation – nearly 90% of the planet. The West has isolated itself through its crimes. The Western defeat in the Ukraine, which is rapidly on its way, is Divine chastisement for its hubris and all its crimes over the centuries, not least its recent genocides in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and the Ukraine.

However, this common sense does not mean that we rejoice in any of this profound tragedy or Russia winning the war. Will Russia win the peace? At least a million men are dead or maimed in the Ukraine. All are victims of international politics, above all the victims are the poor Ukrainians, whom the racist Americans and the Western European elite want to see killed ‘until the last Ukrainian’. Now they want to murder even those Ukrainians between the ages of 18 and 25. However, as we have said from the outset, another great loser will be the once multinational Russian Orthodox Church, which has lost its Ukrainian flock and others by descending into Russian nationalist politics and cutting itself off from communion with the corrupt hierarchy of the Church of Constantinople. All seem to have forgotten that we are pastors, not politicians and we have no interest in power and money. Their punishment is coming. As the proverb says: Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Introduction: The Conflict in the Ukraine

The very tragic conflict in the Ukraine has especially since 2022 caused divisions in the Russian Church outside the Ukraine. (I do not speak of the divisions that it has caused inside the Ukraine – they are all too obvious).

For: Patriots?

On the one hand, there are the Conservatives (for want of a better word), who fully support the armed conflict, which has already created over a million victims, killed and wounded. Many of these, on both sides, are formally baptised, in the same Russian Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, the views of the Conservatives, shared, it seems, by all the bishops and most of the priests inside Russia, though not by all of them in Western Europe and the USA, are that this is an operation to defend the Russian Federation and Russians in the east and south of the Ukraine from American-led NATO and Neo-Nazi Ukrainian aggression from the Kiev puppet government. Therefore, Russian actions are justified. Indeed, they claim that Russian actions are simply defending threefold Orthodox East Slavdom, Holy Rus (the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Belarus), from Western evils like atheism and transgenderism, like that of the 1916 murderer and traitor Yusupov.

Those who support the Conservatives proclaim that the latter are sincere Christians and good pastors, who are just defending Russia against its God-less Western enemies. Those against the Conservatives consider them to be cruel, heartless, anti-Christian, divisive and politically-motivated. How can they, especially as clergy, be in favour of destruction, war and death? What about: ‘Thou shalt not kill’? They consider that the supporters of the Russian forces are mercenary and murderous hirelings of an aggressive Russian government, and that they will do whatever the Russian State wants, that they have no Christian conscience. Their argument is supported by the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church is, or rather, used to be, the Church of all Russian Orthodox and all canonical Ukrainian Orthodox, that it used to be multinational. Therefore, to support one national side against another is to divide the flock of the Church, introducing a civil war into the Church. Is that Christian?

Against: Traitors?

On the other hand, there are the Liberals (for want of a better word), who are opposed to the conflict and demand the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Ukraine. These include the clergy of the former Russian parish in Amsterdam and in Madrid (all of them linked to the late liberal Metr Antony (Bloom)), and a well-known archpriest and protodeacon from Moscow, now in exile in Western Europe. They, and several others, have all been ‘defrocked’ by the Moscow Patriarchate for disagreeing with the ‘Party line’ (See Note 1) and so joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople – Moscow’s US-financed rival. But they had nowhere else to go. Others, bishops of the Russian-American Synod in New York have also called on Russia to withdraw its troops. The anti-Russian attitudes of such bishops, who are American citizens, are not surprising. In the past, they had at least one CIA-agent bishop and until 1991 subsidies from the CIA. Why should they not accept subsidies again?

Those who are against the conflict are said to be sincere Christians and good pastors. Those who support the conflict consider those against to be political traitors. In effect, those against the conflict are supporting Russia’s enemies, the Western Powers, led by the USA. They tell those who are against the conflict to visit the Avenue of the Angels monument in Donetsk, where 400 children murdered by Ukrainian/US shells between 2014 and 2022 are buried, together with nearly 14,000 adult civilian victims. Also, they point out that most of the ‘Russian’ troops fighting in the Ukraine are Ukrainians anyway – Russian-speaking inhabitants of the eastern and southern Ukraine, who are fighting for their right to speak their native language and attend their Orthodox Church, which is sorely persecuted by Kiev. Since they are Ukrainians, how can they withdraw from their own country? Here is the essence of the tragedy – this is the worst sort of war – a civil war.

The Third Way

Those who are for the conflict seem to support Russian nationalism and militarism, those who are against the conflict seem to support US globalism and secularism. It is clear that neither of these extremes can be supported. We support the Third Way. This says that the Church should not take sides in a conflict between secular States, the Russian Federation and the USA, both of which have, for example, very high rates of abortion and divorce, suffer from weak family life and have very low levels of Church attendance. We should act as pastors, not politicians, as Christians, not as secularists. Our secular passport may say Russian or Ukrainian, but our spiritual passport says Orthodox Christian. This is our heavenly nationality, over all that is earthly. We should pray not for ‘victory’, but for ‘peace’. It seems to us that the Russian Orthodox hierarchy in Moscow should grant the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church full independence.

If independence, or autocephaly, is what the canonical Ukrainian Church needs in order to stop persecution, even if only temporarily, let it have it. The Church does not put power above peace and money above love. Sadly, we must admit that the conflict in the Ukraine has highlighted that many, on both sides, have done the opposite, playing politics. For them there is only power and money, not peace and love. The example of St Nicholas of Japan (+ 1912) should be followed. During the Japano-Russian War of 1904-05, as the Russian bishop of Japan and founder of the Japanese Orthodox Church, he lived as a recluse in prayer, telling his Japanese flock to pray for the Japanese authorities, as the Apostle Paul instructs us. And then he fell silent for the duration. Why do the Church authorities in Moscow not do the same today? We also have the example of St Silvanus the Athonite (+ 1938), who during the First World War simply prayed that the least evil side win.

Conclusion: Towards Healing

Here are the examples that we may follow, praying that the present grave divisions inside the Russian Church and those between it and other Local Orthodox Churches may be overcome.

Note:

  1. ‘Defrocking’ for political reasons is utterly uncanonical and is ignored by all sixteen Local Orthodox Churches, including the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Church of Constantinople and the Russian Church. Thus, one part of the Russian Church freely receives ‘defrocked’ clerics from the Church of Constantinople, as well as, in the past, many from the Patriarchate of Moscow. Constantinople received hundreds of ‘defrocked’ Ukrainian clerics in the 1990s and has received others more recently. The Romanian Church has received over 200 ‘defrocked’ clerics in Moldova and in England from the Russian Church, who had been ‘defrocked’ because they had been persecuted by their bishops. As one Russian Moscow bishop told me about another bishop who had carried out such actions: ‘Send for the psychiatric ambulance to pick him up’! What always happens after such ‘defrockings’ is always ‘refrockings’, when meaningless pieces of paper, written against the Holy Spirit, often still in their unopened envelopes, are simply cancelled.

The End of the Second Western Empire and the Road from Damascus: The Just Shall Live by His Faith and the Prophecies of Habbakuk

The First Western Empire lasted just over 500 years, from 27 BC in Rome to 476 AD in Rome (there was no year zero). Its successor, the Second Western Empire, lasted twice as long, 1,000 years, from 1014 with the proclamation of the filioque in Rome to 2014 with, in effect, the proclamation of the filioque in Kiev. This Second and Last Empire was much weakened by tribal rivalries between the nine phases of the Western Empire in Europe. These were between the ‘Holy Roman’, Northern Italian (Venice, Genoa, Florence), Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British, German and Soviet phases. Their rival jostling for leadership of the Empire led to two suicidal European (World) Wars and to the final and tenth phase of the Western Empire, its American phase.

The First Western Empire fell and now the Second is falling. The parallels are obvious. The First Empire fell to ‘barbarians’, but who were less barbarian than Rome. The First Western Empire fell because the Romans who lived on its periphery sided with the converted ‘barbarians’, realising that Rome was the barbarian. Today the Second Western Empire is falling to Non-Westerners, not least of whom are the Russians, who today are converted, more European than the Europeans. The Non-Westerners, ‘the Rest’, form the Sovereign World, whose struggle for multipolarity is the struggle for justice and prosperity. The Western Empire can only respond by convincing countries to commit suicide, as in the Ukraine, Georgia and all of the EU, starting with Nordstream Germany.

The upshot of the First European War was the British-operated regime change in the Russian empire at the end of 1916, which backfired disastrously into the Soviet quagmire. The result of the Second European War was American intervention (it had already taken place in the First European War, as soon as the British had overthrown their Russian rivals) and American leadership of the Western Empire from 1945 on. Now the Americans always promoted gangsters and terrorists to head their imperial client-states. Thus, after reaching an apogee at the turn of the millennium, they declined rapidly. This always happens, as the method used contains the seeds of its own destruction (1). ‘Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind’. So now all is backfiring into the Syrian quagmire of beheadings.

The artificial, post-Ottoman countries of West Asia, designed by the divide and rule British (and French) after the First World War and held together by brutal dictators (only such could hold artificial countries together), are crumbling. Iraq, Libya and Syria. Who is next? The Jordan? Lebanon? Egypt? Syria is a trap for the Western Empire. It was only a pawn between the West and the Rest. Far more important pieces on the Western side of the chessboard can now be taken by the Rest. The Western Empire is today like a cornered, wounded and snarling beast. Cornered because it has painted itself into a corner; wounded because it has lost all its wars, from Korea to the Ukraine; snarling because it has humiliated itself in defeats and because liberation from the West for all Afro-Eurasia is here.

Thus, the Second Western Empire started collapsing immediately after reaching its apogee, the criminal ascent to which contained the seeds of its own destruction. This destruction is the result of unscrupulous imperial overreach, just like that in the First Western Empire 1600 years before. This most recent stage in the collapse began with the fall of the Soviet phase of the Empire at the end of 1991, exactly three generations after the end of the Russian Imperial phase in 1916. That Soviet phase was only the short-lived, dissident last European phase of the Western Empire, patterned by successive phases. Everything is now in motion, the outposts of the Western Empire are falling one by one. We are now on the Road from Damascus – the Road towards Jerusalem.

Despite its dissidence which came from its Western Marxist ideology, the Soviet phase of the Western Empire still shared in the same basic immoral materialistic ideology as all the others. This explains why the fall of the Soviet empire was not the end of a process, as some deluded people like Fukuyama thought, but the beginning of a process, that of the final phase and fall of the Western Empire. The fall of the Soviet empire merely presaged the fall of the American empire a generation later. (Both the Soviet Union and America were former European colonies which overtook the eight heartland phases of the Western Empire). Now we are at ‘the end of history’, that is, at the end of Western history, the result of the imperial overreach in the regime change operation in Kiev in 2014.

And so world history is beginning again after its millennial Western Imperial interruption. Each country of the world, big or small, is now reclaiming and returning to its roots, restoring its sovereignty, identity, nationhood and traditions. The future is not Imperial, but Multipolar, which means it is composed of the co-operation of many centres and of the collaboration of the Nations. From Russia to China, from India to Iran, from Africa to Latin America, from Vietnam to Polynesia, we no longer see the attempt by one Nation to subjugate others to its imperial supremacy and domination, so forming an Empire, instead we see anti-imperial Sovereignties. We have come to the time of the prophecies of Habbakuk (Avvakum), beginning in Chapter 1, Verse 5:

Chapter 1, 2 O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!

3 Why dost thou show me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance? for spoiling and violence are before me: and there are that raise up strife and contention.

4 Therefore the law is slacked, and judgement never goes forth: for the wicked compasses about the righteous; therefore wrong judgment proceeds.

5 Behold among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvellously: for I will work a work in your days, which you will not believe, though it be told to you.

6 For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, which shall march through the breadth of the land, to possess the dwelling places that are not theirs.

7 They are terrible and dreadful: their judgment and their dignity shall proceed of themselves.

8 Their horses also are swifter than the leopards, and are fiercer than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as the eagle that hastens to eat.

9 They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand.

10 And they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them: they shall deride every stronghold; for they shall heap dust, and take it.

12 Art thou not from everlasting, O LORD my God, mine Holy One? We shall not die. O LORD, thou hast ordained them for judgment; and, O mighty God, thou hast established them for correction.

Chapter 2, 2 And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he that reads it may run.

3 For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.

4 Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith.

8 Because thou hast spoiled many nations, all the remnant of the people shall spoil thee; because of men’s blood, and for the violence of the land, of the city, and of all that dwell therein.

10 Thou hast consulted shame to thy house by cutting off many people, and hast sinned against thy soul.

12 Woe to him that builds a town with blood, and establishes a city by iniquity!

14 For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

17 For the violence of Lebanon shall cover thee, and the spoil of beasts, which made them afraid, because of men’s blood, and for the violence of the land, of the city, and of all that dwell therein.

Chapter 3, 2 O LORD, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy.

4 And his brightness was as the light; he had horns coming out of his hand: and there was the hiding of his power.

5 Before him went the pestilence, and burning coals went forth at his feet.

6 He stood, and measured the earth: he beheld, and drove asunder the nations; and the everlasting mountains were scattered, the perpetual hills did bow: his ways are everlasting.

12 Thou didst march through the land in indignation, thou didst thresh the heathen in anger.

13 Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, even for salvation with thine anointed; thou woundedst the head out of the house of the wicked, by discovering the foundation unto the neck.

15 Thou didst walk through the sea with thine horses, through the heap of great waters.

16 When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice: rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble: when he comes up unto the people, he will invade them with his troops.

 

Note:

  1. This ‘bully, sanction and bomb’ policy is the case even of an American bishop sent abroad to assemble all the worst elements in his tiny church, fanatics and careerists, in order to seize power, ‘bullying, sanctioning and bombing’ and so expelling all the honest when challenged. This is exactly the same American technique containing exactly the same seeds of destruction.

Breaking through the Glass Ceiling of the Empires: Why Autocephalies are Now Inevitable

The most intensely centralised, that is, imperialistic, Christian establishment that ever existed was – and is – Papal Rome. Opposition to it began immediately after it had been institutionalised by its schism in the eleventh century (See The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250 by R.I. Moore). There followed violent Papally-sponsored military genocides – the so-called ‘crusades’ – massacres, inquisitions, invasions and hatreds all over Europe. In the sixteenth century the previously outwardly imperialist edifice of Rome came tumbling down in appalling wars and violence against those who protested against it, who were aptly called Protestants.

The second imitation of this centralised establishment came in the ‘Second Rome’, which meant Greek Orthodox in Constantinople. Through their imperialist centralisation, they had encouraged the splits from the Church of the Copts, Syrians and Armenians. Its centralised control intensified in the second millennium, in Russia and then the Balkans, notably in Bulgaria, and continues today in its attempts at centralisation in Czechoslovakia, Macedonia and, above all, in the Ukraine, with wild threats to take away independence from all others. Its imperialistic actions have now created a foolish and unnecessary schism with those far bigger than themselves, those who claim to be the ‘Third Rome’.

This ‘Third Rome’ is Moscow, Russia, where Imperialist centralisation created the ‘Old Ritualist’ schism in the seventeenth century and continues, though they were obliged in the last century to concede autocephaly (independence) to the Orthodox Churches in Poland, Czechoslovakia and a group in North America. Now, as a result of its almost control freak insistence on centralisation, it is going to be obliged to decentralise more seriously, firstly to the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Carpatho-Russia (with Austria-Hungary), the Baltics, Central Asia, and then to Western Europe, North America, Latin America and Oceania, although here this will be in collaboration with other Local Orthodox Churches.

Thus, this process of decentralisation or autocephalisation was made inevitable by the imperialist centralisation of each centre, which all claimed to be a ‘Rome’. None of them, strangely enough, claimed to be a ‘Second Jerusalem’, which is the centre of the Christian Faith, whereas Rome was always the enemy of the Faith. The fact is that the treatment by all three Romes of others of a different ethnicity as second-class citizens (or third-class citizens in many cases) has inevitably led to the desire for independence. The First Rome created the desire for independence among the Germanic peoples, the Second Rome among Non-Greeks, and the Third Rome among Non-Russians. There are no surprises here.

Church life has for 2,000 years been characterised by centralising forces and decentralising forces. Thus, the first Orthodox Christians lived scattered, decentralised, living in what was in fact autocephaly, in Ephesus, Corinth, Colossae, Galatia, Philippi, Thessaloniki, Rome etc. Then in the fourth century came the imperial period and there emerged the centralising forces of the five Patriarchates, the ‘Pentarchy’ of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. In the last two centuries, the last four very depopulated centres have been falling apart. In the last 150 years, we have with the fall of empires seen the number of Autocephalous Churches double, going from eight to sixteen.

These new Churches are in Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, America, Albania and Macedonia. With the geographical spread of the Orthodox Church, the foundation of even more Local Churches is going to become inevitable. As a result of the centralising forces, the decentralising forces have taken over. People feel oppressed by the centralisation of the old centres, which still cling on to power. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is Newton’s Third Law. Romanising/Papalising centralisation has lost. We no longer live in the Imperial period, initiated by Constantine. Since 1917 we have been living in the post-Constantinian period. The glass ceiling is breaking.

For centralisation, the limiting of control to small cliques, entails corruption. These cliques are formed by love of money and power. In the case of the First Rome, this was corruption and domination by pedophiles and other perverts (any visitor to the Vatican can see the pedophilia from the frescoes), and financial corruption. In the case of the Second and Third Romes, firstly backstabbing homosexuality leads to blackmail, and secondly the love of luxury leads to bribery. All this creates a glass ceiling which ensures that spirituality, pastorship and competence are excluded and are replaced by bureaucracy, careerism and narcissism. And rule without the Holy Spirit is no rule at all.