Revolution in France

The three-week old revolt of the French people against their young Rothschild banker President, the anti-populist favourite of the rich EU elite, is intensifying. Insulted by Macron’s arrogant contempt for them and his blinding narcissism, his decision to delay fuel tax increases for only six months has only poured oil onto the flames. Little reported by the State-controlled media either there or here, the rioting concerns not simply a few streets in the rich quarter of Paris which have been ransacked, it is the revolt in the real France, dans la France profonde, outside the capital, that counts.

Here supermarkets and fuel distribution centres have been blocked. Many have nothing but bread and pasta to eat. The retail sector is heading for bankruptcy. The police refuse to break blockades because they too sympathize with the protests of the ‘yellow vests’. Roads are blocked and high schools are on strike. So now the great democrat Macron is considering calling in his Army to crush the people. France’s situation is like that of other EU countries in that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. However, on top of that France has a rigid class system and social mobility is virtually non-existent.

Whereas in the UK the people were allowed (though only by elitist mistake) to vote for Brexit and in Spain, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere anti-EU parties are gaining control, in France they are not allowed. Hence, the frustration of the disinherited masses. In France, which is run by five-year long virtual dictatorships of its presidents who control the media, the only way to get your voice heard is by street protests. Parliamentary representation is totally ineffectual and therefore elections are boycotted, since the gilded political elite and State-paid journalists have no time for the people.

Meanwhile, the Paris Exarchate in Rue Daru has declared that it does not recognize its dissolution by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Here we see that its controlling elite seems to think and act like secular French people, with little understanding of how the Church works. In yesterday’s declaration, the Rue Daru elite boasted that it has adopted the Western mentality and ‘democratic values’. Unfortunately, if your Patriarch dissolves you, that is it. You cannot go on strike or go into the streets. When your boss sacks you, you are sacked, and although you may say that you do not agree with your sacking, you have no choice. Your words are not heard.

We feel sorry for those in Rue Daru who have been let down by their Patriarch. When we others went through the same trauma decades ago, we simply joined the Russian Orthodox Church, even though we were derided and slandered for it by the Rue Daru elite. Today, no-one will deride you or slander you for taking the only logical and canonical course of action available.

 

Orthodox Christian Eastern England

Foreword: For the Orthodox Christian Faith, the Coming King and the People of God in Eastern England, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and the Isle of Ely

Today, in this period of the last coming of Orthodoxy in the twenty-first century, Orthodox centres are being established in the large towns and cities of Eastern England. Today’s examples are not being inspired from Ireland (itself inspired from Jerusalem via Egypt), but from Holy Rus (itself inspired from Jerusalem via New Rome), but otherwise all remains the same. On this tenth anniversary of the establishment of our church in Colchester, we understand that we have only just begun. Much remains to be done and, building on the foundations of old, we ask God’s blessing on ourselves. Below we recall the history of our Orthodox Eastern England, our present and our hopes for the future.

Our Background

There were certainly Orthodox Christians in what later became Eastern England (East Anglia and Essex) as early as the third century, if not before. A notable centre for them was the first Roman capital of Britain in Camulodunum (Colchester), which may have had its own bishop at that time. As proof the foundations of an early fourth century Orthodox church and its cemetery were uncovered here only in the 1980s.

However, the four ancient Orthodox centres of what had come to be Eastern England were established in the apostolic period of the first coming of Orthodoxy in the seventh century. The Faith came in the same way as the Eastern English had settled – by sea and waterway, around the coasts and along the many rivers. Whereas the foundations in Essex came about through the Apostle of Essex, St Cedd (pronounced ‘Ched’), the other foundations had been due, directly and indirectly, to St Felix, Apostle of East Anglia. This was centuries before the territorial divisions of East Anglia and the terms Suffolk, Norfolk and the Isle of Ely came into existence.

Although St Cedd was English and St Felix Burgundian and they spoke very similar languages, their missions to Eastern England were both Irish-inspired. Coming as a missionary from Burgundy in France in 630 and probably consecrated by Archbishop Honorius of Canterbury to preach in East Anglia, Bishop Felix has been inspired by the Irish St Columban. It was he who had founded the monastery at Luxeuil in Burgundy, where St Felix had met his sponsor St Sigebert, the future King of East Anglia. In England Bishop Felix also certainly met the Irish missionary Bishop Aidan from the Irish-founded monastery of Lindisfarne. And the Irish-speaking Bishop Cedd, arriving in Essex a generation later in 653, had learned his Orthodoxy from the same St Aidan of Lindisfarne. Here is what they began in each of the four parts of Eastern England.

  1. Suffolk

This was the first region to be evangelized, from the southern diocesan centre founded in c. 630 by St Felix in the Roman coastal fortress known as Burgh. This centre was called Domnoc – probably from the Irish word Domnach, meaning the Lord’s house – and now identified as Felixstowe, so called in memory of the monastery of St Felix. Domnoc was near the estuary of the River Deben which led to the East Anglian royal palace at Rendlesham. This was near the royal burial site at Sutton Hoo and not far from the port of Dunwich (meaning perhaps ‘the port in the dunes’).

All these sites where St Felix was active are in what is now Suffolk, where he probably also founded a church along the River Stour in Sudbury. His diocesan centre was abandoned during the heathen invasion in 869 and transferred to Hoxne in the far north of Suffolk in c. 900, precisely where St Edmund, King of East Anglia, had been martyred in 869. This is represented today by Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, where St Felix probably founded a monastery and is near the geographical centre of Eastern England. The fact that Suffolk was the first region in the east to be evangelized and where so many churches were built led to it being called ‘Salig Suffolk’ or Holy Suffolk.

Local Saints

Sts Sigebert (+ c. 636), Felix (+ c. 647), Jurmin (+ 654), Botolph (+ 680), Edmund (+ 869).

Holy Places

Iken, Hoxne.

Present (in bold) & Projected Orthodox Parishes in Urban Centres

Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich, Lowestoft, Felixstowe.

  1. Norfolk

This centre was founded in c. 630 by St Felix in South Elmham (called ‘the old minster’), now in north Suffolk and established as a diocesan centre in 673. Nearby there was a church at Rumburgh dedicated to St Felix and two localities called Flixton, which also witness to his presence. St Felix was aided by an Irish monk sent to him perhaps by St Aidan. This was St Fursey (with Sts Dicul, later at Dickleburgh, and Sts Foillan and Ultan), who founded a monastery in c. 631 on an inlet from the coast in the Roman fortress at Burgh (Burgh Castle, now in the far north of Suffolk).

St Felix was very active in what is now Norfolk, founding churches along the river systems in the east at Reedham and Loddon, and in the north-west at Babingley, Shernborne and perhaps Flitcham. In 955 the centre in South Elmham was transferred to what is now Norfolk to a place which was called North Elmham in memory of its origin. The centre then briefly went to Thetford and today is represented by Norwich.

Local Saints

Sts Felix (+ c. 647), Fursey (+ 650), Withburgh (+ c. 743), Edmund (+ 869), Walstan (+ 1016).

Holy Places

East Dereham, Bawburgh.

Present (in bold) & Projected Orthodox Parishes in Urban Centres

Norwich, King’s Lynn.

  1. Essex

Today’s Essex (previously this had included much of what is now London) was evangelized from the diocesan centre founded soon after 653 by St Cedd. This ‘cathedral on the marshes’, most of which still stands today, is on the east coast of Essex in the former Roman fortress of Othona (Ythanceaster) which is now called Bradwell-on-Sea. St Cedd was active elsewhere around the coasts of Essex but today’s Orthodox centre is in Colchester, founded on St Edmund’s Feast exactly ten years ago.

Local Saints

Sts Cedd (+ 664) and Osyth (+ c. 700).

Holy Place

Bradwell on Sea.

Present (in bold) & Projected Orthodox Parishes in Urban Centres

Colchester, Southend, Harlow.

  1. The Isle of Ely (today the Marches of Eastern Cambridgeshire)

This was evangelized from the monastery founded by St Felix in Soham, today in eastern Cambridgeshire, and from nearby Exning on the western edge of Suffolk, the birthplace of St Felix’s spiritual daughter, St Audrey. However, it was only in 673 that she founded the monastery in Ely, possibly on the site of a chapel founded by St Felix earlier. Ely came to be the centre of a diocese in 1109.

Local Saints

Sts Felix (+ c. 647), Owin (+ c. 670), Audrey (+ 679), Huna (+ 690), Wendreda (+ 8 c.).

Holy Place with a relic of St Audrey

Ely.

Present (in bold) & Projected Orthodox Parishes in Urban Centres

Wisbech, Ely.

 

Istanbul: The Young Turks Take Over

The three-day Synod in Istanbul, the last of the year, ended yesterday.

Firstly, after over three generations of indulging its illusions, it finally dissolved the rebellious Rue Daru group in Paris, reducing its 75 year-old French archbishop to a vicar-bishop. We had long expected this, but did not know when and in what despotic conditions without any consultation. Now in each community of that little group infighting will follow between opposing clans, those who are actually of the Russian Tradition and the anti-Orthodox Russophobes. This mirrors the present and coming battle in the OCA (Orthodox Church in America) group, which as such was founded by Paris intellectuals nearly fifty years ago at the height of the Cold War and is equally divided between Orthodox and Russophobes.

Secondly, the Synod sacked the 90-year old Archbishop Dimitrios in North America, as had been expected earlier this year. This sacking involves a large sum of ‘missing money’.

Thirdly, the Synod did not give the Tomos for Ukrainian autocephaly, just as they said they would not two years ago before their disastrous meeting in Crete, but as they had been paid $25 million for by the US taxpayer to do this year. This leaves President Poroshenko, who demanded this Tomos (he was the only one who wanted it, apart from his US paymasters) with a very red face, outwitted by Greeks who came bearing (apparent) gifts.

Why did all this happen now?

With an ageing (and, according to some, ill) Patriarch and many other elderly and ill bishops, such as the unstable John of Pergamos or the above-mentioned 90 year-old Archbishop Dimitrios or the arch-rebel Archbishop Stylianos in Australia, it seems as though the young generation of ‘Young Turks’ has taken over in Istanbul. These include the ultra-papist Metropolitan of Prussa, Elpidiphoros (Lambriniadis), the Metropolitan of Gaul, Emmanuel Adamakis (said to be the very ambitious successor in Istanbul), or the now notorious Archbishop Job (Getcha).

This new generation lacks pastoral experience and is bound to an extraordinary ideology of Eastern Papism, that comes from a fantasy that ended 565 years ago in 1453. They will eventually come down to earth with a very cruel bump. Meanwhile, the self-imposed spiritual suicide of the New or Second Rome does mean its end, except as a small and schismatic group of ‘new calendarists’. This in turn means that the Russian Orthodox Church is now free to establish canonical Orthodoxy worldwide. A great burden has been lost. Freedom has come. The eyes of the Orthodox world are now looking to the Russian Church to take on the mantle of authority and prove itself worthy by at last setting up the infrastructure in the Diaspora which we have so long been battling for without support. To those who have been given much, much is expected.

 

The Great Opportunity

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men.

With the dissolution of the Rue Daru Exarchate in Paris behind the back of its ruling archbishop, the daydreams of autonomy of the ecumenist Fraternite Orthodoxe have been dashed. Now the way is at last free for the Russian Orthodox Church to establish its Local Metropolia of Western Europe. Called for by ourselves in 1988 and, much more importantly, promised by Patriarch Alexey II in 2003, it is time to move forward. With the Patriarchate of Constantinople having officially removed itself from the equation through the phyletism of ‘the superior Greek race’ which has swallowed the Paris Jurisdiction, all eyes are now looking to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe, one attached to Moscow, the other to New York, joined by any Churchly remnants of the Rue Daru group, together can build the long-awaited multinational Church of Western Europe, which ceased to exist in 1054. Surely 964 years of patience is enough! Unlike the Phanar and others, the Russian Orthodox Church is free from the meddling US State Department. Just as in the Ukraine, it is for our free Church to take responsibility for the future of the flock, putting the Truth of God over the enfeebling diplomacy and petty nationalism of men: it has long been apparent that nobody except the Russian Church will.

The End of an Era

The Rue Daru Exarchate, composed of a few largely Moldovan parishes in Paris and a few dozen tiny communities of converts by and large without their own properties scattered mainly through France, Benelux and England, has today been dissolved by the Phanar. Over ninety years of history since Rue Daru broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia have thus cruelly ended.

Founded largely by aristocratic and intellectual traitors to the Tsar from Saint Petersburg, the surprise is that this anti-Russian and anti-monastic group has survived so long. Nearly four generations on, with its last Russian bishop dying in 1981 and without monasteries, it was clear that it would come to depend on widowers and celibates from Roman Catholicism, such as its present Archbishop from Bordeaux. Rue Daru’s failure to return to the Russian Church, when freedom gradually came in the two decades after the collapse of atheist rule in the former Russian Empire in 1991 was lamentable.

However, as long ago as 1966, the then rector of the St Sergius Institute, Fr Alexey Knyazev, went to the Phanar and asked if the Patriarch was really the ‘Oecumenical’ Patriarch or ‘just a petty Balkan bishop’. Today he has received his answer. Fr Alexey and other real Orthodox, worthies like Bishop Methodius (Kulmann) and Fr Igor Vernik, had already understood in the 1960s and 1970s that the Rue Daru group could only survive spiritually if it returned to the Russian Mother Church, becoming the basis of a new Local Metropolia in Western Europe.

I understood it thirty years ago in 1988, when Rue Daru’s then ex-Catholic German Archbishop George (Wagner) categorically and suicidally rejected any plan to establish the foundation for a new Local Church of Western Europe faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and even invited the Papal Cardinal of Paris to celebrations of a millennium of Russian Orthodoxy at Rue Daru instead of Russian bishops! This was of course the last straw. As late as 2003, even the naive Archbishop Sergey (Konovalov) understood this, but it was all tragically too late.

Thus, the end had long been inevitable. For Rue Daru and its tiny group that inevitably broke away from the Russian Church in England in 2006 in the notorious Sourozh Schism, going against history and faithfulness, there is now only one choice: Die out under ‘the superior Greek race’ or else return to the Russian Tradition (which the latter has never had, despite its illusions to the contrary) and also return to the Orthodox calendar by returning to obedience to the Russian Orthodox Church. As we said 12 years ago, you cannot be of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, or even know it, even less understand it, when you refuse to be part of the Russian Orthodox Church. This is not theology, this is common sense! To think otherwise is spiritual delusion – prelest.

In Paris all now depends on whom properties belong to. Elsewhere, there is freedom to return to communion with the canonical Orthodox Church from the Phanariot schismatics, their ecumenism and phyletism and liturgical deviations.

The end of Rue Daru is a warning to all its imitators, not only in the USA, but also to those liberals in Moscow who fell to the Paris School of Philosophy (there never was any Theology here). You follow them and this is how you too will die out.

Told you so.

 

The New Vikings

The ninth century chronicles of England constantly refer to the war between the ‘Christians’ and the ‘heathen’, that is, the war between the English and the Vikings. Once the English had themselves been heathen and a bit like the Vikings. However, they had settled 300-400 years before the Viking raids, founding homes and farmsteads (‘hams’ and ‘tons’) and had begun to live as Christians. The Vikings raided (killed, raped, enslaved, looted and pillaged) and traded (exploited and made huge profits). True, many of them then settled like the English, but their spirit lived on and infected other races.

Their spirit lived on in the last Viking invasion – that of the Normans, who were also Vikings. By the eleventh century, having learned French, these barbarian Vikings had become the shock-troops of the new imperial papist ideology in Rome, massacring in southern Italy, England and then much further afield as far as Jerusalem in so-called ‘crusades’. Then their spirit spread to others, especially in northern France between the Loire and the Rhine, and gradually horse-mounted banditry and castle-built exploitation (called ‘feudalism’) became the norm for the whole European upper-class.

Thus, this was the spirit of the Teutonic Knights attacking 13th century Russia, of Spanish conquistadors in 16th century Latin America, of British and French slave-traders, ‘merchants’ and pirates in the 18th century Caribbean and India, of European cowboys in 19th century North America and the spirit of all Westerners and their converts who have looted and pillaged Asia, Oceania and Africa. At one time people spoke of Westernization, in the 1960s Americanization, today it is globalization. It is all the same. It means infecting the world with the Viking spirit of piratry and pillage.

Today the Viking spirit is not conducted by Viking longships, medieval knights, Spanish galleons, British ‘privateers’ (State-sponsored pirates) or Gatling gun-armed troops massacring Africans armed with spears. It is conducted by Western politicians in cartels, ‘businessmen’, international bankers and Stock Exchange or corporate ‘raiders’. They are raiding, asset-stripping, the rest of the world to feed their incredible capitalist-consumerist machine, making all into drugged, enslaved and enzombied consumerists with their Black Friday Alexa apps, ordering them to buy. They are today’s Viking victims.

 

The First Council of New Jerusalem?

The recent Church Council at the New Jerusalem Monastery to the west of Moscow was organized by the Church of New Jerusalem and All Rus – as the Patriarchate of Moscow has now been renamed. The Council was attended by its 400 bishops and substantial official delegations from all the other Twelve Local Churches that are in communion with it and each other.

Momentous international decisions affecting all were taken at the Council. First of all, the Church of Rus was placed first in order of the diptychs, before New Constantinople (see below), Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem; the Archbishop of Athens has been renamed ‘Patriarch of New Constantinople’ and all five Balkan Churches (Romania, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania) have pledged themselves to the closest co-operation and talk seriously of merging into one again; the Churches of Poland and of the Czech Lands and Slovakia are intending to become Autonomous Churches within the Patriarchate of Rus. If this happens, it will reduce the number of Local Churches to seven: Rus, New Constantinople (the Balkans), Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Cyprus and Georgia. Seven is of course the number of Local Churches in the Book of Revelation.

At long last, after over a century lost since the 1917 international-organized, treasonous coup d’etat which overthrew the Russian Empire, the Diaspora and the Non-Orthodox world are receiving attention. Firstly, the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus now has ten Autonomous Churches, not only the five in the Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Japan and China, but also five new ones: in Western Europe from Iceland to Finland and Portugal to Hungary; North America; Latin America; Oceania; South-East Asia. All Orthodox living in these five territories have been invited to take part in inter-diocesan life, while retaining their complete independence, customs, viewpoints and attachment to their homelands. Secondly, the Patriarchate of Antioch has promised to work to evangelize the whole Arab world, with diplomatic and financial support from the Patriarchate of All Rus.

This Council of New Jerusalem has been hailed as a turning-point in Church history. It means that with the internal nationalist bickering of the recent past resolved and administrative divisions overcome, the Church can now turn its attention to the outside world. Today’s world, divided between narrow racist nationalism and greedy scheming globalism, needs Christ as never before.

On the Liberation and Restoration of Church Life

It is impossible to recall peace without dissolving the cause of the schism – the primacy of the Pope exalting himself equal to God.

We seek and we pray for our return to that time when, being united, we spoke the same things and there was no schism between us.

St Mark of Ephesus

Fall and Liberation

The near-750 year process of the fall of the See of Constantinople since the so-called Councils of Lyon and later Ferrara-Florence is now over. It has finally fallen under a Jesuit-trained Patriarch, who in his delusion actually justifies himself, to the same millennial disease as Old Rome – Papism. New Rome fell to the same heresy of Old Rome: the lust for power justified on ethnic grounds – the mythical superiority of one race over another and over Christ, in the first case, of Latinized Germans and, in the latter case, of phyletist Hellenes. St Mark of Ephesus was right.

As a result, Constantinople parishes, few and scattered already, have been cut off from the Church and true Orthodox have begun leaving them. Withdrawing, they will join one or other of the thirteen Local Churches. Fragments of the Russian Orthodox world in North America and OCA, under Constantinople for political reasons, are hopelessly divided. Now the Orthodox elements in them can rejoin the worldwide Russian Church, returning in repentance to Orthodox practices and values in canonical conditions, without phariseeism or sectarianism.

Restoration and Rise

Now, to assume the leadership of service of the Church on earth, Whose only Head is Christ, the Patriarchate of Moscow, perhaps better repentantly renamed the Patriarchate of All Rus, must too cleanse itself of all the same Phanariot poison. This poison is the fatal mixture, summed up in utterly failed Muscovite diplomacy, of narrow nationalism and modernist ecumenism. Thus, the Third Rome must beware that it too does not fall to the same disease. When will we know that the Russian Orthodox Church is ready to assume this leadership of service, so that Church life can be restored?

  1. When there is no more Great Russian chauvinism and so no more talk of the Patriarch of Moscow as the ‘Ecumenical Patriarch’. This is the title which the Orthodox Pope of Old Rome, St Gregory the Dialogist, rightly condemned already at the end of the sixth century.
  2. When there is no more Russian Orthodox dallying with the Papacy of old Rome and the Pan-Protestant World Council of Churches, with both of which the representatives of the Phanar are naturally active. And so when there is no more new calendarism and experiments with the spiritual death of Paris ‘theology’.

Then, at last unhindered and uncompromised by the shackles of the past, we will be able to get on with our sadly interrupted mission to the seven billion Non-Orthodox, in concert with the other Twelve Local Churches. And only then shall we see Church life restored after such a disgraceful period of decadence.

 

 

 

The Orthodox Teaching on the Church

The following is the English translation of the statement we made at the Conference on ‘The Orthodox Teaching on the Church and Contemporary Challenges’, which was held in Moscow on 26 October and organized by the Analytical Centre of St Basil the Great.

http://ruskline.ru/video/2018/oktyabr/27/konstantinopolya_bolshe_net/

The Russian Orthodox Church suspended Eucharistic communion with Constantinople because of its politically-backed and therefore uncanonical support of schism in the Ukraine. The Russian Church has the canonical authority to do so, for by supporting schism Constantinople entered into dialogue with the anathematized, and so fell under anathema itself. But is this event a disaster or an opportunity?

We believe that this is an opportune time for the Russian Orthodox Church to re-emerge as the Church of the Third Rome. As before 1917, it can now assume leadership of Orthodox Christendom by agreement with the other twelve Local Churches. All of these are very small, but some are very ancient. This is unlike Constantinople, which only had a political claim to leadership, as the former capital of the Empire.

The ancient Patriarchates of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch go back to the apostles and their voices in particular must be heeded. As Patriarch John of Antioch has said, we need a Council where all Orthodox can meet. We would say, as we have been saying for the past eleven years, that such a Council can take place outside Moscow, on the Istra: this will be the long-awaited New Jerusalem Council.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips