An Interview: University College, Oxford and Russian Orthodoxy in Oxford (1974-77)

Christ is Risen!

He is risen indeed!

What made you choose Oxford to study over forty years ago?

I did not choose to go to Oxford, Oxford chose me. Had I known what it would be like, I would have chosen to study at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies in London. But I was given no advice and so knew no better.

What did you make of Oxford University in general?

At that time it was a University of public school snobs, a clique who froze out anyone unlike themselves. Those who did not come from public schools and rich families either, as Establishment careerists, conformed and pretended to be public school elitists, or else, like myself, as free spirits, effectively had as little as possible to do with the University. Thus, I spent my time at the Russian Orthodox church in Oxford and reading about Orthodox theology and history, Russian literature and history and the history of England – my three great interests.

Which college did you study at?

University College, the oldest in the University.

What did you make of University College?

University College was and is famous for Alfred the Great and infamous for the decadent Prince Felix Yusupov. The first is said to be its founder. Of course, this is a myth, but with my lifelong veneration for King Alfred and later as the compiler of the Church service to him, it was pleasant to think of this while I was there. As for the transvestite occultist Yusupov, a graduate of the College, his room was still there and he is infamous as the sadistic torturer and mutilator of the holy monk Gregory Rasputin-Novy. Called Gregory the New, he was the first martyr of the British-orchestrated Russian Revolution and was murdered by a British spy, whom Yusupov had met in Oxford.

Did you meet anyone well-known at the College?

Two of my contemporaries became government ministers. Lord Moynihan and Philip Hammond, but I had and have nothing in common with them. Others are millionaires, academics, judges, barristers, businessmen, civil servants, writers and so on. There were other famous/infamous people at the University then, such as the assassinated President Benazir Bhutto and a couple of BBC correspondents who are very well-known in the UK. But they were Establishment types, without independent personalities, just tide-swimmers, and I had little to do with them.

What did you think of your tutors?

They were very clever people and I profited from listening to their knowledge. But I also saw their severe limitations and they helped me to understand once and for all that the aim of human life is not to collect knowledge and that the source of knowledge is not in books, but in a clean soul.

What did you specialize in as part of your course?

Russian religious thought. The tutor was an Anglican vicar and the course was very disappointing, as it referred only to the thought of intellectuals and philosophers of the Parisian type, whereas I was interested in real Russian Church thought, which is totally different, as it is the thought of saints, gathered from a clean soul.

What did you learn from Oxford?

I learned about the arrogance and elitism of the Establishment and learned distrust for its inherent corruption and decadence.

How did Oxford shape you?

I am not sure that it shaped me, as I already knew what I wanted and where I was going in life, that my place was in the Russian Orthodox Church, beyond all sectional labels. The essentials of my world view had already been formed. But in Oxford I was able to work out details and to verify what I knew by instinct.

What was the most memorable phrase you heard in your time there?

I think it was when a typically elitist Oxford Orthodox priest (now defrocked) told me in 1975 that ‘there is no such thing as ordinary people’. He was effectively saying that the vast bulk of humanity, myself included, had no existence or reality for him. At that point I became interested in the real Russian Orthodox Church elsewhere, outside the limited confines of academic intellectualism, in the real world, where I had come from.

What can you say about Russian Orthodoxy in Oxford of that time?

What was interesting here is that all the different trends, both good and bad, were present. This was because the University had attracted Russian academics.

For example, there were a mother and daughter who were very right-wing, sectarian and nationalistic and would only attend the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) Cathedral in London and like several there had probably worked for the British secret services. Anti-Communism seemed to be far above Orthodoxy for them. They were also so nationalistic, not to say racist, that they were opposed, like most of the ROCOR emigration in London, to the use of a single word of English in services. At the other extreme there were the Patriarchal Lamperts, equally nationalistic and racist, but in the Soviet sense. They were convinced that Communism, Lenin and Stalin, were wonderful and that there had never been any persecution of the Church in the Soviet Union. Their nationalism had also made them completely blind to reality. Extraordinary!

Inbetween, there was the third extreme, equally blind, the extreme of him who had chosen to be my godfather Nicholas Zernov (which was the extreme of most of the others in Oxford). He was Parisian to the core and preached a sort of Anglican Orthodoxy, in which he saw no contradiction between conservative High Anglicanism and the very bourgeois Parisian Orthodoxy of liberal intellectuals and freemasons. Among such people there was the Anglican convert, Fr Kallistos, a public-school gentleman of the old type, who had made a liberal, ecumenical compromise between Establishment High Anglicanism and Paris Orthodoxy under the US-run (formerly Anglican-run) Patriarchate of Constantinople. He was beloved by Anglicans and ex-Anglicans, but did not appeal to those of other cultural backgrounds and never became a diocesan bishop.

Where did you fit into this panorama?

I would say that there were three people whom I admired in Oxford. One was an elderly Russian peasant woman from Latvia called Ala. She had settled in Oxford after 1945 and was very simple and lived in a council flat in the poorest part of the town, well outside the elitist and wealthy University. She was a granny with a heart of gold and had nothing to do with Parisian professors, who ignored her anyway as a result of their academic snobbery. As for her, she had no understanding of their prejudices and ideologies and also little understanding of English. To me she was a beacon of real Orthodoxy.

Then there was the elderly Countess Elizabeth Kutaisova, from a famous aristocratic family. She was the epitome of the best of White Russia, a real gentlewoman, noble, traditional, elegant, tasteful and patriotic. I will always remember her sitting on a bench in front of a flowering shrub in the Oxford park after church, reading the Russian emigre newspaper Russkaya Mysl.

And finally there was Sir Dimitri Obolensky, whose lectures on King Arthur I attended. A distinguished scholar, he was both a Russian prince and a courteous English gentleman. I discovered more about him in the 1990s through a parishioner and his childhood friend, Baroness Olga von Uxkull, who so fondly referred to him simply as ‘Dima’ and gave me a 1930s photograph of him, which I still have. Dimitri had fallen neither into émigré right-wingery, which put anti-Communism above the Church, nor into the illusions of Soviet patriotism, which put the Soviet Establishment (and personality cults) above the Church, nor into bourgeois Parisian Orthodoxy which so despised Russia that it put the West above it, but had remained faithful to the eternal Russian Orthodox Church, where I too belonged and belong.

In other words, unlike the vast majority, the above did not put their secular prejudices higher than the Church. I think all three of them represented the real Church beyond man-made jurisdictionalism and narrow sectionalism, which had so divided the Church in the emigration. They were all waiting for the great restoration, which has been under way in Russia for the last 25 years, but which still has so far to go. They were what the Church outside Russia should really be about, instead of various sorts of sectarianism.

Thank you.

The Last 100 Years: Revelation 8 and 9

There will be a terrible revolution in Russia…But the Lord will have mercy on Russia and will lead her through sufferings to great glory.

Prophecy of St Seraphim of Sarov, as related to the future Fr Nicholas Gibbes and believed in by Tsar Nicholas II

The Lord will restore Russia and it will become great once more and be the strongest bastion in the world for the future struggle with Antichrist himself and all his hordes.
St Seraphim of Sofia

When your sufferings are over….peoples will come to thy light and kings to the shining light rising up above thee.

St John of Shanghai

Such are the statements of three of the witnesses to the future of the Church Outside Russia. They, like all other Church people in the Russian emigration, Archbishop Theophan Bystrov, Fr Konstantin Zaytsev, Professor I. M. Andreyev, Bishop Nektary Kontsevich, Archbishop Averky Taushev, Bishop Mitrofan Znosko-Borovsky, Fr Seraphim Rose and many others, knew that the essential mission of the Church Outside Russia has always been to restore him who restrains now (2 Thess 2, 7) by repenting for the conditions that resulted in the ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’ which overthrew the Lord’s Anointed in 1917.

The Balfour Statement made by bankrupt Britain in 1917 and the subsequent US foundation of Zionist Israel in 1948, the inevitable wars that followed, the capture of Jerusalem by the Zionist State in 1966, the instability caused a generation later, exactly as was predicted, by the imperialist invasion of Iraq in 1991 (the so-called ‘Gulf War’) and the results, especially the anti-Islamic war of greed, carried out by Western weapons of mass destruction, to steal Iraqi oil and gas in 2003, have caused wars and instability in Egypt, Libya, Syria and the Yemen, satanic terrorism and the mass migration of the wretched to Western Europe.

The whole of the Muslim world, much of it arbitrarily created by Britain and France some 100 years ago (sometimes with the help of chemical weapons), some much more recently, is in turmoil. From Bosnia to Kosovo, from Nigeria to Turkey, from Morocco to Uzbekistan, from Libya to Egypt, from the Sudan to Somalia, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, from Bangladesh to Indonesia, there is today a powder keg, spilling over through the land between the rivers to the whole world. As is written in the Book of Revelation: Loose the four angels that are bound in the great river Euphrates (Rev. 9, 14).

We live in pre-apocalyptic times. The 53 million ‘beautiful babies’ slaughtered by US Presidents since 1970 scream it, as do the 2,000 slaughtered under President Trump’s watch today, as do the tens of millions of such babies in Western Europe. We all know it, as we have lived in these pre-apocalyptic times for exactly 100 years, ever since the diabolical export of Western materialism became the State ideology of the anti-Christian Bolshevik Soviet Union. When in 1917 the immoral British Prime Minister Lloyd George rejoiced at the British-engineered fall of the last Christian Emperor, he was rejoicing at his own fall.

The fall by betrayal of the Soviet Union three generations later was celebrated by the Western world as some sort of victory. That too was a mistake of hubris, for the West was in fact celebrating the downfall of its own materialistic ideology. Communism, crassly inefficient because State-run, was only a variation of the Western ideology of the far more efficient private-run Capitalism. If you see the fall of Communist materialism, you will inevitably, within a generation or two, find yourself seeing the fall of your own Capitalist materialism.

We will shortly celebrate the Resurrection of Christ over suffering and death, His triumph over Satan and the spoiling of Satan’s hellish kingdom. Now Orthodox of all races must come together in order to prepare to meet God’s chosen, the coming Orthodox Emperor, who will come among us before Antichrist appears openly in the Western lands, which are preparing through their institutional vice to greet him. The coming Emperor will cleanse as much of the earth as wishes to be cleansed before the end. Let us make ready to receive him. All is being prepared now, all conscious Orthodox Christians have become forerunners in these prophetic times.

The World Takes a Step Closer to Insanity

With the US elite and the elites of its vassal states (‘the G7’), representing a mere 10% of the world, unable to agree on further war crimes against Syria and attacks on Russia (though every day for the last week the roads in the East of England have been full of military traffic and the skies full of military planes, all heading for the Russian border in Estonia), the world breathes a little easier. As for the warmongering British Foreign Secretary, he has not yet understood that Britain has not been a Great Power for 100 years, but is merely the poodle of Washington. That self-evident truth is clearly not taught at Eton. The temporary victory of the Trotskyite neocons in Washington may however be shortlived:

http://www.unz.com/tsaker/a-multi-level-analysis-of-the-us-cruise-missile-attack-on-syria-and-its-consequences/

Syria

Where is the Declaration of War from Congress? This is a blatantly unconstitutional act by the President, whom I voted for. Not to mention where is the proof that the poison gas attack was not a false flag attack to trigger U.S. intervention? And since when is dying by poison gas worse than getting napalmed or firebombed to death? Where is the President’s campaign rhetoric about “America First” and staying out of foreign wars? Syria is NOT a vital interest of the United States. Period. This reeks of Israeli, NeoCon, and Military-Industrial Complex subversion of this Presidency.

From an American Correspondent

Sadly, the probable provocation of chemical weapons (‘Made in Turkey’ according to various sources) in Syria has further ruined US relations with the rest of the world. The affair reeks of the infamous, fabricated American War against Spain in 1898 or the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, which both gave the US military industrial complex the excuse to start Wars which led to invasions, occupations and the slaughter of over 2 million innocent people. (However and whyever would the Syrian government (‘regime’ in propgandaspeak) launch a chemical weapons attack, when it has no chemical weapons? Meanwhile the same complex slaughters hundreds of women, children and ‘beautiful babies’ in Mosul, while maiming and killing British bombs take Yemen back to the Stone Age. Such is the abhorrent hypocrisy of the Western Powers.

The question now is what is the future of the bitterly divided USA? The unprovoked US attack on a sovereign country many thousands of miles away, without any mandate whatsoever, merely reinforces the trigger-happy, cowboy image of the US around the world. The USA is more and more seen as a terrorist state, with its propaganda inventions of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and foundation by the CIA in the 1980s of Al-Qaeda. It was after all the US neocons who created Islamic Sate through their maniacal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Carried out largely for domestic reasons in order to reassert a tottering presidency, this attack could have consequences that could be very serious internationally. Syria, quite literally, borders on Armageddon. Is that really what the American people want?

Is Putin the ‘Preeminent Statesman’ of Our Times?

As the Western world kills thousands in the Yemen (10,000 in the last year beneath a rain of British bombs), in the Ukraine (10,000 Ukrainian citizens in the last two years), in Syria (by ‘moderate’ terrorists with Western arms) in Mosul (over 300 civilians murdered and many more maimed in March alone by US warplanes), and aggressively builds up its forces in Estonia to threaten Russia, the silence of the United Nations in New York astounds. Here are the views of an American Republican, Pat Buchanan:

Is Putin the ‘Preeminent Statesman’ of Our Times?


Thursday – March 30, 2017 at 8:35 pm

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By Patrick J. Buchanan

“If we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the preeminent statesman of our time.

“On the world stage, who could vie with him?”

So asks Chris Caldwell of the Weekly Standard in a remarkable essay in Hillsdale College’s March issue of its magazine, Imprimis.

What elevates Putin above all other 21st-century leaders?
“When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that.

“In the first decade of this century, he did what Kemal Ataturk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he resurrected a national-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country.”

Putin’s approval rating (at 85%), after 17 years in power, exceeds that of any rival Western leader. But while his impressive strides toward making Russia great again explain why he is revered at home and in the Russian diaspora, what explains Putin’s appeal in the West, despite a press that is every bit as savage as President Trump’s?

Answer: Putin stands against the Western progressive vision of what mankind’s future ought to be. Years ago, he aligned himself with traditionalists, nationalists and populists of the West, and against what they had come to despise in their own decadent civilization.
What they abhorred, Putin abhorred. He is a God-and-country Russian patriot. He rejects the New World Order established at the Cold War’s end by the United States. Putin puts Russia first.

And in defying the Americans he speaks for those millions of Europeans who wish to restore their national identities and recapture their lost sovereignty from the supranational European Union. Putin also stands against the progressive moral relativism of a Western elite that has cut its Christian roots to embrace secularism and hedonism.

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The U.S. establishment loathes Putin because, they say, he is an aggressor, a tyrant, a “killer.” …Yet…what has Putin done to his domestic enemies to rival what our Arab ally Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has done to the Muslim Brotherhood he overthrew in a military coup in Egypt?

What has Putin done to rival what our NATO ally President Erdogan has done in Turkey, jailing 40,000 people since last July’s coup — or our Philippine ally Rodrigo Duterte, who has presided over the extrajudicial killing of thousands of drug dealers?

Does anyone think President Xi Jinping would have handled mass demonstrations against his regime in Tiananmen Square more gingerly than did President Putin this last week in Moscow?

Much of the hostility toward Putin stems from the fact that he not only defies the West, when standing up for Russia’s interests, he often succeeds in his defiance and goes unpunished and unrepentant.
He not only remains popular in his own country, but has admirers in nations whose political establishments are implacably hostile to him.
In December, one poll found 37 percent of all Republicans had a favorable view of the Russian leader, but only 17 percent were positive on President Barack Obama.

There is another reason Putin is viewed favorably. Millions of ethnonationalists who wish to see their nations secede from the EU see him as an ally. While Putin has openly welcomed many of these movements, America’s elite do not take even a neutral stance.

Putin has read the new century better than his rivals. While the 20th century saw the world divided between a Communist East and a free and democratic West, new and different struggles define the 21st.
The new dividing lines are between social conservatism and self-indulgent secularism, between tribalism and transnationalism, between the nation-state and the New World Order.

On the new dividing lines, Putin is on the side of the insurgents. Those who envision de Gaulle’s Europe of Nations replacing the vision of One Europe, toward which the EU is heading, see Putin as an ally.
So the old question arises: Who owns the future?

In the new struggles of the new century, it is not impossible that Russia — as was America in the Cold War — may be on the winning side. Secessionist parties across Europe already look to Moscow rather than across the Atlantic.

“Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism,” writes Caldwell. “That turns out to be the big battle of our times. As our last election shows, that’s true even here.”

After a Century of Demonic Possession

Destiny exists. In Christian language it is called God’s Will. God’s Will exists not just for individuals, but also for whole nations. Whole nations receive a calling to do God’s Will. Such is the case for Russia. Its calling came as part of the process of 2,000 years of Christian history. This history began with Christ and went through two great events. The first, after nearly 300 years of persecution and martyrdom, was the proclamation of the future St Constantine as the first Christian Emperor, on 25 July 306 in York in Britain. The second was the martyrdom of the future St Nicholas II as the last Christian Emperor to date, on 17 July 1918 in the very centre of Northern Eurasia. By his martyrdom he united East and West, becoming the personal embodiment of the double-headed eagle. His martyrdom marked the start of a century of demonic possession, during which the Christian Empire was abolished.

Between St Constantine and St Nicholas, the centre and capital of the Christian Empire was transferred from distant European Rome, become provincial, to the Eurasian New Rome (Constantinople) and from there, after its sacking by the West in 1204 and the East in 1453, to the Third Rome (Moscow). By 1453, having passed through the dark crucible of aggressive Western ‘crusades’ and the Eastern Tartar yoke, Russia was ready to accept its Divine destiny as the defender of Christendom against heretics and infidels alike. For over 500 years it lived for Christ, despite setbacks, weaknesses and further Western assaults, until the fateful year of 1917, when it was betrayed. 100 years on from then nearly all now understand that huge and tragic mistake of accepting the illusory Western ideology of Marxism in 1917 with its utterly false promise of paradise on earth, which at once turned into hell on earth.

Today, however, Russia, through repentance for its delusion and through the restoration of Orthodoxy, is on the path once more to its inevitable destiny. True, Russia faces once more, just as in 1917, Western-funded and Western-orchestrated dissidence by greedy and corrupt oligarchs (who, ironically, camouflage their real power-grabbing aims under the mask of being against corruption). For them Russia is simply to become another nationalistic state, like so many others in Western Europe, which, as the provincials they are, they idolize. Russia has, they say, no multinational and international, that is, no Imperial, vocation. This is exactly what the West (the self-appointed ‘international community’, in fact a tyrannical, anti-international ghetto) wants Russia to be reduced to.

The West fears the spiritual power of Russian Orthodoxy, its Christian Civilization and values, its call to the Risen and Living Christ against the dead Western Mammon. This comes at a time when the European Union, the Fourth Reich, in the words of the notoriously Russophobic British Foreign Minister Johnson, is in chaos. This collapse comes as a result of its hubris in imposing the euro, its open Muslim immigration policy (refusing to solve the problems at source), and Brexit, which itself is the result of the two above policies. At the same time, Roman Catholicism, the medieval ancestor of the centrally-controlled EU tyranny, is also in chaos, under a Pope who appears to be a liberal humanist rather than a Christian, that is, an anti-people (anti-populist, in his own words) Pope.

While Brexitland UK is refusing to pay the EU for indulgences in what is a Second Reformation, 500 years after the first one, a magnificent Russian church of All the Saints is being raised up in Strasbourg, the capital of the EU. (https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=eglise+russe+strasbourg&rlz=1C1CAFB_enGB663GB665&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjOyuz9uYHTAhWkD8AKHXTCCmMQ_AUICCgD&biw=1024&bih=470). It is a symbol of the rise of Russian Orthodoxy in the spiritually degutted Western tip of Northern Eurasia, as its local Orthodox saints are being included in the Russian Orthodox calendar. It means that all Russian Orthodoxy in Continental Europe, already 80% of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe, will come under the direct jurisdiction of Moscow. It leaves the Anglosphere under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. This is the Will of God, not of man.

The Battle for the Soul of the Anglosphere

The term Anglosphere has come to be used to mean the English world, what old people used to call the White Commonwealth and the USA. Roughly it means the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Arguably, it could also include parts of South Africa and countries such as Ireland. The Anglospere in terms of power and finance is by far the most important part of the world, the part that others either copy or else fear, either admire or detest. Clearly, by far the most important part of this Anglosphere is the USA. Great Britain ceased being ‘Great’ a long time ago, but in fact the USA is today’s ‘Great’ Britain, as it continues the same policies as Great Britain did in its time of worldly glory, 100-200 years ago, only with all the power of modern technology.

Churchill accurately predicted that Britain would always prefer the USA (‘the ocean’) to mainland Europe. I remember a conversation in a famous French School of Management 25 years ago, when a Frenchman asked me why the UK was so ‘anti-European’ (= by which he meant anti-European Union – what he mistakenly believed to be a French project), as the UK is geographically not in Africa or Asia, but clearly in Europe. I answered simply that geography had nothing to do with it; blood is thicker than water, British people sent their Christmas cards to the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, not to mainland Europe. At that point a German businessman in the class spoke the truth to the discomfort of the Frenchman (and also of many Englishmen), saying that for Germans of his generation Britain is simply ‘the front end of the USA’.

All this is politics, history and geography. But I mention it because it was not always so. Once the English, although politically weak and small in number, had saints and their main export was holiness. All this was over 1,000 years ago. Here then is the battle for the soul of the Anglosphere. To begin to return to that holiness or to continue as now, not just in England, but also to lead the Anglosphere gradually towards that, that is the question. A return is impossible? Probably that is so. After all, why have so few English-speaking (and also in general Western) people joined the Orthodox Church and then actually become Orthodox? Because they reject the depth of repentance vital after 1,000 years of layer after layer of heresy. Self-justification is much easier. But it is not enough to take a Greek name: being a Hellenophile is not Orthodoxy. What is necessary is the cleansing of souls that have been polluted and corrupted by an anti-Orthodox mentality and world-view and then to return to the saints.

The chances of our victory in the battle for the soul of the Anglosphere are minute. But that does not mean that some individual reparation is not possible and if many individuals were to choose this path, then surely there is still hope. Once, the Reformation, separation from Rome, led to excommunication. This led to the Tudor trading conquest of the world through pillage and tyranny. Brexit, separation from the Treaty of Rome, is leading to economic excommunication. This could lead to some new spiritual insight, some return to the holiness of the ancient past. Our God is the God of wonders.

An Autobiographical Note

Archpriest Andrew Phillips was born in 1956 into a family that has lived for centuries on the Essex-Suffolk border in the East of England. He began teaching himself Russian when he was twelve. Following early experience confirmed by reading, he was finally allowed to join the Russian Orthodox Church in 1975. After obtaining an M.A. in Russian in Oxford and working in Greece, he went on to study Russian Orthodox theology in Paris. In 1988 he wrote a first book about the Church in early England and this was followed by five other books on Orthodox themes. After many years spent serving the Russian Orthodox Church in France, Portugal and then England, as senior priest of the Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland of the Church Outside Russia he has since 2008 been rector of the multinational St John of Shanghai Orthodox Church in Colchester, which he founded. Located in his native town, this is the centre of the East of England Orthodox Church trust, which is under the Church Outside Russia and includes a church in Norwich and a community in Bury St Edmunds.

Married with six adult children, serving in one of the largest Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe and working to establish missions from it throughout the East of England, where he travels extensively to isolated families and visits Orthodox in prisons, he also teaches, translates, broadcasts and writes for the website www.orthodoxengland.org.uk, where he especially promotes the veneration of the saints of Western Europe. His work strives to reflect in English the integral Russian Orthodox view of the world. He follows the restoration of Church life in Russia very closely and is a frequent visitor to the Russian Lands. Some of what he writes has been translated and published on websites and in booklet form in Russia and several other countries. He is a member of the Patriarchal Commission for the Diaspora, the representative for Western Europe of the Missionary Department of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, a member of its Diocesan Ecclesiastical Court and of the Theological Committee of the Orthodox Bishops in the British Isles and Ireland.