On Contraception: A Pastor’s Viewpoint

The Orthodox Christian ideal as regards contraception is clear: We do not use contraception.

This ideal is opposed by liberals, modernists, who, like liberal Protestants and nowadays liberal Roman Catholics (who are virtually indistinguishable from liberal Protestants), appear to think that anything goes. The usual suspects on the fringes of the Orthodox Church include the Parisians and their allies, clerics like the heretic Fr Sergey Bulgakov, as well as Fr Alexander Schmemann and Fr John Meyendorff, and philosophers, also verging on heresy, like Evdokimov, Clement, Yannaras and Berdyayev, not to mention their allies in Constantinople and Finland. It is significant that their works are more often read by heterodox and unconverted converts than those inside the Church, who long ago entered the arena. The liberals’ temptation is that they attempt to dogmatize or absolutize ikonomia, pastoral dispensation. The path that they are on leads directly to sectarian liberalism outside the Church.

At the opposite extreme we have the literalists and idealists, almost always ill-integrated converts of conservative Protestant or conservative Evangelical background. They are horrified by any concept of pastoral dispensation and quote out of context the holy fathers and canons just as they used to quote chapter and verse from the Bible – threatening others with hell. Such individuals lack experience of real Orthodox parishes and real Orthodox life, preferring the convert hothouse to what they condescendingly call ‘ethnic parishes’. Their temptation is in fact the same as that of the liberals, that they attempt to dogmatize or absolutize, only in their case they dogmatize akrivia, the strict teaching, never allowing for pastoral dispensation, not understanding that the essential dogmas concern the Holy Trinity and the Person of Christ. The path that they are on leads directly to pharisaical old calendarism outside the Church.

Having considered the two extremes on the fringes of the Church and not of the Church, as they are founded on liberal Protestantism and conservative Protestantism, what then is the Tradition of the Church? It is that the Church has an ideal which we are to strive for, but that for the sake of the salvation of the flock pastors are allowed to make exceptions to specific individuals and in specific contexts, applying pastoral dispensation (ikonomia), wherever it is of spiritual benefit. We do not set the flock a cross that is too heavy and which will break their backs. Those who do so, imposing a spiritual level on those who are not ready for it, will empty the churches, creating pharisaical sects. We have over the last forty years seen too much hypocrisy and too many broken marriages caused by such unwise and ill-discerning converts who dogmatize the ideals of the Church and act without love to weaker brethren and sisters. There is a higher law than the law of the Pharisees; it is called the law of love. That is the law of the Church, of Truth and Mercy, for it alone leads to salvation.

Fake News

First, they called it ‘lies’, then under the Jesuits and later Dr Goebbels they called it ‘propaganda’. Then in the Soviet Union it became ‘disinformation’ and in the West ‘PR’, more recently ‘spin’ and now ‘fake news’. Such are the euphemisms for LIES.

The Western Establishment has excelled itself in this regard, renaming reality to suit itself. For example, Western experts long ago renamed the Age of the Saints ‘The Dark Ages’, labelled the Middle Ages ‘Gothic’, which they were not, repaganization they called ‘The Renaissance’, darkness they called ‘The Enlightenment’, brutal paganism they call ‘modern times’ and the abortion holocaust ‘women’s rights’.

The British Establishment, founded by French-speaking, but still barbarian, Vikings, has shown special skills in this field. Thus it calls native English people ‘Anglo-Saxons’, which they never called themselves, and decreed that they died out in 1066 under themselves, the ‘superior’ Normans, superior because they were more efficient at murder. Then it called a murderous civil war ‘The War of the Roses’, named the looting and wholesale destruction of monastic life and care for the poor under the odious tyrant and mass murderer Henry VIII, ‘The Reformation’, and glorified Cromwell, one of the most violent murderers in human history (1,000,000 dead?), with a statue outside the Establishment’s Parliament.

Later it called a Dutch invasion that cost hundreds of thousands of lives ‘The Glorious’ or ‘The Bloodless’, ‘Revolution’, named the unprovoked Anglo-French-Muslim invasion of Russia ‘The Crimean War’, the freedom of the fighters of India ‘The Indian Mutiny’, the massacre of Dutch farmers’ families in concentration camps ‘The Boer War’, barbaric Western European Wars ‘World Wars’, and, recently, the imperialist killings in Northern Ireland as ‘The Troubles’. More recently still, it calls the alien, US-installed, American-Georgian-Galician junta in Kiev ‘the Ukrainian government’ and Ukrainian freedom fighters ‘Russian-backed separatists’!

Just now we have the lies of NATO, a paranoid organization which spread paranoia to justify itself and its hundreds of billions of dollars of spending, which should have died when the Soviet Union died. Although it claims to be about the North Atlantic, it has just lost a war in aid of its puppet junta in the foothills of the Himalayas, costing 450 British lives and wasting the British taxpayer £35 billion. Having failed to make Sweden join NATO by inventing fake news that a Russian submarine was patrolling the harbour of its capital, it is now trying to get Western governments to stump up huge sums of cash so that it can threaten Russia with invasion from Eastern Europe.

First they called it ‘lies’, then under the Jesuits and later Dr Goebbels they called it ‘propaganda’. Then in the Soviet Union it became ‘disinformation’ and in the West ‘PR’, more recently ‘spin’ and now ‘fake news’. Such are the euphemisms for LIES.

Against Mammon

The ideology which the Western world is so proud of and ants to impose by force on the rest of the world calls itself ‘Capitalism’. In other words, however much it may be disguised by humanitarian concerns trying to justify its ruthless exploitation of the rest of the world, this ideology is the Gospel-forbidden worship of money, of capital, of Mammon, Mammonism. For we are expressly taught by the Son of God that we cannot worship God and Mammon. Some here are deaf and blind.

Essentially, this Western ideology began in the eleventh century as a power grab, asserting that since Christ was absent, he had therefore been replaced by a ‘Vicar’, from whom, moreover, proceeded the Holy Spirit! Very conveniently, the ‘Vicars of Christ’ just so happened to be the successors of the pagan emperor of Rome, ‘pontifex maximus’, and they were also close relatives of the emperors of what was basically Germany, where lived the most powerful and richest race in Western Europe. However, any power grab must be financed. The popes of the late eleventh century developed such finance, as Charlemagne, the first German Emperor of the ‘First Reich’, had tried but failed to do before them. The popes were therefore the first to develop banking to finance their international power grab.

For example, the Papal shock-troops, the Normans, financed their 1066 invasion of England through Jewish usurers in Rouen. And other Papal shock-troops, the Templars, had large land-holdings across Europe starting from about 1100 on, so giving rise to the beginning of Europe-wide banking. In the twelfth century, the general need to transfer large sums of money to finance the Crusades stimulated the further development of banking in Western Europe. Increasingly, Roman Catholicism became not so much an organization to shepherd the flock as an organization to fleece it. Thus, anyone who refused to pay tithes to the Pope could be excommunicated and, as with the case of the Cathars, was also exterminated by crusades.

The Papacy itself was the object of finance by corrupt Italian families. Merchants in Florence, Genoa and Venice in particular set about using their financial power to grab political power. Thus, the greedy Venetians lay behind the Fourth ‘Crusade’ (= the fourth act of organized banditry and mass killing), which resulted in the looting of the Christian Capital in New Rome, in 1204. Indulgences, beginning in about 1170, were also essentially a financial rip-off. In their ‘Renaissance’ art, families like the Medici in Florence would even paint themselves as apostles. This mentality continued to be shared by the Roman Catholic Columbus, who was financed by the greedy to go and steal gold from the New World, where he hoped to find ‘the gold one’, El Dorado.

A few years after him, in strict continuity, the Protestants were no different. Thus, the evil murderer and privatizer, Henry VIII, switched religions so that he could grab monastic money and lands for himself and his cronies. This continued, as Cromwell, the massacrer of hundreds of thousands, financed his murders through Dutch Jews, rather as the atheist Napoleon financed his two million murders through the Rothschilds. The whole British Protestant colonial project was about ruthless exploitation, disguised as a benign and pseudo-religious plan to bring ‘civilization to unenlightened savages’. Thus, in India, members of the ‘Honourable’ East India Company painted themselves literally as Christ’s apostles. As the Indian Gandhi later answered, when asked by British journalists what he thought of Western Civilization, ‘It is a very good idea’.

Or as a South African Protestant has said: ‘They brought us the Bible, but when we turned round we found that in return they had stolen our land’. We might add, ‘and gold and diamonds too’. The same obsession continued in the post-Roman Catholic, post-Protestant, atheist twentieth century, when Wall Street financed the mainly Jewish Bolsheviks, hoping to plunder the riches of the former Russian Empire. Seeing the refusal of Stalin, who had massacred the Jewish Bolsheviks, to co-operate, Wall Street then, ironically, financed the Anti-Jewish Hitler, whom they hoped would in his turn allow them to plunder the riches of the former Russian Empire. How can you be so wrong twice?

Of course, Orthodox should be careful. If the Western world for a millennium has fallen to Mammon, conveniently disguised as God, the same temptation could befall us. There is too much gold in some of our Orthodox churches, not to mention precious stones, silver and marble. Beauty in worship is important, as it inspires prayer, which is why we give our best to God, but let us use gold paint and coloured glass. The real thing can be sold and given to the poor. We reject God and Mammon, which odious combination has been the downfall of Christianity in the Western world. Rather we face the choice of God or Mammon and we know what we choose.

Church of England Bishop Condemns Evangelical Theology

Some have wondered in recent years what lay behind the meddling Western invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the arrogance that ‘we know best’, which resulted in the massacres and exile of millions of people both there and throughout the Middle East. The ‘theology of violence’ in fact lies in the perversions of Christianity to be found in the Protestant and post-Protestant ethos of the US and the UK. After all the Methodist President Bush did claim that ‘God had told him’ to invade Iraq’.

(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-god-told-me-to-invade-iraq-6262644.html).

.The Bishop has said:

“But of course the theology that these people bring to the table very often has an element of violence and sort of nastiness in it, a kind of element of punitive behaviour. God is seen as this punitive figure who is somehow out to ‘get’ people and I suppose it does blind people to what’s going on in front of them sometimes, when there is that kind of violent basic theology.”

For the full story, see:

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/bishop.blames.violent.and.punitive.theology.for.alleged.abuse.at.christian.summer.camps/104423.htm

Why Some Rejoiced at the Restoration of Unity of the Russian Orthodox Church and Others Chose Division

The Romanov throne was destroyed not by young bomb-throwers or forerunners of the soviets, but by the bearers of aristocratic surnames and court titles, bankers, publishers, lawyers, professors and other public figures, who lived off the empire’s bounty…A description of the anti-government activities of the Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia could fill an entire volume – one that should be dedicated to the liberal émigrés who mourn ‘the good old days’ in the streets of various European cities.

From Chapter 16 of ‘The Eve’, by Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, brother-in-law of Nicholas II

Ten years ago, in May 2007, the vast majority of the members of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and of the Church inside Russia were reunited at the Liturgy of the Feast of the Ascension in Moscow. After some eighty years of parallel and unwanted separation, enforced purely by external atheist political interference, unity was restored. Those who rejected this long-fought for unity were to be found on the politicized and sectarian spiritual fringes of the Church Outside Russia and among pseudo-representatives (in fact infiltrators) abroad of the Church inside Russia, as well as among émigré groups claiming to be of ‘the Russian Tradition’, but for long altogether outside the Russian Church and never wanting to return to Her. Those who rejected the restoration of unity left both parts of the Russian Church and went elsewhere. Why?

The ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus explained the reason for this very well, albeit indirectly. He said that all depends on our understanding and devotion to the ideals of Holy Rus. These ideals mean standing up for three things: for the Faith (the purity of Holy Orthodoxy); the Tsar (the Christian Emperor Who incarnates Christian values in life); Rus (the ideal of the Christian Empire supporting the Church and supported by it in symphony). Wherever there was no understanding of and devotion to these ideals, there was no interest in the restoration of the unity of the Russian Church, but only negative, hair-splitting criticism and self-justification for schism. Those who rejected these ideals and thus restoration of Church unity were very diverse and belonged to three opposing groups of both left and right:

Firstly, there were the liberals, whose forbears had actively sought the 1917 Revolution and who had wanted to confuse the purity of the Faith with Western humanist ideology, creating a dreamy, disincarnate, spiritualistic, intellectualist, Gnostic ideology, such as the heretical Sophianism of Bulgakov, denounced by two saints, St John of Shanghai and St Seraphim of Sofia. These were heretics and schismatics, centred in the Paris School of émigrés from Saint Petersburg, and supported by the Russophobic, US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Secondly, there were the anti-monarchists of various political denominations, both the semi-Communist left and the semi-Fascist right. They objected to any Church influence on the State and to any presence of the Church in social, economic and political life in general. They wanted a Non-Christian, secularist State, where they could live egoistic, disordered or even depraved lives for themselves, proudly independent of any Christian influence, values and conscience. The concept of a Christian Emperor (Tsar) was and is anathema to them.

Thirdly, there were the sectarians, both of the left or the right, who wanted a Faith for themselves or their political or nationalist groups, and not for the masses. Anti-incarnationalist by nature, they wanted not a Universal Christian Empire, but a private Church and ideology for the elect – themselves. They wanted to be a sect of purists, ‘walled off’ from others. For example, the typically Parisian late Fr Alexander Schmemann denied that ‘Holy Rus’ had even existed!

It has always been our mission, together with many, many others, more eloquent and better equipped than ourselves, to counter the propaganda against ‘The Faith, the Tsar and Rus’, understood as Orthodoxy Incarnate through the Christian Emperor in a Universal Empire. Many still believe the dubious memoirs of treacherous White Russian emigres after the Revolution, born of the parlour room gossip of anti-Orthodox aristocrats in St Petersburg, and to Bolshevik and the equally Russophobic propaganda of paid Western academics as regards ‘The Faith, the Tsar and Rus’. We reject all of that as untrue, because it is untrue, as we preach the Crucified and Risen Christ, Incarnate on Earth in the Church and in the Universal Orthodox Christian Empire, the restoration of which we believe in and eagerly await.

Europe Has Mutated Into the USSR; Russia Has Become Free Europe (VIDEO)

http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/europe-has-mutated-ussr-russia-has-become-free-europe-video/ri18742?utm_source=Russia+Insider+Daily+Headlines&utm_campaign=70135ff0be-Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c626db089c-70135ff0be-183204397&ct=t(Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014)&mc_cid=70135ff0be&mc_eid=5c8d1856f4

Spirit River Flows

He who was a Ukrainian farm boy from Spirit River in Alberta, Canada, has visited the few remaining parishes of what was once the largest Orthodox diocese in the British Isles and Ireland. However, that was a long time ago – the last Orthodox Bishop of London reposed in 1932.

Within days of his visit, people had been listened to, hopes for restoration had been rekindled, several readers tonsured, several subdeacons ordained, a new priest at last made and other long-awaited ordinations agreed on for a few weeks’ time, doubling the number of active clergy. For the first time, after decades of difficulties, all noticed that the few remaining parishes had now at last begun to become a real diocese, which could at last rapidly develop into many dozens of parishes and monasteries, and so fulfil its enormous potential, meeting the pastoral needs of a huge but until now neglected and so paralyzed flock.

Thank you, dear Vladyka Metropolitan Hilarion of New York, Eastern America, Sydney, Australia, New Zealand, Chiswick, the British Isles and Ireland, deliverer of peace and hope of the English-Speaking Orthodox World! The River of the Spirit does indeed flow through you.

Repose of Monk Joseph (Lambertson)

It is with great sadness that we report the repose of Isaac Lambertson, tonsured only a few weeks ago by His Eminence Metropolitan Hilarion as Monk Joseph. Monk Joseph was the liturgical translator into English of a host of Orthodox service books, not least the twelve Menaia, as well as the composer of some 75 services to Western and Eastern saints, who had had no service previously. The whole Orthodox world in the Diaspora owes a huge debt of gratitude to him, and not just the English-speaking world, for his books are used to translate into other languages from French and Spanish to Swedish and Portuguese, as well as a host of Non-European languages.

To Monk Joseph – Eternal Memory!

On the Fringes of the Contemporary Russian Orthodox Church

Introduction

After the Fall in the Garden of Eden, divisions appeared among mankind. These were described ascetically by the Church Fathers as falls to the left and right sides and are also today described politically as left and right. These divisions can be seen in the Gospels, where we encounter Saducees and Pharisees. The former were the ‘positive’ liberals of their age, who thought that everything was ‘relative’ (to use a modern term) and rejected the Resurrection. On the other hand, there were the negative conservatives of their age, the Pharisees and their sidekicks, the scribes. The Pharisees were highly ritualistic and considered to be model Jews in their devotion. However, our Lord called them ‘hypocrites’ and said to them ‘woe unto you’, when they censoriously condemned others, stoning to death and rejecting merciful healings on the Sabbath day.

We can find parallels to this in every religion in the world and throughout history. Thus in contemporary Islam, we can find fanatical young suicide bombers and, conversely, polite, conformist, Western-educated imams, who dress in suits and ties and whose values seem to be almost identical to liberal Guardian readers. Similarly, in contemporary Judaism, we can find fanatical rabbis who literally spit at Christians with furious hatred, but also ‘reformed’ female rabbis who look and sound like middle-class women from any polite suburb in the Western world. Since these two tendencies have always existed, both inside and outside any religion, and always will exist (because human psychology with all its deformations and deviations does not change), what exact forms do they take in the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church?

The Contemporary Saducees

The contemporary Saducees are secularist, syncretist, Russophobic, cosmopolitan, ultra-liberal, rationalist, anti-ascetic, reformist, new calendarist, ecumenist, modernist, masonic, intellectual, pro-homosexual, anti-mystical, philosophical and renovationist Westernizers. Some of them are converts from Judaism. Great advocates of revolutionary 1917 Duma politics and Church Renovationism and haters of the Tsar, they are admirers of the historic Paris School of Philosophy, which later worked its ills in the USA, and of semi-Orthodox, iconostasis-less, Lutheran-style churches in Finland. Many are in spirit Uniats, like the late French philosopher Olivier Clement, notorious for taking Roman Catholic communion, or like those who celebrate Orthodox services in Uniat churches. Eucharistically-minded, they are strongly opposed to confession and make communion obligatory for all at every single service.

In Moscow their leader is Fr George Kochetkov, invited to take over the Paris-style Sourozh Cathedral in London by the schismatic former Bishop Basil Osborne and once suspended by Patriarch Alexey II as a ‘neo-renovationist’. Politically, the Saducees are strongly anti-Putin and anti-Patriarch (both of whom they love to accuse of corruption with the Western propaganda chorus), pro-Constantinople and therefore pro-US and therefore pro-EU. It is suspected that they receive finance from there, just as the left-wing Paris YMCA émigré organization or the right-wing German émigré NTS were US-financed, little more than puppets. Inside today’s Russia, the Saducees look to the Prime Minister Medvedev and technocrats and liberals more extreme than him. A favourite website of theirs is the anti-Church and anti-Russian www.portal-credo.ru, which many suspect is CIA or Soros-financed, as it continually attacks the Russian Orthodox Church.

Pro-Catholic and so pro-Protestant and so pro-Secularist, the Saducees want to ‘reform’ (i.e. desecrate, that is, desacralize) Orthodox services, by shortening them and rewriting the Typicon and the Menaia. They believe that they understand everything, but in reality understand nothing because they only use their heads and not their hearts. They detest clerical dress, beards, long hair, and above all the Psalter, long services, fasting, asceticism and monasticism. They are strongly feminist (in the secular sense, not in the Orthodox sense, of the word (1)), detest modest dress and head coverings for women and have girls serving in their altars and want woman deaconesses and priests, like the late Elisabeth Behr-Sigel and other Parisian intellectuals and modernists in various countries. Being disincarnate, they prefer dreamy, abstract, ‘spiritual’ (= pseudo-spiritual) philosophy to concrete theology, which is based on practical spiritual experience.

Thus they detest any signs of the Incarnation of the Church in national life. Therefore they refuse to venerate saints like the Royal Martyrs, and in general the New Martyrs of the Communist Yoke, St John of Kronstadt, St John of Shanghai and St Seraphim of Sofia. They are admirers of Judas, whom some of them want to rehabilitate, not to mention Origen and Arius. They substitute for the saints their own ‘saints’, for example, those who helped Jews and so became victims of Hitler. In this way, they want to create a ‘new spirituality’, new simplified forms of liturgical life, new layouts of the church building with ‘open’ and low iconostases. Many of them consider smiling and laughter to be ‘a sign of the Holy Spirit’ and seem to believe, like Protestants, that they have already been saved in some magic descent of the Holy Spirit on them.

The Contemporary Pharisees

The contemporary Pharisees are also secularist, but in the opposite way from the Saducees. They are sectarian, ritualistic, ultra-conservative, ultra-nationalist, isolationist, provincial, loving folklore, racist, chauvinist, imperialist (not Imperial – which is very different), anti-Semitic, obscurantist, apocalyptic, rigid fundamentalists (like fundamentalist Protestants). Politically they are anti-Putin and anti-Patriarch, whom they see as moderates if not traitors, and in history they support both the monster Stalin (whom they want to canonize!) and yet they also admire many of Hitler’s policies! At the same time as this Stalinism, some of them call the Tsar-Martyr a redeemer. Although all suffering can be redemptive, there is only One Redeemer, Jesus Christ.

Another historical figure they love is Ivan IV, called by his Western detractors ‘the Terrible’. (True, he was far less evil than his Western contemporaries like Charles V or Henry VIII, the latter of whom murdered 72,000, but he still murdered some 4,000 enemies of the State). A recent figure whom they admire is the pop singer Igor Talkov, assassinated in 1991, and they have even written an akathist to him. This admiration positions them as victims of the catastrophic perestroika period, when suddenly all values and identities were called into question, creating huge instability. Many at that time were baptized and made it safely from the rocks of the failed and dissolved Soviet Union to the shores of the Church, but the Pharisees never got there, being bogged down in the illusions of nationalism, just as the Saducees got bogged down in the illusions of anti-national Westernism.

The Pharisees tend to create their own sects, which claim to be ‘of the catacombs’. They are not afraid of falling out of communion with the Patriarch and the rest of the Russian Church and in any case, they do not recognize the rest of the Orthodox Church, the Romanians, the Georgians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks etc (though some have links with Greek old calendarists). In this they have much in common with the isolationist 17th century Old Ritualists. Just like the Saducees, they do not much practise the Faith – standing in church and praying demands faith, love and patience – but some may tell you that placing a booklet with the akathist to Igor Talkov or an icon of Stalin (!) on any part of the body that hurts will cure it. In this sense the Pharisees are anti-ascetic, highly superstitious or rather pseudo-mystical (like the Old Ritualists).

They seem to believe more in magic than God, Who will conjure up for them salvation out of thin air. They also seem to prefer dressing up in pseudo-military and pseudo-monastic uniforms (black being the favourite colour) and taking part in processions with banners to standing in church in prayer. They are also anti-intellectual and burn books by modernist thinkers like Fr Alexander Schmemann and Fr Alexander Men, rather than constructively criticizing them. Their strange slogan is ‘Orthodoxy or Death’; the Orthodox version of which would be ‘Faithfulness to the Church to Martyrdom’. These people are generally singularly humourless, gloomy and fearful, believing, it would seem, more in Antichrist than Christ and are obsessed with apocalyptic prophecies. A favourite website of theirs is http://3rm.info, which is anti-Patriarchal.

Conclusion

In surveying these two extremes, we can see how they meet and are parallel, both groups being incredibly intolerant of everyone else. Let us be frank, there is little theology in either extreme, it is psychology and even psychopathology. Some of these people have actually gone from one group to another, usually from the Saducees to the Pharisees. Thus, the Saducees tend to be of the younger generation, whereas the Pharisees tend to be a generation older. Clearly, the psychological need to be in opposition, to be rebellious, to be outsiders, is very strong. Both groups fail to accept the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. For example, the Saducees include in the Church all, including the heterodox who reject Orthodoxy, but not the ‘super-Orthodox’ Pharisees.

The Pharisees reject all the saints and holiness in general (see their rejection of the Menaia) and the Tradition (the inspirations of the Holy Spirit since Pentecost). They reject the Church and form their own sects, rejecting all the saints (like the Saducees, they venerate only selected saints), thus rejecting the Catholicity of the Church. Both groups similarly seem to reject the Apostolicity of the Church, established in the first century. The reference point for the Saducees is the Protestant Reformation (which is why they do not join Roman Catholicism) and the reference point for the Pharisees is medieval Russian history, especially the 17thcentury Old Ritualists (Russian Protestants), and do not go as far back as the first millennium.

The Saducees love the ‘magic’ of intellectual talk and philosophy, preferring it to actually doing. The Phariseees love the ‘magic’ of showy external parades, but not do not like ‘doing Church’, i. e. praying at church services. If anyone should read the above and feel concerned, let us put all this into proportion. Of some 164 million in the mainstream of the Russian Orthodox Church, these two sidestreams are tiny, perhaps 5,000 on each side, perhaps 10,000 in all. Should we therefore be wary of both equally? In one sense yes, because both are dangerous spiritual deviations, however there is a difference. The Pharisees, being inherently sectarian and so mainly having consciously cut themselves off from the Church, are largely discredited, their ideology much mocked, since its stands up to no logic, let alone theological analysis.

The Saducees, on the other hand, for the moment have the upper hand in terms of influence because they are still officially inside the Church. Being well-instructed, they know how to infiltrate and can even get the ear of some who are in power and in many respects cause the extreme reactions of the Pharisees through their humiliating contempt for the little people and sincere piety. And in that sense they are for the moment the more dangerous of the two deviations. As for us in the mainstream, we will continue in prayer and love, avoiding extremes, venerating all the saints, keeping the fasts and admiring genuine monastic life, the barometer of the Church, following the Tradition and obeying the Patriarchal episcopate of the Church – One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

Note:

1. Secular feminism is part of the attempt to re-engineer human nature, common to both classic Communism with its attempted creation of ‘homo sovieticus’ and to modern Western Secularism with its transgender/ transhuman agenda.