Holy Sussex: Three Southern Saints

Introduction

Having written of the saints of East Anglia, Essex and Kent, I have been asked to write of the saints of the fourth of the seven early English kingdoms, Sussex, the Kingdom of the South Saxons. Though not so far to the south of London, just beyond Surrey and Kent and stretching to the south coast, hence ‘Sussex by the sea’, Sussex has a reputation for being separate from the rest of England. Perhaps this is because of its downs, or hills, and forest, which in times past cut it off from others. In any case, as a result, just like the people of Essex, local people, in both east and west Sussex, have a reputation for independence and an aversion to being forced into anything. This is expressed in the Sussex motto, ‘We wunt be druv’ (We won’t be driven/pushed around).

The English settlement of Sussex began in the year 477 with a certain leader Aelle, who landed on the coast, consolidated his territory and was eventually recognised as the first overlord of southern Britain. By the second half of the seventh century the western corner of Sussex around Selsey and Chichester had become the political centre of the kingdom. In the 660s-670s King Ethelwalh of Sussex formed an alliance with the Mercian King Wulfhere. As Mercia’s first Christian king, Wulfhere insisted that Ethelwalh convert to Christianity. Wilfrid, the exiled Bishop of York and future saint, came to Sussex in 681 and with King Ethelwalh’s approval set up a mission to convert Sussex to Christ, his centre in Selsey.

At the end of the 8th century, Aldwulf was probably the last independent king of Sussex, after which Sussex like others came increasingly under Mercian rule. But Mercia’s grip was in turn shattered in 825, when Sussex and the other southern kingdoms came under the control of Wessex which later grew into the kingdom of England. Orthodox Sussex is marked by three saints. These are:

St Leofwynn (Lewina/Lewinna), Protomartyr of Sussex (+ c. 670)

Sussex was the last of the seven kingdoms of England to become Christian and east Sussex remained pagan longest of all. However, even before St Wilfrid’s organized missionary labours in 681, there were isolated Christians here. For example, a Sussex man called Damian had become Bishop of Rochester in Kent in the 650s and King Ethelwalh had been baptised before St Wilfrid. And before Wilfrid there was for a time a small monastery of five or six monks at Bosham in west Sussex, founded in c. 670 by a wandering Irish monk called Dicul (Deicola), later St Dicul (feast: 18 April).

St Leofwynn was another such isolated Sussex Christian, being martyred in c. 670, almost certainly by fellow countrymen who were still pagan and she was not a Briton, as can be ascertained by her name. About three centuries after her martyrdom her wonderworking relics were solemnly translated to a St Andrew’s church near Seaford in east Sussex, so the place of her sufferings must have been nearby. This St Andrew’s church where her miraculous relics were venerated in early English times was perhaps in Alfriston, an attractive village four miles from Seaford. However, others have suggested nearby Bishopstone, which also has a church dedicated to St Andrew dating back to the eighth century.

Most of our knowledge of St Leofwynn comes from an account of the theft of her relics in 1058 for a monastery in Berg in Flanders. After the Norman occupation nearly every memory of the saint disappeared in England, though she was a much-loved intercessor in her new home. In 1558 Berg was captured by French Protestants and the relics of Saint Leofwynn disappeared except for one rib. This was venerated at the monastery until the French Revolution when it disappeared. In 1928 a priest in Berg rediscovered the relic, but when his church was almost destroyed during a bombardment in the Second World War the relic was lost. St Leofwynn’s feast day is 24 July.

St Wilfrid, Apostle of Sussex (+ c. 709)

Sussex became a diocese when St Wilfrid began to convert the pagan kingdom between 681 and 685. St Wilfrid (c. 633 – c. 709) was a Northumbrian noble who became a monk and then Bishop of Northumbria. Exiled by the Northumbrian king who had quarrelled with him, Bishop Wilfrid spent these years of exile in Selsey in west Sussex, where he founded his see with a monastery on an estate of 87 hides, granted to him by King Ethelwalh. Here in the Manhood peninsula he began converting the pagan inhabitants to Christianity, before returning to Northumbria under its new king.

St Bede attributed Bishop Wilfrid’s ability to begin to convert Sussex in part to his teaching them how to fish. He also wrote that the Sussex area had been experiencing a drought for three years before Wilfrid, but miraculously when he arrived and started baptising converts, it began to rain. Bishop Wilfrid worked with another future saint, Erconwald, Bishop of London, in helping to set up the church in Sussex.

His mission was jeopardised when King Ethelwalh died during an invasion of his kingdom by Caedwalla of Wessex. However, Bishop Wilfrid had previously had contact with Cædwalla and may have served as his spiritual advisor before he invaded. And after Ethelwalh’s death Bishop Wilfrid became one of the new king’s advisors and he was converted. Cædwalla confirmed Ethelwalh’s grant of land in Selsey and Wilfrid built his cathedral nearby at the entrance to Pagham Harbour, in what is now Church Norton.

Cædwalla also sent Wilfrid west to the still pagan Isle of Wight with the aim of converting the inhabitants. The King gave Bishop Wilfrid a quarter of the land on the island as a gift. In 688 the King gave up his throne and went on a pilgrimage to Rome to be baptised, but died shortly afterwards. St Wilfrid may have been involved in founding monasteries in other parts of Sussex, but the evidence for this is based only on wording used in founding charters which resembles that used by him in other charters.

After this mission, Christians in Sussex were placed in the Diocese of Winchester and it was not until c. 715 that Edbert, Abbot of Selsey, was consecrated the first Bishop of Sussex. There were eventually around fifty monastic (minster) churches across Sussex and these centres supplied clergy for the surrounding areas. Examples are at Steyning, Singleton, Lyminster, Findon and Bishopstone. The jurisdiction of each of these churches seems to have matched the early land divisions, called rapes.

Thus, it was not until 200–300 years after conversion to Christianity began in the 680s that a network of local parish churches came into existence in Sussex, the earliest being recorded at Henfield in central Sussex in 770. Several monasteries were also established here in the early English period in, for example, Selsey, Lyminster, Aldingbourne, Beddingham, Chichester, Bosham, Ferring and South Malling. In 1075 the Normans transferred the cathedral for Sussex to nearby Chichester. The original cathedral at Selsey is now under the sea. St Wilfrid’s feast is on 12 October.

St Cuthman (Cuthmann) of Steyning

St Cuthman was born in about 681, probably at Chidham near Bosham in west Sussex. This would probably mean that St Wilfrid converted and baptised Cuthman and his parents. His life states that he was a shepherd who had to care for his paralysed mother after his father’s death.

According to one story, once while he was shepherding, Cuthman drew a line around the sheep with his staff so that he could leave to collect food. On his return he found that the flock had not left the invisible boundary. This miracle may have taken place in a field near Chidham, which for centuries was known as ‘St Cuthman’s Field’ or ‘St Cuthman’s Dell’. It was said that a large stone in the field on which the shepherd was in the habit of sitting had miraculous properties.

When Cuthman and his mother fell on hard times and were forced to beg from door to door, he built a one-wheeled cart, with a rope from the handles over his shoulders taking part of the weight, in which he moved her around with him. One day Cuthman and his mother set out east from his home, heading towards the rising sun. When the rope broke he improvised a new one from withies, deciding that when that broke he would accept it as a sign from God to stop at that place and build a church there.

The withy rope broke at a place called Steyning, some 25 miles from his birthplace and inland from central Sussex, at which he prayed: “Father Almighty, Thou hast brought my wanderings to an end, now enable me to begin this work. For who am I, Lord, that I should build a house to Thy name? If I rely on myself it will be of no use, but Thou wilt help me. Thou hast given me the desire to be a builder, make up for my lack of skill and bring the work of building this holy house to its completion.”

For, after building a hut for his mother and himself, Cuthman began work on a wooden church which he decided to dedicate to the fisherman-saint, Andrew, with help from the locals. As the church was nearing completion and Cuthman was having difficulty with a roof-beam, a stranger showed him how to mend it. When Cuthman asked his name, he replied: ‘I am he in whose name you are building this church’. We do not know when Cuthman reposed, but we can imagine it would have been in about 730.

Steyning became an important religious centre and St Cuthman’s grave became a place of pilgrimage in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In charters of William the Conqueror Steyning was sometimes called St Cuthman’s Market or St Cuthman’s Parish. At his birthplace at Chidham there developed a Guild of St Cuthman. Though he dedicated the church he founded at Steyning to St Andrew, the parish was recently rededicated to St Andrew and St Cuthman. A picture of him with his handcart is on Steyning’s town sign. His feast day is 8 February.

Conclusion

In September 1066 the Norman invaders landed at Pevensey in east Sussex near Kent and nearby erected a wooden castle at Hastings, from which they plundered the surrounding area. Thus, the Battle of Hastings took place in Sussex, fought against the English King Harold, who had strong connections with Sussex and whose chief seat was probably in Bosham in the west. It is likely that all the fighting men of Sussex were at the battle, as the county’s chief men were decimated and any that survived had their lands confiscated. As the heartland of King Harold, Sussex experienced some of the greatest and most tragic changes of any English county under the Normans.

Its Orthodoxy supplanted, in later history the west of the county had a tendency towards Catholicism, while the east of the county had a tendency towards Protestantism. Today, even these fragments of the Faith have largely been lost, but the memory of the three saints of Sussex, who all lived and reposed within a century of one another, has not been lost: Leofwynn the martyr from the east on whose blood the Church was founded, Wilfrid, the Apostle of Sussex who worked in the west, and Cuthman, the holy layman who settled near the centre of Sussex. What a fine thing it would be if one day an Orthodox church could be founded in Sussex, perhaps in its one city, Brighton, with its large population located very centrally along the coast between east and west, and dedicated to St Andrew the First-Called Apostle and the Three Saints of Sussex.

An Anglo-Russian Alliance?

In recent days anti-democratic EU bureaucrats and others in Brussels and Berlin have declared war on the UK, even interfering in the UK elections. They are angered by the UK people’s choice to leave their customs and political union. In their crass words, they have declared that Brexit UK owes it 100 billion euros. In the UK, many consider that the EU owes it 400 billion euros, the sum overpaid to the EU during the years when UK governments treacherously signed away our sovereignty to the EU for its mess of pottage without popular support. They arrogantly refused to consult the people – until Cameron, who at last allowed a referendum, but only because he was so blinded by arrogance and out of contact that he thought he could easily win it.

Now the EU is openly and treasonously trying to destroy the UK by prising away Northern Ireland and Scotland. In the UK there are those who consider that it is time for Ireland to be reunited and for Scotland and Wales to receive independence, but that the four countries should then immediately form a Confederation outside the EU, perhaps with a new Parliament building on the Isle of Man, from where all four countries of the Isles are visible. The old Victorian Parliament buildings in London, now falling down, could then become tourist sights. In an electronic age there is no need for a multinational Parliament to be in the English commercial capital of London.

The EU itself is bitterly divided and in chaos. The euro has been a disaster. Many of its countries, like Austria, the Baltics, Poland, the Czech Lands, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary, are disobeying Brussels as regards immigration controls. Greece is bankrupt. Cyprus is almost. Catalonia wants its independence by a clear majority. Hungary rejects EU meddling. Eastern Europe has in general been ravaged by German economic imperialism, its factories closed and its young people forced to emigrate to Western Europe. Many in France want to leave the EU. As Marine Le Pen correctly said last week, the next President of France will be a woman: either herself, or else Mrs Merkel. It will certainly be no-one else in this Fourth Reich world.

The EU has declared war. It is thus achieving the opposite of what it wants, as it is uniting the British people and ensuring a landslide victory in the UK elections for the Conservative Party. This is now seen as the only Patriotic Party and the only Party with a strong leader, now fortified by the return of UKIP voters, most of whom had left the Conservative Party disillusioned with its takeover by modernists. People always unite around a strong leader in times of war, even though they would otherwise never vote Conservative. The Opposition to the Conservatives is laughable, but also treasonous.

Thus, on the western and eastern edges of the EU are two countries which should be uniting in this time of war against the EU: the UK and the Russian Federation. An unlikely couple: after all such New Cold War NATO British warmongers as Johnson and Fallon are sending British troops and arms to Estonia, controlled by its US puppet regime, in order to threaten Russia. These clowns are even overflying Russian territory in the Baltics, giving war equipment to the EU-sponsored and CIA-run anti-Ukrainian junta in Kiev, sending a British destroyer to patrol off the Russian coast in the Black Sea.

Not natural allies? True. And yet despite this and the imperialist British invasion of Russia in 1854-56, 210 years ago, 100 years ago and 75 years ago Great Britain and Russia fought together side by side against Continental Western European tyrants, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, the forerunners of today’s EU leaders. Today, again, there is a common enemy. Not to unite today and not to give up ridiculous, Russophobic Cold War rhetoric, would be a missed opportunity for the UK. Perhaps Non-EU Norway and Iceland would join us? And the rest of Scandinavia too? All could sign a friendship pact of mutual non-aggression and thus, we would form a geographical, political and economic bloc towering over the isolated and divided EU.

The UK and Russia are both pro-European countries and want to free the oppressed peoples of Europe from the EU monster. In this centenary year of the British-orchestrated elitist conspiracy that overthrew the greatest European leader of all, Tsar Nicholas II, founder of the Hague International Court of Justice, speaker of five European languages and builder of 18 Russian churches in Western Europe, it would be an act of repentance on the part of Britain to proclaim a new alliance with the Russian Federation.

An Anglo-Russian alliance? Most probably not, but a friend in need is a friend indeed…

In Montenegro on the eve of the vote on joining NATO the victims of the NATO aggression of 1999 are remembered in prayer

The service was led by Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montenegro and Primorje. On the eve of the vote in the Parliament of Montenegro on the issue of NATO membership, on April 27 2017 in Podgorica was made a remembrance liturgy for the victims of the NATO aggression in Montenegro, Serbia and the world. The Liturgy was celebrated by Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montenegro and Primorje, who concelebrated with Bishop Budimlsko-Nikshichsky Ioanniky, said the official website of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

After the Divine Liturgy, both the bishops and the clergy did a memorial service for the victims of NATO. The memorial service was attended by many, including leaders of the opposition parties in Montenegro.

Before the service,Metropolitan Amfilohije said: “Just as at Easter 1941, Belgrade was bombed and was destroyed in 1999, the capital of Serbia. In celebration of the Easter period the capital of Montenegro, Podgorica also became the object of bombing of the so-called “allies”. Thus, it was chosen as a new bombardment at Easter, a day of joy, of light, of peace, of reconciliation between God and men, the day of mutual forgiveness, both in the family and in society and in the international community. ”

Metropolitan Amfilohije said that it is our duty as members of the Church of God – to remember those who died during the bombing in 1999 and previous bombings. “We have to do this and we must do it here, in front of the shrine with the relics of St. Petrer of Cetinje, the right hand of St. John the Baptist and the fragment of the precious Cross of Christ, our God [these relics are kept in Cetinje Monastery nowadays], in which the Lord showed that only those people and those people who sacrifice themselves for the sake of others, for others, for the welfare of mankind and the world, only these people and the people – real people and real peoples “, – added the bishop. Metr Amfilohije also noted that there are other people – “those who are like the wicked thief, those who, like Herod, Pontius Pilate, and those who then was the head of the Jews, who sacrifice others for their ideas, their ideology and their interest “,” who sell God for earthly honor, fame and fortune. ”

Metropolitan Amfilohije also remembered on the holy Prince John Vladimir and Aleksanere Nevsky, who taught their people that God is not in power but in truth. “And it is this always lived and breathed Montenegro and our people”, – said the Bishop. “We are holding on to each other before the shrine of St. Peter of Cetinje, in order to learn from it, and we encourage others to it – this is the way, which should go to Montenegro. If we want to go on this way, it is the way of St. John-Vladimir, who sacrificed himself in the short-term “, – said the Metropolitan, adding that to follow this path and were guided Serbs and Montenegrins Nemanjic – St. Simeon and St. Sava. “St. Sava taught us that Christ is the way that leads to eternal life. We followed this path in the XIII century, and we go to them to this day “- said Bishop Amfilohije.

“Get the servants of the tyrant – is something that can be done only by those who deviate from the path of God’s justice and truth. Saint Peter of Cetinje instructs and reminds everyone, both for us and for those who are currently managed by the State, his way of suffering between Asian and European tyranny, as it is called by his nephew Peter II Njegos. And nothing has changed to this day, “- the Metropolitan warned.

The First Hierarch of the Orthodox Church in Montenegro, said that the violence associated with the imposition of an agreement to join NATO is the continuation of Nazi violence. It would be good to those who today refer to their anti-fascism, we understood that those who were killed in the battles of the Yugoslav partisans against the Nazis, those who died in the concentration camps in Croatia during the Second World War, did not sacrifice themselves and their human dignity for the sake of their descendants today carried out violence and coercion, said Metropolitan Amfilohije, referring to pressure on Montenegro in terms of its entry into NATO.

“We urge the people of Montenegro and those who are destined to resolve these days its fate, we encourage them to look again at the way which we are taking: Use the injustice and violence, robbery of others, the satisfaction of their earthly interests, or to sacrifice themselves following the example of St. Peter of Cetinje”, – concluded Metropolitan Amfilohije.

Source: http://www.sedmitza.ru/text/7165136.html

Orthodox Christianity in the British Isles and Ireland: Seven Orthodox Churches, Nine Dioceses, One Deanery, Four Choices

Introduction

Every Christian denomination in every country of the world is divided into dioceses and parishes which reflect the geographical area where they are located. Moreover, there may also be internal, sociological divisions. For example, in the town where I live there are several parishes of the C of E (Church of England), but two of these parishes refuse to talk to each other because their views and patterns of worship are utterly different, one is ‘Anglo-Catholic’, elderly and wealthy, the other is ‘happy-clappy’, middle-aged and financially modest. There are also two Baptist churches which refuse to talk to one another, because one is strict, the other is liberal.

In the cities there is a similar situation in Roman Catholic parishes, which can have completely different tendencies (Polish/Irish/liberal/ traditional/‘charismatic’…) and also in monasteries, which belong to different orders. Nowadays, larger Roman Catholic parishes have masses at different times for different ethnic groups in different languages and with different Roman Catholic rites, Polish, Syro-Malabar, Greek-Catholic Ukrainian etc. There is often very little communication between these diverse groups. What is the situation regarding the Orthodox Church in this country? What sort of divisions are there here?

Seven Local Churches and Ten Groups

Of the fourteen Local Churches that make up the worldwide Orthodox Church only seven are represented outside their home countries. In the British Isles and Ireland these seven Churches have nine dioceses and one deanery. These are the following: the Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Georgian, Constantinople (two dioceses, Greek and Ukrainian, and one deanery, Paris), Antiochian and Russian (two dioceses, Sourozh and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia). These nine dioceses and one deanery are not territorial, but are superimposed on one another on the same territory. However, even so there is often little communication between them, as each caters for its own ethnic group. Of these ten groups, the first six, the Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Georgian and the big Greek and the tiny Ukrainian nationalist dioceses of the Church of Constantinople, are largely concerned only with their own ethnic members.

Thus, the above generally appear not to observe the Gospel commandment of Matthew 28, that we are to go out into all the world and teach and baptize all. For example, although a small minority of parishes in the big Greek-speaking Diocese of the Church of Constantinople, mainly Cypriot by ethnicity, do sometimes accept English people, generally these people are Hellenized or even come from a Hellenophile public school background. Moreover, its archbishops, who must have Greek or Cypriot nationality, usually impose Greek names on any they may ordain, such as Kallistos instead of Timothy, Meletios instead of Peter, Aristobulos instead of Alban, and imposes names like Athanasios, Panteleimon and Eleutherios on others. This leaves four choices to the majority of native English speakers who are interested in trying to live according to the teachings of the Orthodox Church without having to change their name and national identity.

Four Choices

The first two of these choices, the Parisian and the Antiochian, appear to cater for two specific small English sociological groups, whereas the last two groups are both part of the Russian Orthodox Church. These are at once sociologically much broader as regards the range of English and other local people within them, but those people sometimes have a Russian connection and they are in a majority Russian Church.

1. The Paris Deanery (also called the Exarchate)

This is a very small Deanery belonging to a Diocese under an elderly and sick French bishop, received and ordained into the Church in 1974, based in Paris under the ‘Greek’ (Constantinople) Church. It has virtually no property of its own. Founded in Paris in the 1920s by anti-monarchist Saint Petersburg aristocrats, who had tried but failed to seize power from the Tsar, it had a small parish in London until 1945. However, in 2006 the group was refounded in this country after a noisy, aggressive and unfriendly divorce from the Russian Orthodox Sourozh Diocese (see below) and it strongly dislikes the Russian Orthodox Church as it is. In 2006 it was 300 strong, out of a then total of about 300,000 Orthodox in the UK, so it represented about one in a thousand Orthodox. Despite its tiny size, in 2006 its foundation was strongly supported by the Russophobic bastions of the British Establishment, the Church of England, the BBC, The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. It is known for its attachment to the arts, philosophy and intellectualism and ordains easily, providing that the candidates come from ‘the right background’.

It tends to cater for rather elderly, upper-middle class Establishment figures – which is why it belongs to the Western-run Church of Constantinople, which uses the Roman Catholic calendar for the fixed feasts, and not the independently-run Russian Orthodox Church. It is thus rather politicized and its perhaps clubby, county-town members tend to support the elitist Liberal Democrats. Its members, often in groups as small as five or ten, may, like their founder, be attracted to spiritual techniques, such as Buddhism, Sufi Islam, yoga or what is called ‘the Jesus Prayer’ (= noetic prayer in Orthodox language). It is not incarnate in any Local Orthodox Church and mixes different practices and customs, also introducing ‘creative’ customs of its own. Some of its more effete members quite unrealistically call their tiny Deanery ‘The Orthodox Church in Britain’, despite the fact that it is dwarfed by nine much more proletarian Orthodox Dioceses. This is rather like some members of the ‘Orthodox Church in America’, a US Orthodox group with a huge title which the Deanery much admires, but which is also dwarfed by others, numbering only some 30,000 out of 3,000,000 Orthodox in North America.

2. The Antiochian (Arab) Diocese

This very small ethnic ‘British Orthodox’ group, originally 300 in number, was founded as a Deanery as recently as 1996 by and for dissident Anglicans. They came from backgrounds as diverse as conservative Evangelicalism, moralistic Puritanism and charismatic Anglo-Catholicism, but all were dissatisfied with Anglicanism. Having since then converted only a few other Anglicans and apparently (??) without much interest in Non-Anglicans, its ex-Anglican clergy sometimes rely on Romanians to fill their churches. The group is known for its missionary zeal and sincerity, providing pastoral care where other Dioceses have failed to do so, but is also known for its lack of knowledge, pastoral and liturgical, and lack of realism. It has little property of its own. In 2016 this Deanery, which uses the Roman Catholic calendar for the fixed feasts, became a Diocese and the first task of its new Arab bishop, without an Arab base and tradition, is in his own words to teach his clergy how to celebrate the services and so enter the mainstream. In the past it has ordained very easily, providing that its candidates are Anglican vicars. This, however, may be changing.

3. The Sourozh Diocese (also incorrectly called the Patriarchal Diocese) of the Russian Orthodox Church

Directly under the control of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, this Diocese has existed for 55 years. It has had a varied history, having been marked by tendencies of liberal modernism as well as Soviet patriotism under its former bishop and founder, the late Metropolitan Antony Bloom of Paris, with his unique personality cult and curious personal views. After his death most of his closest followers, mainly ex-Anglicans, left to found the Paris Deanery (see above) and now the Sourozh Diocese seems to be more and more for the many ethnic Russian immigrants who have settled in this country over the last 20 years. However, there are exceptions and it still has some very active English groups (as well as dying traces of a Bloomite past), though most of its English clergy are now elderly.

4. ROCOR, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (also incorrectly called ROCA or ‘the Church Abroad’)

This Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland of the Church Outside Russia is one of many dioceses under a Synod of fifteen Russian Orthodox bishops (three of them retired) centred in New York. It was originally founded in 1920 by Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow for White Russian émigrés exiled throughout the world. Self-governing and only indirectly under the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, with which it has excellent relations, ROCOR, once worldwide, is now dominant only in the English-speaking world, especially in the USA and Australia. It has seen many of its ethnically very closed parishes in South America and continental Western Europe shut or else dissolve into the more missionary-minded local dioceses of the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church, centred in Moscow. However, in the English-speaking world it is the voice of Russian Orthodoxy and its missionary-minded Canadian Metropolitan, formerly Archbishop of Australia and New Zealand, is, symbolically, the head of dioceses in New England and ‘Old’ England.

The local Diocese has a chequered history, with various incarnations. These range from noble White Russian roots, which especially after 1945 were infected by unpleasant, very right-wing and nationalistic anti-Communism and a generation after that by equally unattractive Anglo-Catholic sectarianism. The latter movement even tried to prise the Diocese from its faithfulness to Russian Orthodoxy. However, these generational nightmare incarnations thankfully died out with the end of the Cold War, quit the Church or else were pushed to the margins, where as relics they have almost disappeared. Over the new generation, after decades of neglect and nearly dying out in the early 1990s, this Diocese has been returning to its White Russian roots, understood as faithfulness, in Russian or in English, to the Orthodox Tradition, which has so much revived among Russians. Today’s ROCOR mission is to spread the Orthodox Faith and values of the reviving multinational Christian Empire of Holy Russia here and throughout the English-speaking world, as well as in its missions from South America to Western Europe, Haiti to Hawaii, Pakistan to South Korea, Costa Rica to Indonesia, and Nepal to the Philippines.

The EU is Finished and the Third World War Has Started, Says Cypriot Metropolitan

Metropolitan Neofitos of the Church of Cyprus has said that 2017-18 mark the end of the EU project, that the EU party is over. This is according to the website AgionOros.ru. He explained:

‘We can see that the EU is collapsing, there remains only the German Europe of the strong, with which we Cypriots have nothing in common. Unfortunately, we have bet on the wrong horse. The alienation of Europe from Orthodoxy had moral consequences, they have legalized debauchery, idolatry and deified the flesh’. The Metropolitan further quoted the great Serbian saint, Nikolai Velimirovich, who wrote decades ago that ‘the tragedy of Europe is that it has rejected the Kingdom of Eternal Life’.

He added that: ‘The Third World War started six years ago in Syria. This was the prophecy of that man of God Metropolitan Antonios (Kompos) (1920-2005). Shortly before his repose, he said: ‘When the disaster starts in Syria, pray. Everything will start from there, from Syria’’.

On the French Elections

The possible next President of France, Emmanuel Macron, is a young, naive and politically inexperienced Rothschild puppet. A Blairite narcissist, he is easily manipulated once his ego is flattered (‘every man has his price’, as the elite knows), with no programme of his own, neither left nor right. He has no depth, merely image. However, he is clearly programmed by the Brussels and EU banking and industrial elite to implement their globalist policies. The elite had despaired of the Obama-sponsored hater of the French people, President Francois Hollande, with his popularity ratings of 4% (compare Vladimir Putin’s at 84%) and in 2016 found Macron and groomed him with its media in time for the 2017 elections. He represents the global elite and the oligarchy, with its control of the EU media. If he is elected, Macron will be used, manipulated and thrown away once he has served his purpose, his moment of glory over.

On the other side of the contest is Marine Le Pen, much slandered and vilified by the elite-controlled French media. She represents sometimes ugly French xenophobia and nationalism, as well as patriotism, independence and sovereignty, she is of the people (a ‘populist’, as the slanderers say). She is a Gaullist, like the anti-US and anti-NATO De Gaulle, who was overthrown in the CIA-run French coup d’etat of 1968. She is against the EU and against the euro and represents the wave of anti-EU sentiment that has swept all EU countries, resulted in riots in Greece, Brexit and the rise of anti-EU parties in all EU countries. There is a very clear choice here, between globalism (with all its dangers) and nationalism (with all its dangers). Nevertheless, whoever wins in France will face parliamentary elections; it will be hard for any President to do anything without a majority in the Parliament. But this is not the problem.

The problem is that whoever wins, the much favoured Macron, or the much maligned Le Pen, Brussels and the global elite must understand that the peoples of Europe are deeply unhappy. The mere fact that the anti-EU, pro-Frexit Le Pen has enough popular support even to be a second-round Presidential candidate, means that the EU is over. Whoever wins, the EU project must disappear – at least in its present form of wanting to destroy every single national identity and culture in the EU and making Europe into a colourless and cultureless imitation of the USA. This concerns us here, because the EU in its present form is anti-Christian, hysterically refusing and rejecting the Christian roots, values and culture of Europe in an attempt to commit suicide. Nobody knows the future, we can only pray that Europe may yet survive through repentance.

Why the United Nations Organization Should Move to Saint Petersburg

History tells us that the spiritual father of the United Nations was the last Christian Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. At the very end of the century before last, it was he who called for an international organization where peace could be negotiated and war stopped. It was he who wanted to ban cruel arms such as chemical and biological weapons, bombing from the air (at that time from balloons) and attacks from under the water. Although the International Court in the Hague did come from his initiative, that was taken over by those who seized power worldwide after the Russian Revolution and is not used for what it should be.

As regards Tsar Nicholas’ calls for peace, they were firmly ignored by the Western Powers and only five years later, in 1904, they unleashed the Western-armed and Western-financed militaristic Japan on the peaceful Russian Empire. On the verge of victory, despite treason inside his Empire, Tsar Nicholas made peace with a bankrupt Japan, in the hope that the Western Powers had learned their lesson; they had, but only for a few years, until 1914. Thirty-six years later the two largest Western Powers then reaped the whirlwind that they had sown in Japan in 1904 at Pearl Harbour and at the surrender in Singapore, where the hopelessly under-equipped British Army was utterly humiliated by the Japanese.

Nevertheless, Tsar Nicholas’ idea for an international form for peace also bore fruit in the League of Nations and then in the UN. Unfortunately, this latter was taken over by the world elite, which set it up in New York and used it as just another instrument, like NATO in Brussels, its EU next-door neighbour, the G7, the International Court in the Hague or the Nobel Foundation. Today, as before, the UN is not representative of the real world, being a corrupt pawn in the elite’s hands. What can be done?

Firstly, surely the UN Security Council could in the future represent the continents of the real world. At present North America is represented by the USA, Europe by its largest nation, the Russian Federation, and Asia (including the tiny population of Australasia) by China. However, South America and Africa are not represented at all, neither is the second largest population in the world in India, and tiny Western Europe is represented by two small nations, American vassals, that no longer count in today’s world. Surely, instead of all this, powerful India should have a place in the Security Council (through China and India nearly one third of the world’s population would be represented), followed by the largest nation in South America, Brazil, and the most powerful nation in Africa, the Republic of South Africa.

Secondly, let the UN be transferred to Saint Petersburg, the city where Tsar Nicholas II first had the idea of an international organization to avert war. Transferred from the manipulations of the global warmongers of the world and their genocidal histories, the United Nations Organization, made representative of the real world and not of the ghetto of the rich and power-grabbing West, could then at last be successful.

On Orthodox Missionary Work

Now that the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) has officially taken up the task of missionary work in the renewed Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland after several decades of disruption, it would be well to consider the nature of the missionary work that we need to do.

First of all, we must understand that there is only one sort of authentic missionary and pastoral work. This serves the people as a community, it is not an ideological plan on a map with pins in it, it is not top-down, but down-top, from the grassroots. Now, wherever there is a demand, ROCOR will do its best to meet that demand, setting up parishes where there is a need, now with official support. Where there are thirsty Orthodox people (at least one of whom can sing and read) and where there are premises, we will provide a priest. We can think of many cases in history of such missionary work, for example the mission of St Augustine in England in 597 or that of Sts Cyril and Methodius to St Rostislav, always in answer to a request. We can build nothing where there is not a spiritual need and a willingness to make sacrifices.

But what of areas where there is no actual demand, but just unconverted souls, potential Orthodox? Here we can take the examples of St Herman in Alaska and St Nicholas in Japan. They lived simply in a place for many, many years, praying, learning and understanding the people among whom they lived, before missionary work began. They waited for people to come to them, they did not serve themselves by imposing themselves on others. Self-serving (usually in the name of some personal problem and unfulfilled ambition) is pseudo-missionary work. It tries to impose itself, being characterized by gurus, vagantes and clericalists who like fancy titles, dressing up and having their photographs taken. They who do not look after the people, do not travel to meet people, even despising them for their simplicity.

We should be wary of the sort of ‘missionary’ work that despises the people, their languages and their customs and tries to force them into a strange mould that is not theirs. That is the false missionary work of those who use their personalities, not heartfelt faith in God, to convert others.

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.