Change and the Church

Politics used to be about left and right. However, negative attitudes to the EU, for example, Brexit, are supported by both those on the left and those on the right. This is because politics today is no longer a division between left and right, but between patriots who love the people and so are social conservatives who desire social justice, and globalists, who love their passions and so are social liberals who desire personal wealth.

We are living through a period of generational change. Just as the social changes beginning in the mid-1960s resulted in revolutions in Paris and Prague in 1968, the US defeat in Vietnam and revolution in Lisbon and invasion of Cyprus in 1974, just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led to the collapse of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the invasion of Iraq in 1991, war in Yugoslavia, famine in Russia and the Twin Towers attack in 2001, so today we are going through generational change. We have seen the anti-democratic seizure of power in the Ukraine, the appearance of ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa, terrorist attacks in France, the debt crisis in Greece, the refugee crisis, Brexit and revolt in Turkey.

Who knows what is next? The implosion of the fragile EU as it limps from one self-made crisis to another is just one possibility. After all, Brexit came about because of the refusal of the anti-populist EU bureaucratic elite to be flexible and concede to the popular will. The possible election of Trump in the US or Le Pen in France are others. The collapse of NATO, ex-Yugoslavia and the Ukraine are yet others. And then there is a host of unpredictable events.

In times of generational change, in times of political turbulence, the only thing we can be sure of is the Church, even though it too can be victim of the fashions (‘politics’) of this world. The Church is like a flotilla of fourteen ships, big and small. The Russian Church is the flagship of the flotilla, by far the largest, the multinational 75% of the whole, and attached to it are three small and dependent ships, those of the Church Outside Russia, the Church of Japan and the Church of China, as well as a large lifeboat temporarily launched from the mother-ship for some North Americans in danger. In fairness to those who criticize, it must be said that there are indeed some strange, liberal-looking characters clinging on to the sides of the Russian ship.

Just by it, but quite separately, are the small ships of the Churches of Bulgaria, Georgia and Antioch. Not far off sail the smaller ships of the Churches of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Near them sail the ships of the Churches of Greece and Cyprus. They are followed by the ships of the Churches of Alexandria, Jerusalem and Serbia. They are followed by the large ship of the Church of Romania, at times in difficulty because of simony, and then the small ship of the Church of Albania. Finally, zigzagging some way behind and bringing up the rear because of damage to its American-made steering, sails the small ship of the Church of Constantinople. If it is still in the flotilla and afloat, it is only because of the prayers of Athonite fathers. For on prayer we all depend.

469: The Number of Island Destiny?

AD 128. The Roman invaders complete Hadrian’s Wall, marking the northern limit of their Imperialism. The Wall delineates the border between the future Scotland and the future England with Wales (Roman ‘Britain’) and also determines that the Roman Empire will not include Ireland. Ironically, it is thanks to the existence of the pagan Roman Empire that a limited Christianization spreads and Sts Ninian and Patrick will both be born in the neighbourhood of the Wall.

The Faith is adopted by the noble few of merchants, like Sts Julius and Aaron, soldiers like St Alban, officials like the forebears of St Ninian, St Patrick and St Gildas, and villa-owners and their servants, especially in what became South Wales. However, paganism, including in the semi-Christian forms of Pelagianism and nominalism, as recorded by Sts Bede, Patrick and Gildas, is far stronger. It will eventually dominate among the Celts who will make no attempt to convert the incoming English.

469 years pass.

AD 597. The Irish missionary Fr Columba, spreading the Faith of Jerusalem come via Egypt and Gaul as well as Roman Britain, reposes on Iona in the far north-west. His mission will spread throughout Scotland and all the northern half of England and further south. The Italian Fr Augustine arrives in Canterbury in the far south-east with his mission to the pagan English, with Cross and Icon of Christ. His mission will spread throughout the south of England and meet that of the Celts come from the north. The two missions will be combined into one great stream by the Greek Archbishop Theodore.

After their repose both St Columba and St Augustine are soon venerated as saints. This glorious age of shared Anglo-Celtic holiness blossoms and is weakened only under Viking attacks 200 years later, though these bring the glory of martyrdom to many. Only then can a great rebirth begin under the holy King Alfred the Great (+ 899) from the English capital in Winchester, which peters out 150 years later in the eleventh century, under the new, Frankish-barbarian, political order of feudalism. This has developed in North-Western Europe and will eventually isolate all Western and Central Europe from the Church for 900 years.

469 years pass.

AD 1066. The last Vikings, the aggressive semi-pagan Normans, invade England (and later the rest of the British Isles and Ireland) under William the Bastard, the illegitimate son of Robert the Devil. They bring violent invasion, genocide and plunder, and their ‘blessing’ from fallen Rome with its full-blown new religion, half-Christian and half-barbarian. With its concentration-camp feudal enslavement and village compounds, it is violently enforced by watchtower castles, ‘filled with devils’, and horsemen trained to intimidate and kill. Uniat-style, the new religion is outwardly similar to what went before, but inwardly totally different, as if reflecting the past in a distorting mirror.

This novel Frankish religion, a combination of pagan Roman Imperialism with heathen Teutonism, makes the peoples’ kings into remote tyrants, Christian peasants into oppressed feudal serfs, humble married priests into proud clericalist celibates and replaces monasteries and ascetic prayer with universities and abstract studies. This religious Normanization violently supplants the Old English Church and Faith. It brings its inherent spiritual deformation of the filioque, the anti-Incarnational division between Divine and human, clerical and lay, sacred and secular, which is the seed of its own destruction, for it results in ever-growing, humanist secularization.

469 years pass.

AD 1535. The bloodthirsty Tudor tyrant Henry VIII, the Hitler of his age, replaces splintering and much discredited institutional Roman Catholicism with his own new, desacralizing and secularizing, moralizing and hypocritical State religion. He imposes this anti-ascetic and anti-sacramental doctrine with the same Uniat-style deceit and Viking violent invasion, genocide and plunder as the Normans, murdering abbots and simple folk alike. In the following century the three Norman vices lead to a series of civil wars throughout the Isles, in which over a million people will die. The Hitler of that age, the new William, the Republican tyrant and mass-murderer Cromwell, is still feted outside Parliament in Norman London to this day.

The three vices of violent invasion, genocide and plunder characterize the worldwide Normanization which Henry’s dynasty undertakes under the name of British Imperialism. From the Viking piracy of Francis Drake to the enslavement of Africans in the New World, from genocide in Ireland to massacres in North America, from Clive in India to the poisoning of the Chinese with opium, from the invasion of Russia to that of Tibet, from the wiping out of the Tasmanians to Rhodes in Africa, from machine-gunning in the Sudan to concentration camps for Boer families, from the Bengal famine to the repression of the Kikuyu, violent invasion, genocide and plunder are the order of the age in a global Empire which justifies its wars and theft as ‘free trade’.

469 years pass.

AD 2004. Having rejected the hypocritical 1535 State religion and Imperialism, but replaced it with a humanistic form of paganism, the English, like the peoples in the other parts of the British Isles and Ireland, begin to awake. Though not recognized as such, this is a movement of Denormanization and fightback against the oppression of the pompous Norman Establishment of 1066. Resistance has been sparked by the disastrous invasion of Iraq of 2003, unleashed by the Unionist British Norman Establishment against the will of the people and their sense of justice. By 2016, the 950th anniversary of the Norman invasion and occupation, this popular, anti-Unionist resistance leads to freedom from the Roman Catholic structured-EU. This promises the gradual development of new sovereign relationships between the Four Nations of the Isles.

The whole centralist Norman Unionism of the UK Establishment in London, which the Normans (like the Imperialist Romans before them) had fixed as their Capital, is being challenged. Amid the reaction to the past which has given rise to the revival of tattooed paganism, a throwback to the pre-597 Pictish world, there are glimmers of hope for the restoration of the values of the pre-1066 world that came after paganism, but before oppression. In throwing out the post-1066 world, there is no need to reject the values of the 597-1066 world, no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The values of the Old English Church and Faith, which are in reality the values of the multinational Church of God, still alive in Russia and other faithful and uncompromised parts of the Orthodox world, may yet be reborn before the end.

Lament for France and Europe

Nine generations, 227 years, ago, in 1789, the values of ‘Foi, Roi et Loi’, Faith, King and Law, the French equivalent of the English ‘Altar, Throne and Cottage’ and the Russian ‘Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People’, were overturned. They were toppled by a blood-soaked, anti-Christian Revolution, rejecting faith, king and law, that led to a generation of Europewide death, the appearance of the devilish Napoleon and well over two million victims. This was only partly checked when Christian troops came from victorious Russia, sent by God, to liberate Paris in 1814 and sing ‘Christ is Risen’ on its main square, so reminding Parisians of all that they had so tragically lost.

Nevertheless, the basest evils in the brilliant national genius of France, created by the diversity of its geography, once emerged from the restraints of religion by the demons of Revolution, had surfaced. The elegance of faith, royal good taste and the justice of the law were more and more replaced by the now unbridled national weaknesses, the unliberty of self-admiring hedonism, the inequality of inward-looking narcissism and the unfraternity of ever-irritable vanity. Ever since its recent great champion and defender, De Gaulle, was removed by France’s enemies, the unprincipled and will-less country, become a German colony, has been humiliated.

France’s once great historic cities, encircled by self-imposed, millions-strong, Muslim ghettoes, are subject to unspeakable murderous attacks, its narcissistic Republican political elite, all faith lost, out of touch with the people, is blinded, enfeebled and consumed by ambition, inbreeding and corruption. The French traditions and values of foi, roi and loi are nostalgically conserved only by the noble few. It will now take a leader of heroic statue to inspire the French masses to ascetic self-sacrifice, overcoming their captivity to consumerist hedonism, and delivering la Belle France from its self-seeking and pleasure-seeking at the bottom of the pit of self-destruction.

In renouncing Christ, France is essentially no different from the other countries of unfree, post-modern Europe. The English have their vices of snobbery, hypocrisy and amoral compromise in everything, the Germans have their vices of arrogance, narrowness and setting inhuman plans and systems above humanity. The other Europeans each have their own innate vices that have also developed tenfold under the unbridled licence of post-modernism. Modernism said, forget the past and believe in utopia, the Brave New World. In 1945, blinded by the light of Hiroshima, post-modernism rightly said that there is no Brave New World, only dystopia, despair and cynicism.

We say that there is an alternative. To the now rootless peoples of Europe who have cast aside their past identities and dress in American clothes and speak in American fashion, we ask: What is your stronger desire? For suicide or for life? If suicide, then you only need continue on the path that you have chosen with your European Union. If life, then you must turn again, back to your identities in your first millennium roots, from which you have been cutting yourself off for a thousand years, with the result that the once great tree of Western Europe is now dying, your roots all unwatered, your branches all withering, your autumnal leaves all falling. Quo vadis, Europa?

France, 15 July 2016

The EU: A Story of Hubris

Introduction: Recent Examples of Hubris

The recent saga of Patriarch’s Bartholomew’s conference in Crete, organized and patrolled by the CIA and billed as ‘Great’, ‘Holy’ and ‘Pan-Orthodox’, but which was in fact small and unholy and involved representatives from only 20% of the Orthodox world, is a classic story of hubris. This event was marked by the intellectual arrogance, insults of Orthodox as ‘fundamentalists’, vanity, pomp, self-importance and failure to listen that affects all who suffer from the delusional megalomania of hubris, ‘Blairism’ as it can be called, such as the fact that the Patriarch had erected a statue to himself. From it we can see the spiritual importance of the seemingly forgotten Christian virtue of humility. But a far more tragic story of hubris is the generational parable of the USA over the last 25 years.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communist Eastern and Central Europe in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The end of the very expensive Cold War and its very bloody proxy wars, from North Korea to Northern Ireland, from South Vietnam to South Africa, should have been a wonderful opportunity for the USA and its allies to disarm, disbanding NATO. Instead, power went to the head of the New World Order-obsessed US elite. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union, it had invaded Iraq and embarked on aggression worldwide. We now know that this hubris ended – with Clinton, Bush, Blair, Obama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and millions of dead and refugees. Another tragic story of hubris is that of the European Union (EU).

Four Errors

The predecessor of the EU was founded through the Treaty of Rome by the US and its European puppets (like Monnet and Adenauer). It basically re-established a faithless medieval Roman Catholic Empire, a post-Catholic trading organization and antidote to continual wars between Germany and France and satellite countries in Western Europe. Having formed a Neo-Carolingian Empire of six countries, its proud elite then began to imagine some far greater, pan-European, political entity. Flattered and urged on by the US, this, they thought, could become a United States of Europe. This first error appeared in the 1970s when the power-crazed elite began to try and take over excluded (that is, ‘economically excommunicated’) Protestant Europe to the north.

The second error came in the 1990s after the dissolution of the Communist bloc in Central and Eastern Europe, when the EU elite began to dream up a universal ‘European Union’. On 1 January 1993 it by diktat changed the name of their bloc to this. Megalomania began in earnest with the Treaty of Maastricht (called by some ‘Mass trick’), as the EU nomenklatura stamped the passports of its once-sovereign, unconsulted citizens with the sign of the beast, ‘European Union’. It also encouraged civil war in ex-Yugoslavia, whose markets and territories the EU elite wanted to take over. By bullying, bribes, blackmail and war crimes it planned the absorption of ex-Communist Europe into the EU with its US-run military arm, NATO. The Soviet Union had been reborn as the European Union.

Thus, although already having failed to take over Protestant Europe, in their hubris the blinded and megalomaniac EU elite actually imagined that they could take over not only Catholic Eastern Europe, but even Orthodox Eastern Europe. This second error meant absorbing those who had at least in part preserved the Faith from the 1960s materialist consumerism and spiritual degeneration of Western Europe, ironically thanks to Communism. In order to further its hold throughout the Union, the elite then began imposing on its subject peoples a single currency, in effect, a one size fits all Deutschmark straitjacket, regardless of the many differences between the various nations. A German Europe, not a European Germany, was the order of the day. This was the third error.

Next, even after the collapse of naïve Greece, bankrupted by EU, ‘easy-money’, consumerism and enslaving itself to cheap euro credit from German banks become expensive, and even after the risk of Grexit, such was the hubris of the elite that in 2014 it proceeded to its fourth error. Urged on by the US neocon elite which was violently sweeping away the democratically-elected government in Kiev, the EU elite gave naïve Ukrainians, impoverished by oligarch corruption, the idea that the Ukraine too could be forced into the EU straitjacket. A pro-Nazi Galician regime in Kiev (like that in Zagreb in the 1990s) which began another bloody civil war in Europe, with perhaps two million refugees fleeing in despair, was installed; blood was on the hands of the US and of the EU elite.

Brexit

But now Brexit has come to destroy the elite’s fantasies of ‘ever-closer Union’. And they, the ‘democratic’ EU elite, are enraged: the people were never supposed to have their say, only the elite knew better. After over 40 years of oppressive captivity, post-Protestant Europe in the form of the UK has now begun to free and relieve itself from the post-Catholic, centralized EU straitjacket. (Sensibly, Protestant Switzerland, Norway and Iceland never even tried on the straitjacket of rule from ‘Rome’). Now the peoples of post-Protestant Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are also thinking of Swexit, Denxit, Fexit, and Nexit and there is much support for Dexit, the Alternative for Germany, notably in the cities of post-Protestant, former East Germany.

In the UK itself the repercussions are huge. The fourth largest political Party, the tiny, largely upper-middle class Liberal Democratic Party, has all but disappeared, virtually wiped out by its own pro-EU suicide, and become a joke. The third Party, the anti-EU protest Party (UKIP), can now disappear with its embarrassingly rude leader, who has already resigned. The second Party, the Labour Party, is split by champagne-socialist, pro-Iraq War MPs, installed by the megalomania of Blair (and Brown), whom many consider a war criminal. These MPs have nothing in common with the grassroots membership, which rightly views them as traitors to the real Labour cause of social justice and to their burning desire for a non-Third World national health service and public transport system.

As for the largest Party, the Conservative and Unionist Party, to give it its full name, it has largely become the Party of Eton toffs, City banksters, big business and neocon Russophobes. It too has been traitorous to its core of working-class patriots, some of whom founded UKIP as a result of the toffs’ betrayal. It anti-democratically signed up the UK to the EU in all its incarnations in the first place. Therefore, it too is utterly split. It is only right that its Establishment elite, in its hubris and conviction that it could easily win the EU referendum, now has to find a ‘Brexit strategy’, that is, a plan for escape from the 43-year old mess that it created. Perhaps it could begin by making a Minister for social justice and a New-York born Foreign Minister for relations with a post-neocon USA and the Commonwealth.

However, more than this, Brexit may not only signal the end of the ‘European Union’, as cracks develop further, not only in Hungary, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, but also in Scandinavia, France, Austria, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and elsewhere. It may also be the end of the ‘British Union’ (the UK), an oppressively united and centralized British Isles and Ireland, an invention of the alien Norman ruling elite that has occupied and ruled the country for 950 years. We may finally be moving towards the reconfiguration of the Isles, into a Confederation of an at long last independent England, an offshore Switzerland, and also an independent Scotland and Wales and at last a united Ireland. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be now? Perhaps we are indeed turning full circle.

Conclusion: Towards a New Europe

One of the myths of Brexit, repeated in the mendacious and outrageous pages of the pro-globalist British Establishment press like The Financial Times, is that those who voted for freedom were stupid, rural, traditional, old and racist. As though 52% of the electorate could be fitted into this tiny category! You cannot disabuse and trample underfoot the sense of justice of the people for 43 years and expect them not to resist and fight to return freedom. The chaotic EU is collapsing. Bankrupt Italy may be next to break free. Moreover, elections are due in the US in November, where if the anti-neocon, pro-British, maverick and provocative Trump, defeats the anti-US neocon Clinton, all is possible, perhaps a new golden age of Anglo-American relations and even freedom for the Ukraine.

In 2017 there will be elections in France and Germany, which come 100 years after the 1917 Western-engineered coup in Russia. This destroyed the Christian Russian Empire, which, after the previous incompetent military leadership, under the inspired leadership of Tsar Nicholas II was on the verge of victory over the hubristic Kaiser. This victory would have restored the sovereign Germanic states, destroyed by Bismarck’s Second Reich, ended the Austro-Hungarian enslavement of the Slavs, freed Western Europe from genocide, the Balkans from masonic German princelings, Constantinople, Jerusalem and Palestine from the Ottomans and avoided the evil Third Reich and today’s tragic Middle East. Instead, the coup created the horrors of the anti-Christian Soviet Union.

Now the freedom-loving peoples of Europe may be able to restore their sovereignty. At last a Europe of independent, sovereign but co-operating nations, as envisaged by Tsar Nicholas II, is possible. EU propagandists lie: the problems of Europe never came from the nation states that they have dismantled, but from the nationalist, anti-patriotic aggression and will of large Western Europe countries to dominate all the others. As the anachronistic EU and so NATO collapse, perhaps it is time for this Westernmost corner of the Eurasian Continent to stop its navel-gazing. Its nations could yet join the Confederation of Nations of the much broader and more successful Eurasian Economic Union, ceasing to be vassals of the neocon elite and so recovering their own identities.

13 July 2016

Our Hope for a Russian Orthodox Church in Norwich (Update 14)

The Update: £5,500 Extra Needed!

We are coming to the end of the year-long saga of establishing a multinational Orthodox church in Norwich. It was on 15 April 2016 that we finally managed to buy the premises for our future church in Norwich. After a three and a half month wait to receive planning permission from the ultra-bureaucratic Norwich City Council, we had had to wait an additional six months for exactly the same organization to send our solicitor the lease. On 9 May, building work starting inside in order to transform the building into an Orthodox church.

On 25 May workers began knocking down internal walls. We realized that we would need more than we originally thought because of extra building costs. By the end of June we realized that this would come to £5,500. On 29 June we set up the new iconostasis and by 6 July painting work had begun. The new floor will be laid on 9 August. The blessing of the Church will take place soon afterwards and, God willing, the first liturgy will be on 27 August and community life will begin in earnest. At last a permanent home for Russian Orthodoxy in Norwich after over thirty years of struggles. Thank you!

History

In the East of England there is at present only one multinational and multilingual church faithful to Russian Orthodoxy with its own urban premises. This is St John’s Church in Colchester. God willing and with your support, we have now been able to buy a second one, in Norwich, exactly 60 miles, 100 kilometres, to the north of Colchester.

Why Norwich? For the last five years I have been visiting Norwich and some of the 200 Russian Orthodox there, mainly recent immigrants from the Baltic States, especially from Estonia. I have baptized several in their homes, married couples in Colchester, buried, blessed houses, listened to confessions, visiting every few weeks, sometimes twice a month and am Orthodox chaplain at Norwich Prison.

We thought of dedicating our community to St Alexander Nevsky. We attempted to begin liturgies using the Greek Orthodox church building in Norwich, but were impeded. How are our people and English people and others interested in the witness of the Russian Orthodox Church, to be cared for pastorally? Only from a church building. And such life is required not only by Russian speakers, but also by Romanian, Bulgarian and English Orthodox. Most of our regular parishioners, only one of whom has a car, live within easy walking distance of this building.

On Friday 8 May 2015, Fr Andrew saw a leasehold property for sale on the rightmove website for £50,000 at 134, Oak Street, Norwich. It measured 88 square metres externally and was then used as offices and rooms for a cultural centre. It had electricity, heating and water and was in very good condition. It was so cheap because it was leasehold, in other words, you have to pay £100 rent per month for the ground it is built on. This amount is fixed until 2032. The lease itself is even longer – it lasts until 2047.

On Wednesday 13 May 2015 we organized a visit to these premises, attended by 9 local Russian Orthodox.

By Friday 15 May, Orthodox in Norwich had generously promised to donate £5,250.

On Monday 18 May Fr Andrew received Archbishop Mark’s blessing to buy the building if possible, meaning we could start obtaining pledges to donate.

On Thursday 21 May we heard from the surveyor that it would cost £3,000-£5,000 to knock down the internal walls and make good the floor and ceiling, so we could use this building as a church. This was lower than Fr Andrew had estimated.

On Wednesday 27 May we heard that our offer of £42,500 had been accepted. However, since conversion and furnishing costs will come to £12,500, this meant that we would need £55,000 in all.

On Friday 29 May we submitted the planning application for change of use from offices to a place of worship. This, we were told then, would take at least 6-8 weeks but should result in a positive answer.

On Wednesday 3 June we launched an internet appeal for £55,000 in order to set up our own church in Norwich.

By Wednesday 29 July, eight weeks after the appeal launch, total gifts and pledges had reached £55,000.

On Tuesday 29 September 2015, after over three and a half months!, we finally received planning permission to convert the building into an Orthodox church.

On Friday 15 April 2016 we were at last able to complete the purchase of our premises and prepare to engage a builder to start work on the premises.

On Wednesday 20 April we received the keys and saw builders to obtain quotes to do the necessary work of knocking down internal walls and then making good the electrics, plumbing, floor and ceiling.

On Friday 22 April, the electricity and water were reconnected and supply contracts prepared.

On Tuesday 3 May, we chose the building contractor we wish to use.

On Monday 9 May, electrical and plumbing work began and the structural engineer called in.

On Wednesday 25 May, almost exactly one year after our offer had been accepted!, demolition of internal walls began and Fr Andrew saw a locksmith to replace the broken lock on the main door and a signwriter to replace the signs on the outside, so that all will know that this is an Orthodox Church, and new lighting was bought for installation. Following this the electrical system and plumbing were adapted to our needs.

On Monday 30 May, we were told that the building work would cost almost £4,000 more than expected because of unforeseen structural problems. Although we did not have the money in the Norwich fund for this, we put our faith in Providence and decided to go ahead anyway.

On Monday 20 June workers at last began replastering the ceiling and walls and putting in the new floor.

On Wednesday 29 June we hired a lorry and took everything that had been prepared in Colchester to Norwich and set up the iconostasis. By this time we realized that the building work would cost almost £5,500 more than expected because of unforeseen problems.

On 6 July painting work had begun. The new floor will be laid on 9 August.

Convertitis: A Spiritual Illness

Introduction

42 years of experience and observation of many nationalities and their psychologies have led me to several conclusions regarding the neophyte and the problems of integration connected with conversion. And integration is vital here, for the opposite of integration is disintegration and nobody wants that. Two particular problems arise with regard to conversion. Against a distorting hothouse background of emotional zeal, these are: weakness of faith, and so insecurity in it, and lack of time spent as an Orthodox, and so inexperience in the faith. These result in the following specific issues:

Ritualism

Ritualism is an attachment to externals. Such superficiality can be linked even to superstition and idolatry. Thus, the occasional male neophyte who thinks that growing a long beard and long hair and wearing prayer beads on his wrist, like a monk who does that but under obedience, is going to make him Orthodox, is mistaken. Look around at all the Orthodox who have been there for generations – they do not dress like that and they are still here after 40/50/60/70/80 years. Similarly, the occasional female neophyte who wears elaborate long dresses and huge veils on her head and the same prayer-beads on her wrist is not necessarily Orthodox. Our faith depends on what we are inside, not on external ‘burnt offerings’ and what we dress in: ‘Make in me a clean heart, O Lord’. ‘A humble and contrite heart, O Lord, wilt Thou not despise’.

Dogmatization

Another convert sign is the dogmatization of details. Thus, for a few converts the Six Days of Creation must be interpreted literally as six 24-hour periods, otherwise their faith is worthless. And yet the Church has never set such literalism as dogma. Six days may indeed mean six 24-hour periods, but we should not be ignorant of other interpretations or, above all, that most of the Church Fathers are completely silent on the subject because it is so unimportant – the salvation of our souls does not depend on such details. An even more dangerous dogmatizing tendency is the ‘starets-ization’ and ‘spiritual fatherization’ of the priest who listens to their confessions. This is a form of self-flattery. They are saying: ‘My ‘spiritual father’ is a holy elder (they often prefer the Non-English words starets or geronda’ in order to mystify), so therefore I am too’. This is spiritual delusion.

Narrowness

It is notable that some converts of a Protestant (= literalist) background initially quote canons as they used to quote Bible verses – aggressively, rigidly, mercilessly, sometimes in order to humiliate others and justify themselves. This is pride. It shows a lack of experience, that in certain pastoral situations we have to react differently, it shows an ignorance of human realities. Recently, for example, we came across the case of a man who had been thrown out of a parish by a recently-ordained, untrained, convert priest, because he had started living with his fiancée before he married. It had needless, negative consequences. Such narrowness soon becomes sectarian, and leads to people cutting themselves off from the Church, so that they become big fish in a very little pond. Here is an example of narcissism, the spiritual illness of self-love.

Nationalism

Another convert tendency is to fall into nationalism, ignoring the multinational reality of life in the Church. Coming into contact with other nationalities, they revert to nationalism in a self-defence mechanism. If there is no evolution, this can bring spiritual death because nationalism is an attachment to this world, worldliness, which is placed above the Kingdom of God. All unrepentant nationalists die out because they do not pass on their prejudices to the next generation. Nationalism can be a devotion to any country. Sadly, some of the worst cases that we have seen are among certain ex-Anglicans, who not only freeze out other nationalities, but also other classes, for Anglicanism as a State-founded and State-Church ideology is profoundly middle-class and pro-Establishment. Specifically Anglican nationalism leads not just to a nationalist club, but to the exclusive class club and the clique.

Judgementalness

The next convert trend we can notice is censoriousness, negativity and the condemnation of all creative initiative (this is born from an insecurity of faith). These tendencies are all coloured by phariseeism, that is, the clinging on to irrelevant details. Spiritually, we should judge (= condemn) only ourselves, not others, for the salvation of others depends firstly on the salvation of ourselves. If we cannot save ourselves, then we can most certainly not save others. And God is the only Just Judge. This negativity comes from the hardening of the heart and can infect older people especially. We are often saved from it by the presence of young people and children.

Intellectualism

The intellectual convert may sometimes be prone to dreaminess, disincarnatedness, the abstract. They may reduce everything to a mere idea. If so, their practice of Orthodoxy will not last long, indeed their practice may never happen as lapse comes very soon. Talking about the Church may be their forte, but without experience, without standing and praying at the services, without looking after and bringing up children in church, without the hardship of fasting, such talk is irrelevant. In some cases, they may continue in the Church for some time and may evolve a whole ideology of dreams and fantasies, but these will not be connected with reality and will never lead to anything concrete. With time the intellectual always disappears because it is all words and not deeds.

Conclusion

The good news about convertitis is that it can be and is healed, with time, patience and compassion. People come and people go, but there are those who stay the course. These are the ones who are not ‘religious’ (part of a system or ideology), but are ‘spiritual’, that is, they have feelings. They are those who are sincere, patient and ready to make humble sacrifices and they are eventually healed, sometimes even quite swiftly. We should always recall that it is pride that goes before the fall (the Latin word for fall is ‘lapse’, as in ‘collapse’). And sincerity, patience and humility do not lead to lapse, but to firm and long-term commitment.

The Meaning of our Life is to Postpone the Coming of Antichrist

The last two weeks have brought a series of very important pieces of news.

Firstly, there has been the failed Crete meeting. Far from being a ‘Pan-Orthodox Council’, let alone the ‘Eighth Oecumenical Council’, it turned into disagreements about a series of narrow ‘Zizioulasisms’, philosophical modernisms approved by the US State Department that runs the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Many of the most respected bishops present in Crete, let alone those representing the other 80% of the Orthodox world and not present, refused to sign the documents proposed. This meeting, so secretive that most media were excluded from it, has no authority or acceptance anywhere in the monasteries and parishes in the real Orthodox world. The mismanaged forum, fortunately largely unreported by the mass media, turned it into little more than a damp squib. It does, however, mean that the Church has resisted the secularization that the powerbrokers of this world wanted to impose on Her, as they had imposed on the Vatican. She will not merge with the world in order to welcome the coming Antichrist.

Secondly, there has been the Brexit vote, the people’s bid for freedom from the dying European Superstate and the corrupt Unionist British Establishment which was so enthusiastic about the EU that it had imposed it on the people. And this was in spite of, or perhaps because of, the manipulation of the assassination that preceded the referendum. Some believe that other countries and institutions, even religious ones, may also wish to escape the straitjacket of the EU. Amid all the new opportunities this opens up there has, however, also been much insecurity and even panic and chaos. Freedom comes at a price. The whole UK political Establishment, as usual totally out of touch with the people it was supposed to represent, not least the Labour Party infiltrated and stuffed with careerist Blairite MPs, is being transformed with the resignations and eliminations of several well-known politicians. Brexit, so much resisted by the bullying of Obama and Merkel, has delayed the move towards One World Government by Antichrist.

Thirdly, there has been the long-delayed publication of the Chilcot report which makes clear that the whole of the British Establishment was guilty of the war crimes in invading and occupying Iraq. Its arrogance and hubris have been revealed for the whole world to see. This opens up UK responsibilities for other recent disastrous massacres and chaotic injustices in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and the Yemen. In the Ukraine British Army equipment is now being used by the Kiev puppet regime in its massacres of the population in Eastern Ukraine. Moreover, the UK Establishment is actively participating in the meeting in Warsaw of the US-led and financed NATO. Russians nervously fear a NATO invasion, as German and other tanks once more mass on the borders of Russia, just as they did 75 years ago. If such a threat did take place, which does seem highly unlikely, it would be one step nearer the One World Government that the neocons in Washington have so ardently been working for ever since they came to power under Clinton in the 1990s.

Two steps forward, one step back? Perhaps. Perhaps there will be a real Orthodox Council that will reject the compromises of Crete. But perhaps not. Perhaps the elite will not allow the UK to leave the EU and the electorate will be browbeaten, bribed and blackmailed into voting again and again until it gets the ‘right’ result. But perhaps the Unionist EU – and the Unionist UK – will collapse and relatively soon. And perhaps then England, freed from the Norman yoke after 950 years, will take its rightful place as an equal among the nations. Perhaps the old Norman-British habit of arrogantly invading, enslaving and exploiting other countries of the world, not least England itself, because it is ‘in the national interest’, that is, in the interest of the elite, will forever pass into the dustbin of history. Perhaps NATO will collapse as the antiquated Cold War structure it is. Perhaps the Christian Emperor will be restored in Russia. But perhaps NATO will invade Russia. There is no point in predicting. We do not know what will happen. What we do know is that if we wish to influence the future, the only thing we can do is to pray – for the meaning of our life is to postpone the coming of Antichrist.

Why Tony Blair is not a Liar

Thirteen years after the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the overthrow of a CIA-installed genocidal monster (not Poroshenko, but Hussein), the report into this catastrophe that has destabilized the whole of Middle East and created ISIS has at last been published. It places the blame for the UK’s responsibility for untold human suffering, for the destruction of Iraq and for hundreds of thousands of dead and over a million refugees on an egomaniac called Tony Blair.

Since this report has taken seven years to publish, largely because of Establishment obstructionism, it raises a number of other questions:

When will the report into the UK’s responsibility for untold human suffering in ex-Yugoslavia (‘regime-change’ recommended by Blair) be commissioned?

When will the report into the UK’s responsibility for untold human suffering in Afghanistan (‘regime-change’ recommended by Blair) be commissioned?

When will the report into the UK’s responsibility for untold human suffering in Libya (‘regime-change’ recommended by Cameron) be commissioned?

When will the report into the UK’s responsibility for untold human suffering in Syria (‘regime-change’ recommended by Cameron) be commissioned?

When will the report into the UK’s responsibility for untold human suffering in the Ukraine (‘regime-change’ recommended by Cameron) which has so far resulted in over two million refugees and over 10,000 dead) be commissioned?

We are not expecting answers to these questions soon.

Many consider that Blair was and is a liar because he is still justifying himself. After all, his whole government was based on ‘spin’, a euphemism for lies. Indeed, it has even been said that the distrust of the Establishment which his government created led to the cynicism that caused the Brexit vote.

However, if we think more carefully, we cannot help believing that Tony Blair was and is utterly sincere. Suffering from the spiritual disease of narcissism, blinded by being in love with himself, he actually believes in himself and therefore in his own wishful thinking and presumptions. And that is why he continually justifies himself. Tony Blair is much worse than a liar, he is self-deluded and sincerely believes in his delusions.

Initial Sorrowful Observations Regarding the Holy and Great Synod by Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus

“The personal opinion of a Primate on any particular issue is not binding on the Hierarchs in the Synod to which he belongs and does not obligate them to fall in line with his opinion. Were that so, the synodal institution would be annulled and every Primate would be transformed into a Pope. It is not the Primate, but the Synod of Bishops that is the supreme administrative organ in the local Orthodox Churches.”

Initial Sorrowful Observations Regarding the Holy and Great Synod by Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus

From the Office of Heresies and Cults of the Holy Metropolis of Piraeus

By way of the mass media we have followed with great sorrow and pain of soul the Holy and Great Synod from its inception at the Divine Liturgy on the Sunday of Pentecost. In what follows we offer some initial and concise observations on the Synod for the benefit of the people of God.

(1) We observe with sorrow the presence and joint prayer of heretical Papists, Protestants, and Monophysites at Matins and the Divine Liturgy of this great Feast of the Lord in the Church of St. Menas in Heraklion. As everyone is aware, this is prohibited by the Sacred Canons. The Orthodox Primates and other participating Orthodox Hierarchs trampled on the Canons of the Apostles and the Synods, wishing from the outset to send a message to the whole world, showing what great respect they have for the decisions of the Oecumenical Synods and, by extension, for the very institution of the Synod, about which they make bombastic declarations.

(2) The presence, at the commencement of the proceedings, of officially invited delegations of heretical Papists, Protestants, and Monophysites was an unprecedented innovation and one foreign to our Synodal Tradition. In fact, Oecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew addressed these delegates as “representatives of Sister Churches” before the Holy and Great Synod made any decision regarding the ecclesiality or non-ecclesiality of the heretical communities in question. Thus, Patriarch Bartholomew, through a fait accompli, sent another message to the members of the Synod: that he had no intention of calling the heterodox heretics. Instead, he called them Sister Churches. Never in the history of the Oecumenical or local Synods during the Byzantine period were “observers” present at such Synods, and as dignitaries, to boot, whose heretical doctrines were condemned by previous Oecumenical Synods. Heretics were, of course, invited, but as persons subject to trial, in order to defend themselves, and not as guests of honor. It was only at the First and Second Vatican Councils that the phenomenon of “observers” made its appearance. The Holy and Great Synod is evidently copying Roman Catholic models.

(3) The Holy and Great Synod began its proceedings in violation of its “Organization and Working Procedure,” which was signed at the Synaxis of the Primates in January 2016. The document in question prescribes that the Synod be “convened by His Most Divine All-Holiness, the Oecumenical Patriarch, with the consent of Their Beatitudes, the Primates of all of the universally recognized local Autocephalous Orthodox Churches” (Article I). Four Autocephalous Churches—those of Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia, and Antioch—justifiably disagreed with the convocation of the Synod and asked for its postponement, thus, the condition “with the consent of Their Beatitudes, the Primates” was been fulfilled. Consequently, there was no justification, on the basis of the aforementioned “Organization and Working Procedure,” for either the Oecumenical Patriarch or all of the remaining local Churches together to convene a Synod, if they wished to be consistent with the “Organization and Working Procedure” that they signed.

(4) The Synod inaugurated its work without first ratifying the Synodal Decrees (Ὅροι) and Canons of all of the previous Oecumenical Synods, so that the present Holy and Great Synod might be truly an organic continuation of the preceding Synods. It should be noted that such reference to previous Oecumenical Synods was a standing procedure upheld by the Holy Fathers of the Synods in question. Through this procedure the Holy Fathers wished to proclaim that they accepted all of the doctrines put forth by the preceding Oecumenical Synods and that they were proposing to continue the work of these Synods. A characteristic example of this is the recognition by the Eighth Oecumenical Synod of 879-880, under St. Photios, of the Synod of 787 as the Seventh Oecumenical Synod.

(5) The Synod inaugurated its work on the basis of an “Organization and Working Procedure” that was not unanimously accepted by all of the Primates at their Synaxis of January 2016, since the Church of Antioch did not sign it. It also commenced its work on the basis of the six unanimously accepted documents of the Fifth Pre-Synodal Consultation, which basis proved to be insecure and unstable. This is because the six pre-synodal documents were unanimously approved by the representatives at the Fifth Pre-Synodal Consultation and by the Synaxis of the Primates (January 2016), but not by all the Hierarchies of the local Autocephalous Churches. When these Churches, and especially those of Bulgaria, Georgia, and Greece, studied the aforementioned documents, they found in them gaps, obscurities, and cacodox formulations, for which they suggested emendations and corrections. For these Churches which proposed the corrections and changes in question it is self-evident that the pre-synodal documents are no longer in force.

The fact that the Primates signed the six documents of the Fifth Pre-Synodal Consultation does not mean that the Hierarchies of the local Churches are bound by their signatures to accept these texts as they stand. The personal opinion of a Primate on any particular issue is not binding on the Hierarchs in the Synod to which he belongs and does not obligate them to fall in line with his opinion. Were that so, the synodal institution would be annulled and every Primate would be transformed into a Pope. It is not the Primate, but the Synod of Bishops that is the supreme administrative organ in the local Orthodox Churches. In view of all that we have said, it is clear that the following assertion by the Oecumenical Patriarch in his opening address is completely erroneous: “We proceed, then, with our work on the basis of documents unanimously approved by our Churches, which each Church has already endorsed.” By “documents unanimously approved” the Oecumenical Patriarch evidently means the documents of the Fifth Pre-Synodal Consultation, which were signed at the Synaxis of the Primates (January 2016), but which have no validity for certain of the Churches after the corrections and changes dictated by their Synods.

(6) The four Churches that did not participate in the Synod were denigrated before an international audience. Their absence was represented both by the Oecumenical Patriarch and by other Primates in their opening addresses as wholly unjustified and reprehensible. To a greater or lesser extent these Churches were portrayed as being responsible, by virtue of their absence, for creating schisms and divisions. However, the Churches in question did not take part, not because they were “piqued,” but because they discovered weaknesses in the pre-synodal documents after examining them in synod. They naturally requested that the Synod be postponed, in order to study the documents in greater depth, make necessary corrections, and thus produce new documents which would be unanimously approved by all of the local Churches. Since their proposal for the postponement of the Synod was not accepted, these Churches understandably did not participate in the Synod.

(7) Most distressing among all of these observations is the acknowledgement, in essence, by way of an obscure and cryptic new formulation in the document “Relations of the Orthodox Church to the Rest of the Christian World,” of the ecclesiality of the heterodox. The Synod unanimously accepted the formulation, “The Orthodox Church accepts the historical name of other non-Orthodox Christian Churches and Confessions,” instead of the formulation, “The Orthodox Church acknowledges the historical existence of other Christian Churches and Confessions.” That is to say, the word “existence” is replaced by the word “name,” and to the phrase “Christian Churches and Confessions” is added the adjective “non-Orthodox.” Archbishop Hieronymos of Athens proposed this change in the formulation after many hours of discussions and deliberations, during which many conflicting views were expressed.

Archbishop Hieronymos states that, by virtue of this new formulation, “we have reached a synodal decision that, for the first time in history, defines the historical scope of relations with the heterodox not in terms of their existence, but solely in terms of their historical appellation as non-Orthodox Christian Churches or Confessions.” This raises a justifiable question: “How is it possible for one to name something, while at the same time denying the existence of that which he names?” Likewise, from a dogmatic standpoint, endorsement of the term “non-Orthodox Christian Churches or Confessions” is contradictory and unacceptable. Heterodox Confessions cannot be called “Churches” precisely because they accept other, heretical doctrines and, as heretics, cannot constitute “Churches.”

Most distressing also is the fact that the delegation of the Church of Greece did not remain unshakably loyal to the decisions of the Synod of Bishops on May 24-25 (2016), as they ought to have done. The Synod of Bishops decided that the phrase “the historical existence of other Christian Churches and Confessions” should be replaced by the phrase “the historical existence of other Christian Confessions and Communities.”

(8) Finally, yet another sorrowful observation: all that Oecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew proclaimed, indeed braggingly, at the conclusion of the proceedings. Among other things, he declared that “the Oecumenical Patriarchate was a pioneer in the realm of the ecumenical movement.” He also adverted to the pan-heretical Encyclical of 1920, “which is characterized by many as the founding charter of the subsequently established World Council of Churches,” and that “the Oecumenical Patriarchate was one of the founding members of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam.”

For the time being, we confine ourselves to the foregoing comments, although that does not mean that the list of sorrowful observations ends here. In view of all that we have mentioned above, the following question naturally arises: What can one expect from a Synod that commenced and proceeded in such a way?

As the Lord observes: ““For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit; for every tree is known by its own fruit” (St. Luke 6:43-44). Let each reader draw his own conclusions.

Eastern England: The Land of Twelve Saints

Introduction: Roman Origins

Eastern England is made up of two of the seven ancient kingdoms of England, East Anglia and Essex, peopled by the East Angles and their cousins the East Saxons. This was once a self-contained area, bordered to the east and north by the North Sea, to the south by the broad River Thames, and to the west by the eastern Midlands, ancient Mercia. In times past that was an impassable area of river and marsh called the fens. In modern terms East Anglia and Essex mean the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk with the area around the Isle of Ely (now in neighbouring eastern Cambridgeshire), and the county of Essex. However, Orthodox Christianity arrived here before England even existed, in the first centuries after Christ. Indeed, within a few years of Christ’s Resurrection Colchester in Essex briefly became the capital of Roman Britain until London had been founded, and it may have been there that the first Christian community appeared.

In any case it is recorded that there may have been a bishop from Colchester who attended a council in Gaul in 314. Certainly, archaeologists have confirmed the existence of a church in Colchester, one of the most important Roman settlements in the country, in the late fourth century. This lasted into the first half of the fifth century and its foundations can be visited. Other bishops from Britain are recorded attending councils abroad in 347 and 359. Baptismal fonts have been found from a villa at Icklingham in Suffolk from the same period and on the Norfolk coast there is an early place name ‘Eccles’, from the Greek word for church, ‘ecclesia’ (like the word ‘church’ itself, from the Greek ‘kyriakon’, ‘the Lord’s house’. However, such urban or villa Roman Orthodoxy had all but died out by the mid-fifth century, as the Roman elite had left these shores, leaving the people unconverted. Only archaeology can confirm even the existence of the little that they left behind.

Holiness: Twelve Saints (643-1016)

After the Roman period and the settlement of the English, there opened in the seventh century a new and deeper Orthodox Christian age, a golden age of saints, both missionaries from across the seas and native. Although nine of these twelve saints lived in the seventh century, three others lived later, continuing the tradition of holiness even into the early eleventh century. The two Irish saints, St Fursey and St Deicola, were ‘wandering saints’ and only stayed here for a short time. Nine of them are venerated only locally, like the two Irish saints above, St Sigebert, St Jurmin, St Osyth and St Withburgh, or regionally like St Felix, St Cedd and St Walstan, but St Botolph, St Audrey and St Edmund were and are venerated nationally and even internationally. Places of pilgrimage to their relics are Ely and Bury St Edmunds, places of pilgrimage to where they lived are Bawburgh, Bradwell-on-Sea, Burgh Castle, Hoxne and Iken. These twelve saints are:

St Sigebert (+ c. 643), King of East Anglia, had lived in exile in France and become a Christian. He was the son or stepson of King Raedwald, the first baptized King of East Anglia, whose burial-hoard became famous when discovered at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in 1939. In 630 King Sigebert invited the future St Felix to come from Burgundy and evangelize his kingdom. Sigebert later founded a monastery in what became Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk and, having abdicated, became a monk there, but was later killed by pagan Mercians.

After seventeen years of activity St Felix (+ 647) came to be known as the ‘Apostle of East Anglia’. He established his centre at the old Roman port of Dunwich in Suffolk (though some say in the now vanished Roman shore fort in Felixstowe, which was in any case later named after him), and then penetrating inland along river estuaries. Thus, he founded the first church in East Anglia in Babingley in west Norfolk and in nearby Shernborne, and also in Loddon and Reedham on the Broads river system in east Norfolk. He also built churches dedicated to St Gregory the Great in Rendlesham and Sudbury, both in Suffolk, and founded a monastery in Soham, in eastern Cambridgeshire next to Suffolk and near Ely.

The Irish St Fursey (+ c. 650) came with his disciples in 633. He established a monastery in a still extant Roman shore fort in Norfolk, now called Burgh (pronounced Borough) Castle, and several churches before leaving for France in c. 644.

St Jurmin (+ 654) was a prince of the East Anglian royal family, a brother or step-brother of St Audrey and St Withburgh, killed in battle by pagans, and his relics were long venerated in Blythburgh and later in Bury St Edmunds, both in Suffolk.

The Irish-trained and bilingual St Cedd (+ 664) came in c. 653. In his brief period as Bishop of Essex, with his see in London, he became known as the ‘Apostle of Essex’. He established a coastal monastery in Tilbury and churches in Prittlewell, Great Burstead, West Mersea and above all in the old Roman shore fort at Bradwell-on-Sea, all in Essex, where there seem to have been some thirty monks. In the latter case this seventh-century ‘Cathedral on the marshes’ still largely and miraculously survives.

St Audrey (Etheldreda) (+ 679) was a royal princess born in Exning in west Suffolk just after 630 and was baptised by St Felix. She founded the monastery in Ely and was the first East Anglian saint to be venerated nationwide. Her hand relic can still be venerated in the Roman Catholic church in Ely.

St Botolph (Botulf) (+ 680) founded a monastery at Iken near the Suffolk coast and was widely venerated throughout Eastern England and well beyond, especially as a patron saint of travellers.

The Irish St Deicola (Dicul) (+ c. 685) gave his name to the small Norfolk town of Dickleburgh, where he founded a monastery in about 660, before leaving for the south of England.

St Osyth (c.700) was a Mercian princess who married the King of Essex, then founded and entered a convent in the coastal village of Chich in Essex and was martyred there. The village of Chich was named after her, being called to this day St Osyth.

St Withburgh (+ 743), a sister of St Audrey, lived as a hermitess at Holkham in Norfolk and then founded a convent in (East) Dereham in the same county.

St Edmund the Martyr (+ 869), KIng of East Anglia, was associated with Attleborough and Hunstanton in Norfolk and with Bures in Suffolk. He was martyred by the pagan Danes at Hoxne on the Norfolk-Suffolk border and was venerated nationwide, becoming the patron-saint of all England. His relics were moved nearby to the town that came to be called Bury St Edmunds and one of the most important pilgrimage centres in the whole country. Some of his relics can still be venerated in the Roman Catholic church there. Today his flag is flown throughout Norfolk and Suffolk and he is considered to be the patron-saint of East Anglia.

Finally, there is St Walstan (+ 1016), who became a simple and humble farmworker, and whose millennium it is this year. He probably came from Bawburgh in Norfolk and was associated with nearby Costessey (pronounced Cossey) and Taverham just outside Norwich. He closes this period of Eastern English holiness.

Disruption: Spiritual Decline

After St Walstan, Eastern England, like all England and the whole of Western Europe, clearly entered the period of spiritual decline common to Western Europe in the second millennium. This was symbolized by the appearance of foreign Viking rulers and their new ways. This decline was especially obvious during the rule from 1042 of the half-Norman King Edward, called ‘the Confessor’, who summoned the bloody invasion of the last Vikings, the Northmen (Normans) in 1066. These brought with them the new institutional religion that came to be called Roman Catholicism and substituted it for the original Orthodox Christianity. They destroyed the old churches and mocked the saints, as they had already done in southern Italy and would later do in the ‘crusades’ in the Holy Land.

Within less than half a millennium, this new, despiritualized institutional religion, centred in Rome, had itself been nationalized and robbed by the rapacious Tudor State. The new State religion that had been invented in turn began splitting into various moralizing Protestant sects, resulting in bloody civil wars. These sects were even more dissimilar to Orthodox Christianity than Roman Catholicism. In their turn, again within less than half a millennium, these sects unravelled and were rejected and the population dissolved and disintegrated into unbelief and paganism, its spiritual roots lost, forgotten or, incredibly, even flatly denied. At this, millennial ‘Western civilization’ entered into terminal decline, the new paganism, thus leaving the missionary field open to the Church, as in the first millennium. The situation has turned full circle.

Continuity: Renewal (1966-2016)

Although various immigrant groups did give some witness to Orthodoxy in Eastern England after 1945, their mononational or ethnic witness was very limited. Mononational communities and private ideologies, seemingly more attached to a culture than the Church, always age and die out. However, it was in 1966, exactly fifty years ago, that an English priest of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia renewed the native English links with the Orthodox Tradition in Eastern England. This was the ever-memorable Fr Mark (later David) (Meyrick) who lived and served for nearly thirty years in a village in Norfolk. Soon after his repose the Church Outside Russia renewed that uncompromised multinational mission with a small church in Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast. After eleven years of patience, this mission penetrated inland, slightly like that of St Felix of old, and founded public-access churches.

These include a large permanent multinational church in the former Roman capital of Colchester in north-east Essex and a permanent multinational church in Norwich, the historic centre of Norfolk and also once the second largest city in England. There is now hope that a church might eventually be founded in Bury St Edmunds, the historic centre of Suffolk. This would create one church in each of the historic centres of the three counties of Eastern England. Beyond this, however, there are other major centres of population which need church buildings, like Stratford in south-west Essex on the fringes of London or Kings Lynn in north-west Norfolk, but also in historic spiritual centres around which Orthodox people live, like Ely (now in the Cambridgeshire fenlands). However, nothing can be planned top-down, from above, nothing can start without the impetus of local people, as we have seen in Colchester, Norwich and also Bury St Edmunds.