Report for St John’s Orthodox Church for the 16 April 2016 Assembly of the Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia

Although our church opened in the area in 1997 in very small, rented premises, in 2008 we at last managed to buy our own church in Colchester in eastern England through the generosity of donors. May God bless them! This is the fastest-growing town in the country, with large numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe. The church has two altars. The main church, which was built for 900, is dedicated to St John of Shanghai, our former Archbishop, and the small church, which is for about 25, is dedicated to All the Saints of the Isles. The parish numbers about 1,000 Orthodox, however many of these only come for baptisms, weddings etc. and although about 2,000 pass through the doors per year, the actual parish list is 572.

On an average Sunday we have between 100 and 200 present and between 50 and 100 communions. We sell half a ton of candles a year. There are 24 different nationalities of which the main ones in order of numbers are: Moldovan, Baltic, Ukrainian, Romanian, Russian and Bulgarian. The Ukrainians came first in the 90s, then the Baltic Russians, then hundreds of thousands of Romanians and now tens of thousands of Moldovans and Bulgarians. We are very grateful for the help of our Romanian Deacon Ion. With so few from Russia itself, everybody speaks with an accent, not least a Russian-Australian who reads at the church.

Our catchment area is huge, covering Russian-speaking and other Orthodox in three counties, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk. Every Sunday people come from as far as Norwich in the north and East London in the south, so we cover about 60 miles (100km) in every direction. However, I also occasionally visit parishioners outside these three counties, as far as Kent, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, covering 18,000 miles a year. These people come to our church much less often because of the distance.

Recent figures for baptisms and weddings are:

2014: 50 baptisms and 4 weddings.

2015: 35 baptisms and 5 weddings.

2016 (so far): 12 baptisms and 0 weddings.

Our last funeral was in 2009. The average age of parishioners, excluding children is about 30. There are very few parishioners over the age of 40.

We run a Sunday school, a Russian School, a Ukrainian School, as well as an art club, a sewing club for girls and a boys’ activities club, and have a parish library. A Bulgarian School wants to open in September. In May we intend to start a children’s choir and they will sing during the Liturgy. I give talks for adults and teenagers after the Liturgy and we issue a 16-page monthly electronic journal in Russian and English. I am also responsible for Fr Sergiy, who lives 12 miles away. He is elderly and ill and at present unable to celebrate. He comes to our church about once a year. He lives in his little house, where he has a chapel dedicated to St Panteleimon.

I have Dcn Ion to help me with Romanians, one day I hope he will become a priest. However, I desperately need a Russian-speaking second priest. In this way we could have two liturgies on Sundays for example and help with new missions. If you know a candidate, please send him to me. Occasionally the Moldovan priest, Fr Gregory Mereacre, comes from London and helps. However, on his last two visits he has had to confess during the whole Liturgy until communion. The need is all the greater in that we will soon be opening a parish in premises that we finally bought on 15 April in Norwich and want to dedicate to St Alexander Nevsky. Here there are 200 Baltic Russians, hardly any of whom has a car.

In general we need another 10 Russian-speaking priests just in the eastern quarter of England. These would be for: York, Lincoln, Boston, Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, Bedford, St Albans, Romford, Canterbury and Hastings. In Cambridge there are 172 children at the Russian School – and no Russian-speaking church. In Bury St Edmunds there are now 30 children at the Russian School and three Orthodox families who come to us from there. We would like to set up the next new parish there.

Stories of the great miracles narrated by the rector of St. Elijah’s Church in Chernobyl, Archpriest Nikolay Yakushin

(Received from the Ukraine)

A chapter from the book “Teraturgima, or Miracles of the New Century”

The first great omen of the Chernobyl disaster, which shook the entire planet in 1986, was revealed at a time of the rapid development of nuclear energy, long before the explosion of the 4th reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Witnesses recall it happened exactly ten years before the accident, on April 26, 1976. It is interpreted as a sign sent by the Lord and Our Lady 40 years ago. A local newspaper “Prapor Peremohy” (“The Banner of Victory) published an article at the time, titled “Fairytales of Clergymen.” An author referred to a cloud of an unusual shape appearing in the sky that day, which the clergymen interpreted as an apparition of the Virgin Mary. However, it was not merely an atmospheric oddity.

That evening many locals witnessed an unusually shaped cloud floating above the ground. The figure of the Virgin Mary could be discerned in it, with her face and brightly coloured raiment clearly visible. She was holding a tuft of dried wormwood, which the locals also call “chernobylnik.” Holy Mary dropped the wormwood over the town. Then the bright radiant cloud moved towards the forest and stopped over the church of the Holy Prophet Elijah. Blessed Virgin Mary faced the church and blessed it twice with both hands. As she appeared in the sky, it stopped raining and the weather became warm and mild. This phenomenon was interpreted by the local priest, Father Alexander Prokopenko. He explained that only Mother of God may give her blessing with two hands. Bishops also have the privilege of blessing with two hands; however the vision in the sky was not that of a male.

The locals interpreted this phenomenon as a forecast of a dry summer and a poor harvest. Some people have found and picked up pieces of wormwood that fell from the sky. Many years later it became clear that this was a prediction: exactly ten years later the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. But when the disaster struck, nobody made a connection between the events ten years apart. People recalled the story much later and came to recognize it as a sign from God.

In 2002 His Beatitude Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev and All Ukraine blessed the creation of an icon which captured the apparition of Blessed Virgin Mary over Chernobyl. It was painted by a servant of God, an artist from Kiev named Ioan, who also created the rest of the artwork in our church. Ioan, who is an orphan, is very religious, pious and earnest. He had been fasting and took communion before starting the work. The icon portrays the church of St. Elijah with the Queen of Heaven and Archangels Michael and Gabriel on both sides, rising in the sky above it. She holds chernobylnik (wormwood) in her hands. Two capsules with wormwood picked in the Chernobyl area are affixed on both sides of the icon. His Beatitude Vladimir blessed the image as one of Chernobyl’s locally revered icons.

A vision of the Chernobyl Saviour icon is revealed to the leader of the Chernobyl Power Plant Communist party section on his deathbed

Another famous icon of St. Elijah’s church is the Chernobyl Saviour, which has a special history. This icon is said to have originated directly from the local people. They have survived one of the greatest tragedies of modern history. After the initial panic subsided, people were looking for support and sympathy. Many of them became very ill.

Yuri Andreev, who is now deceased, was the leader of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant Communist party section at the time. A Communist with a strong attachment to his party’s ideas, he became very ill after receiving huge doses of radiation. He was suffering greatly; the doctors did not expect him to live much longer. Yuri kept seeing a recurring dream: an image of an icon. He described it to the artist and gave instructions on how it had to be painted. He also told of his dream to me, and I passed his message to His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr. Being seriously ill, the Communist leader kept asking for the icon to be painted. He saw the image with his inner spiritual vision and felt a strong need for it to be created. His Beatitude gave his blessing.

The icon was painted at the Trinity-Sergiev Lavra in 2003 and sanctified at Kiev-Pechersk Lavra on the feast day of the Dormition of the Mother of God. When His Beatitude Metropolitan Vladimir blessed the image of the Chernobyl Saviour, three signs appeared in the sky. A dove flew above the icon before hundreds of witnesses, then a rainbow appeared in the sky, and finally the sign of the cross became visible, with the sun shining at its centre. Curiously, Yuri Andreev, the terminally ill leader of the Communist party section of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, greatly recovered after this event. The Lord healed him. It is surprising that a staunch Communist, later the president of the “Chernobyl – Ukraine” Union, was chosen for this mission. Thanks to him the icon of the Chernobyl Saviour came into the world, and the Lord has continued to heal the sick and afflicted people who come to venerate this image.

Vladislav Goretsky, a well-known iconographer, was chosen to create this icon. The image is truly sublime, expressive and spiritual. It is also exceptional in that it depicts ordinary people alongside the image of God for the first time in the history of iconography. The souls of the survivors of the Chernobyl tragedy are portrayed on the right, while the souls of the deceased victims are on the left. His Beatitude Vladimir requested the permission of Patriarch Alexiy II to paint the images of the people in the icon. Permission was granted.

The subject of the icon is deeply symbolic. It is a visual rendition of a theme from the Book of Revelation. At the centre of the image is a “star of wormwood” falling from the sky against the backdrop of the ominous glow of the explosion. Another focal point is a crucifix-shaped pine tree. This extraordinary sign of the upcoming tragedy grew on Polissya’s land decades before the accident. This large, old tree was fully grown before the Second World War. Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant was built just two kilometres away from this huge living cross, growing at the forest edge.

After the tragedy, when the so-called “red forest” poisoned by radiation was cut down, an opening revealed a stunning spiritual vision: two symbols of the universal disaster – the exploded fourth nuclear reactor and the giant tree-cross – became connected in one.

This vision is reminiscent of the Old Testament cruciform tree watered by Lot, which was to become Christ’s cross two thousand years later. The tree is believed to have grown from the three staffs given to Abraham by the Holy Trinity, Who was revealed to the forefather in the form of three angels. Four thousand years later the Chernobyl Cross arose as a symbol of the nuclear crucifixion that would come in 1986. To the left and right of the cross are the living and the deceased liquidators of the nuclear catastrophe. Above them is the Lord Jesus Christ with a scroll of the Apocalypse, open on the page that holds the prophecy, as well as the Holy Virgin and the Archangel Michael. This is the exact vision that came in a dream to the Communist leader of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

The Chernobyl Saviour icon mystically communicates that the One holding the scroll holds the keys to the grand design and to every detail in the lives of those born into the world, as well as the events and defining moments of history, including the tragedy of Chernobyl.

The Saviour looked at the priest every night, leading him to where His image was hidden

There is another extraordinary icon, which I have never mentioned before. It is the image of the Saviour from St Michael the Archangel’s church in the village of Krasno, located in the exclusion zone.

This wonderful icon has an unusual history. After the accident all the villagers from Krasno were evacuated due to very high levels of radiation brought on by the radioactive cloud moving towards Belarus. One of Krasno’s inhabitants ended up in St. Petersburg, where he became a priest at one of the local churches.

Eleven years ago he found my phone number and called. “Father Nikolay, I’d like to ask you for a favour,” he told me. “I have a recurring dream, in which I see the eyes of the Saviour from an icon left in the exclusion zone in Krasno. I would like you to find it – it is a large icon of Christ painted on wooden board.” “How will I find it?” I asked. “I’ll tell you where to go,” he responded.

He described the location with great precision. He named the house and the place in the house where the icon was hidden. One had to be a local to give such exact instructions for navigating the village that by now had become contaminated and abandoned.

The priest’s grandfather used to serve in St Michael the Archangel’s church for many years. The extraordinary old icon of the Saviour had been stolen from the church once, but was later miraculously restored by the Lord. The remarkable wooden church itself, built in 1800, was plundered after the Chernobyl disaster. But the grandfather, now deceased, had an opportunity to hide the antique icon, although the location remained unknown. The Lord Himself gave a sign and taught how to find the sacred icon that was dear to Him.

Thousands of kilometres away, in St. Petersburg, a priest and a native of the Chernobyl zone began to dream of this icon, the Saviour looking at him every night. I drove to the village and found the abandoned house as it had been described over the phone. Everything turned out to be true. I pulled the icon from the attic and brought it to our local church. When the icon was restored, the priest from St. Petersburg came to our church to worship and to witness his dream, which became reality.

The image of Jesus Christ in this icon is truly alive and unforgettable, his gaze forever vivid in your memory.

Angels lead a church service in the exclusion zone

The old church in the village of Krasno has long been abandoned. However, we have had multiple witness accounts of church services being held there by the angels and the heavenly host. Staff members of the Chernobyl police force have come to me on multiple occasions between 2005 and 2009, asking to explain the meaning of what they had witnessed.

Police officers have recounted the following events. On one occasion a police unit that patrols the exclusion zone approached the village church and heard voices. They thought it was an illusion, since settlers had long left the village. There is also an abandoned checkpoint at the entrance to the village. The surrounding forest has grown thick and dangerous, making it impossible to get into the village by any other route.

The patrol vehicle moved forward towards the church. Officers could hear beautiful singing coming from the church and saw a mild glow of the lights inside the building. The men came out of the car and froze, overcome with religious fear. The Chernobyl police unit is a well-trained professional force, prepared to respond to a variety of emergency situations. Yet, these hardened men felt so overwhelmed with fear that they left the scene immediately. They went back to the same location again, but this time the church looked quiet. They did not dare enter the church and sent a report to their chief.

The police officers later came to my church and asked me to explain the nature of the event they had witnessed. I told them that the history of the church has multiple accounts of such events. Angels do not leave the holy altar until the end of time. When people have to abandon a church for any reason, angels come to worship there instead. The church in Krasno has special significance to them, since it is dedicated to the Archangel Michael, the head of the heavenly host. The place, although burned by lethal doses of radiation, still remains a sacred site, where God’s grace abides. The Lord’s will was to bring responsible witnesses to recount this miracle to the wider world. All subsequent witness accounts of the liturgy in the empty church were identical to the first description.

I have been going to the church in Krasno to lead services on feast days ever since. During one of my visits I found an icon of the Archangel Michael. I went into the loft between the church’s cupolas. It is a difficult spot to reach and quite dangerous to walk through, because of the rotting old floor boards. I prayed and walked as far as I could go, when I suddenly felt as though someone was looking at me closely. I raised my head and saw the icon of the Archangel Michael with a fiery sword in his hand, placed on a decrepit old shelf. The church had been previously plundered by looters, but this icon had remained mysteriously concealed from their sight. The icon was placed there to protect the church. It is unknown who hid the image; perhaps, the angels themselves.

The Apparition of St Seraphim of Sarov and the blessing of the annual liturgy in Chernobyl on April 26th

This event happened in 2001 and shook me deeply. I have seen many things in my lifetime; however, this story was important unlike anything else. It helped me understand the place of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the history of the Church and the life of the universe as a whole. There is a deep spiritual interconnectedness between this explosion, the history of the Church and the history of the world at large.

The fishermen who were in their boats on the Pripyat River at night on April 26th saw a bright explosion of light above the church of St. Elijah the Prophet, followed by another explosion above the nuclear power plant. This was a sign described in the book of Revelation as “a great star, blazing like a torch” (Rev. 8:10-11).

When I came to serve in this church after the tragedy, the building and grounds required a lot of restoration. We worked hard to rebuild the church, and I conducted regular liturgies, even though there were very few parishioners. On April 26th, my first anniversary of the tragedy at this church, I prayed and went to bed. There were people keeping vigil in town and remembering the victims through secular rituals, concerts and feasts. I fell asleep.

My window overlooks a cliff above the Pripyat River. I remember suddenly waking up at night and looking out of the window. I saw an old man in white robes with a white beard and a staff walking towards my house. I recognized St Seraphim of Sarov, his face, gait and bearing looking exactly as depicted in the icons. St Seraphim approached my house, stopped in front of my window and looked at me closely. He hit the ground three times with his staff, then turned towards the river and walked off through the church gates towards the power plant. Then I remember finding myself in bed again. I turned on the lights and saw it was 1.30 a.m. – the precise time the nuclear disaster struck. The Lord has sent St. Seraphim to wake me up and call me to prayer and vigil that night.

I immediately had an insight: the nuclear catastrophe was one of the watershed events in human history, described in the Book of Revelation: “The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water – the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter” (Rev. 8:10-11). Wormwood is a wide-spread plant in this area, also known as “chernobylnik,” hence the name of the town.

There is also a direct link between the apparition of the Holy Virgin above Chernobyl ten years before the tragedy. This land was meant to be a place where the Holy Scriptures culminated, and the Lord’s word split human history into “before” and “after” the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. I kept trying to understand why the Lord has chosen St Seraphim to reveal the spiritual meaning of the tragedy and wrote a letter to Patriarch Alexiy II. We corresponded for two years. As a result, our church officially received part of St. Seraphim’s holy relics, which I personally brought from Diveyevo. St Seraphim was a devout monk, but also an active participant in all the important events of his time. He began his spiritual journey in Kiev, where he worshipped at the holy places and the saints of the Kiev Caves monastery. He wanted to join the brothers at the monastery and received a blessing to go to Sarov. He always remained involved in the affairs of his homeland.

Ever since St Serpahim’s apparition on the anniversary of the tragedy we have conducted all-night vigils and the Holy Liturgy on the night of April 26th in Chernobyl. Numerous archbishops, bishops and members of the clergy have joined us over the years to remember the victims. Among them is Pavel, the Metropolitan of Chernobyl and the bishop of the Kiev Caves Lavra, who ordained me to the priesthood. I believe the Lord has purposefully made him the first church leader in Chernobyl.

Numerous pilgrims are also drawn to Chernobyl on this day. We usually go to the cemetery to have a funeral service for the firefighters who were the first to face the blazing nuclear reactor. Thus, through St Seraphim, the Lord has blessed us to stay awake and pray during the hour our planet suffered a nuclear explosion. In 2016 this tradition will be 30 years old.

It is unlikely we will ever be able to grasp the fullness and the importance of signs and events surrounding the history of the nuclear tragedy in Chernobyl. Yet, there is clearly a direct spiritual link between all of them. The Lord reveals all that is necessary in His own time. We must remain patient and steadfast in our prayer, as we wait to receive His knowledge.

On the Past Divisions in the Russian Orthodox Emigration

Why did divisions take place in the Russian emigration: I mean, there were some everywhere who chose the Non-Patriarchal ROCOR, a few stayed under Moscow, others locally in North America set up the OCA and yet some others locally set up the Paris group. Four groups! And a second question: what do you think will happen to them in the future?

D.O., Kent

The Past

A correction: Three groups: the OCA, as it is now called, was built on Non-Russians, ex-Uniats from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who had emigrated to the USA and Canada well before the Russian Revolution, and, to a lesser degree, on native Alaskans. True, precedents of the OCA were under the Russian Church (either Moscow or else ROCOR) for periods, but it was never part of the Russian emigration. The only émigrés who joined it, and that after the Second World War, were elitist aristocrats with the Paris superiority complex, for instance, Fr Alexander Schmemann, Fr John Meyendorff and Sophia Kulomzina.

As regards the three Russian groups, they represented earlier social divisions – notice ‘represented’ in the past tense, since there are now essentially only two groups or, arguably, only one. One is minute and, as it is outside the Russian Church, in effect schismatic (Patriarch Alexei II’s words), the other is the Russian Church. These divisions existed well before the Revolution, even in the nineteenth century. Thus, those few who remained loyal to Moscow inherited to some extent the old Statist mentality of the pre-Revolutionary period. Their leaders remained loyal to the State, whatever, though there were also many very sincere Orthodox patriots among clergy and people. This mentality was inherent in the infamous decree of 1927, signed under duress by Metr Sergius, commanding all Orthodox outside Russia, including Non-Russians, to swear loyalty to the Church-persecuting, atheist State! A situation, which the Patriarchate in Moscow is still paying for, trying to retrieve the trust that it lost then, and again later, by appointing morally corrupt or renovationist individuals to its episcopate.

ROCOR, on the other hand, inherited the mentality of the pre-Revolutionary monastic revival. This was led by the neo-Patristic (and therefore slandered) figure of Metr Antony of Kiev, but had both positive and negative aspects. The positive aspects included faithfulness to the Tradition (and not to corrupt customs), with its ascetic, canonical and liturgical disciplines, and the love of the saints. The negative aspects, mainly on the fringes, included conservatism (instead of the Tradition), narrow Russian nationalism (instead of the multinational, Imperial Tradition), dry and formalist, at times pharisaic, ritualism, narrow negativism stifling any initiative, an elitist lack of pastoral understanding of and compassion for married clergy, children, parish life and the people in general, eccentric right-wingery and a sectarian mentality. It was these aspects that led some extremist individuals in ROCOR to support Hitler, to persecute and put on trial the spiritually vibrant St John of Shanghai and, more recently, to break away from the Church altogether, forming strange and tiny right-wing sects with all the usual sectarian infighting.

The Paris group, always very small, represented the pro-Western aristocrats and elitist intellectuals. They were already disloyal and even treacherous to Christ, both Church and State, long before the Revolution, going back to the Decembrist traitors of 1825. Many of them actually plotted and prepared the February 1917 Revolution with British and other anti-Christian foreign encouragement. That overthrew the legitimate rule of the Anointed Tsar and Orthodox Christian Empire, which ironically resulted in the self-punishment of their exile, once the ruthless Bolsheviks soon took over from their incompetent misrule in October 1917. (A similar situation to that of the corrupt English-speaking oligarchs who misrule the Ukraine today). Most of these emigres, mostly from Saint Petersburg, speaking fluent French, sometimes better than Russian, naturally headed for Paris. They were the oligarchs of their day.

The Present

Naturally, after the dissolution of the Soviet State in 1991, the first two groups, Moscow and ROCOR, joined together, but only once they had overcome their mutual political prejudices, which took them sixteen years to do. It is difficult and probably unfair to apportion blame for this lack of haste – history will do that. Clearly, there could be no unity until Moscow had at least on paper condemned co-operation with the atheist State and ecumenism (defined as intercommunion, prayer with heretics etc, and not simply talking to heterodox and witnessing to them) and canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors. All that happened in 2000. Nine years lost, but that is how long it took to overcome on paper the Statist Soviet mentality that refused to criticize even Stalin. On the other hand, many in ROCOR must bear a share of responsibility for their lack of haste too.

A few elderly, KGB-appointed individuals in the old Soviet Union never overcame the Statist mentality. Such is the tragic case of the 87-year old dinosaur, Michael Denysenko, who now calls himself ‘Metr Philaret of Kiev’. A provincial Party hack from the Ukraine of the old days, and reputedly an atheist, he is certainly married with two children. Obsessively jealous that he was not chosen Patriarch after the death of Patriarch Pimen in 1990 and seeing the way the tide was turning, he overnight converted himself to Ukrainian nationalism. This he had previously strongly and mockingly condemned, but he changed his ways in order to further his career, thus, like any vulgar vagans, giving himself the right to dress up in a patriarch’s costume! He depends entirely on political support from US-backed, neo-Nazi nationalists. What happens to him when the provincialist regime in Kiev, put in place by the US colonial administration, inevitably collapses, is unknown, but he may be dead by then anyway.

For its part, ROCOR had to lose its fringe sectarians and pharisees who had been troubling Church life since the 1960s. In the 1990s they even dared to forge alliances with old calendarists and received various mainly sectarian individuals on ex-Soviet territory into the Church, though these were never accepted by the unconsulted clergy and people in ROCOR. These sectarian elements actually claimed that the martyric Church in Russia was without grace and made political co-operation with the atheist State, i.e. the simple human sins of weakness and cowardice, into a new heresy! But if sin is heresy, then we are all heretics, the apostles and saints included. Their longer-term knowledge of Church history was extraordinarily weak and their practice of Orthodoxy seemed mainly to be limited to formalities and ritual.

The worst example was perhaps the politicking of the defrocked bishop, Barnabas (Prokofiev), in the south of France, who was later rightly put on trial and sentenced by the French government for embezzlement. In this country I know three laypeople, then in ROCOR, who, though too young to remember much about him, shocked me in the 1990s by telling me that they thought that Hitler had been a good thing. All three were extremely ignorant and all three unsurprisingly left the Church in 2007, joining various extremist sects. The strange thing is that two of them are married to Anglicans, i. e. in their own abrasive language, married to heretics!

The Future

As regards the future of the fourth, in fact, Non-Russian, group, the OCA, who knows? It is certainly suffering from a severe identity crisis and undergoing great tensions, constantly changing metropolitans. Two questions can be asked about it: Will it be able to survive as one intact group or will it split into its artificially combined constituent fragments, with a large part returning to the Russian Church? And would that be a negative or a positive thing? These questions are not for us to answer; those who constitute the OCA will answer those questions themselves, voting with their feet. As they are outside the Russian Church, we are merely onlookers and can only observe events.

With the exception of some non-Saint Petersburgers, and despite repeated invitations, the tiny third group, centred in Paris, has no intention of returning to the Russian Church and Her ascetic, canonical and liturgical disciplines. It can therefore be termed ‘ex-Russian’. Such a state of politicized, adolescent rebellion does not bode well. Indeed, we can already see the ‘withered branch syndrome’, as this self-isolated group gets ever smaller, though with several dozen quite untrained clergy with tiny ‘parishes’ (often between five and ten!) who sometimes do the strangest things. It will inevitably die out, as it runs out of bishops and Church-educated people and veers towards full secularization by the local Western Establishments which for obvious reasons encourage it, losing the reason for its existence. But that is not a problem for the Russian Church, which it ignores.

This leaves us with the first two groups, now more or less united into one. Here also it is difficult to know what will happen. At present there is no case for an administrative merger of the two, despite them sometimes sharing the same territory. The Moscow group, which gets ever larger in Western Europe, is in drastic need of many more missionary-minded bishops and clergy and a less ‘Soviet’ mentality, adapted to local needs and languages. It also suffers from a lack of premises, the result of the chronic lack of vision and maladministration of the past. Often, but not always, it still appears to lack leadership, vision and dynamism, still dealing with the short-term situation on a day to day basis – a recipe for long-term disaster.

As for ROCOR, it urgently needs dynamic young bishops and priests. Some seem to forget that the canonical age for consecrating a bishop is 35: to have nearly all your bishops (and too many clergy) in their sixties and seventies is profoundly abnormal and makes it likely that any group will die out. Now is the time of the wake-up call for ROCOR, if it wishes to survive in some form or other in the longer term. The result of any lack of leadership and direction is always that you live in the past and do not look to the future. Any loss of dynamism has to be remedied now. However, it is not too late and everything is still possible. ROCOR still has huge potential: whether that will be squandered or not, we cannot say.

To St Cuthbert

To the shrine of Holy Cuthbert
The wreckers came with wrath and spite.
To the shrine of Holy Cuthbert
The robbers came to steal and slight.
Deformers, darkened in their mind,
Bone rot was all they thought to find,
But instead a body they saw,
Sweet-scented and inspiring awe.
For the grace that hallowed his life
Did not leave us in times of strife.

At first the Christ-haters fell back,
Then in menace moved forward again.
The Christ-hating mob in mood black,
Could not be stopped or stayed by men.
The wealth around the saint they stole,
In dark anger his leg they broke,
Wanting him fornaught and not whole.
But then England awoke and spoke,
And to Durham with heart or feet
Ran with the honour that is meet.

So she revered our God-bearer,
Cuthbert from Lindisfarne above,
Than all the English saints fairer,
And asked him with meekness and love
And with tear upon burning tear
To pray for the now stricken land,
Until, raised up by prayers so dear,
She becomes anew Eden’s strand
As she was ever called to be:
The Garden of the Trinity.

(With thanks to Walt who inspired and shaped most of the above)

Our Hope for a Russian Orthodox Church in Norwich (Update 11)

The Update

Finally, on 15 April 2016 we managed to buy the premises for our future church in Norwich. After a three and a half month wait to receive planning permission from Norwich City Council, we had to wait an additional six months for exactly the same organization to send our solicitor the lease. Now we can at last start building work to transform the premises into an Orthodox church. 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 four 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 measures 88 square metres externally and is at present used as offices and rooms for a cultural centre. It has electricity, heating and water and is in very good condition. It is so cheap because it is 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, 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.

Why the Non-Commemorators are Mistaken

In the Gospels Christ tells us that although we are in the world, we are not of it, that although we are incarnate on earth here and now, our destiny is in heaven. Human errors have all been due to the failure to live according to these words. Either to the failure not to be incarnate here and now and to drift away into intellectual speculations and disincarnate daydreams and philosophies: such have been the tendencies either of Western intellectuals or of Non-Christian religions – indeed many such intellectuals have been attracted to Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism, for example, for that very reason. Or else to the human failure to forget that our destiny is in heaven, to concentrate only on the incarnate here and now: such have been the tendencies of the Roman Catholic and Protestant deviations of Christianity, with their concentration on the thisworldly organization of the affairs of men, instead of the balanced God-Man, Christ, the Son of God become incarnate as man and calling us to heaven.

Put in terms of Church history and human deformations of the Church, the first said that Christ the Son of God never became man, the second said that Christ was not the Son of God. The first deformation, denying the Incarnation, went down in early history as Monophysitism, the second, denying possible human salvation, as Arianism. Later, in the fourteenth century, they appeared again, combined in the one heresy of Barlaam of Italy, who said that since God was unknowable (Monophysitism), man would have to rely on his autonomous reason to live (Arianism). Here was the justification for Western humanism and Renaissance paganism and all that has followed to this day – man the measure of all things. St Gregory Palamas opposed this heresy and expressed the universal Christian teaching, distinguishing between the essence and the energies of God. In modern, secular times the same two heresies have appeared as disincarnate, Western liberalism and petty, worldly nationalism.

Thus, today the Orthodox Christian world still suffers from these same constant enemies of the Faith, from petty, inward-looking nationalism of the ghetto and disincarnate, pro-Western liberalism of the intellectuals. In 1453 the latter betrayed Constantinople and provoked its fall and in 1917 it collaborated in the trap sprung by the West in Russia, provoking the February Revolution, later taken over by the Bolsheviks, and then dividing the Russian emigration between true White and false White. Thus, it can be asserted that the New Martyrs of Russia are ultimately the victims of the treachery of Western liberalism, for without Western support and finance the Bolsheviks would never have seized power. Without apostate wealthy aristocrats (including members of the Romanov Family), treasonous generals and Anglophile Duma freemasons, there would never have been any New Martyrs. Their anti-Orthodox and therefore anti-Russian treachery drips with the blood of the betrayed millions.

Then there is the second enemy, nationalism, which, unlike patriotism, which is love of God’s Creation, is simply worldliness, love of man’s creation. It betrayed the universalism of Old Rome, taken over by barbarian-minded Franks, and of New Rome, taken over by Hellenist nationalism. Unlike the petty nationalism of others in the past and today, petty Russian nationalism is worse because Russia has a vocation to defend all Orthodox of all nationalities and to witness to all the fragments of Christianity, a vocation to be Imperial, to be above ghetto nationalism. Examples of nationalism are the treasonous Old Ritualists, who openly supported the 1917 Revolution, a few divisive Russophobic émigrés who sympathized with Hitler, trying to undermine the Church Outside Russia and then siding with Western spies, and in our own times the pro-Old Ritualist Solzhenitsyn. His anti-patriotic nationalism, like that of all Russian nationalists, ironically ended up supporting Western liberals.

On this subject of inward-looking nationalism, there are now in Moldova, the Ukraine and on Mt Athos nearly seventy individuals, mainly monks, including one vicar-bishop and over a dozen priests, who refuse to commemorate Patriarch Kyrill at services. There are two reasons for the decisions of these non-commemorators. Firstly, there was the February meeting between Patriarch Kyrill and the Bishop of Rome in Cuba, for which the Russian Orthodox world had not been prepared although secret preparations for it had been under way for six months, and the vague joint declaration that they issued afterwards. This came after the disturbing document regarding relations between the Church and the heterodox world, released some two weeks earlier in Geneva, in preparation for the meeting of some Orthodox bishops in Crete in June. For some completely incomprehensible reason, this has provocatively already been called ‘a Holy, Pan-Orthodox Council’, when so far it is none of these things.

Seventy people make up 0.00004% of the Russian Orthodox world. We think their first concern is exaggerated. The document issued was after all a diplomatic one, not a dogmatic one and in their sincere simplicity they failed to distinguish between the two aspects. As for the second document, it is only a draft and has already been rejected by several Local Churches and many prominent and well-respected bishops in several countries. Even if it were passed as such, the vast majority, myself included, would either ignore it or tear it up. Such top-down decisions, taken without the slightest consultation with the masses, cannot be enforced. However, I do have a much more serious concern, which I wish the non-commemorators would share. They seem not to realize that since 2014 the Russian Orthodox world has been in a state of war, after an attack on the Ukraine, which toppled the legitimate government and installed an anti-Orthodox, Fascist junta in Kiev, ‘the Mother of Russian Cities’.

This is part of the Neocon-initiated World War, which has reduced a large part of Western Asia and Northern Africa, from the coasts of the Atlantic to the foothills of the Hiamalyas, to terrorist anarchy. This has resulted in the deaths of up to two million and well over ten million refugees, leading to the mass deChristianization of Iraq and Syria. It has also ravaged Eastern Europe, economically and in ex-Yugoslavia, militarily, where part of the population is affected by cancer from uranium-tipped NATO shells and menaced by the US-installed terrorist regime in Kosovo. It has also seen Russian Orthodox forces in combat in Syria, supporting Orthodox and friends of Orthodox next to the Holy Land, by Armageddon. In the post-Soviet world it is one thing for ‘Orthodox’ liberals and nationalists from anywhere in the Orthodox world to criticize or disagree with the Patriarch of Rus’. He may not be ideal (who is?), but to stop commemorating him during what is a World War, is almost treasonous.

President Putin and the Empire

The Empire’s debt casino is unsustainable and the ruling oligarchy sees war as the only way to salvage their hegemony

by Sergey Glazyev

Originally appeared on Lenta.ru.

The author is a prominent economist, advisor to the Russian President on regional economic integration, and the mind behind the Eurasian Economic Union

Is there any reason to expect the lifting of American sanctions?
The sanctions are an element of the hybrid war that the US is waging against us. They are doing this not because they do not like Russia’s ‘annexation’ of the Crimea, but because of the objective and subjective interests of the American establishment.

The US is losing its hegemony: it is already producing fewer products and exporting fewer technologies than China. China is also catching up with America in the number of scientists and engineers, and many innovative Chinese technologies are capturing world markets. China’s development rate is five times that of the US. The international system of economic entities recently set up in China exemplify the new world economic order.

The economic entities that dominate in the US, serving a financial oligarchy, have destabilized the American monetary and financial system, which defaults about twice a year. The causes of the global financial crisis of 2008 have not disappeared and the American debt bubble — financial pyramids composed of derivatives and the national debt —are still growing.

According to systems theory, this process cannot continue indefinitely. The American oligarchy is desperate to get rid of its debt burden, which is why it is conducting a hybrid war, not only against Russia, but against Europe and the Middle East.

As always happens in a changing world economic order, the country that is losing its leadership tries to unleash a world war for control over the periphery. Since Americans consider the former Soviet space to be their financial and economic periphery, they are trying to gain control over it.

The American political establishment has been brought up on the chimeras of nineteenth century geopoliticians. American students study basic English and German geopolitical ideas of that time in political science classes. The main question back then was how to ruin the Russian Empire, and they still look at the world through the eyes of the XIX century ‘hawks’, when Great Britain tried to save its hegemony in the First World War, then lost its colonial empire after the Second World War.

This is what American geopoliticians study in the State Department and the White House, continuing to look at the world through the prism of both the Cold War and British confrontations with Russia and Germany in the nineteenth century, and now the US is unleashing another world war.

The combination of the objective problems of the American financial oligarchy, and the strange mindset of American geopoliticians threatens a world conflict. This has nothing to do with the Crimea. Any reason will do.

We need to act in terms of the contradictions leading the US to an aggressive stance fraught with the risk of a hybrid war with the whole world. They have chosen Russia as their main objective, and the Ukraine, occupied by them, as their main means of destruction.
To survive under these conditions, maintain our sovereignty and develop our economy, we need to build a broad anti-military coalition, pursue our priority development strategy, recover our financial and economic sovereignty and pursue Eurasian integration.

To prevent war, we need to realize the president’s goal of a common development area from Lisbon to Vladivostok. It is very important to convince our European partners as well as our partners in the Far East and in the South that we need to cooperate, not by blackmailing or threatening them, but through mutually beneficial projects, joining our economic potential while respecting the sovereignty of each state.

Can we mend relations with the EU and how?

To mend cooperation with the European Union, we need to restore its sovereignty. The sight of European politicians among the crowd of Nazis at Euromaidan showed how much European political culture has degraded. The EU leaders are not independent; they are US puppets.

The American media dominate Europe’s political space, embedding anti-Russian chimeras into people’ consciousness, intimidating them with a so-called Russian threat. Their politicians are forced to go with the media line provided by Washington in order to win votes. This has lead to the catastrophe we are watching today in Brussels and other European cities, which are gripped with fear as governments fail to provide security.

Unfortunately, the sovereignty of Europe cannot be restored just by booting up social consciousness. The problems did not appear out of the blue; they are the result of the European political class abandoning its national interest. Europe is facing a very difficult period of transition, during which it is not yet a partner, but Washington’s shadow.

Europeans have lost their sense of direction. They live in a mosaic, a fragmentary world that has no shared relationships. But life will force them back to reality, and I believe that eventually European democratic traditions and humanism will prevail.

In the Church of the Holy Wisdom

A Greek journalist writes: “I met Ishmael who is Turkish in 1975, in England, where I was attending university. We became good friends and after graduating we kept in touch. Ishmael lives in Istanbul (Constantinople), a stone’s throw from Hagia Sophia. Recently he wrote a letter to me. “In the past year, at night, when we are outside, the smell of incense that you Christians burn in church overpowers us.”

An Old Man Remembers how the Great Apostasy Began in the 1960s

The European Orthodox Times, 16 July 2054

On this Day of Solemn Repentance, the Millennial Anniversary of the Western Folly, which started by replacing God with a small step for one sinful man and finished by replacing God with a giant leap into the abyss for sinful mankind, we publish an interview with one of the few remaining eyewitnesses of the tragic events which began in the 1960s.

Q: I know it is nearly a century ago, but can you tell us your memories of what really happened in the Great Apostasy, from the 1960s on? Many of our younger readers are fascinated by it. They simply cannot understand how so many people could have acted in such a suicidal way and yet still thought it normal. It sounds as though people were possessed by the spirit of folly.

A: Well, although I was only a child when it all began, I can still remember quite vividly what it was like. Possession by folly is indeed a good description of it. I think the process of apostasy suddenly sped up in about 1964. The old world petered out and the new world of the Great Apostasy began, a world of plastic, of false values, was born. Everything suddenly changed, as though an order had gone out from above and most people blindly obeyed it, like sheep to the slaughter.

Q: How had it all come to that? And why did it all happen so suddenly?

A: You have to remember that at that time there had still been no repentance for the two Great Wars of 1914 and 1939 and since then there had been various scandals and depravity among the ruling elite: that explains a lot, it meant the ground was ready for a fall. There was spiritual emptiness all around and the devil always fills a vacuum. So the masses at last began to say, ‘Well, we too have lost our Faith and we too declare that for us God is dead, just like you, the elite, and we will now live in the same folly as you’.

Of course, those words, ‘God is dead’, had first been pronounced almost 100 years before by a German philosopher who later went mad, but only the elite had ever heard of him. Following his words, there had taken place the two mass slaughters in Great Wars, carefully prepared and organized by the selfsame elite. However, it was only in the early 1960s that the folly of the elite finally filtered down and the masses lost their faith too, following the example of the ruling class.

In the 1960s in England, for example, there were corrupt politicians and faithless bishops from the State religious organization who, following the examples of German Protestant philosophers, committed apostasy, writing that they no longer believed in the Son of God become man. Rather they believed that they, the sons of men, fallen and sinful, had become gods. With their loss of faith, they at once lost all sense of the sacred. They began preaching intellectualism or infantilism, but in any case secularism, that is, they decided that merging with the world was the only way.

They wanted to be ‘like everyone else’, to renounce their Christian birthright as ‘a peculiar people’, nobody wanted to confess their faith, people were ashamed of it. One bishop called his loss of faith ‘honesty’. So, naturally, people deserted their churches in their masses. Outside England the same thing was happening, Roman Catholics also renounced their faith and the sense of the sacred in the 1960s. They too began to collapse into the same apostasy of secularism that gradually led to the folly of atheism. Thus, they abandoned fasting and within two generations they faced a crisis of obesity.

A: What happened in the Church Herself? Was Orthodoxy infected too?

Q: Only on the margins. From the 60s, and in some cases even before, the Westernmost fringes of the Orthodox world, in the USA and in Europe, for example in France and Finland, were infected by new calendarism and various other forms of secularism and aped the Western world. Many frauds appeared and the naïve were tricked and then disbelieved those who denounced the frauds. Fortunately, it was only on the fringes, where some, although baptized in Orthodoxy, lost the sense of the sacred. This was because they had stopped living an Orthodox life and began living like others, which they justified.

Of course, there were reactions to this decadence, some so negative that people began breaking away from the Church and founding old calendarist sects by reaction. This was understandable, but, as the old saying goes, although you can find some muddied water in a river, it is always muddied in a puddle. However, most of the Church world was protected from this decadence, ironically in part through the persecutions of atheist Communism. In the countries where that atheism had come to power officially, people retained their understanding of the Church and their sense of the sacred, helped by the witness of the New Martyrs and Confessors.

Q: What happened next in the West?

A: Well, as you know, every civilization, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Pagan Roman, Inca, Aztec, Indian, Chinese or any other, is based on spiritual beliefs and values. So when Western people renounced the underlying, founding beliefs and values of Western civilization, it simply collapsed, just like a tower standing by the seashore that suddenly collapses because its foundations have been gradually washed away by the waves over the centuries.

You see, if you say that God is dead, that is a purely subjective statement. What you are saying in reality is that God is dead for you, that you have lost your faith in God, which means that your soul is empty, it has died, in other words, you are spiritually dead. God looks on and sees that He has been rejected by that individual soul and knows that only the suffering, created by His rejection, can bring that soul to repentance.

That was the case of Western civilization: it was rotten from inside. By rejecting the Church and Her Orthodox Faith, it showed that it had been carrying within it the seeds of its own destruction ever since 1054. When enough people in Western civilization said that ‘God is dead’ at the same time, then they effectively said that their civilization was dead. And spiritual death is always followed by physical death. It is a law of history. It is only a matter of time. For example, by the end of the nineteenth century the European elite had lost its faith and so within the first two generations of the twentieth century, they produced the suicide of two Great European Wars. Loss of faith always and inevitably leads to death for all around.

Q: But wasn’t Western civilization already so weak before the 1960s that its collapse was inevitable?

A: Of course, it had been greatly weakened by the two Great European Wars in the twentieth century, let alone before, but the point is that people could still have realized what the origin of their problems was and returned to the source, to Holy Orthodoxy, which they had had in the beginning. Even in the early 1960s it was still not too late. There were enough vestiges left for people to return to the fullness of the Faith.

God is patient and you can always turn back, even on your death-bed. But no, instead of turning back, even after the blinding light of the atrocities on the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people refused to repent. A whole civilization gone. So sad. Instead of returning, people went even further in their folly of self-destruction in the next generation, that is, precisely in the 1960s. As a popular American song of the 1960s, written in regret for the past, said:

And in the streets, the children screamed,
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed,
But not a word was spoken,
The church bells all were broken.

And the three men I admire most,
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train to the coast,
The day the music died.

These words, ‘the church bells all were broken’ meant that society had renounced the Holy Trinity, they had departed ‘to the coast’, to the outskirts of Western society: the music of God had been silenced among men.

Q: Why did all this happen in the 1960s and not before or later?

A: Because, as I said, it is the next generation, the next 25 years. The first generation had seen the First European War in 1914, the second generation had seen the Second European War in 1939 and the third generation was 25 years later, in 1964. Degeneration, like regeneration, always takes three generations to become widespread throughout society, then it requires further generations for the rot to infect every branch of human life, right down to the level of the family and to the individual.

Q: So what happened in the 1960s, once the masses had been contaminated by the loss of faith, declaring that for them too ‘God is dead’?

A: All kinds of things. First of all, in the 60s there followed a wave of sexual depravity, people began living like cats and dogs. They called it ‘living together’, though old people called it ‘living in sin’. Divorce became the norm, the family began to die out. After a generation of that, husbands and wives ceased to exist and became ‘partners’, as in a business, because everything had become monetized, a question of money and contracts. There were no longer people, only consumers and customers. People were measured economically only, as units of cost and spending.

It no longer mattered who you were, but what you had. What was important was not to be, but to have. People became possessed by what they possessed. People had fewer and fewer children and, within two generations, you saw mainly older people on the streets. Most children were the children of immigrants, often Muslims. The talk was of retirement, pensions, dementia and old people’s diseases, as though that were normal. Society was quite literally dying out.

Q: Why was society ageing? Because of the breakdown of the family?

A: This ageing of society took place above all because hundreds of millions had been killed as a result of the depravity that began in the 1960s, I mean, as a result of abortion. Over the decades tens of millions of little babies were sent off to be turned into ashes in incinerators, just as the Nazis had done with the corpses of their slave camp workers. I think over forty years, it was about six million just in this country.

When you add in all the other Western countries, the figure came to well over one hundred million, far greater than in the two Great Wars. It was the greatest genocide in history, in fact a self-genocide, a suicide. As I said, when for you God is dead, then you are dead too and physical death inevitably follows. God, Who exists, despite the denials of those possessed by folly, looks on and weeps. It was a period of folly, for the greatest delusion, which rejoices Satan, is when people say that there is no God, as the Scriptures say.

Q: Did no-one protest at this wave of legalized mass murder that began in the 1960s?

A: Only small minorities. The masses actually soon began to consider abortion normal and, of course, the media all over the Western world supported this, brainwashing the people; any journalist who wrote otherwise was censored, sacked and would probably have been imprisoned for ‘infringement of human rights’. Abortion became a habit, like taking an aspirin. The profoundly abnormal became normal and the Western world actually condemned and boycotted societies that had normal values, whether their own society in the recent past or else others in the present outside the Western world. You can imagine the billions in profits made by the abortion industry over the decades. The main idea was profit, convenience and comfort, not moral principles, let alone the Truth.

Q: What happened to those who defended the Truth?

A: Defenders of the Truth were systematically accused of lieing….

Q: What happened next in society?

A: Well, having killed God inside themselves, hundreds of millions of people went berserk. All these people, either committing or approving of child murder, began to go mad, so that they needed large quantities of anti-depressants to live. Others poisoned themselves with tobacco, alcohol and other even more lethal drugs, trying to forget and escape. They had no-one to tell their sins to and no-one to receive absolution from and so mental illness reached all-time highs. Others placed images of the demons, reverse icons, around themselves, they bought costumes for their children so that they would look like demons, calling them aliens or witches. And of course the demons are aliens for normal human-beings, but, as I said the abnormal had become normal, exactly as the Apostle had foretold. Paradoxically, as people were unable to face death, people killed themselves. Suicide rates went up and up. There was only one taboo – death, and the dead were usually discreetly incinerated in special centres outside the towns.

At that time, whatever human-beings created tended to be contaminated by the lack of faith and ugliness in souls. Some were condemned to living in ‘blocks’ of concrete and glass and other hideous buildings that were called eyesores. It was a society with the cult of ugliness. They only rarely made anything beautiful or tasteful: music was often just loud noise which actually made some people deaf, and what they called art was often laughable – at best. Films were often obsessed with war, violence, depravity, horror, aliens, zombies and monsters. In a word, the monstrous began to take over life, as the demons came up from hell to the surface and there were demonic manifestations, ‘signs in the heavens’, and so on.

As the decades went by, some even began deforming themselves, destroying the image and likeness of the human in themselves. Some men and women began dressing in rags, as torn and worn clothing became popular. Then some men started dressing like women, some women like men. You could not tell the difference. It was called ‘unisex’. Some people shaved their heads. Others began colouring their hair pink, blue, yellow, green, later sometimes going bald as a result of all the chemicals they used, then inserting pieces of metal into their faces and tattooing themselves, because they were so unhappy with what God had given them. You felt so sorry for those people.

At the same time, in order to escape death, others became obsessed with their bodies, spending billions on special food and in restaurants, ‘sport’, ‘fitness’, gyms and slimming. There was a cult of ‘health and safety’. Others had operations on their bodies and changed their shapes, a few even changed their sex. This movement became quite hysterical and you were not allowed to criticize this, as it had been deemed normal by the State. In fact, you could be arrested for criticisms because by that time free speech was considered ‘intolerance’. Some people tanned their skins, catching skin cancer, others coloured their skin orange or covered their faces with thick layers of chemicals and creams.

Some further deformed their bodies by poisoning their food with chemicals, syrup, hormones and genetic modifications and eating so much of it quickly (called ‘fast food’) that they became obese and developed cancers, diabetes and heart disease. You could no longer recognize some people – they looked physically different, they changed, something had taken them over, as their souls died. So people began dying younger and younger. This was suicide and a great tragedy.

Q: How did people come to their senses?

A: Well, of course, this tragedy brought many tears and all had to come to a crisis. A permanent sense of crisis became apparent in the generations after the 1960s. Only suffering could bring people to their senses. So, in 1989, another generation on, the Western elite in its arrogance started wars of terror all over the world in order to strip other countries of their natural resources and dominate them economically. This was much more ruthless than the old colonialism in the nineteenth century, which had at times at least been patriarchal and even beneficial.

In this way Eastern Europe was impoverished, its factories closed, its young people turned into economic refugees who went westwards, and the whole of the Middle East, as far as the Himalayas and all Northern Africa, from the Ivory Coast and Kenya northwards as far as Pakistan and Afghanistan, was ravaged by Western occupations, bombings and terrorist groups, initially created by the Western elite in order to divide and rule.

All came to a head another generation later in what some called World War III in 2014. With the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government in that year and tens of millions of wretched refugees, mainly from Syria, sent into Western Europe by the Turkish government, the persecution of Christians in the Ukraine and the Middle East and waves of revenge terrorism, there followed a very dark period indeed. It was only after this, through the interventions of the saints, that people gradually came to realize that if they continued, they would destroy the world and it would end very soon.

Many saw no hope. But then, quite miraculously, in the face of death, on the very brink of Armageddon, some began to choose life over death, drawing back from the edge at the very last moment. Little by little people began abandoning the hell that they had created for themselves, they saw through the myths that they had been fed, they came back to ideals, to God and common sense and started living normally again. At last they saw through the consequences of Filioquization and returned to the Church.

Q: What do you mean by Filioquization?

A: The millennial process by which sinless God was replaced by sinful man.

Q: What happened next?

A: As you know, knowledge of the Church began to spread throughout the paganized Western world and several tens of millions repented of secularism and became Orthodox Christians, starting to venerate their own saints again. And then Jerusalem was freed by the Orthodox Empire, as Imperial forces swept down from Russia, liberating Turkey on their way. That was a real miracle because they had been preparing it for Antichrist. That was the beginning of how the Church delayed Antichrist. And that is why we are still alive on this day in 2054, the thousandth anniversary to the day of the Western Folly, that ruthless lust for supremacy which led to the Great Apostasy in the first place.

Orthodox Voices from Europe: Viktor Orban

In this historic speech, the Prime Minister of Hungary cries for Europe to unite and fight the political correctness that is destroying the freedom of Western nations. March 15 – 2016.

The destiny of the Hungarians has become intertwined with that of Europe’s nations and has grown to be so much a part of the union that today not a single people — including the Hungarian people — can be free if Europe is not free.
And today Europe is as fragile, weak and sickly as “a flower being eaten away by a hidden worm.” Today, 168 years after the great Wars of Independence of the European peoples, Europe, our common home is not free!
Ladies and Gentlemen, Europe is not free. Because freedom begins with speaking the truth.
Today in Europe it is forbidden to speak the truth.
Even if it is made of silk, a muzzle is a muzzle.
It is forbidden to say that those arriving are not refugees, but that Europe is threatened by migration.
It is forbidden to say that tens of millions are ready to set out in our direction.
It is forbidden to say that immigration brings crime and terror to our countries.
It is forbidden to point out that the masses arriving from other civilizations endanger our way of life, our culture, our customs and our Christian traditions.
It is forbidden to point out that those who arrived earlier have already built up their own new, separate world for themselves, with its own laws and ideals, which is forcing apart the thousand-year-old structure of Europe.
It is forbidden to point out that this is not an accidental and unintentional chain of consequences, but a preplanned and orchestrated operation; a mass of people directed towards us.
It is forbidden to say that in Brussels they are concocting schemes to transport foreigners here as quickly as possible and to settle them here among us.
It is forbidden to point out that the purpose of settling people here is to reshape the religious and cultural landscape of Europe, and to reengineer its ethnic foundations — thereby eliminating the last barrier to internationalism: the nation-states.
It is forbidden to say that Brussels is now stealthily devouring more and more slices of our national sovereignty, and that in Brussels many are now making a plan for a United States of Europe — for which no one has ever given authorisation.
Ladies and Gentlemen,Today’s enemies of freedom are cut from a different cloth than the royal and imperial rulers of old, or those who ran the Soviet system; they use a different set of tools to force us into submission.
Today they do not imprison us, they do not transport us to concentration camps, and they do not send in tanks to occupy countries loyal to freedom.
Today the international media’s artillery bombardments, denunciations, threats and blackmail are enough — or rather, have been enough so far.
The peoples of Europe are slowly awakening, they are regrouping, and will soon regain ground.
Europe’s beams that rest on the suppression of truth are creaking and cracking.
The peoples of Europe may have finally understood that their future is at stake:
Now not only are their prosperity, cosy lives, jobs at stake, but our very security and the peaceful order of our lives are menaced as well.
At last, the peoples of Europe, who have been slumbering in abundance and prosperity, have understood that the principles of life that Europe has been built on are in mortal danger.
Europe is the community of Christian, free, and independent nations; equality of men and women; fair competition and solidarity; pride and humility; justice and mercy.
This time the danger is not attacking us the way wars and natural disasters do, suddenly pulling the rug from under our feet.
Mass migration is a slow stream of water persistently eroding the shores.
It is masquerading as a humanitarian cause, but its true nature is the occupation of territory.
And what is gaining territory for them is losing territory for us.
Flocks of obsessed human rights defenders feel the overwhelming urge to reprimand us and to make allegations against us.
Allegedly we are hostile xenophobes, but the truth is that the history of our nation is also one of inclusion. and the history of intertwining of cultures.
Those who have sought to come here as new family members, as allies, or as displaced persons fearing for their lives have been let in to make a new home for themselves.
But those who have come here with the intention of changing our country, shaping our nation in their own image, those who have come with violence and against our will — have always been met with resistance.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
At first, they talk about only a few hundred, a thousand or two thousand relocated people.
But not a single responsible European leader would dare to swear under oath that this couple of thousand will not eventually increase to tens or hundreds of thousands.
If we want to halt this mass migration, first we must curb Brussels.
The main danger to Europe’s future does not come from those who want to come here, but from Brussels’ fanatical internationalism.
We should not allow Brussels to place itself above the law.
We shall not allow it to force upon us the bitter fruit of its cosmopolitan immigration policy.
We shall not import to Hungary crime, terrorism, homophobia and synagogue-burning anti-Semitism.
There shall be no urban districts beyond the reach of the law, there shall be no mass disorder.
No immigrant riots here, and there shall be no gangs hunting down our women and daughters.
We shall not allow others to tell us whom we can let into our home and country, whom we will live alongside, and with whom we will share our country.
We know how these things go. First we allow them to tell us whom we must take in, then they force us to serve foreigners in our own country.
In the end we find ourselves being told to pack up and leave our own land.
Therefore we reject the forced resettlement scheme, and we shall tolerate neither blackmail, nor threats.
The time has come to ring the warning bell. The time has come for opposition and resistance.
The time has come to gather allies to us. The time has come to raise the flag of proud nations.
The time has come to prevent the destruction of Europe, and to save the future of Europe.
To this end, regardless of party affiliation, we call on every citizen of Hungary to unite, and we call on every European nation to unite.
The leaders and citizens of Europe must no longer live in two separate worlds. We must restore the unity of Europe. We the peoples of Europe cannot be free individually if we are not free together.
If we unite our forces, we shall succeed; if we pull in different directions, we shall fail.
Together we are strength, disunited we are weakness. Either together, or not at all — today this is the law.
Hungarians, In 1848 it was written in the book of fate that nothing could be done against the Habsburg Empire. If we had then resigned ourselves to that outcome, our fate would have been sealed, and the German sea would have swallowed up the Hungarians.
In 1956 it was written in the book of fate that we were to remain an occupied and sovietised country, until patriotism was extinguished in the very last Hungarian.
If then we had resigned ourselves to that outcome, our fate would have been sealed, and the Soviet sea would have swallowed up the Hungarians.
Today it is written in the book of fate that hidden, faceless world powers will eliminate everything that is unique, autonomous, age-old and national.
They will blend cultures, religions and populations, until our many-faceted and proud Europe will finally become bloodless and docile.
And if we resign ourselves to this outcome, our fate will be sealed, and we will be swallowed up in the enormous belly of the United States of Europe.
The task which awaits the Hungarian people, the nations of Central Europe and the other European nations which have not yet lost all common sense is to defeat, rewrite and transform the fate intended for us.
We Hungarians and Poles know how to do this. We have been taught that one can only look danger in the face if one is brave enough.
We must therefore drag the ancient virtue of courage out from under the silt of oblivion.
First of all we must put steel in our spines, and we must answer clearly, with a voice loud enough to be heard far and wide, the foremost, the single most important question determining our fate:
The question upon which the future of Europe stands or falls is this:
“Shall we be slaves or men set free — That is the question, answer me!”