We do not want to go to Rome, Constantinople or Moscow, we want to go to Heaven! We want Archpastors, not Archpoliticians!

The Nature of the Church and its Governance

Q: With the schism between Greeks and Russians, some say that the Orthodox Church does not exist. What would you say?

A: Of course, it does not exist and never has done. But this is nothing to do with the current political dispute, created by the CIA. The words ‘the Orthodox Church’ are abstract, but the principle of the Church is concrete, it is the Incarnation. The Church it is not an abstract idea, as in the minds of Protestants, it is real in places. Concretely, we think of the real Local Orthodox Churches, of Orthodox Christianity, of the Orthodox Faith. Such was the situation in the New Testament, with the Local Churches in Corinth, Ephesus, Colossae, Philippi, Galatia, Thessaloniki, Rome. Today there are sixteen Local Churches, double the number 150 years ago. In 150 years’ time, that number may well double again to 32 Local Churches, in any case reaching at least 24. What is One and creates Unity is the Orthodox Faith, shared by all the Local Churches.

Q: Can the Church be corrupt?

A: If you see ‘The Church’ as a group of upper middle-class Anglican bishops appointed by an atheist or Hindu Prime Minister, as I think you do, then it is corrupt. However, that is not the Church, that is a mere human organisation, founded by a corrupt and evil King out of lust and some of whose properties were ‘privatised’ and handed out to his cronies, and which is run by accountants. In reality, the Church is the Body of Christ (in the words of the Apostle Paul), and it is run by the Holy Spirit. This can be seen clearly in the case of the Church in heaven.

As for the Church on earth, I think it can be likened to a huge Ship, carrying to Paradise those who sail in it, the captain, the navigator, the senior officers, mechanics, cooks, waiters, cleaners, plumbers, doctors, as well as the very many passengers, who are baptised. Some of these help the crew greatly, some do not, in fact they hinder. Sometimes some passengers decide to leave the Ship on lifeboats, which get lost or sink, others follow in the wake for a time and some from them get back on. Some passengers jump off, others come in new boats and climb on board. If the latest captain is bad, so what? Sooner or later the Owner of the Ship will come and change course, appointing a new captain. In the end, all are only passengers, who follow the Owner.

Q: Is the Church hierarchical or congregational?

A: If you are Roman Catholic, especially a traditionalist, then it is hierarchical. If you are Protestant, then it is congregational. If you are a normal Orthodox Christian, it is both. However, if you are some sort of old calendarist / ROCOR convert and you dream of dressing in clerical or monastic garments and hats and having a long beard or, if a woman, of dressing as a nun, then it is hierarchical. And if you are a liberal modernist, then it is congregational and you ignore and despise bishops.

Q: What happens in a Church if there is a shortage of suitable candidates for the episcopate?

A: We recently had the visit of a Romanian bishop. He told us how he and the Metropolitan are the only bishops in the Metropolia of Iasi of over 1,200 parishes. The Metropolia is in fact run by 15 deans, married priests. This system of delegation works very well. And that is in a Local Church which has a lot of active monasteries.

I remember in Moscow in 2007 being told that the Russian Church had 2,000 candidates to be bishops. This was quite untrue. They had in reality 2,000 single men who had an interest in a career in the Church. In fact, over 300 of the 2,000 became bishops. The results have been catastrophic and many have already had to be defrocked; many others will be. Single men with an interest in the Church do not make bishops! When will this common sense fact be understood in Moscow and Constantinople?

If there is a shortage of good bishops, then delegate! Thus, in the Russian Church exhausted bishops rush around at the end of Lent and in Holy Week doing long unction services, whereas in the Romanian Church priests can do unction services every month, if they wish. Such things are delegated. Only ordinations are not delegated.

Q: What sorts of bishop are there in your experience?

A: There are the real bishops, who are shepherds and love their flock, who loves them: St Spyridon, St Nicholas, St Nectarios, St John of Shanghai. The rest are lovers of themselves – administrators, narcissists, intellectuals, careerists, thieves, sadists, bullies, sexually disturbed homosexuals, pedophiles and psychopaths.

Q: What is more important, frequent confession or frequent communion?

A: Both. There should be frequent communion and confession, together with frequent prayer, the prayer of the heart and prayer from the prayerbook. This is different from the heterodox world, which has only frequent communion.

Q: Ever since the incidents in Amsterdam in 2022, the Russian Church has been known as ‘the Persecuting Church’ and lost most of its credit. How did a Persecuted Church become a Persecuting Church?

A: Persecution certainly was not present until 2008, when Patriarch Alexis was there. Then tens of millions of newly baptised and sometimes very zealous people and clergy worked enthusiastically hand in hand to rebuild the Church. The change came afterwards, with the spirit of centralisation (an old Soviet hangover), Papalisation (all those visits to the Vatican were a sign of this), bureaucratisation (the paperwork which was suddenly demanded by the Centre and detested by the priests), the military-style clericalisation (literal uniformity in dress, but also in political opinions), the closeness to the State and the Armed Forces, ‘blessing’ tanks, bombs and guns, and the insistence on rigid discipline, ritualisation and the use of archaic and little understood Slavonic.

All I can say is that the Persecuting Church developed in a process between 2008 and 2022. Let us take the mid-point of 2015 as a symbolic date for its appearance. And the essential reason for all this is that by then State politics, raison d’etat, had been put above pastoral love and above the support for Orthodox teaching. Schism followed. Schism always follows politics, that is why we speak of party (part) politics.

Q: Has your parish ever produced a monk?

A: Yes, we had one. However, he went to a monastery in the USA, where he was ‘touched up’ by a monk. He fled and came to complain to the bishop here, who had already turned down the offer of a free monastery, which had involved me in a lot of hard, but wasted, work. That bishop in turn made homosexual advances to the monk. The result was that the monk fled from him too. Later, others fled.

Q: Where do you think ROCOR is heading today?

A: In 2007 it had the opportunity of bringing its liturgical and ascetic heritage to help in renewing the life of the ex-Soviet Russian Church and the Local Churches in the Diaspora, as the late Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) insightfully urged. Instead of making a positive contribution, however, ROCOR gradually began developing into a negative exclusive sect and cult, especially after 2017.

Having only a very small ethnic flock, it began recruiting crazies. The rest, as they say, is history. Therefore, today its American Synod is already in schism from most Local Churches, for which it has expressed hatred, not love. After its recent meeting at its former US church in Munich, donated to it by the CIA, I fear it may turn altogether into a Californian homosexual and pedophile sect. See: https://www.bing.com/search?q=pokrovtruth+fr+seraphim&FORM=PVSBDF&PC=PV02

The Undivided World and the Zionist World

Q: How did the Western world come to dominate the rest of the world until quite recently?

A: This is the question raised, but only vaguely answered, by the great Roman Catholic cultural historian and philosopher, Christopher Dawson (+ 1970), the English Berdyayev, in such books as Religion and the Rise of Western Culture. Here he writes that Western supremacy comes from a restless spirit, a spiritual energy, ‘a spirit that strives to change the world’. In Orthodoxy, we know what that spirit is; as a Catholic, he did not.

Before the eleventh century there was a multipolar world, as the Pentarchy of five Patriarchates was, which was not dominated by any one centre. We can see this in the life of the saintly English King Alfred the Great, who visited Europe, sent alms to Jerusalem, which he never, quite unthinkably, tried to seize from the Muslims. He also sent alms to India and despatched a mission to explore the countries around the White Sea.

Multipolarity is a sign of diversity and of unity in diversity, the sign of the Holy Trinity. The late historian Robert Moore describes in detail how from the early eleventh century on, any diversity was persecuted, in his The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250.

Multipolarity was gradually destroyed by what we can call Zionism or Universalism. The First West, the West of the first millennium, was pre-Zionist, that is, diverse. The symbol and reality of this Zionism is the filioque. That heresy, adopted in the late eighth century as an imperial ideology in what is now western Germany and spread slowly until it was promulgated in Rome in 1014, is anti-Trinitarian. It dePersonalises the Trinity, making the Father and the Son into One and the Holy Spirit the mere link between them (as portrayed in many a heretical icon). This is why the Church insists on the Holy Trinity.

To the Vatican it was rather irrelevant, as the Unitarian Head of their ‘Church’ is the Pope of Rome, whom all must obey. Protestant Unitarians are like freemasons, who believe in One Architect-God. Thus, Western Europe moved away from the ascetic and grace-filled towards the legal and the moral, as seen, for instance, in Roman Catholic ‘days of obligation’ and Protestant puritanism.

Q: What is Zionism, in theological terms?

A: Zionism means universalism that is, globalism, the movement towards One World Dictatorship, homogeneity, unity without diversity, overseen by oligarchs. These think they are infallible, superior to those whom they consider to be lesser human-beings. Trotskyism is a classic example. Today’s extraterrestrial (or is that demonic?) ‘Muskism’ is another. Zionism can only exist outside the Holy Trinity, which is the principle of unity in diversity.

Here it is important to state that Zionism is by no means necessarily Jewish. By far the majority of Zionists are not Jews. Indeed, a great many Jews are anti-Zionists. For example, the last Non-Zionist US presidents were Eisenhower and Kennedy, that is, over sixty years ago. Since then, all US presidents have been Zionists, whether Democrat or Republican, but none has been a Jew. One of the greatest British Zionists was the psychopathic Churchill – he had no Jewish blood, despite what absurd conspiracy theories claim. His ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, was also a Zionist. Other British Zionists include Cromwell, Rhodes, Thatcher and Blair, among many others.

Moreover, even among Jewish Zionists, there is huge variety of individuals, of left and right and nothing at all, for example, Rothschild and Marx, Trotsky and Zuckerberg, Freud and Spielberg, Sarkozy and Zelensky, in the UK Maxwell, Mandelson, Starmer (by his wife), Straw, the Milibands and Polanski, or in the USA, Epstein, Witkoff, Kushner and Cohen (Trump’s mentor and friends).

Some homosexual politicians are also Zionists, for example, Mandelson (and many other Blairites such as N. Brown), Lord Ali, the Dutch Rutte, several in the US-run Baltic States, and the US Bessent, Graham and many others.

Some pedophiles are also Zionists and are very active in the media, for example in the gagging-ordered, heavily censored (‘editorially controlled’) BBC. This perhaps should be called the ABCC (the Anti-British Broadcasting Corporation), as it appears to be controlled by Zionist journalists and pedophiles too numerous to name here, for Savile, Harris and Edwards are only the tip of the iceberg.

Today parts of the USA appear to be ruled by Zionist oligarchs and perverts, the so-called Epstein class, the majority of whom are not Jewish, but who are globalists. They run the banks, the oil corporations, Silicon Valley, the nuclear-armed military, Wall Street, Hollywood, the PR industry, the legacy media, the social media and pseudo-academia. They operate by sanctions and tariffs, instead of by encouragement and development. To drain the US swamp and not to be sucked into it must be very difficult.

Contemporary Wars

Q: Would you say that the wars in the Ukraine and Iran form one single World War?

A: Yes, but it must be understood that this World War is not only a military War and that it began decades ago. Indeed, for 35 years, since 1991, the West has been embarked on a war against the world, which has been composed of a series of campaigns to promote a ‘forever’ war in several phases, both military and social. This began in Iraq and Serbia, spread to Afghanistan, created the chaos in Libya and Syria, included the campaign against the anti-globalist Brexit, the social engineering attempts to enforce the manmade climate change and net zero myths and to poison the weak and elderly with manmade covid, and then the new phases of this one single war, in the Ukraine and Iran.

Is Today’s Rome Washington or Moscow?

Q: The US Secretary for War, Hegseth, has on his chest a tattoo in the form of a red cross, surrounded by four smaller crosses. It looks Orthodox. Is it?

A: No. This US Secretary for War wears the crusader cross. He has, after all, like the crusaders, tried to destroyed to invade West Asia and Eastern Europe. These crusades have since 1096 become worldwide. Thus, President Bush also launched a ‘crusade’ against Iraq, as he publicly declared, and that is why the current US Secretary of War wears a crusader cross tattoo. He follows a very long history.

It is all logical. Just as the Papacy used excommunications and indulgences, so his successors, the US President in his Capitol and the EU Commissars, use sanctions and tariffs. However, those ‘infallible’ and ‘exceptional’ Fascist crusaders, who are above the law, not only cannot win in the Ukraine against a Superpower like Russia, they cannot even win against a regional power like Iran. Washington is not Rome.

Q: Is Moscow the Third Rome?

A: When Archbishop Nikitas was at last appointed Archbishop of the Greek Thyateira Archdiocese in Great Britain in 2019, in order to save a Greek ethnic group from rapidly dying out, he gave a radio interview to the Spectator. In this he stated that the Moscow the Third Rome idea is absurd, that there is no Third Rome, only a First and Second Rome! In other words, he was only a mouthpiece for Phanariot ideology. As one very senior and outspoken (in private) Greek cleric from the Patriarchate of Constantinople said to me of his own Patriarch last year: ‘We are waiting for the toilet to flush’. His words, not mine.

Rome, First, Second or Third, are all an absurd and fatal distraction, worse still, a delusion and those who believe in it are delusional, whether in Washington or Moscow. We want Jerusalem, not Rome. Romes are the downfall of the Church. We do not want to go to some Rome, we want to go to Heaven. We want Archpastors, not Archpoliticians. The so-called First, Second and Third Romes are irrelevant in Church life, as they all fell, in 1054, 1453 and 1917 respectively. Why keep harping on about the fallen and disappeared past? Neither Moscow, nor Constantinople, nor Rome are of any importance or help now, as we face, potentially, the end of the world.

Hatred of Russia

Q: Why do so many politicians hate Russia, but not other Orthodox countries like Romania, Greece, Bulgaria? King Charles, for example, loves Romania, and owns properties there, tourists love Greece, yet many hate Russia.

A: The elite of the Western world hates Russia and not other Orthodox countries, because the latter are small, poor and weak, unlike Russia, which is vast, rich and powerful. In other words, it is all about jealousy and greed for resources.

The British elite especially hates Russia, because in October 1917 Russian-language, Marxist ideologues overthrew the masonic MI6 regime imposed on Russia by the British between December 1916 and October 1917. This is why they made up the Litvinenko, Salisbury and now El Money cases as cheap propaganda. In the same way, the American elite hates Cuba and Iran, because they are the only ones who successfully overthrew CIA-imposed regimes.

As regards British Russophobia, see in greater detail: The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain from 1815 to 1841: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion by John Howes Gleason, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, London Oxford University Press 1950.

President Putin

Q: President Putin seems to be very cold. Do you think he is?

A: I have only been able to observe him one in real life, in 2007, but I think his apparent coldness is because he is probably autistic, that is, he is someone who is brilliant at systems, but perhaps lacks people skills. He is an ultra-cautious diplomat and lawyer, who does everything by the book. He has an excellent memory and is brilliant at chess and German, but he presents a very blurred image of Russia.

Nobody quite knows where he stands. He used to be a devout Westerner, a protégé of Yeltsin, who wanted to join NATO. He has acknowledged publicly his many mistakes of naivety after 2014. Many blame him for the Ukrainian situation and not acting then, which would have been far less destructive of life and property. His present indecisive diplomacy is frustrating to some and makes him seem weak and naïve. As a result, he has led Russia into full-blown nationalism. Neither his previous Westernism, nor his present nationalism are Orthodox. We are still obliged to wait for Russia to move out of both these deviations, Westernism and nationalism, towards Christ.

Q: Who could replace Putin in this year’s Russian elections?

A: The elections in Russia next September are Parliamentary elections, not Presidential. President Putin will stay. But the influence of the former Westerner and now strong Russian nationalist Medvedev may become a lot stronger. Rightly or wrongly, he is seen as strong and decisive. Others have unflattering views about him. We shall see.

Personal

Q: Do you hope to live a long life?

A: I hope so, as there is still so much to do, or so it seems to me, but what I hope is completely irrelevant. God decides. Perhaps tomorrow I will be gone! As Chaucer wrote: The life so short, the craft so long to learn.