Tag Archives: Church Truth

‘There is No Grace Outside the Orthodox Church’. True or False?

The very fact that the above statement is sometimes made displays either ignorance of the rudiments of our Faith, or else a pathological state. The latter by definition quenches the Holy Spirit, Who is the source of grace. And yet the statement is widespread among the tiny numbers of pseudo-Orthodox sectarians who are not and do not wish to be in communion with the Orthodox Church, known as ‘old calendarists’, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian and Russian. The Russians are from the Russian Old Calendarists Outside Russia, who are now struggling to overcome their latest pedophile scandal.

Such old calendarists, perhaps 75% of them in the USA, number some 10,000 individuals and are divided into some 20 different tiny sects, which are constantly warring with each other. In this they resemble the various warring Protestant sects, which comes as no surprise as most old calendarists are ex-Protestants. They enjoy telling each other and others, that they ‘will go to hell’, as they are possessed by the spirit of pharisaic condemnation. This is the darkness of every Spiritless and so Loveless human ideology, which stems from demonic pride. Such pride is founded on praise of self by condemning others.

In this way they feel superior to others, their hearts swollen with self-loving pride, as they have deprived themselves of the Holy Spirit and so of humility. They fail to understand the basic theological truth that we are saved only by Divine Mercy, never by any narrow human ideologies, which are always founded on the absence of love, that is, on hatred. The pharisees ignore the words of Christ, that ‘the wind (Spirit) blows where it wishes’ (Jn. 3, 8) and of the Creed: ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit…Who spoke by the Prophets’. These words clearly disprove the human ideology that there is no grace outside the Church.

Denying these words, the human ideologists of exclusive grace, that grace belongs to them only, declare that Christ was lying, that the Prophets were not saved, including the Forerunner John, the last Old Testament and first New Testament Prophet, was not saved, and nor was the Mother of God, at least for the first 33 years of her life. They deny that the Spirit can blow and call people into the Church, like the Jews before Christ spoke to them, like the Archangel-visited Inuits before St Innocent came to them. And such is their anti-historical sense and hatred that they condemn generations even of their own ancestors.

St Sophrony the Athonite explained Orthodox theology to us nearly fifty years ago, in 1978, before many of the saint-denying, ‘Orthodox’ sectarians were even born. This followed a scandal on Mt Athos. Orthodox sacramental theology is clear, he said. The sacramental forms outside the Orthodox Church are not sacraments, but rites. The sacramental potential of those rites is only activated by the grace that comes from contact with the Church. Thus, there is no need to repeat the rite. Anything that is ritually deficient (single immersion or splashing instead of triple immersion, for example) is covered by the grace of the Church.

The fact that people come to the Church is proof that the Church transmits (non-sacramental) grace outside of Herself, the free and direct grace of the Holy Spirit. However, that grace cannot be maintained in the world without the support of the grace from the sacraments, that is, sacramental grace. This explains the age-old and universal (except among the new, US, pseudo-Russian old calendarists) practice of the canonical Russian Church of receiving Catholics by confession and communion. Certainly, when I was in the old ROCOR, I received Catholics thus, in faithfulness to the practices of the old, Russian ROCOR.

As an Orthodox prison chaplain, I am in constant contact with Orthodox thieves, fraudsters, rapists and even murderers. They are all baptised Orthodox Christians. Do these then have grace, whereas my fellow-chaplains, Catholic or Protestant and other good, but Non-Orthodox, people, have no grace? This is absurd and reveals only that the old calendarists have no knowledge and experience of life in their gloomy and negative ghettoes, where apparently the Sun does not shine. They are victims of their own ideology of censorious, accusatory and sectarian judgementalism, so self-isolated from the Church.

Those who deny the presence of any grace outside the Church, deny that the Church is like the Sun – it shines on all, the righteous and the wicked alike. Those who deny this, limit God, taking over His role as the Only Giver of grace of the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father, and not from old calendarist schismatics. No ‘infallible’ Pope, of Rome or of any other Western Capital, can dispose of the Holy Spirit. All such bishops are literally ‘disGraceful’. In the homelands of Orthodoxy, ancient homelands as in Western Europe, or modern homelands as in Eastern Europe and West Asia, we know this from experience.

 

 

 

 

 

A Reality Check for Reader-Victims of ‘The Economist’

A spectre haunts the West: He is called Christ.

When I taught at Business School in Paris, I had to read ‘The Economist’ every week. Of course, the magazine was transparent. We could see through it as a magazine that saw human-beings as no more than economic units to exploit and be exploited. It was anti-Christian and therefore with a very twisted view of reality. Rothschild-owned, it reflects above all the views not just of the British Establishment with its State mouthpieces in the BBC, tabloid print media, Oxbridge, MI5 and the rest of the State apparatus, but of the whole Trostkyite (‘globalist’) Western Establishment, with its UN, EU, NATO, G7, bankers, Davos and the groups that stand behind them. Sadly, its many victims (‘readers’ – including even a few who actually claim to be ‘Orthodox’!) are so naïve that they swallow the myths peddled by it without understanding reality.

A recent amusing article (amusing because it was so badly written and misinformed), claiming that the Russian Church is ‘too close to the Kremlin’ (!) was typical. Last July the Russian Foreign Minister,  Sergei Lavrov, speaking at a conference in Germany, explained this absurd Russophobia: ‘The West hates Russia because it is returning to its traditional values’ ( = Christianity). Thus, the anti-Russian conspiracy theories peddled by such magazines are ultimately based on the inherent anti-Christianity that infects and informs the whole Western Establishment. Thus, following the well-known Party line, this article regretted the 1990s, when Harvard adolescents, neocon oligarchs and their gangster hirelings were in charge of an alcoholic Russian President in Moscow and the people were starving and dying from despair by the million.

That was the period of the banksters at the top, when at the grassroots the Russian Church, at last freeing Herself from the Western (‘Soviet’) State, began to baptize 100,000,000 people. Today, as the Church continues to strengthen and fight against Western-inspired secularist nominalism, She is at last beginning to influence the all too strong remains of the State. Although most of the Russian media is still in the control of the Western media, although much of the education and health systems are still in the grip of anti-Christian bureaucrats, the Church is at last beginning to influence the State: in truth, the Russian State is ‘drawing too close to the Church’ for the likes of the Western Establishment and ‘The Economist’. For them faith must be a private affair and have zero influence on politics, economics and society in general.

After the West had organized the 1917 coup in Saint Petersburg and replaced the legitimate Christian government, then on the verge of victory in the German War, a victory which terrified the West, it ignored the greatest persecution in history. Like all the others, ‘The Economist’ did not report on the 600 martyred bishops, the 120,000 martyred Russian priests, monks and nuns and the tens of millions of victims of Marxists. After all, most of them were Non-Russians, like Lenin and Trotsky, and had lived and been trained in the West for years before being sent back to Russia in 1917 to create havoc. Neither did it report on the holocaust of the 27 million victims of the Western invasion of 1941, longed for both in Berlin and London. ‘The Economist’ had no space to report on martyrs for Christ; its interest was in Mammon.

Today, 100 years on from those awful events, the Western elite is worried. What if the Christian Church should revive and challenge their secularist ideology? What if the State became Christian? The thought terrifies them because they would lose power; hence the anti-Russian propaganda.  All of this is published in a country which runs a ‘State Church’, whose every bishop is appointed by Prime Ministers, most of whom are atheists who support every perversion! Let the scribblers rant as the Russian State starts to become Christian again thanks to the Church of God. Let the scribblers hate Christ and His Holy Church and all us Orthodox Christians. For we shall go on ignoring them, in the knowledge that Christ is coming and will sweep away all these fantasies. The Truth will set you, enslaved by Western propaganda, free!