Tag Archives: Corruption

NOTHING HAS CHANGED: ON THE RUSSIAN CLERGY ON THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION

From the Memoirs of St. Mardarije (Uskoković)

Fpr those who do not know the Russian Church and Russian history well, below is the key to everything. Having read it, you will understand why the Russian Revolution, with the brutal persecution of Russian Orthodox, carried out mainly by baptised Russian Orthodox, took place.

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips

St Mardarije (Uskoković)

The future St. Mardarije (Uskoković) (1889–1935), the first Serbian bishop in the United States and Canada, spent more than ten years in Russia on the very eve of the revolutionary events that brought tragic and unprecedented trials to the Church. The uniqueness of the young Serbian hieromonk from Montenegro lay in the fact that during his years of study and service in Russia he interacted with a remarkably broad circle of public and ecclesiastical figures, from Volhynia and Kishinev to Kiev and St. Petersburg. As a vivid and exceptional personality, he was welcomed into various homes and circles and spoke extensively with bishops and other representatives of the Russian clergy. At the same time, he was always filled with ardent love for the Russian Church, Russia itself, its spirituality, history, and culture, to which he became deeply spiritually akin in the fullest sense.

Hieromonk Mardarije (Uskoković)

He began early to write and speak about various problems in society and Church life. It is possible that his judgments and actions were marked by a certain youthful fervour and naivety, but they were also entirely sincere. The young servant of the Church soon revealed a gift for preaching, which was especially appreciated by the Russian flock. Several collections and pamphlets by the future saint were published in Russia, and he himself took part in the Local Council of 1917–1918. As a man deeply immersed in Church life and personally acquainted with it from within, the future bishop wrote with pain about certain phenomena he observed.

It is interesting that the young hieromonk repeatedly expressed his views on the state of the Russian clergy and on relations between bishops and priests in private conversations with outstanding hierarchs and pastors of the Church in Russia. Many of them listened to his assessments with attention and interest; some agreed, while others disagreed less with his conclusions than with the practical steps he proposed for changing the situation as he saw it from distant Montenegro. Nevertheless, the memoirs and descriptions of the future saint are of special value, first and foremost because they illuminate important aspects of the life of the Russian Church on the eve of the terrible trials that befell it after the Revolution, and they compel us to reflect on what lessons and examples we may draw from the tragic experience of the Russian clergy more than a century ago.

The memoirs Incomprehensible Russia was written by St. Mardarije in the 1930s, though it is possible that it was based on periodic notes written earlier and later assembled into a unified work. Its English-language text, entitled Incomprehensible Russia, was discovered only relatively recently and is dated 1935. A Serbian translation was published in 2017 with the blessing of Bishop Longin of New Gračanica and Midwestern America at St. Sava Monastery in Libertyville.

From the Chapter ‘On the Russian Clergy’

Representatives of the Russian episcopate, for the most part, very rarely descended from their thrones into the midst of ordinary life. Avoiding contact with common people, they also tried not to allow the lower clergy to come too close to them.

Such aloofness was explained by the belief that close interaction with parishioners and priests could undermine the authority of the “princes of the Church,” whereas distance only elevated them further.

Only a few fortunate members of the lower clergy ever received a “gracious” invitation to dine at a bishop’s table. Fewer still were those who could freely visit a bishop expecting a warm reception.

The attitude shown toward me by the higher Russian clergy was, of course, exceptional. To this day I gratefully remember the hospitality with which certain bishops and the rector of Kazan Cathedral, Archpriest Ornatsky—who was not only a priest but also a philosopher—received me. But things were quite different with the Russian priesthood generally, as I repeatedly observed while traveling throughout Russia.

Yet there are no rules without exceptions, and among the one hundred and thirty Russian bishops there were notable exceptions to the rule I have described of proud isolation. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the Russian episcopate was divided into two classes: those who kept themselves apart and enjoyed a lifeless authority sustained by vanity formed the first and much larger class, while the second, smaller group consisted of those unconcerned with their own dignity, who believed in spiritual communion with the people and regarded the clergy not as subordinates but as fellow labourers in the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.

This smaller group did not lose authority; on the contrary, it raised its authority in the eyes of clergy and parishioners alike by creating a living bond of mutual love and respect in place of the armour of cold formalism. How far the first group stood from the meek image of the Savior, walking through the wheat fields of Galilee with words of love on His lips and seeing nothing degrading in washing the feet of His disciples. Nothing but mutual love and faithfulness explains why the Lord’s disciples were ready and glad to die for Him.

I recall a typical example from the first, larger group, which I once witnessed in a bishop’s reception hall.

In a large round chamber, petitioners and visitors stood waiting along the walls, as was customary in the offices of ministers and government officials, while important and highly placed persons were received in the bishop’s private study.

After some delay, the bishop appeared accompanied by a secretary carrying pencil and paper. The bishop began walking around the room while the secretary followed behind, taking notes concerning the business of the petitioners.

At first the bishop was cold, dry, and formal. Suddenly something displeased him in one of the priests who had come with a petition, and he unleashed the full force of his anger upon him. The petitioner was stunned and too frightened to gather himself and explain; besides, the bishop gave him no opportunity to do so.

Nearby stood a rural priest with an ascetic, deeply wrinkled face resembling one of the fathers of the ancient Church. It seemed as though St. Anthony the Great, Paul of Thebes, or Pachomius the Great had come there from the Egyptian desert. In his aged hands he held a petition requesting the ordination of his grandson so that he himself might retire.

But he could not withstand the bishop’s fury. Trembling, he dropped the petition from his weak hands, as though expecting that the bishop’s wrath would soon fall upon him as well.

Distressed by this sad and unseemly scene, I turned my gaze toward the corner of the reception room, where there stood a blessed icon of the Savior, who patiently endures even those who have sinned deeply.

Although the bishop kept an icon of the Savior in his reception room, I saw no evidence that this stern, thunderous hierarch carried that image within his own heart.

During my years in Russia I encountered bishops from both groups, and now I would like to sketch a pair of contrasting portraits.

I remember one bishop from the first group very clearly, because I studied together with him.

As an academy student he distinguished himself in nothing except his enormous stature and thunderous voice. In these he had no equal.

Lacking particular spirituality, he paid great attention to the external appearance of a priest. If one of his fellow students—a monk gifted with talent, spirituality, and a true pastoral calling—merely trimmed his beard, our future bishop sharply criticized him. His own beard was always very large, since he regarded it as a necessary outward symbol of three qualities he himself did not possess: piety, spirituality, and monastic restraint.

Even during his student years, while still only a monk, he openly declared that he expected to become a bishop. At the time this amused us more than impressed us. But he had influential friends, and after graduating from the Theological Academy he advanced through the ecclesiastical hierarchy twice as fast as normal. A talented graduate without connections needed about ten years to reach a bishop’s see. He achieved it in four. He quickly became a vicar bishop, and soon afterward received his own diocese.

Before departing for his diocese, he summoned representatives of the diocesan clergy to the capital in order to instruct them regarding the ceremonial arrangements for his solemn entry into his new episcopal residence. Everything was carefully prescribed, and they returned with detailed instructions on how he was to be received generally and, in particular, how he was to be greeted at the diocesan border.

Before boarding the train, he changed his appearance, replacing his modest black monastic cassock with a purple one and decorating his mighty chest with all the honours he possessed.

The train arrived at the station, where officials had gathered on the platform awaiting the new bishop. His personal railway carriage, adorned with flowers and branches, stopped opposite a special reception area, and from it emerged the bishop in solemn procession, immediately surrounded by the crowd ordered to greet him.

At the appointed hour he arrived at the cathedral for the solemn liturgy, where a great crowd awaited him, including clergy, officials, and military officers. Seeing his immense stature—for physically he resembled Ilya Muromets—and hearing his powerful voice, those present imagined that a giant both of spirit and body stood among them.

But disappointment awaited them. At the conclusion of the brief service the bishop addressed the people, as was customary. His voice carried beyond the cathedral walls, but his words were banal, empty, and devoid of spiritual meaning.

An even greater disappointment awaited those who sought an audience with him the next day. Despite carefully prepared letters of recommendation, it proved far from easy to obtain access to the new bishop. By the evening rumours had spread throughout the city and diocese that a steel barrier, embodied in the secretary and the bishop’s lay brother-assistant, had arisen between the bishop and his flock. Visitors had to pass through the purgatory of double interrogation. Moreover, it was their practice not to admit petitioners and not even to listen to those seeking spiritual support. Such people were sharply dismissed: “The bishop should not be troubled over trifles.”

Nor did the bishop himself show much hospitality toward those wishing to visit him—whether bishops from other dioceses or former fellow students, even those who had become outstanding preachers.

He politely declined such visits. In this way he succeeded in protecting not only his cathedral but the entire diocese from visits by authoritative, energetic, and talented individuals.

Thus he became a highly successful representative of the first group of bishops already described.

And now—a portrait of a very different kind of bishop, a man who made an unforgettable impression on me.

A large crowd of people, myself among them, waited beneath the warm spring sun for the arrival of the train. That day too there was a crowd, but with one important difference. The people had come not because of an episcopal order, but voluntarily, having heard many good things about him.

Animatedly conversing, everyone watched intently as the train approached the platform, then rushed toward the last carriage, where governors and bishops usually travelled.

We waited for the bishop to appear. A minute passed, then another. Our impatience grew, but no one emerged onto the platform. Someone bolder asked the conductor and then turned to us and announced that the bishop had arrived in a third-class carriage attached directly behind the locomotive.

Without losing a moment we hurried there, but it was too late. The bishop had already left the station through a side exit, hired the first cabman he found, and gone to the cathedral.

At first those standing in the cathedral were perplexed by his modesty and simplicity of dress. But the opening words of his address explained everything. His speech was fiery, and the hearts of the listeners “burned within them” (Luke 24:32). Some even wept. The sermon concluded with the words of the Great Shepherd: “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28), to which the bishop added: “Believe me, the doors of my home will always be open to all who are in need of help and counsel.”

Those present at the reception of the new bishop departed with warmth in their hearts and the joyful news: “This new bishop is right for us.”

In the first months of the Russian Revolution, a phenomenon occurred in many dioceses that at first glance seemed surprising. Priests gathered together to vent their anger against their bishops. I witnessed such scenes many times, but I was not surprised. In those dioceses no spiritual bond united bishop and flock, and there was nothing surprising in their desire to replace a worthless bishop with a better one. In some dioceses the bishops were better, and everyone knew it.

During those revolutionary days I attended an assembly in one such diocese. At the mere mention of the bishop’s name, thunderous applause broke out, although he himself was a thousand versts away in Petersburg on diocesan business.

I understood well what had provoked such an ovation. Several years before the Revolution I had accompanied him on an inspection tour through the diocese. He visited peasants in their humble village homes. He spent much time with his clergy, instructing them, paying attention to their children, and explaining to their wives how they might become true friends to their husbands and help them bear the heavy burden of responsibility. With interest and love he asked about their troubles and emphasised the importance of their labours for the welfare of the Russian people.

It is no wonder that when the Revolution began, priests and laypeople unanimously demanded the return of absent bishops such as this one. They knew they could rely on him in difficult times.

 

 

 

 

 

The House Springs Tragedy: The Church versus the Ambitious and Greedy Bureaucrats of the New ROCOR

The Fake Monastery in House Springs: Spiritual Abuse in ROCOR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq1mdZhUD5g

Spiritually I was brought up in the old Russian émigré Church. Regardless of its division-causing, internal squabbles, its bishops (let alone its priests) lived in poverty and modesty. Most spent their time in church services and prayer in their humble cells. Most did not have a car. Most took part in cleaning their modest church and other day-to-day activities like everyone else. When they passed away, most left nothing behind them, except for a change of clothes and some books and icons. Such was the old generation of bishops, whom we loved and respected.

Meanwhile, in post-Soviet Russia, which I first visited in 2007 officially and after that almost every year, officially and unofficially, until 2018, the Church was booming. 100 million were baptised, tens of thousands of churches and hundreds of monasteries and convents were reopened, renovated or built. And money flowed. And that is how the corruption began among the officially celibate episcopate. First came the money, then came the lust for power, then came the spiritual emptiness, then came the inevitable homosexualisation and the schisms. (See, for example, in Budapest). The result of all this? The episcopate began persecuting the Church of the parish clergy and faithful people.

Seeing this, what did the heirs to the old émigré bishops, by then passed away, do? Sad to say, instead of remaining faithful to their heritage, they wanted to copy them. From about 2016 on, the same demons of corruption entered into them. House Springs was among the firstfruits and it has been followed by a whole series of cases in the scandal-ridden ROCOR episcopal persecution of priests and people in the USA and Western Europe. They had replaced the acquisition of the Holy Spirit with the acquisition of money, property and power through attempted bureaucratic intimidation and ‘protocols’, nowhere mentioned in the Gospels. Its episcopate is no longer composed of servants of the servants of God, but of ‘princes of the Church’, to use the Papist expression for cardinals, on whom they model themselves.

By their fruits ye shall know them….

 

 

 

Trump

I am just old enough to remember the assassination of J F Kennedy. I did not understand what was happening then, but my parents told me that the act was typical of a country of cowboys, but they were also sad because Kennedy was a man who, they said, ‘could have changed things’. Perhaps my parents were thinking about Kennedy’s reluctance to make war and so enrich the US military industrial complex, which Eisenhower had a little before warned Americans about.

Now we have the attempted assassination of one who is highly likely to be the next US President. A turn of his head saved him. In England, for the moment, hate figures get drinks thrown in their face. Not in the USA. However, given the hate speech against Farage in the Establishment media, his assassination would not be surprising, even in non-cowboy England. Neither is the widely predicted attempted assassination of Trump surprising. Senior Democrat politicians had, indirectly, been calling for it, as also mainstream media journalists. Having failed to imprison him, some wanted to kill him.

Spiritually speaking, how do we understand this? Trump is hardly a man of piety. Would God save him? A man of his financial and sexual disorders? A man who for four years allowed the 100% Clinton-Obama Democrats’ policy of arming the Ukraine in order to weaken, destroy and dismember Russia to continue?

However, Trump did say something else about the Ukraine more recently. He said that he could bring peace to the Ukraine within 24 hours. Paradoxically, people who call for peace are always the victims of violence. But they are also protected by God. A turn of his head. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God’.

Ironically, however, in order to make peace, we have to fight, fight, fight.

Fight against the Deep State/Establishment and fight for Nation and Family.

Fight against the corruption and homosexualisation of the State and fight for justice and humanity.

Fight against the corruption and homosexualisaton of the Church and fight for Truth and Love.

Why We Reject both Roman Catholic and ‘Orthodox’ Popes

Real Orthodox Patriarchs and bishops claim only spiritual authority. However, there are a few Orthodox Patriarchs and bishops who appear to claim temporal power also, just like Roman Catholic ‘Popes’, whose power they seem to admire. Those Popes have consistently claimed both spiritual and secular power. But what is the origin of the claim of the Roman Catholic Popes to this?

The earliest and most famous forgery which justified this blasphemous claim is known as the ‘Donation of Constantine’. It was fabricated in a Papal scriptorium, probably as early as the 750s, in order to get military support from the Germanic King, Pepin the Short, against barbarians attacking Rome. In any case, the earliest known allusion to it is in a letter of 778, in which Pope Adrian I asks Charlemagne to endow his Church with land and income.

According to this document, several centuries earlier Emperor Constantine the Great had, out of gratitude for a cure from leprosy, ceded ‘to Pope Sylvester (285-335) and all his successors until the end of the world all the imperial insignia’, that is, the totality of ‘the imperial greatness and the glory of our power’. Constantine also allegedly ceded to Pope Sylvester ‘both our (the Lateran) Palace and the City of Rome and all the provinces, localities and cities of Italy or Western regions’. However, from a simple attempt to get protection and sponsorship from a local Germanic king, the Donation of Constantine was to be turned into the centrepiece of a massive enterprise of falsification.

The first Pope to abuse the Donation came three centuries later. This was Leo IX, in a letter sent to Patriarch Michael of New Rome (Constantinople). The Pope cited a large portion of the document and this led automatically to the Western Schism of 1054. Having supposedly received full temporal power over the West, the Popes strove to transform all its kingdoms into Papal fiefs and their kings into vassals. Thus, in 1059 Pope Nicholas II gave Orthodox southern Italy and Sicily (if he could conquer it) to the Norman bandit Robert the Cunning (in Old French ‘Guiscard’), on condition that he pay him homage.

Next, in 1066, Pope Alexander II gave England to another Norman gangster, William the Bastard, on the same condition, this betraying the people of England too. Then, in January 1077, Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) forced the German Emperor Henry IV to humble himself before him and recognise his suzerainty at Canossa. The (English) Pope Adrian IV (1154-1159) next betrayed Ireland, granting it as a ‘hereditary possession’ to the King of England, Henry II, because ‘all the islands are supposed to belong to the Roman Church under ancient law, according to the Donation of Constantine, who richly endowed them’.

To justify their power-grab project of universal monarchy, from the twelfth century onwards the Popes employed an army of legal scholars who developed a new canon law, using forgeries to make their new system appear to be the oldest. The purpose was to invent precedents for the sovereign authority of the Bishop of Rome over the Universal Church on the one hand, and over all Western secular sovereigns on the other hand. Slowly but surely, from one coup d’état to the next, thanks to its magic weapon of excommunication, the Pope became the overlord of Europe, receiving allegiance and tribute from countless kings.

However, the forger of the Donation of Constantine gave the Popes spiritual supremacy not just over Western Europe, but over the whole world. Thus, Constantine the Great is made to decree that the Bishop of Rome ‘shall govern the four Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople (which did not exist at the time of Constantine as Patriarchates!), as well as all the Churches of God throughout the world. The Popes who will now preside over the destiny of the most holy Roman Church will be the highest, the head of all priests all over the world and all things will be regulated according to his decisions’.

This Papal claim of supremacy over other Patriarchs was yet another betrayal of the original ‘Catholic’ (= Conciliar, in the Orthodox sense of this Greek word) constitution of the Church. This was an attempted coup against the principle of brotherly entente that was the condition for the Holy Spirit to guide the whole Church. Already, in the year 1001, in response to a request from Pope Sylvester II to ‘restore’ to the Holy See eight counties of Italy, the highly-educated, half-Greek Western Emperor Otto III had denounced the ‘negligence and incompetence’ of the Popes, as well as ‘the lies forged by themselves’ written ‘in letters of gold’ and placed ‘under the name of the great Constantine’.  He for one clearly had no illusions about the forged Donation.

While the Donation was used as a legal document by the Papacy from the eleventh century, its authenticity or validity were challenged. At the beginning of the 13th century, Walther von der Vogelweide, a poet close to the ‘Holy Roman’ Emperor Frederick II, though not disputing the origin of the Donation, saw it as a great misfortune, which reversed the natural order of the world and caused infinite suffering to Europe. Frederick II had his lawyers declare it unlawful: Constantine simply had no right to make it. As for the Italian poet Dante (1265-1321), he wrote:

Ah, Constantine, how much evil was born,
not from your conversion, but from that donation
that the first wealthy Pope received from you!

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 19, lines 115–117

However, by the 15th century the fraudulent origin of the Donation began to be recognised widely through a fairly simple critical analysis (for example, how could Constantine evoke the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which did not even exist then?). Yet no official apology was ever presented by the Vatican for its fraud. In fact, nothing changed fundamentally in the attitude of the Papacy and, although already unmasked as liars, in 1870 they resorted to the absurd claim of ‘Papal Infallibility’.

Today US Presidents, who from their Roman temple in Washington act as successors to the Popes as the ideological leaders of the Western world, do exactly the same thing. They operate by coup d’etats, overthrowing other governments by ‘regime-change’, thus exacting allegiance and tribute from today’s puppet ‘kings’, and issuing illegal ‘excommunications’ (now called sanctions), proclaiming that US Presidents too are infallible and ‘exceptional’.

We reject the Sanhedrin of the scribes and pharisees, for we belong to the Church of Christ. However, this essay is not an anti-Roman Catholic polemic. Ordinary Roman Catholics are the first victims of this fraud of Papal power. They have our sympathy. And as we mentioned at the very beginning of this article, a few individual Orthodox Patriarchs and bishops also try and claim more than spiritual authority. In reality, our Church is the one of married priests, church communities and families, all together, for we all have a family life. As for more spiritual things, we go to monasteries and hermits, who are celibate by Divine calling, not by the ordinances of mere men.

Orthodox Patriarchs and bishops are administrators and spiritual guides like the apostles, and they should most certainly have nothing to do with money, property and power, which all inevitably lead to corruption and moral decay. And if they are involved with this corruption, then they are not with us, but are against us, the ordinary people, parish clergy, monks and nuns, as they make themselves into mere ‘princes of the Church’, exactly like the Popes. For their spirit too is precisely that of Papism, even though they may dare to call themselves ‘Orthodox’, which they are not.

 

 

Unholy spirits or the Holy Spirit?

‘Russia and its Orthodox Church think they are the holiest and most traditional, but see how they stack up in their corrupt nation! Not only among the world’s highest rates for alcoholism and abortion, they also enter the top fifty countries for rates of homicide, no matter how many bishops or priests they have’.

Opinion seen in social media

 

I suspect that the writer of these words is a neophyte who has just had his first disillusion. If he has faith he will survive, as he will after all the disillusions to come. If you don’t want to be disillusioned, it is very important to get rid of your illusions as soon as possible. If he is still there in fifty years time, then all is well. After all, Orthodoxy is not about ‘becoming Orthodox’ but about remaining Orthodox.

First of all, his ‘Holy Russia’ is a mistranslation of Holy Rus, Rus meaning all who confess the Russian Orthodox Faith, wherever they may live. Do not confuse it with the Russian State, either before the Revolution, or after the Revolution, or with the post-Soviet State. This young man mentions ‘Holy Rus’. Although I prefer the term ‘Orthodox Rus’, it refers to the ideal of holiness, which is nevertheless a real aim among a few, I would say, among about 1 in a 100.

Thus, there are 200 million nominal Orthodox in the world, of whom about 75% are Russian Orthodox. However, only about 1 in 100 actually belong to Holy Rus, that is believe in and strive for the reality of holiness of Russian Orthodoxy. Similarly of some 20 million Romanian Orthodox (thus Russian and Romanian Orthodox together number 85% of the nominal total), only about 1% belong to Holy Romania, and the same proportions go for Holy Greece, Holy Serbia, Holy Bulgaria, Holy Georgia and all the even smaller Local Churches etc. (However, in my wide travels throughout the Orthodox world, I would make one exception, Moldova, where in my view perhaps as many as 4 in 100 are seeking ‘Holy Moldova’).

We can say then that only about two million Orthodox actively confess and therefore seek the Orthodox Christian ideal of Holiness, that is, they have real faith. In countries of the Diaspora, where even nominal Orthodox rarely make up more than 1% of the population, I would therefore put the number of those who belong to Holy Rus, Holy Romania, Holy Bulgaria etc, or for that matter to Holy England, Holy France, Holy Italy etc, at about 1 in 10,000 of the population.

Here we state that the only Faith that has Holiness as its ideal is Orthodox Christianity. This is because of our confession of the Holy Spirit, which is unique to it, which can change it from a mere State-sponsored or institutional religion to real faith. Thus, the religion of Catholicism has substituted for the Holy Spirit a kind of pious, obligatory moral obedience to its Pope. The Protestant religion has substituted for the Holy Spirit the priggish prudery of a moralising puritanical straitjacket, in which sexual sin is virtually the only type of sin. Other religions have their ideals too. Islam has as its ideal that there is only One Great God, pantheistic Hinduism that there are thousands of gods, Buddhism has as its ideal meditation to reach ‘nirvana’ etc

However, in fairness to Non-Orthodox, the majority of Orthodox Christians, as is especially visible among some senior clergy, have also substituted mere ‘religion’, State-sponsored institutionalism, for the Holy Spirit and faith. There is at times little difference between them. A favourite ‘Orthodox’ substitute is Nationalism. The young man quoted above has clearly seen this substitute among some and now seems to be on his way to denying that Holy Rus even exists! Perhaps he is obsessed with someone else’s nationalism, American nationalism, for instance. Another favourite ‘Orthodox’ substitute for the Holy Spirit is Phariseeism, with its ritual observances and cult of blind obedience to anti-spiritual and anti-Christian sectarian gurus, usually of clerical rank.

The combination of these two deviations, Nationalism and Phariseeism, is the worst of all worlds. I visited the Ukraine many times over the last few years, after I had been appointed ROCOR missionary representative for Europe by the late Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral). (This was in the days of the old, pre-Trump Church). In the Ukraine I saw exactly that Uniat spirit which has long existed there. Basically: As long as the rite is the same, nothing matters. ‘Glory to the Ukraine’ – as for God, he has no importance. Today we pray for Kyrill, tomorrow for Francis, the day after for Filaret, the day after that for Epiphanius and then…for Antichrist. But the rite is the same. Nothing else matters. Here is why there are so many ‘Churches’ in the Ukraine. As for the Holy Spirit, some of them there have clearly not yet heard of Him, which is why those are murdering their own people.

However, in fairness to the 1% of ‘Holy Ukrainians’, who face the enmity of the 99%, is it any better in Russia? After all, it was Russian bishops who persecuted St John of Kronstadt, the Eucharist-Giver, who at last changed the very decadent attitude to communion before the Revolution. Those bishops made him rector of the church he had himself founded only after 40 years of his priesthood! Another St John, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe (as we have always called him here), was deprived of his see and put on trial in San Francisco, not by Arians, Iconoclasts, Papists, Turks, Communists, Nazis or Ecumenists, but by his very own fellow ROCOR bishops, some of whom I knew and were still unrepentant in the early 1990s. Their hounding and harassment led to his early death.

But they were both only following in the footsteps of a third St John, St John the Baptist. And we know what happened to him. But we should not despair. Only in the last six weeks, icons of St John of Kronstadt (in St John’s Church, Colchester) and of St John the Baptist (in the Russian Patriarchal Cathedral in Kensington) have given off myrrh. All Orthodox (if only all had seen it) who have seen the excellent film ‘The Man of God’, or before that read Sotos Chrondopoulos’ excellent Life of St Nectarius, will know what I am talking about.

Quite simply: Who demanded the crucifixion of Christ? It was the chief priests, the intellectuals (‘scribes’) and self-appointed righteous (‘pharisees’). Such is the lot of us all, to be put on trial by the same Caiaphas for being real Orthodox. And we recall this today especially, when we remember how the Imperial Martyrs were betrayed precisely by Grand Dukes, famed aristocrats, generals, businessmen…

I remember in 1980 a conversation I had with the late Fr Alexander Schmemann about the episcopate inside the then Soviet Russia. He simply answered my question about them: ‘Half of them are saints and the other half are rogues’. I remember later a young man coming from Eastern Europe. He was quickly made priest, though only because he spoke Russian and knew how to flatter. He openly molested women-parishioners and stole large sums of money from his church, driving all away with his scandalous conduct. For that he was given award after award by his bishop. He should have been defrocked several times over, as also, frankly, his bishop. But, instead, his bishop was also given awards, despite destroying his diocese by ordaining and encouraging such a figure and defrocking others.

The problem today is that because many senior clergy have no authority –because there is no presence of the Holy Spirit among them – they only know harsh and punitive authoritarianism. The search among careerists is not for the Holy Spirit, but for money (corruption), glory (power), and perversion. All of this is vain money, vainglory and depravity – the same as in most contemporary Western political life, which increasingly is entered only by those who have failed in the real world and seek money and power or else are perverts. None of them has yet heard that: ‘Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory’.

Here we cannot fail to mention the elephant in the room, the homosexualisation of the Orthodox episcopate over the last fifty years. Although sad exceptions have always existed, for example in sixteenth-century Russia (when they were called ‘sodomites’) or in nineteenth-century Russia, their numbers now have risen everywhere. Of the 1,000 Orthodox bishops in the world (I must have met about 100 of them over the last fifty years), 20% – 30% of them must be homosexuals. Thus, Greeks speak of ‘the lavender mafia’, Russians of ‘the pale blue mafia’ and Americans simply of ‘the gay mafia’. (Thank God there have so far been only three known examples of pedophile bishops, one in France, one in the UK and one in North America). We know of seminarians of a very conservative jurisdiction who openly displayed themselves and yet years later were ordained and are now consecrated. The problem with such is also their appalling jealousy of and therefore persecution of, married clergy who have children, which they cannot have. The latest scandal in the Greek Church in the USA only confirms this. Such is the danger of being ‘first without equals’.

Yes, the end of the world is coming. There will come a point when none of us will be able to go to church any more and there will be no sacraments. Then the end will come, on account of narcissists, who ‘love their own selves’ and are ‘unholy’ spirits. It was all foretold:

‘This know also, that in the last days times of stress shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, implacable, slanderers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, reckless, swollen with deceit, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away’.

(2 Timothy 3, 1-5)

‘We ourselves glory in you in the churches of God for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and tribulations that you endure’.

(2 Thess. 1, 4)

St John’s Church, City of Colchester

The Imperial Martyrs, 2022

Q and A May 2019

The Corruption of the Constantinople Episcopate

Q: What do you make of the appalling allegations against certain members of the episcopate of Constantinople, which are now making their rounds on the internet? Is this fake news? Or, if is true, is it time for us to have a married episcopate?

A: When I first saw the allegations, clearly not fake news, I wondered what the fuss was all about: these stories have been well-known for decades, though, true, they have never been issued on the internet. The corruption of Orthodox bishops in the Diaspora is well-known. There was the Russian bishop in Paris, sent to Siberia, when Moscow actually got to realize it was all true, the Serbian bishop who had to ‘retire’, the episcopate of a certain group in the USA known as ‘the gay mafia’, who therefore fell under the thumb of a certain priest who had the dirt on them, the Greek and Russian bishops in Europe with their boyfriends or multiple mistresses, the one they called ‘Johnny Walker’ (we know how he died) and the chain-smoking bishops from the Middle East and the alcoholic Slavs. All this has been well-known for decades and generations. However, the latest stories with Rolex watches worth 400,000 euros and all the sordid details worthy only of British gutter tabloids, do bring it down to a different level (or depth).

Of course, the Protestant-minded immediately call for married bishops. I am completely opposed to this. First of all, it would be completely unfair on their wives. It is difficult enough for the wife of a priest to have her husband. The wife of a bishop would never see him. Then, secondly, it would introduce nasty careerism among married clergy. It is bad enough among certain hieromonks and archimandrites, without polluting the married clergy.

There is only one solution: to stop electing bishops from among candidates who are candidates simply because they are not married. Otherwise you will simply end up, at worst, with pedophiles and homosexuals who only have contempt for married priests, women and children (as among the Catholics) or, at best (?), with narcissistic professional bachelors who have no love for anyone except themselves and their favourites and operate a mafia against real pastors. We have seen enough of both sorts and suffered enough from them during 40 years. They are the only enemies of the Church and always have been. They wreck dioceses and ruin lives. There is only one solution: monastic renewal. If you are not living a monastic life in a monastery and you have no pastoral experience and love for the people, you cannot become a bishop.

As for the sort of bishops described in Constantinople, they must all be defrocked asap. We have had enough of them. All they do is bring the Church into disrepute and upset and persecute the sincere parish priests and the pious faithful. And, above all, they can be corrupted by the US State Department which has all the dirt on them all and so can blackmail them – just like the KGB did in the days of the Soviet Union, just like the CIA does in the Ukraine today.

Q: What do you think of the appointment of Metr Elpidiphoros as the new Greek Archbishop of America?

A: His name means ‘bearer of hope’. However, he is the bearer of despair. Expect schisms in the Greek Church in the USA, Australia and Great Britain. Indeed, they have already begun, with priests and parishes leaving them for canonical Orthodoxy. It is the beginning of the end for the rule of Constantinople. Sad though it is, it is inevitable and, ultimately, this will be a positive event. God is not mocked. We have to live for the future, not for the corrupt past. All will be providential. And Providence is God’s Love in history.

Russian Orthodox Church Matters

Q: I recently visited Russia and saw and heard some strange things from some people. For example, someone told me he knew an Orthodox man who was sure that Stalin will one day be canonized. An Orthodox woman I met said that she thought the Russian Church should become like the Catholic Church. Are such views widespread?

A: Today’s Russian Church is 90% a Church of converts, so inevitably you do occasionally come across extremes and marginals, or to put it very frankly, ‘weirdos’, nationalists, ecumenists and what have you. On top of this, you can also encounter among some clergy the hangover from the Soviet period – centralization and bureaucracy (though this was to some extent also present before the Revolution). I should not worry about it. This will all pass, it is all a phase of growing up. And it all only affects some; most are solid. Remember to look at the wood, not at the trees.

Q: The Russian Orthodox Church has for several months now an Exarchate in Paris. You had written a lot about this before it happened. Why does the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (including yourself) not participate in it?

A: The Russian Exarchate is for the moment very much on paper only. It is centralized, bureaucratic, missing bishops on the ground in Italy and Scandinavia, which like Germany is not included in it. The Exarchate is so far not real, not local, not skilled, not pastoral. And I know this from concrete contacts at the very highest AND the very lowest level. It is not at all ready to operate like the best of the Church Outside Russia (where it exists) and does not even want us to take part in it! Our offers of help have been rebuffed, several times, as they prefer to take orders from Moscow, where they understand nothing of the situation on the ground. It is not ready – by far!

When the Russian Exarchate is ready to be pastoral and to become a real Exarchate of (and not merely in) Western Europe, then we shall see changes. For now it clearly lacks the necessary pastoral skills and local knowledge, being a disincarnate  export from Moscow. It will need several years to grow up. The task, duty and mission of the local Church Outside Russia in Western Europe are precisely to prepare the terrain for this moment, filling the largely empty infrastructure created by Moscow, going before, like St John the Baptist.

Speaking as the only priest in the Russian Church who has ever been awarded a jewelled cross by Patriarch Kyrill (seven years ago) and a second such cross by Metropolitan Hilarion of New York (three years later), I believe that the Exarchate is not viable without ROCOR.

Pastoral Psychology

Q: What is the difference between low self-esteem and humility?

A: Low self-esteem comes from being humiliated, insulted and bullied. The victim of humiliation and bullying stops believing in themselves and doubts everyone and everything and can hate themselves and even self-mutilate. However, this is in contradiction with the last two words of the commandments, to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves. We must love ourselves. Not because we are anything other than sinners, but because God loves us. Anyone who believes or has experienced that fact that God loves them, will not fall victim to low self-esteem, but will become humble. Low self-esteem is the result of believing in the opinions and actions of nasty narcissists and sadistic bullies, whatever rank they may hold, more than in God.

Q: Is it true that there are only two choices in the Church, marriage or monasticism?

A: Only as an ideal. I would say, and I think I have said this before, that in reality there are two and a quarter choices. The quarter choice is for all those who for some reason do not fit in to either of the main choices at present. In other words, we must always be prepared for exceptions and exceptional circumstances. For example, there are, though they are very rare, celibate priests, neither married, nor monastic.

 

 

A Fools’ Paradise

And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees.

Lk 3, 9

Election results in Italy have brought political instability and ungovernability. So read the headlines. Of course, some would say that political instability has been the order of the day in Italy since the fall of the Western fragment of the Roman Empire in the year 476. Yet Italy is still there.

More seriously, however, the current political stalemate in Italy has in part been caused by the appearance of a new populist protest party, the ‘Five-Star Movement’, which is fed up at the corruption of the whole political elite, the euro it imposed and the austerity policies of an unelected, German-style, technocrat Prime Minister, imposed by Brussels and the US. No-one should be surprised. The same thing has already happened in many European countries, where many others are also fed up with the democratic deficit of EU-imposed policies, not to mention mass immigration and yet at the same time mass unemployment.

‘A plague on both your houses’ comes from Italy, but it is universal. In France there is the Front National, which under its present leader is breaking the mould of the old identical left-right technocrats, who all come from the same elitist schools. In Greece a rather extreme political protest party called Syriza has moved out of the old and corrupt two-party system of left and right. In Great Britain the Independence Party (UKIP) is upsetting the old two/three party system and its public school boys. The old political mafia of Western Europe, shown to be incompetent by the financial crisis which it directly created but refuses to take responsibility for, is falling.

In Italy, the situation was made all the more complex – and corrupt – by the situation whereby for some fifty years after 1945 the right was kept in power, government after government, by corruption and US dollars, in order to prevent Italy falling to Communism. The corruption was guaranteed by a self-perpetuating elite, kept in power by mythical democracy. The democracy was mythical because the electorates were only ever given a choice between two self-interested and almost identical individuals, who between periodical elections did whatever they wanted, regardless of what the electorates may have wanted.

However, it is unlikely that anti-elite populist protest parties will actually bring a solution, at least not in the long-term. The underlying problem of Western Europe is debt and bankruptcy. For a generation and more, government after government in country after country has avoided the essential issue of debt. All political parties, including the new anti-elite populist parties, are quite unwilling to make the drastic cuts to budgets that all Western European countries have to make if they are to stave off ever closer bankruptcy in their ever closer union.

One of the essential weaknesses of Western so-called ‘democracies’, run by accountants, is short-termism. No political party actually thinks of national well-being, only of its own well-being – and survival through the next elections – so each party simply makes promises that it can never keep. As they say, ‘if it is too good to be true, it is’. No political party wants to do something openly and immediately unpopular – such as cutting State spending and employment by the huge amounts necessary if Western Europe (+ the USA + Japan) is to avoid a bankrupt future. So instead there is slow but inevitable decline.

Does this mean that austerity, in a far harsher form than even at present, is necessary? Does this mean that we approve of Thatcherite economics, that is, of economic egoism which panders to the basest and greediest instincts of humanity, to the idolatry of Mammon? Does this mean that we approve of an ideology which denies that society exists and has turned tens of millions into economic refugees, creating mass emigration and mass immigration, uprooting communities and destroying family life across Europe, East especially, but also West?

No. In reality, there are huge amounts of money in the world; it is just that so much of it is in the hands of very few. If austerity is shared by all, then that austerity can be bearable. What is unbearable is when the poorer half of society has to bear everything. Some kind of austerity is inevitable, but that does not mean, as in Spain and Greece and Italy, as in Latvia and Estonia and Hungary, that people literally have to starve and the young have to emigrate to Canada and Australia, if they can. Austerity has to be, but it also has to be fair.

Forty years ago, amidst the consumerist frenzies of 1970s materialism, the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn pleaded with the selfish Western world for ‘self-limitation’. What he meant by this was the necessity for it to distinguish between selfish wants and actual needs. Most Western ‘wants’, artificially created by manipulative advertising and publicity, are not what we need. Most of Western Europe, merely copying its US idol before it, has been living in a fantasy world of debt for over forty years. With the ‘revelation’ (at least, to some) that banks had been lending money which they did not have for much of that time, reality is now dawning. And that reality is past selfishness, because it never thought of how children and grandchildren would cope with the accumulated debt.

However, this ‘Third Way’ of self-limitation is not a political problem; it is a spiritual problem. And here is the rub. Self-limitation means repentance for greed and selfishness, acceptance of needs and rejection of wants. And that means a shift in values and a shift in ideology and a shift in the whole pseudo-democratic Capitalist Western system, a fools’ paradise. And this is not going to happen because the Western world agrees to it. But it is going to happen – because the Western world is rapidly coming to the point when it will have no say in the matter. A bankrupt has to live within his means, whether he wants to or not.