Tag Archives: europe

2013: Challenges before the Church

As 2012 draws to a close and we enter 2013, we both look forwards and look backwards. 2013 is the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan and the 400th anniversary of the House of Romanov. This will be followed by other years commemorating momentous centenaries: 2014, the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War; 2017, that of the Revolution, the immediate entry into that War of the USA, the British agreement to found the State of Israel and the Armenian genocide – all within a few months of each other; 2018, that of the martyrdom of the Russian Imperial Family and the end of the First World War; 2019, the Treaty of Versailles, whose injustices made the next German War inevitable.

We recall how with every generation, every 25 years since 1914, history has been patterned by momentous events. 1914, the First War and the European suicide; 1939, the second part of that suicide and the Western Slav and Jewish holocaust; 1964, the social revolution and the Western abortion holocaust; 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Empire, leaving only one Superpower, and all the consequences of this, good and bad, for Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq, South Africa, Northern Ireland, the EU, China and the Muslim world. We wonder what the year 2014 may bring.

For the Russian Orthodox Church, the past 25 years have brought freedom, renaissance and unity. Over 80% of the multinational population of the Russian Federation, the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Kazakhstan is Orthodox. 164 million people confess the Russian Orthodox Faith, 75% of the total.

Although concentrated in one seventh of the world, the Russian Orthodox Faith is confessed by sixty-two nationalities, in Japan and China, in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in Central Asia, and, via the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, throughout the whole world. This has meant that the thirteen other far smaller Local Orthodox Churches, many of which have suffered spiritually bruising and compromising Westernisation, are now inevitably looking to the Russian Orthodox Church for global Orthodox leadership in the globalised world.

However, there are also great problems.

Inside Russia, the Church has been subject to a year of persecution by renovationism. This renovationism has often been supported ideologically by the writings of various, at present fashionable, schismatic Russians from the emigration in France and the USA, who refused to remain faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church Tradition. However, that renovationism is only a front and has a much deeper political aspect.

Openly supported by the Western Powers, their intelligence agencies and their so-called ‘NGOs’, remaining Soviet-style atheists have wanted to destroy the Church, exploiting both vestiges of hopelessly old-fashioned Soviet ideology and fashionable anti-Christian Russophobic Western ideology, exploiting the naïve and the satanic. Steeped in the ideology of Russia’s anti-Russian wreckers, Gorbachov and Yeltsin, they are anxious that the Church is beginning to influence the Russian State for good, bringing it back to Christian values. Ths, they have wanted to slander the Patriarch, the clergy and Church teachings. Their devilish intentions have not succeeded.

The demographic problem also remains profound in all Orthodox countries, regardless of whether they are in the EU or outside it. Until the States concerned can provide decent and affordable conditions in which mothers can give birth to and bring up children, supported by responsible fathers and husbands, this demographic problem will deepen. ABC, Alcoholism, Abortion and Corruption, continue to ravage all the Orthodox countries: Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Romania, the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Russian Federation itself.

Internationally, there is the threat from the Muslim world. The Western-exploited political protests in Bosnia, Kosovo, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and especially the war in Syria could easily spill over. Syria is virtually a neighbour of Russia. The situation in the nearby Caucasus remains fragile. Central Asia, bordering Afghanistan, could easily be affected. Here the West is playing with fire, risking ‘blowback’ from its meddling.

Then there is the missionary challenge. China, soon to become the world’s greatest economic power, is on its way to becoming the largest Christian nation on earth. It must become Orthodox, overcoming the facile errors of the widespread semi-Christian Western schisms, which are all but dead in the spiritually bankrupt Western world itself. Since the apostatic West has little interest in the real words of Christ and His Orthodox Church, let the East take up the yoke that is light.

The solution to economic and demographic problems and missionary challenges is to restore the Orthodox Christian Commonwealth, Romaiosini, Holy Rus. The embryonic Eurasian Union, set to overtake by far the stagnant and bankrupt EU, is the starting point for this. We would expect Orthodox countries, which have fallen into the EU temptation, partly because of the Russophobic reaction to the oppression of the old Soviet Empire, to withdraw from the German-run EU Europe or be ejected from it in the coming years.

A new generation of unprejudiced politicians in those countries will judge if today’s Russian Federation is deSovietised and can therefore be trusted. Their countries will need the support of the new Eurasian Union – the Russian Federation, Kazkhstan and Belarus. This Union could spread its protective influence into Eastern Europe (to the Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Bosnia in particular) and the Middle East, where Orthodox minorities live.

There are many temptations, many failings, many weaknesses and many attacks on the Church to come. The Orthodox Faith has to be preached worldwide before the end – and we have only just started. All the great days and the great challenges are before us. We are only setting out on a long and huge road. The real revolution, the spiritual one, is yet to come. May the grace of God guide us.

30 November /12 December 2012
Holy Apostle Andrew the First-Called

On the Second Vatican Council

Introduction: ‘We Have Lost Western Europe’

‘We have lost Western Europe’. These were the words that a senior Catholic layman said to me last week as we discussed organising the arrival in England of the Czestochowa Icon of the Most Holy Mother of God and its visit to the London Cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. His words are not exact, for Catholicism has lost not only Western Europe, but also North America and Australia.

The fact is that Catholicism in Africa, Asia, Latin America, let alone in Catholic Eastern Europe, is a very different sort of Catholicism from elsewhere. It is a sacral Christianity that values and respects the sense of the sacred – a Catholicism in other words far closer to the Christianity of the Orthodox Church than any other type of Catholicism. I know this as a Russian Orthodox priest, for on a weekly basis I meet Catholic Poles, Italians and Lithuanians who come to me and tell me that they want to come to our Church, because ‘Catholic churches in England are no good. They are Protestants’. Not my words, but theirs.

A Sad Fiftieth Anniversary

Most Catholics in Western Europe today are lapsed. It is an extreme rarity to find any Catholics, including practising ones, who agree with the official policies of their Church. There is no doubt that the Second Vatican Council that opened fifty years ago in Rome is in part responsible. Perhaps in great part. Certainly it led to the protestantisation of the vestiges of the Orthodox Christian Tradition of the first millennium, still kept by the then Catholic world, by introducing the desacralising rationalism and humanism of the Northern Protestant world.

Twenty years ago in France, where I then lived, a senior Catholic priest spoke to me of the effects of that Council, saying: ‘We created all the sects’. He was referring to the explosion of exotic sects in France since the 1960s. He blamed his own Church for this; the fact that the new Catholicism had removed all sense of mystery and the sacred from its services, demystifying the Church and no longer satisfying the spiritual needs of the people, was for him responsible for the disaffection of the masses and their absorption into all manners of sects, often founded by dangerous charlatans.

The Errors of the Council

We can see this clearly if we look at areas of change and unchangingness as a result of the Second Vatican Council. As regards change, the great change was in ‘the Mass’. Latin was replaced by local languages. This seems good in principle, but when we look in reality, we see that it was a disaster. You do not exchange something for something worse, but for something better. In other words, the vernacular translations were often vapid, spiritually uninspired. And once Latin was replaced, so a whole liturgical, cultural and musical tradition was also jettisoned – and not replaced. The whole feeling of the Mass changed, illustrated, for example, by the fact that Catholic priests no longer faced God, but turned to face the people, as though worshipping them and not Him.

For many, clergy included, the Catholic Eucharist became, as in Protestantism, a mere commemoration of bread and wine – or rather of biscuit-like hosts. Received in the hand, distributed by laypeople, crumbs swept away into bins, without any meaningful fast beforehand, without confession (now called ‘reconciliation’) beforehand, the Eucharist lost any remaining sacral reality. The same attitude was taken towards the Virgin Mary, relics, the priesthood and a multitude of practices of Catholic piety. Though most of these relatively recent practices were alien to ancient Orthodoxy, they at least represented popular piety – and they were not replaced. They were lost.

What Should Have Changed – and Did Not

As regards unchangingness, the first error was surely keeping Papal centralisation and infallibility – despite all the verbiage about promoting Local Churches. As regards birth control, there was another tactical error. To keep the ideal of no artificial contraception is good, but why make this into what many outside Catholicism now view as its central tenet? And what of pastoral economy or dispensation? The rigid dogmatism of this policy lost Catholicism hundreds of millions and made at a stroke almost all its married couples into hypocrites. Worse still. This policy was to be implemented by a priesthood on whom celibacy was enforced. Tens of thousands gave up the priesthood as a result and at the same time feminist revolt was ensured.

This also guaranteed that a large number of homosexuals and pedophiles were drawn into the Catholic priesthood – in Ireland the figure in a much depleted priesthood is said to be 25%. This was already hypocrisy, since for centuries Catholicism had allowed a married priesthood for its Uniats and today allows a married priesthood for its ex-Anglican Ordinariate. It was even more hypocrisy in Africa and Latin America (not to mention France, Italy, Spain and Portugal), where many priests are in reality married and have families – and always have been. But the main result of compulsory celibacy for the Catholic priesthood is simply a chronic lack of priests and hosts distributed by laypeople.

Conclusion: The Baby and the Bathwater

By the early 1960s a Roman Catholic Council was needed – if only to attempt to shake off the vestiges of Fascism, with which Catholicism had so cruelly compromised itself during and after the Second World War – not least in Croatia. However, it has often been said by Catholics themselves that the Second Vatican Council threw out the baby (the essentials) with the bathwater (the non-esssentials). But not even this is not true. The Second Council threw out the baby BUT KEPT the bathwater. More exactly, the Second Vatican Council threw out the remaining traditions of the Orthodox Christian First Millennium and kept the inessentials of its semi-secular Second Millennium.

The present ‘celebrations’ of the Council in the Vatican by a Pope who supported the changes then but regrets them now, are highly symbolic. Many have called for a Third Vatican Council. However, this means two different things. Some want a Third Council that will sweep away any heritage that remains and fully desacralise, rationalise and humanise Catholicism. Others want to restore the old-fashioned Catholicism and its Latin Mass, taking it back to the past before the Council. Neither is the solution. Let him who has ears hear.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,
London

4/17 October 2012