Tag Archives: Hope

Shipwreck or Salvation on the Rivers of Babylon?

Introduction: Shipwreck

Whenever groups have left the Church for political, that is, for secular, reasons, they have inverted the values of the Church and so found themselves shipwrecked. Thus, the founding values of the Christian Empire, long ago defined as ‘Orthodoxy, Sovereignty (deliberately misunderstood by secularists as Autocracy) and the People’, are all derived from our Trinitarian Orthodox Christian Faith. ‘Orthodoxy’ refers to our Christian Faith in the Father of Love, ‘Sovereignty’ refers to the Incarnation of the Son in the world but sovereign and free from the world, and ‘the People’ refers to the sanctification of the peoples by the Holy Spirit.

We can see the inversion of these principles in the values of the renovationists and modernists on the fringes of the Orthodox Church, like those around the Paris Archdiocese of ‘Rue Daru’. They deform the values of ‘Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People’ into their opposites, ‘Anti-Orthodoxy, Secularism and Russophobia’. With Faith in the Father rejected in favour of fallen humanity, Faith in the Incarnation of the Son in the Christian Empire rejected in favour of the secularism of disincarnate private delusions, and Faith in the Holy Spirit rejected in favour of intellectuals, Orthodoxy is reduced to mere rationalist humanism.

Anti-Orthodoxy

Anti-Orthodoxy is expressed by liturgical modernism in imitation of heterodoxy. This includes the use of the Catholic calendar (so-called ‘new’ calendar), the celebration of evening Liturgies and the deliberate absence of iconostases (‘to be more like the Catholics’), defective knowledge and ignorance of how the services are celebrated, sometimes even of the Eucharistic Liturgy) and the substitution of knowledge of the Typikon by abbreviations and fantasies, such as conducting the Proskomidia in the centre of the church or the interruption of the Liturgy by ‘charismatic’ calling out of names of anyone to be prayed for.

It includes a lack of musical culture, poor behaviour in church (sitting on the floor; children running about without discipline), the use of colloquial Russian instead of Church Slavonic in the Liturgy, the disappearance of confession and obligatory communion for all, including that of practising homosexuals and Non-Orthodox. This is not only not the Russian Tradition and certainly not the Greek Tradition of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, in fact it is no Tradition at all. To liturgists like the late Archbishop George (Wagner) of the Paris Archdiocese (‘Rue Daru’) it was, and to others like him it is, only ignorance.

Secularism

Archbishop George (Wagner) used to complain to me that the problem of Rue Daru was that it had been founded by individuals who had wanted the Revolution. In other words, among them left-wing politics (liberalism and freemasonry) had replaced Churchliness. Indeed, their whole approach to Church life was marked by politicization. Their movement was, after all, part of a political foundation before the Russian Revolution which created that Revolution. In their movement the values of the Kingdom of Heaven are replaced by heterodox fashions and dependence on secularism in its basically atheistic, Western liberal form.

We can see this in the recent Charlie Hebdo and Copenhagen murders. These sparked massive demonstrations, but the murders of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya, as those of thousands of Christians in Iraq, Syria and the Ukraine, were dismissed by the propaganda-filled Western media, which are so keenly followed by these secularists. In Paris the secularists, ‘Orthodox’ among them, decided on the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’ and those who rejected this slogan in favour of ‘Je ne suis pas Charlie’ because it would mean that they supported blasphemy, were dismissed as terrorists and their lives were threatened by atheists.

Russophobia

In the days of the atheist regime in the Soviet Union, all agreed that the ideology of the materialists who had usurped legitimate power was abhorrent because they persecuted the Church. However, there were those who opposed it for purely political reasons. They were those who had usurped authority, then lost the power that they had seized to the Bolshevik bandits and were exiled to Paris. They did not care very much about the persecution of the Church, of the martyrdoms of the Tsar and the clergy, only about ‘human rights’ and the persecution of minorities, liberals, freemasons, Uniats, heretics, Jewish intellectuals etc

In those days they detested the Church inside Russia because the bishops lied, as they were held hostage by the regime. They should rather have had sympathy for the Church inside Russia, including captive bishops. Today they justify their continued isolation and rejection of the Church through their Russophobia. They say: ‘We cannot return to the Russian Church because She is still not free but is held in feudal subjection to Putin’. The absurdity and sheer ignorance of such arguments is apparent to the rest of the world, but not to the politicized, who are an integral part of the anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox Western Establishment.

On the Rivers of Babylon

The saddest thing about the Paris Archdiocese, ‘Rue Daru’, is that those bishops who founded it and led it for decades, Metropolitans Evlogy and Vladimir, Archbishop George (Tarasov), Bishops Methodius (Kulmann), Alexander Tian-Shansky and Roman (Zolotov), full well believed that their jurisdictional attachment to the Patriarchate of Constantinople was only a temporary arrangement which would last only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. They would be horrified if they could see where its extremists have wanted to take it in recent decades. A group that has lost its way now only has self-justification left to it.

In exile they sat down ‘on the rivers of Babylon’, on the banks of the Seine, and there they wept. The emotional Metr Evlogy could not wait and, in 1945, he rejoined the Russian Church – too early, for the persecution had not yet ended. Bishop Methodius, like Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, Archpriest Igor Vernik and many others, was also tempted, tired of isolation. There is no doubt that if any of them were alive today, they would have rejoined the Russian Church in the last fifteen years, as Archbp Sergiy (Konovalov) also wanted. However, there were always forces present which prevented the inevitable return.

The Past

I have known Rue Daru since 1979. The first thing that struck me was how isolated and insular it was, unlike anything else in the Orthodox world, which I already knew quite well. And yet that there were people at Rue Daru who saw themselves as being in the centre, instead of the reality, that they were on the margins. Parisian intellectualism was their ethos and their lost grasp of reality caused them to dwell in fantasies. Archbishop George (Wagner) used to remark to me that one day at Rue Daru lists of names of those to be prayed for would contain not only titles like ‘the sick’, but also ‘the intellectual’ (‘intelligent’ in Russian).

A lifeboat was offered Archbishop Sergiy’s Rue Daru by Patriarch Alexey II in 2003. Through no fault of his own and his untimely death, it was rejected. It has seemed ever since that the Paris Archdiocese has chosen a suicidal course of drift and shipwreck. With the Rue Daru Cathedral belonging to the city of Paris, most of its active people from the ex-Soviet Union, with unintegrated and politicized converts (though many of them later see through it all) manipulated by the descendants of liberal emigres who have themselves never known the Tradition but only delusional fantasy, it seems to have little future, having become marginal.

The Present

Today the once prestigious St Sergius church and Institute are in crisis, most students transferred to the new seminary of the Russian Orthodox Church. A new Cathedral and Diocesan centre, already blessed by Bishop Nestor of the Russian Orthodox Church and Archbishop Job of Rue Daru, is about to be built. Only 80 and 90 year olds, living in the past, still believe that Rue Daru, now very small and rather irrelevant, can be the foundation for a new Local Church in Western Europe. This is part of their delusional fantasy that Constantinople will one day grant Rue Daru autocephaly and create a ‘Western European Orthodox Church’.

Constantinople was never going to and never will grant them their pipe-dream fantasy. At last the ruling bishop, Archbishop Job, is doing exactly what Archbishop George (Wagner) promised us what he would do in 1981, but let us down and doing the opposite through weakness. 33 years have been lost. Over the decades so many have been chased out by the intolerant ideology of the liberals and modernists that only a few faithful are left. At last now, problematic individuals who caused so many huge difficulties in the past and forced serious Orthodox to leave, have been removed. And some serious clergy have come from Russia.

The Struggle

As I have written before, we must all intensify our prayers for Archbishop Job. He bears a name of much suffering. Can he right the errors and weaknesses of the last fifty years? Renovationism, a Vatican II Orthodoxy in the Finnish-Lutheran style, is what the extremists want. Over fifty years they have step by step come to power, making the lives of the Archbishops miserable, intolerantly chasing out the Orthodox, making Rue Daru ever more sectarian and marginal. Instead of being inclusive, their intolerance has forced many to leave. Why do they not simply join the Uniats? This at least would be honest on their part.

The present disciplinary actions of Archbishop Job and his courageous attempt to restore the isolated Rue Daru jurisdiction to canonical Orthodox norms after a decade of disastrous drift are to be welcomed. As one senior priest of the Paris Archdiocese in England said to me last year, the first thing that Archbishop Job has to do just in England is to defrock three members of the clergy. In France perhaps too. We must pray for Archbishop Job. Can he steer the ship of the Church away from the rocks of the irrelevant, renovationist meanders of the past towards its future of helping to witness to authentic Orthodoxy in Western Europe?

The Future

The most Churchly elements in the Russian emigration understood its providential mission and future – to witness to authentic Russian Orthodoxy in Western languages. Thus St John of Shanghai spoke of the Russian mission to witness to the rest of the world. Metropolitans Antony and Anastasy, like Archbishop Seraphim of Chicago and many others, also knew that God has sent us forth to convert the world. Thus, in Western Europe the great task of the Russian Orthodox Church is to become an autonomous Metropolia, the foundation of a future Western European Orthodox Church under the loving guidance of our Patriarch in Moscow.

We wish Archbishop Job every good thing in his long and arduous struggle to at least attempt restore all of Rue Daru to the canonical norms and traditions of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, which it claims to represent, but in large part, clearly does not. He has the youth to attempt to reverse the marginalization of Rue Daru that has gone on for far too long and so return it to the mainstream of the Orthodox Church. After a decade of disastrous drift and ever smaller numbers, only his actions can prepare it to reintegrate the Russian Church and to take at least a modest part in the great task of witnessing to authentic Russian Orthodoxy.

Conclusion: Salvation

The reunited Russian Church in Western Europe goes from strength to strength. It has many historical monuments, large churches and large numbers of Orthodox. In Western Europe the two German Dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church alone are at least twice as big as the whole Rue Daru group, which has been built on tiny communities which gather in private or rented rooms, usually fewer than twenty in number. The whole jurisdiction is only a few thousand strong and most of these would leave tomorrow if the Churches they actually feel allegiance to, mainly the Russian and Romanian, were equipped to look after them.

In 1980 I married in St Nicholas church in Boulogne Billancourt in Paris. Among the guests was Archbishop George Tarasov, to whom we were close. I often think of the future Archbishop, flying on the Western Front one hundred years ago. What was he fighting for? For Russia and Her Church; not for the project of today’s iconoclastic renovationists. His life as Archbishop in Paris was made a misery, he was publicly booed and hissed by the Brotherhood and he lived in poverty. Can his humble tears ‘on the rivers of Babylon’ help steer Rue Daru from shipwreck to salvation? We pray that it may be so.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,
Colchester, England

4/17 February 2015

Sad News and Hopeful News

The Eurozone is bankrupt, so much so that it now has to go to the inflationary last resort of printing a trillion euros (a process known by the euphemism of ‘quantitative easing’), just like the bankrupted US and the UK before it. And yet many colonized countries in the feudal Eurozone, like France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, have already been ravaged by the debt caused by printing money before, debt which they will never pay off. Much of the eastern and southern Eurozone, although much less in debt than the US and the UK which will never pay off their debt either, has become a region of inevitable emigration for the young. It has reverted to poverty beneath the austerity programmes imposed on it by Berlin, which is at the top of the feudal Fourth Reich pyramid in Europe.

In countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland especially, young people are being forced to flee abroad to seek work as wage-slaves doing jobs that local people no longer want to do. Then their governments can declare that ‘unemployment is falling’ (only because the population is falling) and the young in question can send money home to their elderly parents, thus propping up the governments. In France, governed by a supposedly Socialist regime, almost every day they pick up the frozen corpses of those who died in the streets the night before (15,000 last winter). Even in the apparently prospering UK, as in the US, tens of thousands of people are living off foodbanks in a situation unthinkable only a few years ago.

Meanwhile, in the luxury resort of Davos, outside the ravaged Eurozone, it is said that 1700 private jets have flown in many of the world’s billionaires, including the arms-dealer Poroshenko, to talk about the state of the world. Elsewhere in Europe a war between the US-financed separatist Galician junta and the Ukrainian people rages. Thousands are already dead. American arms are found by the liberators of the Ukrainian people at Donetsk Airport. Ukrainian children are dying in bombardments at the hands of that neo-Nazi puppet Poroshenko and other murderous and anti-Christian oligarchs, most of them based abroad. They are keenly supported by the grandchildren of US and Canadian Galician Nazis who guarded Auschwitz, liberated 70 years ago by heroic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians.

The US has launched anti-Russian economic sanctions and a currency war, a declaration of economic war, against Russia because the people of the Crimea massively and democratically voted to join Russia. Now, at US behest, Saudi Arabia is pumping so much oil that the oil price has fallen by over half in the last few months. The objective is to bankrupt oil-rich countries perceived by wealthy neocons in Washington as enemies – countries like Russia, but also Venezuela and Iran. The objective behind this is ‘regime-change’ – manipulating and setting up pro-Washington puppet regimes in those countries, whose natural resources can then be stripped, or, if not, simply creating chaos and mayhem in them, as has so successfully been done in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Yemen, the Sudan, Nigeria etc.

The first problem with all this is that both US-imposed sanctions and cheapened oil are more likely to bankrupt EU vassal states and even US oil corporations first. The second problem is that the US elite seems to have learned nothing from the fate of the puppet governments in the banana republics it has always created in Latin America, as well as in South Vietnam fifty years ago and in Iraq and Afghanistan ten years ago. It has forgotten that as one corrupt oligarch after another fell there, Washington had to send ever more of its young men to kill and then die there in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’, but in reality all for nothing. The result of it all is that a now bankrupt (by $17 trillion) USA is reducing itself to becoming no more than a regional power, with an economy already second to that of China.

The First World War, whose inglorious centenaries of the slaughter of the youth of Europe are being so noisily remembered just now, is commonly considered a war of futile deaths. And yet what could be more futile than the deaths of the millions of men, women and children who are dying today at the hands of pseudo-Muslim psychopaths and criminals, trained, armed and financed by the anti-Muslim West, its secret agencies and its allies? Has the West not understood that the terrorism of the pseudo-Muslim fanatics it has created in Syria and elsewhere will rebound on it again and again? In the globalized world that the West has created, it is no longer insulated from its own crimes. The secularist and atheist West has made its own worst enemies and dug its own grave for itself in its self-imposed old age.

Fortunately, outside the insular-minded West, healthy forces are gathering, not just in Russia, but in Iran, China, India, Brazil, in several Muslim countries including Turkey, as well as on the disillusioned fringes of the EU and Europe itself, in Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Greece, Serbia, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia. And those forces are all saying the same thing – enough. Thus, ignored by the enslaved Western media which has no free speech, in the Chechen capital Grozny, 800,000 Muslims and Russian Orthodox Christians march hand in hand against the Western blasphemies of spoilt infantiles. Here is hope for the future, that spiritually healthy forces worldwide will yet unite against the Great Western Apostasy, which Satan has so cunningly prepared these last thousand years. All is not yet lost.

From Further Correspondence and Conversations

Following the questions and answers published on 23 November, we now publish further questions and answers resulting from them.

Q: Does anyone try and stop you from writing?

A: Oh yes, two or three anonymous individuals, probably from both extreme left and extreme right (interestingly, their views are identical – the extremes always meet) try censorship. The fact that, aggressively and dictatorially, they try to impose their censorship on free expression means that they are wrong. If they wish to read what they agree with, they can turn to any of the conformist, secularist media; why do they try and censor those who are Orthodox Christians and so think otherwise?

As they say of those on the extreme left: ‘There is no-one as intolerant as a liberal’. As regards those on the extreme right, they are by definition illiberal. I ignore extremists, especially anonymous ones, because they are motivated not by love but by hatred. Interestingly, earlier this month I met in London one who had not been anonymous and had tried to silence me some years ago. He has completely changed his life and apologized for what he had asked me to do six years ago. People change, people mature with experience. Give them time for repentance. We do not repeat their intolerance, but show patience.

Q: You said in the first questions and answers that some old calendarists are concerned by the possible 2016 All-Orthodox meeting. But when you compare the piety of old calendarists to new calendarists, can’t you support the former?

A: An example. Last month a Greek woman (dressed in jeans and of course without any head covering) came from London to visit our Church. The first question she asked me was: ‘Why aren’t there any pews?’ (!). Such is the result of decades of modernism in the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the diaspora. But why would I compare an unchurched person from a new calendar Church with an old calendarist convert? You cannot justify your schism by comparing yourself with someone who is unChurched and whose Church attendance consists of 20 minutes per year on Easter night.

I can remember in 1977 meeting an unChurched old calendarist from an old calendarist village in northern Greece. I was not impressed. Let us compare like with like. There are devout people who live on the new calendar (because they are forced to, definitely not new calendarists) and devout people who live on the old calendar (freely, but definitely not old calendarists). And there are non-devout people who live on both calendars too.

On the subject of that possible 2016 meeting, I should also have mentioned that, apart from the dispute between Constantinople with the Czechs and Slovaks, the dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem may also prevent it from taking place. And not only that. This week the US politician Joe Biden, whose son Hunter son has conveniently landed a very well-paid job in the energy sector in the Ukraine, was again in Istanbul, discussing the Ukraine – with a Patriarchate which has no jurisdiction whatsoever there. All the notorious CIA mouthpieces of the Phanar were present at the meeting, ready to take their orders from an organization that has a history of mass murder.

Q: What could happen as a result?

A: If Biden bribes the Phanar into setting up a pro-CIA schism in the Ukraine, as the Phanar did in Estonia, then there will be a major schism, with the elite of Constantinople falling away from the Church altogether, maybe its Patriarch becoming the irrelevant departmental head of the Uniats in an obscure bureau in the Vatican. However, if such a schism occurred, only the elite would fall away, as at the Council of Florence, a few faithful bishops, new St Marks of Ephesus, most monks, parish clergy and people would remain in the Church, perhaps going under the Church of Greece. As the proverb says; ‘A fish rots from the head’.

Q: Is bribery a realistic option?

A: Yes. Remember that the former US ambassador in Kiev, John Herbst, already set up the Agathangel schism in Odessa. Divide and rule is Washington’s motto and even if it costs a few tens of millions of dollars, they don’t care. They just print the money off in Washington and call it ‘quantitative easing’. Remember that it cost them $5 billion, as Victoria Nuland admitted, just to set up the current lame duck regime in Kiev. With $17 trillion dollars of debt (and that is how the Soviet Union was defeated – the US could go into massive debt, but the USSR could not), that is a drop in the ocean.

Q: What could happen if Constantinople fell away?

A: In such a case the remaining faithful Local Churches could hold a real and free Council in the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. This Monastery is almost ready for this. I have been there. From there the Orthodox Truth could be proclaimed in its integrity to the whole world, which would then see the essential, underlying unity of the Church, free of CIA manipulations. In such a case we could expect the Local Churches concerned to drop their compromises, such as the new calendar, and return to the fullness of Orthodoxy. Possibly the Patriarchate of Moscow could, as three-quarters of the Orthodox Church, become the first Patriarchate in the diptychs. That would be a necessary update to the reality of the Church today. Certainly, that would completely change the state of several Local Churches from CIA control and nationalist stagnation to missionary dynamism.

Q: How will Antichrist come to power?

A: There are two techniques for establishing Antichrist’s New World Order, that is, for obtaining the Global Dictatorship of the One World Government.

First of all, you can bribe naïve leaders and organize paid mobs of the unemployed and criminals to create riots in order to overthrow the legitimate government (called a ‘regime’ by the US-run Western media which duly demonize the legitimate government). This is politely known as ‘regime-change’, which is also the aim of Western sanctions. This is what has been tried unsuccessfully in Moscow and more recently in Hong Kong, but successfully in Kiev – a technique that had been well-practised in what the CIA-paid media dubbed ‘the Arab Spring’, a series of catastrophes which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives so far.

I think Washington may soon try the same technique of ‘regime-change’ in Kishinev (where it has banned all parties except pro-EU ones – the Kiev scenario again), Belgrade, Prague and Budapest – capitals of three countries whose leaders are now valiantly resisting US and EU bribery, bullying and threats for being independent. Of course, this does not happen in Tokyo, Berlin, Paris and London, because there the regimes (often elected with less than 30% of the popular vote) are only vassals, heads of US vassal states. Where the selected elite (who call us ‘plebs’) are already in your pocket, you do not have to unseat it – you already control the country

The second technique is to use the media, including the social media, to demonize a government and then to bomb its country back to the Stone Age. This is the Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya scenario. Once you have bombed the country to smithereens and unleashed interminable tribal infighting, you are then free to plunder its natural resources, so dividing and ruling, because, again, you already control the country.

Q: In the first questions and answers you mentioned the fact that there was support in the Russian Church for Kerensky after the 1917 Revolution. How do you explain that?

A: Apart from the naïve, ignorant and deluded, there were treacherous renovationists. They had been infiltrating the Russian Church since the early 1900s. Think of the twice married Fr George Gapon who led the 1905 protest and soon after hanged himself. These people wanted a socialist Orthodoxy! The 1920s renovationist schism under heretics like the renovationist Vvedensky and the Paris schism in the emigration did not come from nowhere – the highly politicized elements responsible for these schisms had long ago infiltrated the Church. Such self-deluded individuals call the Patriarch Antichrist or Judas and still dare to take communion. Such blasphemy burns them alive, as it did the Old Ritualists. Believe me, I have seen it happen. Such individuals always end up outside the Church, embittered through their self-delusion and hatred and often commit suicide.

Q: Are there still renovationists in the Russian Church?

A: There are still a few here and there, but very, very few and they are dying out. Most have left the Church, though some have joined Constantinople.

Q: You seem to overlook the role of Catholicism. Surely it, and not Orthodoxy, could save the West?

A: The West has categorically rejected Catholicism. And here I do not only mean the Protestant West, which has directly become atheist. I also mean the once Catholic countries of Europe. In Europe Catholicism is in freefall, even in a country like Poland, where the number of those practising Catholicism has halved in the last 25 years. Why?

It is because Catholicism is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Catholicism is the father of Protestantism, which is the father of the modern atheist West. No new pope, even if he is a master of PR, is thoroughly anti-Orthodox and pro-Uniat, was voted in by Washington and has the CIA-backed Western media behind him, can change anything. It is 1,000 years too late.

Q: What do you mean by Catholicism as part of the problem?

A: Historically, the West has degenerated from Christ (Orthodoxy) to Feudalism (Catholicism), then to Democracy (Protestantism) and so to Antichrist (Post-Protestantism). We can see this in many examples. For example, feudalism appeared in England very suddenly, in 1066. It simply did not exist here before. In other words, feudalism is the socio-political and economic result of Catholicism. Or, to take another example from today, the present genocide in Catholic Mexico (100,000 dead in the last twelve months, it is said) is being caused by feudal drug-traffickers, who are holed up on their castle-ranches, and pay serfs to work for them. (Of course, the drug-traffickers only exist because a section of the US population takes drugs. Otherwise they would go out of business).

As regards Russia, serfdom, that is feudalism, was only introduced in the 18th century by Western and Westernized rulers like Peter I and Catherine II. Significantly, they are praised to the skies and called ‘the Great’ by both Western and Soviet historians. Why? Because they both represented feudal empires. The West used feudalism to maintain its colonial empires and the Soviets reintroduced feudalism to maintain their empire. For what was Stalinist collectivization if not refeudalization? Take the land from the people and slaughter those who resist, that is refeudalization.

The West hates the fact that Western-introduced serfdom was abolished only after a century and a half in Russia, whereas in the West it lasted for centuries. In Russia, Orthodoxy defeated serfdom and Russian Orthodox have always opposed and destroyed slavery, freeing slaves. However, in the West the ruling Catholic ideology was inherently feudal so it could not be defeated, it could only degenerate into Protestantism, the next step to Antichrist.

Similarly, we can see the example of Western democracy in Russia, which only lasted for seven months in 1917. Why? Because for Western democracy, as it is called, to exist, you must have a Protestant mentality. This why it never worked elsewhere and cannot be imposed elsewhere, where it is always accompanied by massive corruption, as in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Latin America, South Vietnam, Japan, Thailand – or the Ukraine. From Western democracy in Russia, it was only one step to Antichrist, that is, to Bolshevism. True, this so-called Western democracy has lasted much longer in the West, where Protestantism existed, but even here we can see that today it too is degenerating, as Protestantism has been rejected. Even in the Estonian capital they are now selling off the main Lutheran church because it has gone bankrupt.

Western democracy has outlived its purpose, which was to overthrow Christian monarchs. With that done, Antichrist has been readying himself to take over from the secular presidents, prime ministers and chancellors who replaced the Christian monarchs. We saw this with Napoleon and Hitler, who replaced Christian leaders and were both prefigurations of Antichrist and both invaded Russia, just as the US is trying to invade Russia today.

We can see this today in the replacement of democracy and its degeneration in Western countries, which are quite freely introducing ever more Fascist legislation, with selective assassinations by the secret services, censorship of the media, militarization of the police, arrest without charge, deprivation of citizens of their passports, refusing them the right to live where they want, surveillance of their every movement through camera networks and State spying on e-mails and phone calls etc.

Q: Does Orthodox Russia have friends in the West?

A: Yes. Apart from the local Russian Orthodox and Orthodox allies of other nationalities, there are still minorities in the West who have a sense of national tradition, sovereignty and identity. All of them support Russia in some way. The enemy is the cosmopolitan Brussels/Berlin bureaucrat who takes his orders from Washington and has only contempt for real Europeans and our patriotism. There is in preparation an alliance between Orthodox Russia and healthy ‘sovereignist’ forces in at present enslaved Western Europe.

Q: What chance is there of the return of an Orthodox Emperor, a Tsar, who could protect all Orthodox worldwide from Western bullying and so delay the rule of Antichrist?

A: The Church can work in any political system and survive, as history proves, but our ideal is a Christian State, which incarnates the values of the Church, creating a Christian Civilization. If that exists, Antichrist cannot come. Our situation since 1917 has been abnormal; there has been no Christian Emperor, no Tsar, and so the Local Churches have been swayed this way and that way by secular political forces, whether Communist or Capitalist, Atheist or Mammonist, however the end has not yet come. The question is whether we are to return to normality, the Christian Empire, or whether we are to continue on the path towards Antichrist.

Thus, the last nearly 100 years have been quite exceptional, all should have ended in 1917, but we have been granted further time by the mercy of God. Nevertheless, it is still a stark case of the path to the Apocalypse or the path to the Restoration. But there are reasons for thinking that Restoration is still possible because of the sacrifices of the New Martyrs and Confessors during the first generation after 1917, on which the whole rebirth of the Russian Church has been founded.

Since the long and slow process of overthrowing Antichrist in Russia, which effectively began in 1941 with the first Nazi invasion (the second Nazi invasion being in the Ukraine in 2014) and the revival of the Church inside Russia, we have begun to see the three different stages in the restoration of the Church. These are: Orthodoxy; the People; Sovereignty. They come in the opposite order to what we would expect, Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People, because we are putting history into reverse.

First of all, we have seen the process of restoration of Orthodoxy, with the end of outward persecution by Communism and the end of inward persecution by renovationism. This first stage in this process is ongoing, but is almost at an end now. The outward persecution by the Communists has ended. And both the renovationists who were supported by the Phanar and the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and who were still active in the Diaspora until recently, and the neo-renovationists who came to prominence inside Russia in the 1990s and 2000s (with the support of the old Diaspora renovationists), have literally been dying out. The latter were rejected outright by Patriarch Alexei II and elders like Fr John Krestyankin and have been defeated. That is why the last ones are so aggressive. The re-establishment and reassertion of Orthodoxy inside the Russian Orthodox Church is clear. Only a few treacherous individuals inside Russia and in the Diaspora are still resisting – but they are living in the past, irrelevant.

The second stage in the process is the revival of the People as a believing force. This stage is ongoing, but has very far to go. The missionary witness of the Church to the masses has scarcely begun, but at least it has begun. Only when the Church has been allowed to go out into the whole world by Divine Providence and preach the authentic Gospel, which has been so compromised by Catholicism, Protestantism and Modernism, can we move on to the third stage. Already, however, there has been the first political emigration after 1917, which brought Orthodoxy to countries which previously knew nothing of it, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a second economic emigration, far larger than before. All this is the Providential opportunity to witness.

Only when people have been Churched, when they are ready for the new Orthodox Emperor, the Tsar, can that restoration occur. In other words, there can be no restoration of the Sovereign Christian Empire until the baptized masses want it, until they have repented in preparation for it. Only repentance can bring restoration. And we are still far from this – though I must say we are much closer than even five years ago, let alone twenty-five years ago, when all this was still only a dream.

For Russia has now begun to play the role of the country which restrains or withholds the movement towards Antichrist. That is why the forces of this world are so aggressively attacking Russia at the moment, trying through so-called sanctions to punish Her. The most ruthlessly logical and consistently anti-Christian Western elitists like Brzezinski in the US and Bildt in Sweden have publicly declared that the West must destroy the Russian Orthodox Church (in order to hasten the arrival of Antichrist – though they are so delusional that they do not even believe in Antichrist).

Q: If that repentance or process of Churching happens, who will the new Emperor be?

A: We do not and cannot know. That is in God’s hands or rather in the hands of the Mother of God, for since the forced and forged abdication of 1917 the Empire has been in the hands of the Sovereign Mother of God. Our task is to repent, not to argue about possible candidates. God will choose the right candidate for us and it will be plain to all Churched Orthodox that this is the right choice.