Tag Archives: Leadership

2016: The Tipping-Point?

It is clear that despite the positive events of the twenty-first century, Russia is still greatly suffering from the consequences of twentieth-century atheism, both from three generations of Marxist materialism and one generation of Capitalist materialism. Nevertheless, a spiritual and cultural renaissance is under way and may in 2016 have finally reached a tipping-point. Thus, although we may not always agree with him, the Russian political leader, inspired by the bimillennial Orthodox Christian Tradition, is now the leader of the worldwide anti-globalist movement, opposing planetary US hegemony and the One World State that it is aiming at.

The question now is if the Russian spiritual leader, the Russian Patriarch, can similarly become the leader of the worldwide anti-apostasy movement, opposing the folly of today’s atheist world? If he can, he will gain the full support of ordinary clergy, ordinary people and monastics. Some of these faithful have been hurt by treacherous, ecumenist elements in Moscow and a few of them are upset with the Patriarch. Despite this, the Patriarch of Moscow is already the de facto Oecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox world, but that status so far depends only on numbers. How can he increase his moral and spiritual authority?

This can only happen through his confession of Orthodoxy. Here, there are two acts which would unite the Church behind him. The first act, as Metr Benjamin of Vladivostok has recently said, is to leave the All-Protestant World Council of Churches. Membership of it, as we in the Church outside Russia have always known, only discredits the Church. On leaving, we should explain why we consider it a council of the impious and its ideology heretical. The second act is to stand up at the Crete meeting in June and refuse to sign any document which betrays Orthodox dogmatics through vague, ambiguous, ecumenist and secularist language.

During Lent Patriarch Kyrill set out on this path of confession by declaring that the main heresy of modern times is the worship of man as God and that this is what lies behind the spiritual catastrophe of the West. As he further said on the news channel, NTV, on 1 May, ‘the world is heading straight for hell’. These are not the words of some local bishop, but the words of the global Christian leader, who, unlike Pope Francis, is not afraid of telling the truth. As he is such, it was at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow that the Paschal Gospel was read in 27 languages, demonstrating the universal mission of the Russian Orthodox Church.

These two acts would definitively reassure those dissidents whose confidence has been shaken by the events of January and February, that is, by the release of the ambiguous draft documents for the Crete meeting and the meeting of Pope Francis with the Patriarch in Cuba. More than this, however, they would make clear, both to the whole Orthodox Church and to the world outside the Church, that the global spiritual leader of the contemporary world is the Russian Patriarch, who is standing up to Western apostasy and its deification of fallen mankind. In this way we can find the path of salvation amid the chaos and folly of today’s world.

Patriarch and Pope to Meet in Cuba on 12 February

It has been announced today in the Third Rome and also in Old Rome that Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Pope are to meet briefly at Havana Airport in Cuba on 12 February. This meeting will take place during the Patriarch’s long-awaited eleven-day pastoral visit to the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Latin America, notably to Cuba, Brazil and Paraguay.

This high-level trip, involving visits to the political leaders of all three countries follows repeated invitations. The 15,000 strong Russian Orthodox flock in Cuba will especially greet our Patriarch, but the Patriarch will also recognize the important role played by Russian Orthodox in Paraguay before the Second World War and in Brazil over the last 100 years. However, beyond pastoral matters, this is also clearly a brilliant diplomatic move – for five reasons:

Firstly, it upstages and sidelines the absurd claims of the tiny Patriarchate of Constantinople to make out that it is somehow the ‘leader’ of the Orthodox world, whereas in reality it is fifty times smaller than the Russian Orthodox Church! It also ends the Phanariot myth that only it can represent the Orthodox Church at the Vatican, the real, de facto, leader of the Orthodox Church is Patriarch Kyrill. There will be anger at the Phanar, as it realizes that after nearly 100 years of trying to monopolize attention its diplomatic end has come.

Secondly, this is clearly a move aimed at further undermining the ridiculous pretensions of the sectarian Ukrainian Uniats, who have done so much and are still doing so much to encourage aggression and hatred towards Ukrainian Christians in the civil war that they have fostered in the Ukraine. They will be extremely worried that their official leader, the Pope of Old Rome, is in fact renouncing them and their psychotic Russophobia.

Thirdly, this meeting marks the enormous concern of the Russian Orthodox Church for Orthodox and other Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, who have been abandoned by the West, which has also abandoned the Papacy. Only the Russian Federation has substantially intervened in the war in Syria to bolster the majority there against the Western-trained, armed and financed terrorist movements intent on genocide, as has been made clear by Catholic leaders in the Middle East. Notably, during his visit, Patriarch Kyrill will lead the service at the Syrian Cathedral in San Paulo.

Fourthly, this meeting is taking place outside Europe in the course of a pastoral visit by the Russian Orthodox Patriarch to Latin America. This marks the internationalization of the Russian Orthodox world before the rest of the world. Having settled many of the outstanding problems of the Church inside the Russian Federation and brought numbers of bishops up to 361 and of clergy to 40,000 from the pitiful few 25 years ago, the Patriarch is now looking further afield outside Eastern Europe and the Federation. The second generation of renewal can begin. We can now expect that the Patriarch will make other high-profile visits to the more distant territories of the Russian Orthodox Church, including, God willing, to ourselves.

And finally, this meeting on the US doorstep, specifically in independent and sovereign Cuba, also marks the fact that the uncompromised Orthodox world does not recognize the globalist power grab of the Neocon Empire based in Washington. This move against the New world Order is an outstretched hand to the independent peoples of the world – the vast majority – in an unprecedented missionary endeavour. We cannot but welcome it.