Tag Archives: Victory

On the Persecution of the Church in the Ukraine and England

 

https://spzh.news/en/zashhita-very/75761-the-victorious-world-of-the-ocu-seized-churches-no-parishioners

As we can see from the above, in the Ukraine, as in England, the Church is persecuted by so-called ‘clerics’ who wish to see our churches closed down. This is why we have since 2019 always commemorated at the Great Entrance ‘His Beatitude Onufry, Metropolitan of Kiev and All the Ukraine, the brethren of the Kiev Caves Monastery and all his persecuted and suffering flock’. Like us, he too has been railed at by the two thieves on their crosses on either side of Christ, the one who represents the Western persecution by the so-called ‘OCU’ and the other who represents the persecution coming from the Sovietised Russian side. Like the greatest Ukrainian saint of the twentieth century, our patron, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, who was persecuted by the forces of this world when he lived in China, and then put on trial by false brethren in California, Russian ‘bishops’, we too follow St John. The greatest disciple of St John of Shanghai is Metr Onufry. We follow in both their footsteps, for we follow in the footsteps of the persecuted Christ, as we are faithful to the Gospel of Christ, and not to schismatics and slanderers and all those who repeat those slanders. May the Lord have mercy on their souls!

The Murk Lifts as the Saints Come in Victory

Four years ago now we were informed by a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) that Fr Alexander Belya had been selected as a bishop by a majority of the old ROCOR Synod in New York. All had legitimately been signed off and sent to the Moscow for the final approval. Indeed, Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) had earlier personally spoken to us about Fr Alexander with great enthusiasm. However, the objections of a minority in the Synod were so strong that they launched what was in effect a coup d’etat, taking advantage of the late Metropolitan Hilarion’s dementia and cancer, creating a new ROCOR and beginning a campaign to discredit Fr Alexander’s candidacy. All manner of accusations were made, for which no proof has ever been offered.

Accusing someone of forgery and then spending two and a half years in the highest courts in the USA trying to avoid having to respond to evidence to the contrary does seem very strange. In any case, after losing its very expensive court cases against Fr Alexander Belya and awaiting the new one for defamation, the new ROCOR has lost yet another battle.  It can no longer resist the consecration of Fr Alexander Belya, already signed off by the old ROCOR under Metr Hilarion (Kapral). However, given the purging of the old canonical ROCOR by the dominant new ROCOR, the consecration will go ahead under the very unpopular and highly controversial Archbishop Elpidiphoros of the Church of Constantinople in North America. He has now called the bluff of very naïve, objecting bishops of other jurisdictions in Northern America and will proceed with the long-awaited consecration.

It is a great pity that few can trust Archbishop Elpidiphoros personally, but no doubt there was no other choice for Fr Alexander in the highly politicised American context. And so the vital forces of the Russian Church in Northern America are going under the Church of Constantinople, as the elderly who know the Tradition die out. We can only imagine the dissatisfaction with ROCOR in Moscow. A candidate for the episcopate and yet another set of good clergy and prosperous parishes lost by ROCOR and this time forced, however reluctantly, to join the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Moscow’s great rival. (Where part of the OCA also wants to go). The living elements of the old ROCOR, are fleeing its new marginality, in Northern America quite logically joining the largest jurisdiction there (the Patriarchate of Constantinople) and in Western Europe quite logically joining the largest jurisdiction there (the Patriarchate of Romania). In both cases all keep the old calendar and all other Russian liturgical customs.

All had been possible, but, according to some, on account of jealousy (Fr Alexander speaks and writes fluent Russian and Ukrainian, unlike those who oppose him), slander and sham ‘defrockings’, those who oppose him have lost nearly everything. First there came notoriety for receiving clergy without letters of release from canonical (= non-schismatic) Local Churches. (Letters of release are necessary to check on the moral conduct of clergy, not if the only objections to the clergy leaving are because they refuse schism, because of political disagreements or if they concern coveting of parishioners’ property on the part of those who do not wish them to leave.

The refusal to issue letters of release for purely political purposes or to try and obtain property illegally is not canonical. And there is no such thing as an oath of obedience to a schismatic bishop!). One Russian priest in London called ROCOR’s uncanonical suspensions ‘null and void’. And as another Russian priest said: ‘If there is no canonical crime, then it means that canon law is simply used as a mechanism of political repression’. (https://uk.yahoo.com/news/russian-orthodox-priests-face-persecution-062625884.html).

Thus, the clergy who left Constantinople for ROCOR were suspended by the Church of Constantinople. This is normal practice, as you do not ‘defrock’ clergy, if they are acting in integrity according to their conscience. Unless, that is, you are some sort of punitive, gaslighting, right-wing sect. Why did so many leave the new ROCOR elsewhere? The ROCOR schism from the Moscow Patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church (to which ROCOR supposedly belongs!) in Western Europe took its toll. This was because the Moscow group in Western Europe receives Catholic clergy in the same way as the rest of the Moscow Patriarchate and the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church, that is, not by rebaptism, like Greek Old Calendarists. This suicidal act of Russian old calendarism on the part of ROCOR cost it sixteen clergy and half of its Diocese in Great Britain. All refused to obey neophyte schismatics – see Canon XV of the First and Second Council. Now ROCOR in Great Britain will never be anything more than an irrelevant, tiny, closed marginal sect.

Then there was the use of electronic signatures, used in utterly vain attempts to bully, gaslight and intimidate. With these acts many have indeed discredited and isolated themselves from canonical Orthodoxy. How long will Moscow tolerate these losses and scandals? At a time like this, the already very isolated Moscow needs allies, not scandals. It has already suffered scandals in the tragic situations in Kiev, Riga, Amsterdam, Madrid, Vilnius and those that are rapidly developing elsewhere. There will come a point when Moscow, with its many parishes which use the new calendar, simply will not accept the threats made to it by the old calendarist American Synod. These threats involve boycotting the workings of the Moscow Patriarchate and are made by the New York Synod because it believes that it has Moscow over a barrel and can get away with anything. It is a dangerous game, because one day after the Ukraine is over Moscow will call its bluff and pull the plugs.

All this is a result of the ROCOR identity crisis. This began after its formal unity with Moscow in 2007, when it at last found universally recognised canonical status, for which we had battled for so long. However, instead of choosing to use this God-given opportunity to contribute to the positive and mainstream construction of new Local Churches in the Diaspora and show political independence from the secular Russian State, it chose negative and censorious self-isolation in an extreme right-wing ghetto and political co-operation with the secular Russian State. So it lost its Ukrainians – and many other normal families, purged by the alt right, long-bearded crazy converts it is introducing. It means that the only Russian Orthodox input into the inevitable new Local Churches in Northern America and Western Europe will come from the free Russian Orthodox, who belong to other Local Churches. Fringe groups with their extremism such as ROCOR will have no involvement. Just like all old calendarist groups, they have nothing to contribute.

Unless, that is, the few remaining Orthodox in ROCOR can at the last moment take back control of the Church from those who usurped power from the saintly, but very weak Metropolitan Hilarion (+ 2022) during the years of his dementia and cancer. This now seems very unlikely, unless the largely convert mini-Synod which took full control of ROCOR through its internal coup can be ousted. At present the new ROCOR is carrying out a purge of all its senior clergy of the St John tradition, all those who belonged to the old ROCOR and are being replaced by ‘Orthobros’ and incels.  Distracted by its loss of the Ukraine, Latvia etc and its desperate search for support in the Diaspora for the Russian State’s political and military battle against the USA in the Ukraine, the Moscow Patriarchate authorities have let things slide in the Diaspora. So badly indeed that the return of ROCOR to canonicity now seems virtually impossible. And that severely compromises Moscow’s own non-ROCOR existence outside Russia only more.

Interestingly, the news of Fr Alexander’s coming consecration was reported by the notoriously biased, American-run but Moscow-based, website ‘orthochristian.com’. This site is well-known for being backed by and publishing the works of very conservative ex-Evangelicals in Northern America. Some have even said that that website has been infiltrated by murky CIA/NATO assets, who started establishing themselves in ROCOR, Vlasovite and Russian-language publishing and broadcasting circles in the Diaspora in the 1960s. In any case that website never prints articles and comments that are critical of the practices of the MP and ROCOR or show up their hypocrisy and disrespect for human rights. It is surely being protected by someone important in the hierarchy in Russia, who knows the emigres well. According to some, he may himself, perhaps by naivety, have been turned and been involved in those murky dealings.

This is possible. After all, we should recall that the US Establishment is now divided between the conservative nationalist patriots of the CIA and the woke cosmopolitan neocons of the Washington State Department. And this situation is strangely very similar to that in the Soviet Union just before its dissolution in 1991. Then that was divided between pro-American liberal Euro-Atlanticists, who overnight transformed themselves from Communists into Capitalist oligarchs, and the patriots/nationalists, centred in the Soviet equivalent to the CIA, which was then called the KGB. And one of the latter was the present Russian nationalist President Putin, at that time a lowly KGB operative in provincial East Germany.

We should not forget that the former US President George Bush Senior (his son was not bright enough) was head of the CIA before himself being elected. Does a parallel between today’s patriotic CIA and the then patriotic KGB exist? Does the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991 indicate the coming collapse of the American Empire? We remember how in the 1970s and then the 1980s, the right-wing Washington ROCOR, of which some were CIA assets (once an asset, always an asset, as the late Fr Mikhail Artsimovich commented to me in 1992), was warmly welcomed into the Reagan White House and the coffers of the CIA generously opened to it. Now it is payback time, return on investment. We gave you then, now you will obey us. You cannot escape the murk, once you have joined it, you are signed up for life. You have sold your soul.

What is clear is that the new ROCOR is collapsing. It is not for families. We have often asked ourselves what the righteous people, priests and bishops of the old ROCOR, so many of whom we knew well, would have done. What would the ever-memorable St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, Fr Seraphim (Rose), Archbishop Antony of Geneva (who never defrocked anyone) and Metr Laurus (Shkurla) have done, given the present convert sectarianisation? Their Church has now been taken over by the descendants of those who suspended and put St John on trial in 1964, who persecuted Fr Seraphim in the 1970s and Archbishop Antony in the 1980s and 1990s and ourselves since 2007.

Surely, if they had still been alive in the years following 2007 and saw they risked losing control of the New York Synod to the murky mini-Synod, which had already begun forming as long ago as 2001 after the Metr Vitaly fiasco, they would have closed down the separate Synod in New York. Then, seeing the convert immaturity and uncanonical actions, Moscow would have taken ROCOR under its direct control. Moscow then would surely have proceeded towards the regionalisation and Metropolitanisation of ROCOR, as so many of us and the Patriarch Kyrill of the time had so much wanted, as he told us quite clearly in the Danilov Monastery in Moscow in May 2012.

This would have helped towards founding the coming foundation of the four Diaspora Local Churches, in Western Europe, Northern America, Latin America and Oceania. In this way the New York Synod could never have been diverted from its Christian path by insecure ‘One True Church’ converts and the other psychologically troubled with their murky connections. It is probably too late for this, for the Persecuted Church has become the Persecuting Church and the way back seems impossible. It is too late for any ‘Make ROCOR Great Again’. This is what happens when the spiritual is supplanted by the political and the financial. In history such people were ruled by a Sanhedrin and they were called pharisees.

However, we should not doubt in Divine Providence. The saints came to rescue us from the ROCOR schism and even now they are gathering together with St John of Shanghai. We shall see great changes in the near future, as the Holy Spirit takes over from evil men, their hearts full of hatred. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!

 

 

On Those who Betray the Church and Those who are Faithful to the Church

Tell everyone that the evil that is in the world will grow even stronger,

but that it is not evil that will triumph, but love.

Tsar Nicholas II 

The Tsar and the Tsarina thought that they were dying for Russia.

In fact, they died for all mankind.

Pierre Gilliard

The misfortune that has befallen Russia is the direct result of grievous sins and her rebirth is only possible through cleansing from them. However, so far there has been no real repentance.

Bishop (now St) John of Shanghai

I have been asked many times from North America and from far distant Australia, to explain what seems to them the unexplainable, the spiritual catastrophe that took place here over the last five years, when what once was the Persecuted Church became the Persecuting Church, and how we avoided it. We explain to you that the Church has and has always had only one parts, but that there are two parasitic parts which outwardly mask it:

The Quenchers of the Spirit

These are young, inexperienced, often homosexual, lovers of money and power, slanderers, but above all narcissistic lovers of themselves. They are swimmers with the tide, agreeing with any who have power and belonging to them and their intrigues. They love worldly success and titles for they have sold their souls for material things. They have no future and will die out because they have no principles and nothing spiritual to give. As our Metropolitan said of them: Such always end up outside the Church.

The Sectarians

Although there are many good, sincere, simple and naïve among them, they have been misled by leaders who are pharisees and who love wealth. They love to condemn others and isolate themselves. As a result, they create and live in inward-looking ghettos. They say: ‘We don’t want many people here. It is cosier together’. They are dominated by the elderly and, sooner or later, they will die out.

The Faithful

These love the Saints of all nations and of all times. With the Saints they are the World Resistance Movement. Although they are hated and persecuted, they are always victorious, like the Saints and like their Master Christ, Who says: ‘Fear not, little flock’!

Here is what we believe:

Our Creed

We believe that we now stand at a parting of the ways in world history with the millennial failure of the Western world and Western religion. Therefore, we live for the restoration of the integrity of Orthodox Christendom. Although some are betrayed by the young Judas with his hand in the money bag, riven by nationalist subservience, compromised by money-oriented careerism, strangled by bureaucratic centralism and reduced to sectarian ritualism, we follow the Orthodox Christian way, the way of the New Martyrs and New Confessors, the way of the Saints of God. For the King is coming and we must be ready to meet Him.

I have lived in several European countries, not only in Russia. Just as I recognised neither the Soviet Union and post-Sovietism, nor do I recognise the European Union and post-Europeanism. The latter Union was born just a few days after the funeral of the former Union, as the demons that had haunted the USSR for exactly 75 years from December 1916 to December 1991 crossed westwards and found another corrupted and rotting corpse to infest and consume.

I was brought up with Tsar Nicholas II, the man who is maligned far more than any other in history, and with the murdered Alexander Pushkin and Ivan Turgenev, but also with William Shakespeare, Johann von Goethe, Alphonse Daudet and Knut Hamsun. I listened to Piotr Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rakhmaninov, but also to Johann Strauss, Edvard Grieg, Charles Trenet, Amalia Rodrigues and Albert Ketelby. I lived in Saint Petersburg, but also in Oslo, Paris, Thessaloniki, Lisbon and Vienna, passing through Belgrade, Geneva, Berlin, Prague, Madrid, Rome, London, Helsinki, Budapest, Bucharest and some very obscure but far more significant places inbetween, for their significance is mystical.

There is a birch forest and dusty summer tracks just outside Ekaterinburg in the Urals, a log peasant house outside Great Novgorod, a village on the Slovak border with the Ukraine where they have never spoken either Slovak or Ukrainian, the whitest sandy beach in the Gaelic Outer Hebrides by a ruined monk’s cell, a special old farmhouse with an apple orchard in Suffolk, a fragrant pine forest on the ambered Baltic coast of Latvia, a dark backstreet in Porto where I did a funeral service, the woods of Thassos in the azure-blue Aegean, a secret, lilac-filled courtyard in north-east Paris, left over from another age, a path by Lake Balaton in Hungary and a path by Lake Naroch in Belarus, and a little wooden chapel in the Romanian Carpathians that belongs to hermit-shepherds. They have all played a part. All these places, and many others, form one continuous story. But that is the little epic of a family with branches scattered across Old Russia and Old Europe and which is yet to be told. The tale of that Resurrection is for another time and another place.

In all my wanderings through Russia and Europe I have always believed that Russia must return to its roots and identity in order to refind itself. Since 2014, by Divine Providence, this has been happening. However, I have always believed that Europe too must return to its roots and identity in order to refind itself. This can be so through the example of Russia’s return, but it will be very radical and it will hurt a lot. Just as it hurt and hurts Russia. Humility, like the Church, always hurts.

Nevertheless, all can still come right, injustices can still be righted. The thirst for justice and for restitution can still triumph over the conspiracies of the past. It is always the same sevenfold story: Repentance, return, redemption, rebirth, restoration, restitution and resurrection. They form one continuous story. But that is the great epic of all the families with branches scattered across Russia and Europe and which is yet to be told. The tale of that Resurrection is for another time and another place.

Our Life

 

Our one road is the road God made

And all that we gave is repaid.

And as we follow this chosen road,

We know the blessing for what we sowed.

And as we tread, so do we fight,

In this great war beneath God’s light.

For we know that the Night will cease,

And like a shining white-robed priest

Coming forth all bright from the East,

The streaming Dawn will break and sing

That God, our Wisdom and our King,

Will grant us Life and Light and Spring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 2018-December 2022: On Becoming a Local Church

After the Liturgy for the Feast of the Entrance into the Temple of the Mother of God on Sunday 4th December, Fr Andrew was interviewed informally about the present situation of the Orthodox Church. Below is the slightly edited interview.

 

Q: What would you say about the events in the Orthodox Churches over the last four years?

A: The present very tragic situation of the Local Orthodox Churches is such that I almost feel nostalgic for the first third of my Orthodox life, before 1989, during the Cold War. In those days there were two groups of Local Churches: those in front of the Berlin Wall and those behind the Berlin Wall. All was clear. You knew exactly why some spoke in one way (because they had a Communist gun in their backs) and why others spoke in another way (because they had an anti-Communist gun in their backs). The first were involuntary hostages, the second were voluntary hostages.

I did not think I would live to see the present chaos, which has accumulated as a result of the errors over the last thirty-three years. First of all, precisely in December 2018, exactly four years ago, the Church of Constantinople, backed by the USA, for purely political and financial reasons started a major schism with the Russian Church in the Ukraine (it had already started a minor one in Estonia, back, I think, in 1994). This 2018 event was the foundation of the OCU, or ‘Poroshenko’s Orthodox Church’ (PCU), as it is called in Ukrainian. Result? The Russian Church refused to concelebrate or have anything to do with the Church of Constantinople and all those who supported it, for example, the Church of Alexandria. In so doing, however, it locked itself into isolation.

Then, in 2019, the small New-York-based Diaspora part of the Russian Church began taking numerous clergy and churches from Constantinople. This caused even more division and controversy. Then, exactly two years ago, in December 2020, the same fraction started a schism with the other Diaspora part of the same Russian Church, which is based in Paris. So there developed a still unresolved schism inside the Russian Church itself! A Church in schism with itself. What have we come to? Then, a year later, in December 2021, the Russian Church formed a schism in Africa, taking nearly 200 clergy and parishes from the Patriarchate of Alexandria, nearly half of its total number of missions there.

As if that was not enough, on 24 February 2022 the Russian Federation invaded the Ukraine and most of the hierarchy of the Russian Church backed the action. From this highly divisive moment on, the once multinational Russian Church started splitting into different Churches, the Russian, the Ukrainian, the Latvian, and perhaps tomorrow the Estonian, the Moldovan and the Lithuanian (where the situation is already dire after the uncanonical defrockings of clergy for merely expressing a different political viewpoint from the Russian Patriarch).

As a result, the Russian Orthodox parishes in Western Europe are cruelly affected, for a majority of their clergy and people are not Russians from Russia, but Baltic Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans etc. So people have left those parishes, many of which are now undermined. Therefore new parishes of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (not the tiny and uncanonical OCU) have been opened for the (so far) four million Ukrainian refugees in Western Europe. The situation is catastrophically divisive.

Oh, for the good old days of the Cold War! It was all so simple then.

The whole situation is in an out of control spiral. Where will it end? What has happened over the last four years – most of the events taking place every December – is that the century-old uncanonical chaos of the Diaspora, with its multiple jurisdictions, has been spread to Estonia, the Ukraine and Africa and may very well spread elsewhere. For example, it now looks as though Cyprus is going to be affected in the same way, with two jurisdictions developing there too.

This is all due to a problem of lack of authority in the Church, caused by those who are more interested in politics than in Christ. And here authority is very different from bullying authoritarianism. Authority comes from the Holy Spirit, whereas authoritarianism comes from a perverted human spirit.

Little wonder that the Vatican is looking on and saying: ‘What do you expect, look at the chaos of the Orthodox Churches, always at each others’ throats, because they do not have the Pope in control and guaranteeing unity’. Of course, that is nonsense. Anyone who knows anything about the schismatic situations within the Roman Catholic Church knows it to be nonsense. Nevertheless, there is a problem and that problem can only be solved by the highest organ of authority in the Church, a real Orthodox Council, free of politics. Sadly, at the present time the chances of that are probably as small as they were fifty years ago. We have not moved forwards at all. However, miracles do happen.

Q: What do you think will happen in the Ukraine?

A: The arms and army of Russia will win against the very weak and now even weaker NATO in the very risky war that the US began there in 2014. For there has never been a war between Russia and the Ukraine. The latter is just a location for the NATO battles. The war has always been purely between Russia and NATO. The Ukrainians and the huge number of mainly Polish mercenaries there have only been pawns and cannon fodder for the USA, just like the now increasingly arm-less NATO. The new cemetery for them in Poland has 1,200 dead so far.

However, the coming Russian victory in the face of the lack of real support for Kiev on the part of the now bankrupt West, does not solve the pastoral problem. You can conquer a country, but you cannot force its people to attend your churches. There will have to be an Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, without mention of a Russian Patriarch. The only very unlikely chance of unity would be if there were to be a Ukrainian Patriarch of the whole Russian Church and the ‘Moscow’ title was dropped from it altogether. Then the once multinational Russian Church might be restored.

Q: But surely this is just another Cold War situation, with the Church divided as before into two, East and West?

A: Not at all. It is far more complex than that. There are now three groups of Local Orthodox Churches. There is the Russian Church all by itself in the first ‘group’ and the US-backed Constantinople/Alexandrian Churches in the second group. Those two groups are at daggers drawn. Then, there is the third group, the thirteen other Local Churches. The thirteen others are the only ones that are in communion with everyone, Greek and Russian alike, but still independent of both of them.

True, the Cypriot and Greek Churches may well be forced by political pressure from the local US ambassadors to join the Constantinople/Alexandria group. This would leave only eleven in the third group, independent of both Russian and American politics. However, it seems as if more new Local Churches will also be founded and increase the number of those eleven. Certainly, Autocephalous Ukrainian and Latvian Churches would join that group and any others that might come into existence, for example, perhaps in Moldova. Quite simply, nobody wants to be too close to the Russian or Constantinople Churches at the present time, but all want to remain distant from them and any schismatic actions.

Q: So there is great disunity in the Church?

A: Tragically, yes. For instance, if I think about the Russian-French parish where I used to serve in Meudon, a suburb of Paris, I can clearly see this disunity. In Meudon there used to be only one church, the one where I served. It united everyone locally. Now there are three small parishes in the same small suburb and none of them is in communion with each other! There is the one where I served, which sadly has become very closed, almost club-like and very much Russian only, excluding Non-Russians and even Russians who do not have a certain spirit. Secondly, there is a very modernist Greek parish, which mainly uses French, and finally there is an old calendarist Greek parish, which also mainly uses French. It is so sad to see this quite unnecessary disunity. This is not a local church, but three anti-local churches.

Q: How do you see your own situation in Colchester?

A: In Colchester we defended the church against the evil one. Let me explain.

I remember in 1976 the Belarussian priest in Cambridge, a dear friend, Fr John Piekarsky (Eternal Memory to him), telling us how in the late 60s all the people in his home village in Belarus near Dokshitsy, gathered together and stood around their village church which the atheists, instructed by the crazy Ukrainian Khrushchov, wanted to destroy. An armed militia faced them. The people made it clear that the soldiers would have to gun everyone of them down in order to close their church. The militia backed off and the church was saved.

We also have a Ukrainian parishioner, whose grandmother, Galina, also in the 60s, just lay down in front of the bulldozer which the atheists were going to use to destroy the village church. She made it clear they would have to murder her, the most respected person in the village, to close the church. The atheists backed off and the church still stands today.

Well, we did the same, using English Trust law as our defence. We too had to defend our church from those who wanted to take it away from us, demanded the keys (which we refused to hand over), persecuted and slandered us (only the weak in faith believed such nonsense), and then wanted to close it, just as the atheist nationalists of the OCU do in the Ukraine. We won with the support of many.

Now is the time to confess the faith, there is no need for martyrdom, that is not yet required. But we have to confess the faith against aggressive bullies, those with hatred and not love in their souls, whether Communist or Capitalist. They will have to kill us to steal our churches. We made that clear to them despite, and because of, their aggressiveness and they backed down and lost everything. That was visible to all.

Q: What sort of churches do you have in your group, which since last February has been inside the Romanian Church?

A: I suppose we are rather like Moldovan churches, not just in the sense that we all have Moldovans, but in the sense that we are Russian and Romanian. However, we are also more than that in Colchester, as we have 25 nationalities and our other churches, in Coventry, Little Abington just outside Cambridge, Wisbech, Bradford and Felixstowe, are all still multinational.

Q: Do you have any Greeks among your parishioners?

A: We have very few Greeks, only four in fact, for the simple reason that there are hardly any practising Greeks in any of those places.

Q: How would you characterise the Colchester parish?

A: As you know, our patron saint is in effect a Ukrainian from Poltava who lived all over the world and was multinational in his outlook, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. He also accepted the Western rite, which at that time, over sixty years ago, was still a reality.

Now, all my life I have worked and prayed that we might be able to build a Local Church. Be careful what you pray for, because you might get it! Well, towards the end of my life, we have managed to avoid all ghettos, both ethnic and ideological, and have been given what we prayed for, a local church.

In the home countries of Orthodoxy, inevitably churches will be mononational. That is normal. In capital cities like London, Paris and Berlin, centres of immigration, you will also have embassy churches, that is, mononational churches. That is not the case here outside London. Here we have to go with the flow, to go with the majority. God sends you a flock of all nationalities, who knock at your door. You behave as the Good Samaritan, not like the priest who walked by on the other side. You have to accept them all, with all their diversity, but it is logical to be with the majority, providing that their hierarchy behaves canonically, and not schismatically.

Q: Isn’t it difficult to have different nationalities together?

A: It can be, but it does not need to be. Nationalists and racists do not come to us (but nationalists and racists tend not to be Christians and, if nominally Orthodox, do not set foot in church anyway), but those with a little tolerance do come. And they learn to accept each other, with the result that you end up with mixed marriages, mixed in the positive sense of inter-Orthodox. For instance, our second priest who is Romanian is married to a Latvian and that is only the tip of the iceberg. We have couples who are Scottish-Cypriot (yes, he did get married in his kilt), Estonian-Nigerian, Moldovan-Guinea-Bissau (that must be unique!), Romanian-Slovak, Ukrainian-South-African, Lithuanian-Serbian, as well as the really rather ordinary English-Russian.

Sad to say, I have seen very many Orthodox parishes all over Europe closing in my lifetime. Why? Because their flocks died out. The original immigrant-parents, the first generation, died and as their children were assimilated and gave up attending a church which to them was foreign, the parishes died out. We must not do the same here. We have hordes of children at our church, between 50 and 100 at every liturgy. I am told that this is more children than in any other church in this country. They are our future. We must not lose them to narrow, bigoted, right-wing ideologies, relating to the past or to the present, or lose them to attempts by exclusivists to grab our properties, as they are the properties which belong to all the local Orthodox of all nationalities, or to some ethnic narrowness, which refuses to preach Christ in the local language.

In the last three months we have chrismated two English people (former Protestants) and baptised another one (who had not previously been baptised) into the Church. May this continue. So, despite the great changes and the chaos caused by politics over the last four years, we continue. We continue despite them all and despite their opposition.

 

 

In Bright Week 2020

Christ is Risen!

As the COVID-19 virus continues to take its grim toll, almost wholly among the elderly and long-term ill (after four months it has caused a third as many victims as swine flu), conspiracy theories continue. Now in sections of the mainstream media in the US, rumours have begun that a laboratory in Wuhan in China (as in other countries also) was paid by certain forces based in the US to experiment. The dangerous experiment went wrong and the virus escaped. If this rumour were true, it would be an example of outsourcing backfiring.

Whatever the truth, and all the conspiracy theories are probably untrue, many have been wondering if the remedy, shutting down the economy, bankrupting hundreds of thousands of businesses and creating tens of millions of unemployed, is not worse than the illness.

Others have wondered if this is not a Western disease. The countries so far worst affected by far are the USA, Italy, Spain, France and the UK. Africa and Latin America seem, like a multitude of tiny islands around the world, to be relatively unaffected, if at all. Of course, this may only be because many such countries are unable to collect accurate statistics or are unable to provide accurate diagnoses. They may have many more victims than are officially reported. Alternatively, it is also true that few people in such countries reach old age or else die of serious illnesses long before COVID-19 can prematurely end their lives.

For the Church, there is a great irony: priests spend their lives getting people to come to church. Now we have to send them away. But good can always come out of bad: the baptised who came to church irregularly may now appreciate more what is available and not take the church for granted as something they only need for ‘hatch, match and despatch’. In any case, one thing is for certain: Christ overcame death, He will certainly overcome this vulgar little virus.

 

On the Naming of Wars: History is Written by the Victors

Many have remarked how after the Allied victory in 1945 the Nuremburg war crimes trials rightly tried Nazis, but not the Allies, who had bombed and murdered 500,000 German civilians. For history is written by the victors. In the same way the Western world names the wars it starts and wins in a way that does not reflect reality. Thus the two ‘World Wars’ were essentially Western Wars and should be called such. The fact that colonial troops were dragged into them as cannon fodder does not mean that those colonies started those wars and, as for Japan, it was essentially a Westernized country.

For example, in the case of Great Britain, which has invaded most of the world’s countries (exceptions include Luxembourg, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein and the Marshall Islands), we have many examples of deliberately misnamed wars: the so-called ‘India Mutiny’ which was in fact the First Indian War of Independence, or the so-called ‘Boer War’ which was the British Genocide in South Africa in order to steal gold and diamonds. In Vietnam the Wars against foreign invaders from the 1940s to the 1970s are rightly called, respectively, the French War and the American War. Today the United States refers to its wars and battles against the CIA-founded and funded Al-Qaida, Taliban and others as ‘The Global War on Terror’, which is in fact ‘The Global War of Terror’.

Even wars named after the two main combatants are misnamed, as the order in which the combatants is named is significant of bias. For example the ‘Mexican-American War’ was in fact the American-Mexican War, the ‘Spanish-American War’ was the American-Spanish War, the ‘Franco-Prussian War’ was the Prussian-French War and the ‘Russo-Japanese War’ was the Japano-Russian War, for the first countries were the aggressors. Wars named after locations also often hide the reality of aggression. For instance: the Crimean War was the Western-Ottoman Invasion of Russia, the Korean War was the American Genocide in Korea and the Gulf War or ‘Operation Desert Storm’ was the Western Genocide in Iraq or the Oil Grab War.

We should also be careful of words added to a nation’s name or location to describe a war, such as rebellion, insurrection, revolt, mutiny, revolution, uprising, intervention, coup, troubles and border. Examples include the Philippine Insurrection, in fact The Philippine War of Freedom, the Boxer Rebellion, The Chinese War of Independence, and the Russian Revolution, in fact the British-orchestrated Palace Treason of power-grabbing and treasonous Westernized oligarchs (who closely resembled the spoilt Decembrist aristocrat rebels of 1825, except that the latter fortunately failed). A more recent example is ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, in reality an Irish War of Independence against British Establishment tyranny.

Some wars do have names in certain places that reflect reality: so the American colonial conflicts are correctly known in the ex-British colonies as Queen Anne’s War and King William’s War. This is also true of wars with nicknames. Thus, the American Civil War is sometimes referred to as ‘Mr. Lincoln’s War’, as well as ‘The War of Northern Aggression’, while American participation in World War One is sometimes called ‘Mr. Wilson’s War’, after President Wilson. However, these are the exceptions.

What we need is history to be written truthfully, not by the victors, not by the losers, but by those who love the truth. This is the history that will one day be written – at the Last Judgement. Then we shall see that many who are first will be last and many who are last will be first. Then it will be seen that it is not always good to be a victor.

 

Three Western Failures: Communism, Fascism and Secularism

Communism = Christianity without Christ.

The originally Jewish ideology of Communism, imported from Germany into Russia, failed, and Russia began its long and repentant return to authentic Christianity (Orthodoxy). However, its return has been much slowed by the temptation of the illusions of Western Capitalism, which gives out its glittering technological beads to the natives in exchange for their birthright. Some Russians have fallen to this temptation, its most notable victims being oligarchs and other wealthy Westernized liberals.

Fascism = Catholicism without Christ.

Fascism, which also developed in Germany, but in the twentieth century and so well after Communism, failed in 1945. Thus, Catholicism, which had sponsored Fascism as a political and cultural anti-Russian project, was soon after obliged to protestantize itself in order to survive. The alternative, to repent for its nine hundred years of heresies and to return to Orthodoxy, would have been too radical for it, as it would have meant renouncing its inherent secularity, its corrupting power.

Secularism = Protestantism without Christ.

This is the only surviving Western ideology now. This is today’s globalised Plastic Civilization of secularised Protestantism, the ‘human right’ of Consumerism that ransacks and pollutes the globe. We know that this too will fail, simply because Communism and Fascism failed before it and they were merely variations on the same theme of Materialism. They were the same atheist, capitalist Secularism, even if forms of Materialism run by totalitarian States, whether Communist or Fascist.

All these Western failures are simply variations on a theme, that of the same pseudo-rationalistic ideology, which in fact is deeply irrational. The essence of this ideology consists in the misbelief that human-beings have no souls, that there is nothing after death and that our only care can thus be the organization of our life in this world for our comfort. Any such ideology is doomed to failure for it does not take into account spiritual reality, the origin, existence and destiny of our immortal souls.

 

 

Who Governs the Church?

Preface

In my last article, I wrote:

‘Mission on most of five continents, in most of Europe, most of Asia, in Oceania and in North and South America, lies before us. And this mission can only be carried out by a Church, which is uncompromised and untainted by State interference, by racist nationalism, by secularist ecumenism and modernism’

One reader wrote to me and said that such a Church has not existed for some 1,700 years. I replied that we must distinguish between the Church and the hierarchy. Below is my fuller reply to him.

Introduction

In forty-five years of Church life I have met between one and two hundred bishops of the present 900. I believe that at least two of them were saints. Many others were good. However, some were bad, indeed awful.

Bad bishops like the ones I have encountered traumatize their priests. The faithful quit them because nobody can trust them or some of the priests whom they ordain. Such bishops are at best celibates. (And some of them are not even celibates – see below). However, celibates can also be corrupt and incompetent and even atheists. Celibates can also be under-educated, incapable of writing anything, chronically ignorant. They can also be over-educated and nobody can understand their pompous and overblown philosophies. And celibates can prove to be incompetent simply because they are too old and ill to be competent, for instance falling asleep during Synod meetings. In their weak old age they then get manipulated by women, called in Russian ‘bishopesses’. However, most of the temptations that I have seen bishops falling into concern either morality or else power.

  1. Moral Temptations

There are three of these:

The first is money and the luxuries it provides. Who has not met a Greek bishop with a fancy villa in Athens? Or a Russian bishop with an expensive black cars. With all this goes pride, snobbery and elitism.

The second is sexual. Fortunately pedophilia is extremely rare (though I do know of two cases from the Soviet period). Sadly, homosexuality is relatively widespread among Diaspora bishops, with the episcopate of one group in the Diaspora known as ‘the gay mafia’. These like ordaining homosexual boyfriends to the priesthood, excluding married clergy and so perpetuating their vice. I have seen it. Then there are the heterosexuals, the most notorious one being the Soviet-period Metropolitan of Kiev, the notorious Filaret, whose wife had men ordained to the priesthood in return for expensive presents and flattery. One I knew here took Church funds and bought his mistress a house with the money. Another wanted to sleep with the wife of a candidate for a priesthood, He walked out of his old Diocese forever and was ordained elsewhere by a moral bishop. The senior priest (uncanonically ordained) in his old Diocese, who knew all about his bishop’s conquests, defended his bishop: ‘It’s his only fault’. After some years his Diocese came to be in a critical state. No surprises there.

Thirdly there is vanity. Vain bishops are easily manipulated. Their narcissistic vanity is used to deprive priests and their families of their parishes and income. Insults, humiliations, slanders and bullying follow them. The Diocese is ruled by flattering favourites, who support and ordain bad elements against the good. Injustice rules and awards are given to corrupt favourites. Pastoral life suffers, parishioners are not visited, the flock sees no example from above and quits the Church, as nobody cares and those who do care are punished. The sheer lack of love of the vain and narcissistic bishop who abandons the good, preferring the bad, wrecks whole dioceses. I have seen it twice in my life.

  1. Power Temptations

There are three of these:

The first is politics. Uncanonical dependancy on figures in the State leads to uncanonical actions. Thus, for centuries patriarchs of Constantinople have been appointed by Muslim sultans, British and French ambassadors and today US ambassadors. Russian bishops were appointed by lay ‘oberprocurators’, at least one of whom was an atheist. We of course know about the Soviet period. We have the example of today’s Ukraine where a Jewish-Uniat president has set up his own Church, exactly like Henry VIII in England. Power corrupts, and this is why so many recent patriarchs and bishops of Constantinople have been freemasons, trying to corrupt candidates for the priesthood, as I know.

The second is the heresy of phyletism, the Greek word for racism. We have seen so many churches draped in national flags, especially Greek, Romanian, Serbian and Georgian. In one Greek Cathedral forty years ago we saw the Greek metropolitan actually stop the Liturgy: The Greek ambassador and his family had just entered and had to be escorted by the deacon to their seats…Such is spiritual death.

The third is dictatorship. Power goes to the head of the bishop and he becomes a dry dictator, a ‘good administrator’, ‘an effective manager’. Never consulting local people whom he only has contempt for anyway, such a bishop is just a spiritually dead bureaucrat. His diocese dies.

Conclusion

Some may be scandalized by the above and even despair. I say: So what? There is nothing new in the above, for there is nothing new under the sun. Sin is intensely boring because it is just the same old thing over and over again. Given the list above, my reaction is that this proves that the Church is Divine. If the Church were a secular company, it would long ago have gone bankrupt. For the Church is not governed by bishops – and if any bishop thinks that, he is clearly insane. The Church is governed by the Holy Spirit. Man proposes, but God disposes. And that is why, they can throw and have thrown all sorts of the above bishops at us and we are still here. And they are not. Victory is always ours, for Christ stands behind us.

 

Russian Church will include more Western saints in its calendar

Orthodoxy in the West will revive. There’ll be Orthodoxy in Britain and Ireland, in France and Germany, in Holland and Spain and in America, too! Every language and nation will have Holy Orthodoxy. This is the charge laid upon our Russian emigration for our repentance.

St John of Shanghai

Moscow, March 27, Interfax – The Russian Orthodox Patriarchate will continue to include the names of the saints venerated in the early West in its calendar.

“This process is not completed, it has only started,” said the head of the Synodal Department for External Relations, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, on the Church and the World programme on the Rossiya-24 TV channel.

As was reported, in early March the Patriarchate included in its calendar St. Patrick and 15 ancient saints glorified in the countries of Europe before the schism of 1054. St. Patrick the Enlightener of Ireland was among them. It was decided that he would be commemorated on 30 March according to the secular dating system.

According to Metropolitan Hilarion, these saints were included at the request of the many Russian Orthodox dioceses in Western Europe.

“There are also other Western saints whom I hope will also soon be included in the calendar of our Church,” said Metropolitan Hilarion.

He explained that the main criterion for including the name of the saint in the calendar is veneration of the saint in a certain locality. Besides this, this saint should have lived before the schism of 1054, “as everything that happened afterwards belongs to the separate history of the Orthodox Church and Catholicism.”

The hierarch noted that it was important that the person had not participated in struggle against Orthodoxy, “as happens with certain Western religious figures.”

He also said that he would not interpret the inclusion of Western saints in the Russian Orthodox Church calendar as a step towards drawing closer to local Church reality,” said the Metropolitan.

http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=13661

THE DEATH RATTLE OF GLOBALISM?

The neocon globalists, led in the USA by the defeated Clintons and Obama, in the EU by the discredited Hollande (popularity rating – 4%) and the reviled Merkel (as for Cameron, who has heard of him?), are showing all the signs of being bad losers. Having lost the war in Aleppo, they are now turning to desperate measures and not just propaganda lies about hacking or Russian ‘threats’. Having failed last summer in the CIA-run Gulenist coup to overthrow and murder the Turkish President Erdogan, they have now had the Russian ambassador, Andrey Karlov, murdered, a terrorist shooting him in the back in typically cowardly fashion.

Designed to spoil Russian-Turkish cooperation, it will not. This situation is not the same as last year, when a Russian pilot was killed by the Gulenist network. After the murder of the ambassador by a Gulenist, the Turkish side sent its apologies to the Russian people and government immediately. Vladimir Putin directly blamed the CIA-backed network of Islamists that were behind the murder and sympathized with the anti-NATO President Erdogan. On the same day there was a terrorist attack in Germany, organized by ISIS. We are witnessing the death throes of anti-Christian globalism, forced out of the White House by popular consent.

The US organizer will pay a huge price for this assassination. Russia and Turkey will work together in Syria and create peace in the cradle of Christendom, the Middle East. The Russo-Turkish alliance is deepened, as is the acceleration of the Turkish withdrawal from NATO, creating a new Central Asian alliance, together with Iran. Our enemies – the globalists – fear this more than anything else. Nothing will stop progress to the creation of a multi-polar, democratic world order against the globalists and their pathetic, Neo-Cold War, bad loser propaganda. The regiments of CIA hackers always accuse their enemies of doing what they do.

Having thrown off the Western-imposed, Soviet yoke, Russia’s agricultural exports are now returning to those before 1917, the exports bringing in more than its arms sales: Russia is independent. Obama, who supported the terrorists (‘resistance-fighters’) in the Middle East, especially against the democratically-elected and very popular Assad government (‘regime’ in CIA mediaspeak) has lost. The neocons’ meddling has lost the USA not only Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt and Syria, but now also Turkey. Eurasia will now be united under Chinese and Russian leadership. A diplomat assassinated: a new Empire is born.