The Future All Before Us
Introduction: The Political Background
In the process of globalisation it is the weakest and the poorest, the nations with the least technology or the least natural resources, which go to the wall first. Thus, most of Africa and much of Latin America went to the wall first, in the 1970s and 1980s. Then came the turn of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Utterly indebted through a costly but futile arms race which only capitalist banks could debt-finance, these multi-ethnic confederations went to the wall next, in the early 1990s.
Today, in the 2000s, it is the turn of the little countries of Europe, of Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and the ‘soft underbelly’ of Mediterranean Europe. Now they go to the wall, its elite having vastly overspent on French and German consumer goods and military hardware. Now they see 50% unemployment rates among the tragic young, who prepare to be exiled from their homes and be scattered to the four winds. The Europe that 60 years ago desperately sought to create a Europeanised Germany is being forced to become a Germanised Europe. The plan to impose an unwanted political union on Europe by first enforcing a cunning currency union, is well on track. Bankrupted country after bankrupted country, held in the euro straitjacket, now receives EU-imposed puppet rulers.
Meanwhile parts of debt-laden USA also resemble the Third World: Will it be next to go to the wall, brought low by a war against Iran? It is as a result of crippling debt and the ensuing problems that many countries will disappear, as the prophecies tell. In Russia, sustained like Australia, Brazil, Canada and Saudi Arabia by vast natural resources and raw materials, recent and current dissatisfaction with the government carries with it a warning against endemic corruption. Those who vote against the current administration are not voting for others, they are voting only as a protest vote against institutionalised dishonesty and the apparent lack of any redress.
The very real social injustice there is outrageous. However, it is nothing new. Much of it began in 1917, when a gang of criminals and bank robbers (including a minor one nicknamed Stalin) came to power. This was because the Western-backed, upper class rebels, who had seized power from the legitimate authority of a saint in a cunning coup d’etat seven months earlier, proved to be utterly incompetent. Great is their responsibility. This corruption became even worse after the fall of Communism in 1991, after which so-called Communists turned into Wild-East Capitalists overnight.
These latter stole the immense assets of the State, held in the name of the people, and became oligarchs. And most of these then fled with their billions to Western Capitalist States, where they were protected by ‘the international community’ (i.e. the USA and its allies), as so many professional criminals are. Thus, these oligarchs merely took the place of the largely corrupt oligarchic aristocrats of before 1917, who in turn succeeded the largely corrupt oligarchic boyars of earlier centuries. The problem of Russia has always been in its oligarchs.
Although the present Russian government is hardly made up of angels, what is the alternative to it? The fourth largest Party in the Russian Federation is made up of Socialists – the sort who governed Greece for years...The third largest Party are Nationalists, whom some would equate with Fascists. And the second largest Party is the Communist Party. And we know what they did when they had their chance, in fact, very many chances, over an infernally long 75 years....But what of the Russian Orthodox Church in all this?
The Tasks Before Us
The first task of the multinational Russian Orthodox Church today is that of St John the Baptist. This is to prepare the way, to make the crooked paths (of left and right) straight, to preach the repentance ready for Christ, not for His First Coming, but for His Second Coming. The harvest is plenteous, but the labourers are few, and the harvest of the earth is ripe (Rev 14, 15). We pray the Lord of the harvest.
Where to preach? There are not only all of the lands that once were controlled by the Soviet Union, where such an enormous amount remains to be restored in post-Sovetia, there is also the rest of the Orthodox Commonwealth of Peoples, the Orthosphere. Here there is Greece, where impoverished families now abandon their children and policemen protest at having to enforce the diktats of Brussels against their own families, not to mention Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania, all EU-enslaved. There is martyred Serbia, under the heel of ‘Camp Bondsteel’ and the proxy troops of the NATO legions. And there is little Georgia, now little more than a Latin American colony of the US administration, as was Greece under the colonels.
Beyond this, there is Syria, where Western-organised terrorists try to destroy the last remaining Christian presence, and Turkey, also in south-west Asia. Then there is all of Africa through its canonical Patriarchate in tormented Egypt. Then there is all of Latin America. And in south-east Asia there is Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, where missions are already starting, and China, soon to be the largest Protestant nation in the world, but called to become the largest Orthodox nation in the world.
The second task is the administrative reorganisation needed for the Church. Many archimandrites, abbots and hieromonks are being consecrated bishop in Russia. Many more have yet to be consecrated bishop for the new dioceses. Though there are thousands of candidates in the monasteries, quality must not be sacrificed for the sake of quantity. Yet another thousand dioceses and Russian Orthodox bishops of all nationalities would not, in time, be too optimistic to hope for and certainly not too many.
The third task is the need to reorganise the diasporas. This too is already under way. Local inter-Orthodox assemblies, in effect episcopal parliaments, consulting with theological and pastoral committees and run only by consensus, are now in operation in all the diasporas. Church-building and church-foundation in the diasporas move, albeit slowly, ahead. There is hope that Regional Orthodox Metropolia can be set up worldwide under the Russian Church.
Such infrastructure and organisation would inevitably sooner or later attract the voluntary participation of different Orthodox dioceses (so-called ‘jurisdictions’) and other nationalities. More and more churches now realise that the way ahead is in inclusiveness, that is, in bilingualism, catering for the various layers of local parishioners whose needs they are called on to meet. The residual petty nationalism (‘phyletism’) of provincial provinces for the lost Centre, an Empire that disappeared nearly 560 years ago, the nostalgia for which is evident in Greek music and song, is not relevant. Neither is that of ill-integrated converts who sometimes bring local Western nationalisms and secularisms into the Church with them. The only response to nation-negating globalisation is the nation-affirming Global Orthodox Church.
Conclusion: Providence and Trust
There are two types of Orthodoxy. There is the new, fake or secularised, Western-sponsored ‘Orthodoxy’ of a few intellectuals and political westernisers, and real Orthodoxy, that of the vast majority which has always existed. The differences between them are especially visible in the diasporas. Fake Orthodoxy, originally a product of British Empire freemasonry in the early twentieth century, was adopted and expanded by the US elite over sixty years ago.
It is renovationist, modernistic, anti-monastic, new calendarist, conformist, pro-EU, clean-shaven, protestantantised and secularist, sanitised and sterilised so that it can no longer create holiness, in the same manner as Vatican II Catholicism. In the long term, real Orthodoxy will inevitably triumph over the fake version created for Western consumption, as it always does, for the simple reason that what is secular always dies, because it has no spiritual and eternal roots and values.
Just as before the 1917 Revolution the defrocked priest George Gapon preached his Gospel of secularism and after the 1917 Revolution Russian Renovationists, sponsored by the Bolsheviks and the British-manipulated Patriarchate of Constantinople and encouraged by the Vatican, tried to seize power and failed, so will it be again. This is because Confession and Martyrdom - oh, how slandered we are! – will always support what is real, ensuring the failure of the fake.
The only ideology of the militantly secularist West is based on lack of duty and lack of sacrifice. ‘What’s in it for me’ is the mentality here. In the West, politically incorrect words like ‘sin’, ‘repentance’ and ‘holiness’ are all taboo words, if not actually quite unknown. Consumerism’s only alternative to Orthodoxy is ‘Me-time’. But this self-serving ego trip of self-absorption is the very decadence that has been the ruination of every Empire that the world has ever known.
To those who doubt in the Final Victory of the Church, we can only repeat: Trust in God. He will provide the leaders necessary. Our last Russian Orthodox Patriarch brought all together – as was necessary then. In other words, he achieved the opposite to what the world wanted, which was to divide the Church and so rule Her. The victory of the émigré Patriarch, Alexis II, a victory for the emigration, was indeed a spiritual one, for the Church is not divided and rules Herself.
Our current Patriarch is intent on bringing as many as possible with us. In other words, he is achieving the opposite to what the world wants, which is to reduce the Church ever more, to confine it to a tiny ghetto of ‘the pure’ or ‘the modern’ and so make Her irrelevant. It may be, but as God wills, that our next Patriarch will seek consolidation. In any case, of one thing we can be sure, that all the schemings and conspiracies of this world have come to naught and will always come to naught. The Russian Orthodox Church is Risen after Her Crucifixion, for ‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts’. And so the future really is all before us.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
The Meeting of the Lord
2/15 February 2012
