Source: Orthodox England
March 24, 2016
Introduction
Over 20 years ago the ever memorable Metropolitan John of Saint Petersburg wrote prophetically: ‘Today there is no longer a Tsar. And the Patriarchal throne is now the only mystical centre which can unite around it the earthly and the heavenly Rus, the suffering and the triumphant. This is now becoming the only bulwark for the coming Resurrection of Rus’. Today, as the restoration and gathering of the Patriarchal Church continues, however hesitantly, these words are even truer. We only have to listen to the new consciousness as recently expressed by Patriarch Kyrill.
The Call to Consciousness
In March, after a liturgy in the newly-consecrated church of St Alexander Nevsky in Moscow, he proclaimed: ‘The most terrible problem in the contemporary world is the persecution of Christians – 100,000 are killed every year…Today Russia is the last power to defend Christians all over the world. In today’s situation the defence of Russia is the defence of the Orthodox Faith…May God preserve our Church, the guardian of the Faith and the spiritual strength of the people!’
And on 20 March, the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, he said: ‘Today the concept of life without God is already spreading all over the planet. We can see how many prosperous countries are making efforts to legislate to allow the right to choose any way of life, including the most sinful that is in complete contradiction with the Word of God. That is why today we speak of the global heresy of man worship, a new form of idolatry, which tears God out of human life. It is precisely at overcoming this main heresy of the contemporary world, which may lead to apocalyptic events, which the Church must today direct the force of its word and thought.
We must defend Orthodoxy, as the Fathers of the Seventh Universal Council defended it, as Patriarch Methodius and the Empress Theodora and a host of bishops defended it, as St Mark of Ephesus and our New Martyrs and Confessors of the Church of Russia defended it’.
‘…my consecration took place on the Feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy…and my enthronement as Patriarch took place on the feast day of St Mark of Ephesus, 1 February 2009. It was he who almost alone saved Orthodoxy from Uniatism…I do not consider that these coincidences in my life were random ones…the path that I chose in life is to proclaim Divine salvation from day to day and to keep the purity of the Orthodox Faith, resisting every heresy and every temptation’.
Conclusion
Let us be clear: the world has for a generation been sliding towards a terrible war. Only Russia can halt that war, but only providing that the spiritual rebirth of Russia can go further and the Russian State can be Churched in time. This means the State repenting of its atheism, which so many of its agents already confessed before the Revolution. This can be seen from the atheism, deceit and betrayal of Holy Rus among a great many in the emigration, which alone was responsible for the pride of émigré Church divisions, as they veered to both Orthodoxophobic and Russophobic modernism or pharisaic sectarianism.
If this repentance happens and the Russian State can recover its sense of Providential, universal mission and its Imperial spiritual duty, then the servants of the coming Antichrist can be stopped, as the Patriarch says. To those who think back to the youthful, ecumenist errors of Patriarch Kyrill decades ago, we recommend his above words. We were all young once and in our naivety we were deceived by older people who were in fact traitors. Above we can see the huge differences between the young Fr Kyrill and the mature Patriarch Kyrill. And as such, he is calling each of us to be preachers of Holy Rus, of the authentic Gospel of Christ.
I live in Russia and see that the churches are not emptying, but to the contrary filling up, more being built to make them less crowded, this is at least in and around Moscow. The churches are experiencing more attendance in other major cities as well. There is a problem in the rural areas, but that is mainly because the people are leaving them for the cities. Don't know why you say they are emptying. Have you ever been there?
Dear Father Andrew,
Not wanting at all to hurt your feelings and respecting all the work you have done to bring Shakepeare's Emerald Isle back from the shores of atheism and self-destruction, I must repeat what others have said: that the Ruskii Mir ideology grafted on to Orthodoxy in Russia will not do. Orthodoxiya does not need phyletelistic warmed-over 19th century pan-Slavism foisted on her shoulders. It is Orthodoxy and nothing else. This harmful ideology is destroying not only Ukraine - and I am referring to that long and lingering war - from where my ancestors came from but Russia itself as her economy is going down the proverbial toilet. It is merely bolstering a corrupt and dictatorial post-Soviet political system that benefits Gospodin Putin and his mega-rich cronies. The ROC ought to jettison this satanic thought system and concentrate on christianising the Russian people. For the last decade, churches have been emptying out and perhaps only one to two percent of the that nation now are regular church attenders.
Sincerely
Michael Zurowski
Warsaw and Montreal