Nick: I believe nothing in history compares to the two World Wars, Nazism and Communism. It all started when Darwin convinced people that they too were animals. Stalin’s and Nazis’ crimes prove that they were convinced that humans are less valuable than non-human animals.

There have always been evil people who used our Christian Faith to justify wars and their evil deeds. This does not mean that Christianity is bad. It means that the devil, and the children of the wicked one, will always try to discredit Christianity.

So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares? He said unto them, An enemy hath done this.

For now, God’s mercy is sparing the wicked, because of the righteous.

Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

Western Europe was post-Christian at a time of the two world wars.

Eliot: Maybe among the intelligencia and political leadership Europe was post-Christian. I doubt that was true among the masses.

Christian nations do not slaughter each other.

If that were true, then Christianity did not exist in Europe for the last 1700 years. During that period, or at least for the last 1400 years, Islam slaughtered others. Christians predominantly slaughtered their brothers.

Western Europe was post-Christian at a time of the two world wars. Christian nations do not slaughter each other. From a two thousand years perspective the post-Catholic and post-Protestant Europe is also post-Orthodox. Europe “discovered” that we are descendants of gorillas and did not want to hear anymore about Christ and the Heavenly Father. People want to become gods themselves. This is the humanist ideology.

St Nicholas of Zhicha (+ 1956),

Christ has left Europe, as once before Christ left Gadara at the insistence of the Gadarenes. But as soon as He left, there started wars, misfortunes, horrors, destruction, annihilation. Pre-Christian barbarianism has returned to Europe, that of the Avars, the Huns, the Lombards, the Vandals, only nightmarishly multiplied a hundredfold. Christ has taken up His Cross and His blessing and left. Darkness and stench have spilled forth. So decide who you want to be with: with the darkness and stench of Europe, or with Christ.
http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/dachau4.htm

The Iconoclasts fought against the icons because they believed that Icon worship was wrong. EU and the neo-Iconoclasts ban the icons because they remind people of God.
“Without Me you can do nothing.” (John. 15:5). The Lord, through His servants -the saints- has forewarned us against a third WW. This last one, unlike the first two WWs, will not be for repentance ; it will be for destruction and annihilation and meant to force people to demand one global leader.

As for the Orthodox Russia, in the life of St. Luke Archbishop of Simferopol the Surgeon (1877-1961) I read a different account:

This period of time was extremely difficult for the Russian Orthodox Church, as they were constantly being assaulted from the right (zealots and schismatics) and from the left (the atheist government and their heretical “Living Church”). Because of St. Luke’s confessions of faith (and despite his immense medical and scientific achievements), he was imprisoned, tortured, and exiled for 11 years in total to Siberia, and other trecherous locales. Besides persecution from the government, he had to deal with heretics from the “Living Church” who masqueraded as Orthodoxy and drew people away from the Church, and schismatic individuals who also caused unneeded harm in those turbulent years.

Eliot: It is not that simple. Europe went through two devestating world wars. That, in and of itself, caused a lot of people to turn from God and seek some sort of a super nation (ultimately evolving into the present EU) in an idealistic effort to prevent further devestation. The Vatican (esp. # I) did not help the situation with its head in the sand approach. Vatican autocracy and Protestant anarchy were both rejected as nefarious. Secularism became the alternative. I think what happened to Orthodoxy is even deeper. Call it clericalism or whatever. There has emerged a disconnect between the hierarchy, their disciplina arcana, if you wil, and a popular but extreme form of piety, almost reflective of western pietism, that developed among the masses They were in opposition to each other but coexisted until the hierarchy decided that obedience” was to be enforced. That was the situation in pre-Revolution Russia. The state decided to eradicate the hierarchy to a great extent and the peasant could not have been happier to rid itself of the hierarchy. The catacomb Church in Russia survived, not because of the hierarchy, but because of the peasant piety.

If you have not read, I strongly encourage you to read Dostoevski’s “The Grand Inquisitor” which is one of the chapters in “Brothers Karamatsov”. What he describes directly is the Roman Church. But, reading between the lines, it is also an indictment of the Orthodox hierarchy as it became under the Tsarist regime.

I for one don’t believe that within the West there is no method of self-reflection. […] The West didn’t impose that on us, Eliot, neither did Islam.

Are you sure George? I am not sure of anything anymore. Who’s leading Europe, anyway? EU brainwashing denies the Christian roots of our civilization. Who are the ideological fanatics of Brussels? Perhaps “the seizure of power by a small group of villains” would explain everything.

I for one don’t believe that within the West there is no method of self-reflection. To always blame others for the problems of Orthodoxy does a disservice to both the “others” and us. Case in point: the nonsense that emanated from Chambesy took twenty years to come to fruition. It was all because of pride (who’s on first). No patriarchate was willing to concede its ethnic eparchies (read: cash cows) because there was an almost complete lack of love and humility. The West didn’t impose that on us, Eliot, neither did Islam. The papalist pretensions of Constantinople were on the ascendant from the time of the Comnenii. Since then, they’ve only ascended to greater height.

“The beginning of modern history”, the French Revolution deemed as “a decisive event in world history” was beset with real or imagined conspiracies by internal and foreign enemies. The following revolutions throughout Europe and eventually in Russia have followed a similar pattern. Like Met. Hilarion says:
“I should say at once that I cannot interpret what happened in Russia, in 1917 as an accident, the seizure of power by a small group of villains.”
I believe things are really complicated. Perhaps it all started back, in 313, A.D, when it became easier, indeed fashionable, to become a Christian and new members with pagan pasts and dishonest intentions were accommodated in the Church. The troubles continue to this day, but the Church is the ground and the pillar of Truth and “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”.

You know, this is why I tire of the neo-Monarchialists, Elliot. It is always someone else’s fault. The criticism always ends at blaming Catholicism or Protestantism.

I’m not saying you are doing this Elliot, only that this reading is superficial.

This article is also interesting:

Since the modernists, known to Russian Church history as ‘renovationists’, were fundamentally Protestants, with a whiff of occult theosophy, they viewed the whole of Russian Orthodox theology as Catholicised, that is, captive to Roman Catholic scholasticism.

This merely displayed their ignorance of real Church life. What was taught in universities and academies was not theology, it was only a rationalistic game, ‘theological science’. Real Russian Orthodox theology had never died, but, as we have said, was still lived on a daily basis in monasteries and parishes. This was where, of course, the intellectual elite never set foot, confined as they were to the upper-class salons of St Petersburg, where treachery to the monarchy and so to all Russia was hatched.

The essence of the renovationist tragedy was their towering pride. (Interestingly, before the Russian Revolution, many of the future renovationists used to meet in a building in St Petersburg, called ‘The Tower’). They believed that they could ‘improve on’ the nineteen-hundred year-old Church with their ‘spiritual’ and ‘apolitical’ views.
[…]
Now we can understand why Russian renovationists so actively accused the Russian Church of being in thrall to Roman Catholic influence. It was because the renovationists themselves were in thrall to Protestant influence. When they talked about captivity, they were talking about their own theological captivity, their own loss of the Tradition. Today, their only real influence outside Russia is among a few grandchildren of Russian emigres who have lost their roots, and a few Non-Russian converts and, inside Russia, some eccentric intellectuals.

http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/pdf/realfake.pdf

The Methodism of John Wesley did much to “innoculate” the working classes of Great Britain against the siren song of communism.

I would strongly recommend Vera Shevzov’s book “Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution” (New York: Oxford University Press. 2004). It traces the popular pietism which developed in the villages, the Church’s intolerance of it, the attempt to corral it, the Church’s close affinity with the Tsarist Regime, its total disconnect with the serfs (later peasants), etc. It has monumental insights as to corruption and decay which the Church finally tried to reverse with the 1917-1918 All Russian Council, which was the right step but came too late.

I read the book several years ago. Met. Hilarion’s interest will result in my re-reading it in the next few days.

Great to hear that! I would love to live there. I do not know where the middle path lies. One needs to have understanding towards human helplessness but it is also important to preserve the faith.

Get off the east coast. The east coast is not the norm. Certainly we need to do better in teaching the faith but if we continue to allow the east coast to rule any of the jurisdictions we have not even begun the task of evangelism. Seems to me that the vast majority of negative stuff is coming off the east coast. Not just in church life but culturally and polticially it is insular, elitist and deaf.

Come visit me at my parish: St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral in Wichita, KS. We are really trying to build an Orthodox community of worship, witness and service that includes (eventually) a monastary, planting other Orthodox parishes etc.

Our services are shorter than the Russian norm, but chanted, sung (including from the pews {ok we have pews}) with vigor.

I really don’t think we are alone in the process. The vitality of the Orthodox Church is in the heartland of this country between the mountains.

there is the possibility for martyrdom everywhere.

So far I see and hear about people whining about long services, and strict fasts in the Orthodox Church. I hear people complaining about getting a numb butt from sitting too long or complaining of itching beards.
http://orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/hopko_bem.aspx

Father Thomas characterizes the corporate worship of the Orthodox Church by citing the words of a lay believer in upstate New York who participated in a colloquium designed to measure Orthodox lay response to the BEM document. This woman complains that Orthodox services are long, uninspiring, conducted in a foreign tongue that even the ethnics cannot understand, or conducted in English in an off-handed manner that gives them no substance. People stand or sit passively, separated from the Priest by a screen of Icons, and are discouraged from receiving Holy Communion, except during Lent, when the atmosphere is penitential and lacking in joy. Fasting is a prerequisite for this infrequent communion, and women, during their female cycles, are discouraged from communing, attending Church, and kissing the Icons or Cross. Father Thomas rightfully calls this picture a “sorrowful” one. But it is not so much sorrowful because it reflects the poverty of Orthodox worship, but because it betrays such a total lack of understanding of what that worship is. If the challenge which the BEM offers us results in this kind of response, then the BEM document is not the issue. The issue is that of teaching our people the rudiments of their Faith and bringing them back to an understanding of how that Faith beautifully and joyfully expresses itself in worship.

Met. Hilarion, it seems to me, in trying to locate some historical antecedents is addressing, in a very cautious way, whether the Church had any culpability in the atheistic onslaught that caused it such terrible suffering. It’s a question that needs to be asked, especially in this age of secular excess.