"The Catholic Assault on Russia" by Vladimir Moss

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"The Catholic Assault on Russia" by Vladimir Moss

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THE CATHOLIC ASSAULT ON RUSSIA

Written by Vladimir Moss

From the decline and fall of the Byzantine Empire in the Middle Ages, and until the Russian revolution of 1917, the main bastion and protector of Orthodox Christianity in the world was Russia. The Russian Tsars protected the Orthodox of many nations, not only within the bounds of their own realm, but well beyond it – in particular, in the Balkans and the Middle East. They defended them not only against pagan and Muslim Mongols and Tatars and Turks from the East, but also from Christian Swedes, Poles, Germans, Austrians, French and English from the West.

This mission was conducted with notable success right up to the revolution: Napoleon was crushed in 1812; the English, French and Turks were, if not defeated, at any rate repelled in the Crimean War, and the Holy Land was again opened to Orthodox pilgrims; and when the Russian revolution broke out in February, 1917, the Germans and Austrians who had invaded the Orthodox lands of Russia, Serbia and Romania were on the point of being turned back. But then Russia was stabbed in the back by an enemy that came neither from the East nor from the West, but from within – the Jews, vast numbers of whom (half of the world’s total) had been incorporated into the Russian Empire since the end of the eighteenth century, and who, by 1917, had taken control of one-third of Russian commerce and almost all of the country’s newspapers. It was these Jews who whipped up public opinion against the Tsar, viciously slandering him and his family and calling for the overthrow of the dynasty, until almost the whole country believed their lies. Such calls at a time when the country was fighting for its survival would have exacted the death penalty for treason in any other of the combatant countries. But Tsar Nicholas was a gentle and generous man who hated bloodshed… In any case his enemies were too many to be executed en masse, and acting against them would have involved, among other things, a complete purge of the army high command, which was unthinkable at such a time… And so he chose the way of Christ, the way of non-resistance to evil, and abdicated…

Of course, the Bolshevik Jews who, within a few months, seized control of Russia were aided by many other forces – first of all their fellow Jews in New York (such as the banker Jacob Schiff, who financed Trotsky and hundreds of other Bolsheviks), then the German High Command (Lenin was a paid-up German agent with vast funds at his disposal), and then a group of about 300 Russian Freemasons who occupied most of the leading posts in the Russian Army, Industry and Society, together with their French and English brothers who supported them from abroad. And then there was another enemy of Russia that is often forgotten in historical accounts of the revolution, but whose undying hatred of Russia was known to all the Orthodox – the Roman Catholic Church. Let us briefly look at the historical threat posed by the Vatican to Holy Russia before turning to the very present threat that it poses…

*

Throughout the whole of the first millennium of Christian history, almost the whole of Europe and much of the Middle East confessed a single form of Christianity – not Roman Catholicism, as Catholic historians would have us believe, but Orthodox Christianity, which existed in several national and linguistic variants – Greek, Arabic, Slavic, Georgian, Roman, Spanish, Gallic, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon... However, this unity of faith was shattered in 1054, when the Pope of Rome, offended by the refusal of the Christians of the East to accept his authority over them and the new dogmas that he was introducing, anathematized the Eastern Churches. Almost immediately, as if possessed, the Popes began a series of crusades to crush by armed force those who rejected this ecclesiastical revolution that they had effected in one of the historic centres of Christianity.

Probably the first crusade of the Roman Catholic Church against Orthodox Christianity took place in 1066-70, when Duke William of Normandy, with the full blessing and support of Pope Alexander, invaded the “schismatic” land of England. At the battle of Hastings and in its aftermath William killed the English King Harold and perhaps 20% of the population (Harold’s daughter fled to Russia, where she married the Russian Great Prince), forced most of the English aristocracy to flee to Constantinople (where they took service in the armies of the Emperor Alexis and were given land in Bulgaria and the Crimea), took over and “communized” most of the land of England (and, later, Wales, Scotland and Ireland also), destroyed most of the English churches, removed almost all the English bishops, replacing them with French ones, defiled the relics of the English saints, banned the age-old Orthodox liturgy and music, substituted French for English as the official language, and in general created one of the most complete and fateful cultural, political and religious transformations in history… There were further crusades, on a smaller scale, in other parts of Western Europe, particularly in Germany, whose emperors were for long unwilling to become papists…

Then the Popes turned their attention to the eastern “rebels” against his dominion. In 1098-99 Pope Urban incited the footloose and land-hungry western knights to go on a vast scavenging campaign to the East, which ended with the wholesale slaughter of the Jewish and Muslim population of Jerusalem and the devastation of all the Orthodox lands between Serbia and Egypt. Further eastern crusades followed. They failed in their overt purpose, which was to destroy Muslim power in the Middle East, but succeeded in another purpose, which was to undermine the power of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire and the Orthodox Church in the region. The Eastern crusades were “crowned” by the sack of Constantinople in 1204, one of the most barbaric and tragic episodes in Christian history.

By this time, however, the main concentration of power in the Orthodox Christian world was neither in the east nor in the west, but in the north. And so in 1150 the Roman Catholic Bishop Matthew of Crakow in Poland asked the famous Catholic rabble-rouser Bernard of Clairvaux to “exterminate the godless rites and customs of the Ruthenians [Russians]”. The “Teutonic Knights” duly answered the call and invaded Russia, but were defeated at the famous battle on the ice by St. Alexander Nevsky, Prince of Novgorod. Shortly afterwards, the Mongols conquered Russia – a great tragedy, without a doubt, but a tragedy that, by the Providence of God, turned out for the ultimate benefit of Russia, since the Mongols, though pagans, were much more tolerant of Orthodoxy than the Roman Catholics. And on emerging from under the yoke of the Mongols the Russians did not forget the threat of Catholicism: by the sixteenth century they had turned their land into a fortress whose main purpose was: to preserve the Orthodox Faith pure and undefiled from the ravages of the Latins.

Unfortunately, however, the re-emergence of Russia as an independent (in fact, the only independent) Orthodox state coincided with the rise to power of one of the two great states of the Catholic Counter-Reformation – Poland. At the same time that the other great Catholic State, the Hapsburg Empire, was slaughtering Protestants in the West, the Poles – with the active connivance of the Jews – were persecuting the Orthodox over a vast swathe of what is now the Ukraine and Belorussia. Finally, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Poles conquered Moscow and placed a Catholic king, the “false Dmitri”, in the Kremlin. But Patriarch Hermogen of Moscow from his prison cell in the Kremlin dungeon issued appeals to the Russians to rise up against the heretical invaders. And although Hermogen did not live to see the outcome (he was starved to death in his cell), his appeals were heeded, and a great army of national liberation drove the Poles and the Swedes, if not out of Russia completely, at any rate out of her historical heartland.

The new dynasty that came to power in Moscow, the Romanovs, steadily increased its power – to the great frustration of the Popes. Although papal propaganda had some success in infiltrating the upper classes, and in inciting the Crimean war against Russia, the Russian people as a whole remained faithful to Orthodoxy, and the Tsars, especially after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, faithfully protected the interests of Orthodoxy throughout the world. Russian power extended slowly but surely to the south and the west, until, in 1915, the last of the age-old Russian lands, Polish Galicia, was recaptured from Austrian armies: the “regathering of the Russian lands” was complete.

But then, just when Russian power seemed to be at its height, tragedy struck: the revolution. Three years after the recovery of Galicia, most of the West Russian lands were again in German and Austrian hands. And the heartland of Holy Russia was in the hands of their worst enemies, the Jews…

*

How did the Vatican, Russia’s age-old enemy, react to the revolution? In reality, with joy, as being a wonderful missionary opportunity. However, since the Vatican had always opposed communism as well as Orthodoxy, it had to hide its joy at first….

On March 12, 1919 Pope Benedict XV sent Lenin a protest against the persecutions of the Orthodox clergy, while Archbishop Ropp sent Patriarch Tikhon a letter of sympathy. The Bolshevik Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin noted with dissatisfaction this “solidarity with the servers of the Orthodox Church”.[1]

In general, however, the attitude of the Vatican to Orthodoxy was hostile to the Orthodox. Thus Deacon Herman Ivanov-Trinadtsaty writes: “Pope Pius X (who was canonized in 1954) pronounced on the very eve of World War I, ‘Russia is the greatest enemy of the [Roman] Church.’ Therefore it is not surprising that the Roman Catholic world greeted the Bolshevik Revolution with joy. ‘After the Jews the Catholics did probably more than anyone else to organize the overthrow of tsarist power. At least they did nothing to stop it.’ Shamelessly and with great candour they wrote in Rome as soon as the Bolshevik ‘victory’ became evident: ‘there has been uncontainable pleasure over the fall of the tsarist government and Rome has not wasted any time in entering into negotiations with the Soviet government.’ When a leading Vatican dignitary was asked why the Vatican was against France during World War II, he exclaimed: ‘The victory of the Entente allied with Russia would have been as great a catastrophe for the Roman Catholic Church as the Reformation was.’ Pope Pius conveyed this feeling in his typically abrupt manner: ‘If Russia is victorious, then the schism is victorious.’…

“Even though the Vatican had long prepared for it, the collapse of the Orthodox Russian Empire caught it unawares. It very quickly came to its senses. The collapse of Russia did not yet mean that Russia could turn Roman Catholic. For this, a new plan of attack was needed. Realizing that it would be as difficult for a Pole to proselytise in Russia as for an Englishman in Ireland, the Vatican understood the necessity of finding a totally different method of battle with Orthodoxy, which would painlessly and without raising the slightest suspicion, ensnare and subordinate the Russian people to the Roman Pope. This Machiavellian scheme was the appearance of the so-called ‘Eastern Rite’, which its defenders understood as ‘the bridge by which Rome will enter Russia’, to quote an apt expression of K.N. Nikolaiev.

“This treacherous plot, which can be likened to a ship sailing under a false flag, had very rapid success in the first years after the establishment of Soviet power. This too place in blood-drenched Russia and abroad, where feverish activity was begun amongst the hapless émigrés, such as finding them work, putting their immigration status in order, and opening Russian-language schools for them and their children.

“It cannot be denied that there were cases of unmercenary help, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, this charitable work had a thinly disguised confessional goal, to lure by various means the unfortunate refugees into what seemed at first glance to be true Orthodox churches, but which at the same time commemorated the pope…

“In Russia the experiment with the ‘Eastern Rite’ lasted more than ten years…[2] The heart and soul of the papal ‘Ostpolitik’, its eastern policies, was a Jesuit, the French Bishop d’Erbigny, who was specially authorized by the pope to conduct negotiations with the Kremlin for the wide dissemination of Roman Catholicism in the Soviet Union and by the same token the supplanting of Orthodoxy in Russia and in Russian souls.

“With this in mind, d’Erbigny travelled three times to the Soviet Union on a French diplomatic passport. He consecrated several Roman Catholic hierarchs with the aim of building up a group of Russian Catholic clergymen who would be acceptable to the Soviet authorities. Let us listen to the degree of open amorality that these clerics were capable of: ‘Bolshevism is liquidating priests, desecrating churches and holy places, and destroying monasteries. Is this not where the religious mission of irreligious Bolshevism lies, in the disappearance of the carriers of schismatic thought, as it were presenting a “clean table”, a tabula rasa, which gives us the possibility of spiritual recreation.’ For those to whom it is not clear just what kind of spiritual reconstruction the Benedictine monk Chrysostom Bayer is referring to, his thoughts can be amplified by the official …Catholic journal, Bayrischer Kurier: ‘Bolshevism is creating the possibility of the conversion of stagnant Russia to Catholicism.’

“No one less than the exarch of the Russian Catholics, Leonid Fyodorov, when on trial in March of 1923 along with fourteen other clergymen and one layman, pathetically testified to the sincerity of his feelings in relation to the Soviet authorities, who, Fyodorov thought later, did not fully understand what could be expected from Roman Catholicism. He explained: ‘From the time that I gave myself to the Roman Catholic Church, my cherished dream has been to reconcile my homeland with this church, which for me is the only true one. But we were not understood by the government. All Latin Catholics heaved a sigh of relief when the October Revolution took place. I myself greeted with enthusiasm the decree on the separation of Church and State… Only under Soviet rule, when Church and State are separated, could we breathe freely. As a religious believer, I saw in this liberation the hand of God.

“Let us not lose sight of the fact that all these declarations by Roman Catholics, who were quite friendly with the Soviets, were pronounced during the nightmarish period when the Soviets were trying to eradicate the Orthodox Church. Keeping in mind that Vatican diplomacy adheres to the principle that the end justifies the means, which is illustrated throughout its centuries-old history, the game which the Vatican has been playing with Moscow should be clearly understood. The essence of the matter is that Russia has become a sacrifice to two principles hostile to it, Catholicism and godless communism, which are drawn together by a curious concurrence of interests. Moscow realizes that the eradication of faith from the Russian soul is a hopeless task. As long as the Russian Church remained faithful to itself, and uncompromising towards the godless power, courageously witnessing to the fundamental incompatibility between Christian and communist principles, the Soviet leaders were ready for two reasons to graciously study the variant of Roman Catholicism offered to them. By this means they hoped to manipulate the religiousness of the Russian soul.

“The first reason was Rome’s consistent, impeccable loyalty to the communist regime, both in the U.S.S.R. and outside it [until 1930]. Secondly, it was advantageous to the Kremlin, or simply entertaining, that the religious needs of the Russians should be satisfied by this centuries-old enemy of Orthodoxy. For their part, the Catholics were ready to close their eyes to all the atrocities of Bolshevism, including the shooting of the Roman Catholic Bishop Butkevich in April of 1923 and the imprisonment of Bishops Tseplyak, Malyetsky and Fyodorov. Six weeks later, the Vatican expressed its sorrow over the assassination of the Soviet agent Vorovsky in Lausanne! The People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs told the German Ambassador, ‘Pius XI was amiable to me in Genoa, expressing the hope that we [the Bolsheviks] would break the monopoly of the Orthodox Church in Russia, thus clearing a path for him.’

“We have discovered information of the greatest importance in the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A secret telegram № 266 of February 6, 1925 from Berlin, stated that the Soviet ambassador, Krestinsky, told Cardinal Pacelli (the future Pius XII) that Moscow would not oppose the existence of Roman Catholic bishops and a metropolitan on Russian territory. Furthermore, the Roman clergy were offered the very best conditions. Six days later, secret telegram № 284 spoke of permission being granted for the opening of a Roman Catholic seminary. Thus, while our holy New Martyrs were being annihilated with incredible cruelty, the Vatican was conducting secret negotiations with Moscow. In short, Rome attempted to gain permission to appoint the necessary bishops and even permission to open a seminary. Our evidence shows that this question was discussed once more in high circles in the autumn of 1926. In all likelihood, it had not been satisfactorily settled earlier. This might be viewed as the culmination of the unnaturally close relations between the Vatican and the Soviet government.” [3]

In July, 1927 the deputy leader of the Russian Church, Metropolitan Sergius wrote a notorious declaration, committing his church to cooperation with the Bolsheviks. Having broken Sergius, - but not the True Russian Church, which went underground, - the Bolsheviks no longer needed the Catholics. And so, as an “unexpected and indirect result” of the declaration, writes Ivanov-Trinadtsaty, “Moscow put an end to the negotiations and the attention it was devoting to Vatican offers… The restitution of the traditional [in appearance] Russian Orthodox Church, neutralized as it were, seemed more useful to the Soviet authorities than the Vatican. From then on, the Soviets lost interest in the Vatican. Only at the end of 1929 and the beginning of 1930 did the Vatican finally admit that it had suffered a political defeat and began vociferously to condemn the Bolshevik crimes. It had somehow not noticed them until 1930. Only in 1937 did Pope Pius XI release the encyclical Divine Redemptori (Divine Redeemer), which denounced communism…”

*

In the early 1960s the relationship between the Vatican and Russia began to change. The Second Vatican Council introduced ecumenism into the Roman Catholic bloodstream, and the Orthodox were now “separated brethren” rather than schismatics and heretics. So the Popes were now willing to enter into friendly relations with the Orthodox – although whether this was simply the wolf putting on sheep’s clothing remained to be seen... As for the official Russian Orthodox Church, it was now a complete slave of the Bolsheviks. In 1948, at Stalin’s bidding, it had condemned ecumenism and the Roman Catholics. But now, under orders from the same KGB, it entered the World Council of Churches and sent observers to the Vatican Council. The aim, undoubtedly, was not ecclesiastical, but political: to infiltrate western church life with Soviet agents, and to influence western church gatherings in a pro-Soviet direction…

Soviet control of the Russian Orthodox Church, and its influence on the Vatican through the Russian hierarchs, was proved in January, 1992, when a Commission of the Presidium of the Russian Supreme Soviet investigating the causes and circumstances of the 1991 putsch, established that for several decades at least the leaders of the Moscow Patriarchate had been KGB agents. Members of the commission obtained access to the records of the fourth, Church department of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, and revealed that Metropolitans Juvenal of Krutitsa, Pitirim of Volokolamsk, Philaret of Kiev and Philaret of Minsk were all KGB agents, with the codenames “Adamant”, “Abbat”, “Antonov” and “Ostrovsky”.

But it was the Commission’s report on March 6 that contained the most shocking revelations: “KGB agents, using such aliases as Sviatoslav, Adamant, Mikhailov, Nesterovich, Ognev and others, made trips abroad, organised by the Russian Orthodox Department of External Relations [which was headed by the present patriarch, Cyril (Gundiaev)], performing missions assigned to them by the leadership of the KGB. The nature of their missions shows that this department was inseparably linked with the state and that it had emerged as a covert centre of KGB agents among the faithful.” “The Commission draws the attention of the Russian Orthodox Church leadership to the fact that the Central Committee of the CPSU and KGB agencies have used a number of church bodies for their purposes by recruiting and planting KGB agents. Such deep infiltration by intelligence service agents into religious associations poses a serious threat to society and the State. Agencies that are called upon to ensure State security can thus exert uncontrolled impact on religious associations numbering millions of members, and through them on the situation at home and abroad.”[4]

The findings of the Commission included:- (i) the words of the head of the KGB Yury Andropov to the Central Committee sometime in the 1970s: “The organs of state security keep the contacts of the Vatican with the Russian Orthodox Church under control…”; (ii) “At the 6th General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver, the religious delegation from the USSR contained 47 (!) agents of the KGB, including religious authorities, clergy and technical personnel” (July, 1983); (iii) “The most important were the journeys of agents ‘Antonov’, ‘Ostrovsky’ and ‘Adamant’ to Italy for conversations with the Pope of Rome on the question of further relations between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church, and in particular regarding the problems of the uniates” (1989).[5]

But the process of infiltration was not one-way: the Vatican also managed to get its agents into the highest reaches of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1992 the Pope said that he had two cardinals among the bishops in Russia.[6] We now know that the most powerful Russian bishop in the 1970s, Metropolitan Nicodemus of Leningrad, was both a KGB agent with the nickname “Sviatoslav” and a secret Vatican bishop! This at first sight unlikely combination gains credibility from the witness of Fr. Michael Havryliv, a Russian priest who was secretly received into the Catholic Church in 1973. Fr. Serge Keleher writes: “The Capuchin priest told Havryliv that Metropolitan Nicodemus [of Leningrad] was secretly a Catholic bishop, recognized by Rome with jurisdiction from Pope Paul VI throughout Russia. This assertion is not impossible – but neither is it entirely proved.

“On September 6 1975 Havryliv made a sacramental general Confession before Metropolitan Nicodemus, who then accepted Havryliv’s monastic vows and profession of Faith to the Apostolic See and the Pope of Rome. Kyr Nicodemus commanded Havryliv to order his monastic life according to the Jesuit Constitutions, and presented him with a copy of this document in Russian. This was all done privately; four days later the Metropolitan tonsured Havryliv a monk. On 9 October Kyr Nicodemus ordained Havryliv to the priesthood, without requiring the oaths customary for Russian Orthodox candidates to Holy Orders.

“In 1977 Havryliv was reassigned to the Moscow Patriarchate’s archdiocese of L’viv and Ternopil… In Havryliv’s final interview with Kyr Nicodemus, the Metropolitan of Leningrad ‘blessed me and gave me instructions to keep my Catholic convictions and do everything possible for the growth of the Catholic cause, not only in Ukraine, but in Russia. The Metropolitan spoke of the practice of his predecessors – and also asked me to be prudent.”[7]

These words indicate the truth behind the mask of the Vatican’s ecumenism; and the fact that Havryliv was reordained by Nicodemus show that Rome accepted the sacraments of the Orthodox for only as long as it suited her. The Orthodox were, according to Vatican II, not heretics, but “separated brethren”. However, the “separated brethren” still had to return in repentance to their father, the Pope…

The intriguing question is: which master was Nicodemus really serving – the Soviets or the Vatican? His pro-Soviet statements on the international stage were notorious. But his love of Catholicism also seems to have been sincere. He completed a massive master’s thesis on Pope John XXIII, the originator of Orthodox-Catholic ecumenism, and in 1969 he engineered a decree establishing partial inter-communion between Orthodox and Catholics in the Soviet Union. He himself gave communion to Catholics in the Rossicum in Rome. And in 1978 he died in Rome at the feet of Pope John-Paul I, from whom he received the Catholic last rites – a graphic symbol of the dangers posed by the too-close relationship of Russia’s hierarchs to the Vatican…[8]

The career of Nicodemus is not merely of historical interest. He founded a school of theology, “Nikodimovshina”, and a close circle of disciples, that still controls the upper reaches of the Russian Orthodox Church. Thus both the former Patriarch Alexis II (Ridiger) and the present Patriarch Cyril (Gundiaev) were disciples of Nicodemus…

*

Whatever the Vatican hoped to achieve through its policy of ecclesiastical détente with the Moscow Patriarchate, it must have known that it could achieve little as long as the Soviet regime remained in power and the restrictions on all religions remained in place. However, in the early 1980s the Polish Pope John-Paul II succeeded, with the help of the Polish trade union Solidarnost, in fatally weakening the communist regime in his native land; and when Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the whole of the Soviet power structure in Eastern Europe began to totter. The Vatican saw its chance, and began a more aggressive – although still outwardly “eirenic” and ecumenist – approach to Russia.

The Achilles’ heel of Soviet ecclesiastical diplomacy was the Western Ukraine, where Stalin had forcibly “converted” the majority uniate or Greek Catholic population into the Moscow Patriarchate at the council of Lvov in 1946. The uniates were Catholic through their submission to the Pope, but Orthodox in their ritual and historical ancestry. In other circumstances, they might have been happy to return to the Orthodoxy of their Fathers, from which the Poles had separated them at the false unia of Brest-Litovsk in 1596. However, Stalin’s heavy-handed approach to church unity had only alienated them even further from Orthodoxy and the Russians. At the same time, it was from the former uniate population of the Western Ukraine that the Moscow Patriarchate recruited a large proportion of its clergy (Stalin had killed most of the clergy in the other regions of the country in the previous thirty years).

Now when Gorbachev came to power, the uniates who had resisted absorption into the Moscow Patriarchate came out of their catacombs and began agitating for the legalization of their Church. They were supported, surprisingly, by the chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs, Constantine Kharchev, who insisted that local authorities keep the law in their dealings with believers and suggested the legalization of the uniates and the free election of bishops. This roused the patriarchate and members of the Ideology department of the Central Committee to complain about Kharchev to the Supreme Soviet, and he was removed in June, 1989.

The ferment in the Western Ukraine also motivated the Moscow hierarchs to refuse the request of Pope John Paul II to attend the festivities commemorating the millennium of the Baptism of Russia by St. Vladimir of Kiev in 1988. The Pope pointed out, correctly, that in 988 there had been no schism between Eastern and Western Christianity, so his attendance was natural, especially in the contemporary climate of inter-Christian ecumenism. But Moscow feared that the Pope’s visit would elicit a stampede of conversions from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, not only in the Western Ukraine, but also in the heartland of Russia. Not the least of the attractions of Catholicism for many Russians, especially intellectuals, was the fact that the Pope was clearly an independent hierarch, whereas the Moscow hierarchs were “KGB agents in cassocks”, completely dependent on the whims of their communist bosses. Ecumenism was all very well, but it could not be allowed to undermine the power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!

However, the tide of liberalization could not be stopped, and in January, 1990, just after Gorbachev met the Pope in Rome in order to try and stem the tide, the uniates finally achieved legalization for their church. Moreover, even before they had recovered their freedom in law, the uniates started taking over churches in Western Ukraine which they considered to be theirs by right. By December, 1991, 2167 nominally Orthodox parishes had joined the Uniates.

Deprived of the help of the local authorities, who showed every sign of being on the side of the uniates, and discredited by its associations with communism, the Moscow Patriarchate seemed helpless to stop the rot. One reason for this was that for many years the patriarchate had been teaching its seminarians, a large proportion of whom came from the Western Ukraine, that the Orthodox and the Catholics were “sister churches”. 60% of those who joined the uniates were graduates of the Leningrad theological schools founded by that KGB Agent, Orthodox Metropolitan and Catholic bishop, Nicodemus...

This represented the second major diplomatic triumph of the Vatican in the communist bloc (after the legalization of Solidarnost in Poland) and the beginning of the re-establishment of Catholic power in Russia…

*

When the red flag came down for the last time from over the Kremlin in December, 1991, the way seemed open for a repeat of the Catholic conquest of Moscow in the early seventeenth century, spearheaded once again by a Pole… But then something unexpected happened. Along with the Jesuits and the Freemasons and the Protestant missionaries, there also came into Russia from the West the Russian Church Abroad, the so-called “White Russian” Church. This Church had long been a thorn in the side of the Moscow Patriarchate. Fiercely anti-communist, it was also anti-ecumenist and anti-Catholic. And although the numbers of its adherents in Russia remained small, and its attempt to unseat and replace the Moscow Patriarchate failed, its ideological influence continued to increase throughout the 1990s. Anti-ecumenism and anti-Catholicism grew in Russia, and even found adherents among the hierarchy. True, the patriarchate remained in the World Council of Churches, and ecumenist meetings with leading Catholics continued – but the Pope was still not invited to Moscow…

When KGB Colonel Putin came to power in 2000, he acted swiftly to stop the ideological rot. He summoned the leaders of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Church Abroad to settle their differences, and in 2007, by dint of various forms of persuasion and blackmail, the Russian Church Abroad surrendered and joined the patriarchate. Now only a few “True Orthodox” Churches remained in Russia to contest the ecclesiastical consensus – and in 2009 the largest of these, the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church, was neutralized and its churches confiscated.

It would seem that the final victory of the “Red Church” is now assured. And yet… it is now not at all clear what the “Red Church” stands for. Is it for the anti-ecumenism and anti-Catholicism of Stalinist times, and the nationalism of the Russian Church Abroad? Perhaps; for Putin is a great admirer of Stalin, and paranoically anti-western. Or does it wish to continue the ecumenist and pro-Catholic policies of the 1960s to early 1980s? Perhaps; for Putin, as one who worked in the Fifth Department of the KGB, is well familiar with this aspect of Soviet diplomacy, and values the power that infiltration of western ecclesiastical institutions and media gives him. One thing only is certain: that Russian ecclesiastical policy is as firmly determined by the secular authorities now as it was in Soviet times…

One factor working against the pro-Catholic line is the situation in the Ukraine. Since acquiring political independence, the Ukraine has moved further away from Moscow in Church matters also; both the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who is seen as an American agent, have made major inroads into there. Both Putin and Patriarch Cyril desperately want to keep the Ukraine out of the western orbit…

*

In this context, it will be useful to take a brief look at what we may call “the Fatima phenomenon”. In 1917, on the thirteenth day of the month for six months the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared to three shepherd girls in Fatima, Portugal, the first appearance being on May 13. The girls were entrusted with “three secrets”, the second of which is the most important. This supposedly revealed that, in order to avoid terrible calamities in the world and the persecution of the Catholic Church, the Virgin will ask for the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart. If her request is granted, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace. If not, then she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecution of the Church. “The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.”[9]

Now from the point of view of the Orthodox Saints and Holy Fathers (and even of some of the Catholic “saints”, such as John of the Cross), these visions and revelations are clear examples of demonic deception and not to be trusted. In May, 1917 it was not difficult to see that Russia was descending into chaos, and the devil used the opportunity to try and persuade people that the chaos could be averted only through the submission of Russia to his tool, the Catholic Church. Not surprisingly, the Vatican seized on these “revelations” and in 1930 pronounced them worthy of trust; and every Pope since then has been committed to belief in the Fatima phenomenon.

However, this poses a major problem for the present ecumenist policies of the Vatican. For Orthodox-Catholic ecumenism presupposes that the two Churches are – in the words of the Balamand agreement of 1994 – “the two lungs” of the single Body of Christ. Such a formulation is incompatible with the idea that Russia has to be “converted” - for it implies she is converted already, if not to Catholicism, at any rate to a sister Church of roughly equal status. The anathemas between the two Churches were supposedly lifted in 1964 by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople, and concelebration between hierarchs of the two Churches at the highest level has already taken place. Nor is there any reason why Russia should be “consecrated” to the Mother of God, since she has called herself the House of the Mother of God for centuries. And if reconsecration is necessary (although the Orthodox prefer the word “repentance”), then she has her own hierarchs to lead the way… Perhaps in view of these difficulties, no Pope has yet specifically consecrated Russia. In fact, when Pope John Paul II consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1984 he specifically acknowledged that this was not the consecration of Russia.

But this has aroused the wrath of the Fatima fanatics, some of whom are known as the "Blue Army." One of the leaders of the Fatima movement, Fr. Nicholas Gruner writes: “God asked for the consecration of a specific country – Russia. Now, centuries ago, Russia was known as Holy Mother Russia. It had been, so to speak, consecrated to God, but the Catholics of that country fell into schism not so much directly but through the bishops – between them and Rome. The Catholics of Constantinople fell into schism in 1054 and people from Russia followed suit over time. They have been separated from the True Church ever since. Also, Russia was, in a sense, ‘consecrated’ to the devil in 1917 to be the instrument of atheistic Communism and its worldwide war against God; to deny God’s existence, to fight God in every way.

“Thus God calls for a public reparation, a solemn ceremony by the Pope and the bishops of the world consecrating Russia to the Immaculate Heart – to call people back to the service of God.”[10]

Another Fatima fanatic, Atila Sinke Guimaraes, writes: “From 1917 until today, the schismatic Russian Church has not changed any of its erroneous doctrines on the Holy Trinity, Papal infallibility, and the immaculate Conception of Mary. It also sustains the same spirit of arrogance towards Rome that it has held for the last 1,000 years”. [11]

Now it will be immediately apparent that this is the old-fashioned, pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism speaking. The modern, ecumenist Vatican would never say that Russia has “separated from the True Church” or that it was “schismatic”. Such language would ruin its ecumenist diplomacy with the Moscow Patriarchate. Of course, in his heart the present Pope may think like the Fatima fanatics, and in practice the Vatican allows this old-fashioned kind of thinking to coexist with the newer spirit of ecumenism. But the fact is that the cult of the Fatima phenomenon and the Vatican’s present ecumenist strategy in relation to Russia are incompatible – which may explain the tensions between the Fatima fanatics and the Pope over the “Third Secret” and other questions…

So there are tensions between ecumenist and anti-ecumenist forces in both Roman Catholicism and the Moscow Patriarchate. However, in spite of that, there are signs that both the pope and the patriarch are pushing forward the ecumenical agenda with renewed vigour. If newspaper reports are to be believed, a visit of the Pope to Russia is imminent…[12]

*

The conclusion, then, must be that Russia is in as imminent danger of being drawn into a unia with the Vatican as it was four hundred years ago. Indeed, the danger is probably greater now for the simple reason that the leaders of the Russian Church are as compromised in their own way as the papacy itself, and can therefore offer far less effective opposition to the threat than the dying Patriarch Hermogen was able to produce from his freezing Kremlin prison. The National Bolshevism (disguised under the slogan of “Sovereign Democracy”) of the neo-Soviet Russian State cannot help – one cannot drive out one demon by employing another, hardly less wicked one. The only hope for the Russians is to begin to repent at last of their apostasy from God since 1917, and to purify themselves by returning to the undefiled truth of the Holy Orthodox Faith. Then, and only then, will a true leader emerge who, like Moses, will use God’s own weapons to drown the spiritual Pharaoh threatening it from the West…

April 17/30, 2010.

[1] Peter Sokolov, “Put’ Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi v Rossii-SSSR (1917-1961)” (The Path of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia-USSR (1917-1961)), in Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ v SSSR: Sbornik (The Russian Orthodox Church in the USSR: A Collection), Munich, 1962, p. 16 (in Russian).

[2] In 1922 Hieromartyr Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd said to Fyodorov: “You offer us unification… and all the while your Latin priests, behind our backs, are sowing ruin amongst our flock.” Nicholas Boyeikov writes: “In his epistle of 25 June, 1925, the locum tenens of the All-Russian Patriarchal Throne, Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsa, who suffered torture in Soviet exile, expressed himself on the ‘Eastern Rite’ as follows: ‘the Orthodox Christian Church has many enemies. Now they have increased their activity against Orthodoxy. The Catholics, by introducing the rites of our divine services, are seducing the believing people – especially those among the western churches which have been Orthodox since antiquity – into accepting the unia, and by this means they are distracting the forces of the Orthodox Church from the more urgent struggle against unbelief’ (Tserkovnie Vedomosti (Church Gazette), 1925, №№ 21-22).” (Nikolaiev, Tserkov’, Rus’ i Rim (The Church, Russia and Rome), Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983, p. 13 (in Russian)). (V.M.)

[3] Ivanov-Trinadtsaty, “The Vatican and Russia”, http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/new.htm (in Russian).

[4] Fr. George Edelshtein, “Double Agents in the Church”, Moscow News, August 26, 2005.

[5] I.I. Maslova, “Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ i KGB (1960-1980-e gody)” (The Russian Orthodox Church and the KGB (1960s to 1980s), Voprosy Istorii (Questions of History), December, 2005, pp. 86-87 ®.

[6] Liudmilla Perepiolkina, Ecumenism – A Path to Perdition, St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 204.

[7] Serge Keleher, Passion and Resurrection – the Greek Catholic Church in Soviet Ukraine, 1939-1989, Stauropegion, L’viv, 1993, pp. 101-102. Cf. The Tablet, March 20, 1993. Recently, writes Perepiolkina, “the Catholic Journal Truth and Life published the memoirs of Miguel Arranz, in which this Jesuit, who in Nicodemus’ time taught at the Leningrad Theological Academy, told, among other things, that with Nicodemus’ blessing he celebrated ‘the Eastern Rite Liturgy’ in Nicodemus’ house church at the Leningrad Theological Academy.” (op. cit., 1999, p. 276, note).

[8] The Boston Globe, September 6, 1978, p. 65; "On the Death of a Soviet Bishop", Orthodox Christian Witness, October 23 / November 5, 1978; Piers Compton, The Broken Cross: The Hidden Hand in the Vatican, Sudbury: Neville Spearman, 1983, pp. 158-159.

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_F%C3%A1tima.

[10] Gruner, in “The Fatima Challenge”, The Fatima Crusader, 94, Spring, 2010, p. 12.

[11] Guimaraes, “The Progressivist Challenge to Fatima”, http://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTop ... Shrine.htm.

[12] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatn ... -rift.html.

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