The Church of the living God is founded upon a most solid Rock and that Rock is Christ (Matthew 16.18; I Corinthians 10.4). The churches of dead gods that is, of mortals who have been raised to the status of gods by their deluded followers are founded upon less solid and attractive materials. Thus the Roman Catholic church is founded upon the pride of the eleventh-century Pope Gregory VII, who declared that he could judge all bishops and kings, that he himself was above all judgement, and that all popes were saints by the virtue of St. Peter. The Lutheran church is founded upon the folly of the German monk Martin Luther, who married a nun and declared (very conveniently in his particular case) that good works are not necessary for salvation. The Anglican church is founded upon the lust of the English King Henry VIII, who created his own church in order to grant himself a divorce from his first wife (he married five more and killed several of them). The contemporary Ecumenical Patriarchate is founded upon the ambition of the Greek patriarch Meletius Metaxakis, a Freemason who introduced the new calendar, deposed Patriarch Tikhon and died, screaming that he had destroyed Orthodoxy. The contemporary Moscow Patriarchate is founded upon the cruelty and the cunning of Joseph Stalin, the most wise generalissimo and leader of all the peoples, but also the greatest persecutor of the Church in the history of Christianity.

Just as the True Church is created in the image and likeness of its Founder, and displays His virtues in its members, so false churches are made in the image and the likeness of those who created them, and display the characteristic vices of their founders. Thus the Moscow Patriarchate is particularly distinguished by its cruelty and its cunning (lukavstvo). It cruelty was particularly evident in the first decades of its existence, when the deaths of many True Orthodox Christians were caused by the denunciations of their pseudo-Orthodox fathers and brothers. Its cunning has been particularly evident in recent, post-Soviet times, when, not being able to rely on the power of the State to eliminate its rivals as counter-revolutionaries, it has come to rely more on clever admixtures of truth and falsehood in order to deceive the believing population. A good example of such cunning is to be found in the article, A Church for Valentine (Rusantsov), by MP Priest Alexander Bragar.

Bragars target is, of course, Archbishop Valentine of Suzdal and Vladimir, first-hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church (ROAC) and the leader of the True Orthodox, anti-patriarchal forces in Russia. However, rather than attempting to answer any of the very serious and weighty accusations that the ROAC has made against the MP, or draw a comparison between Archbishop Valentine and his main ideological opponent, Patriarch Alexis (Ridiger), which could only turn out to the disadvantage of Ridiger and the church of the evil-doers (lukavnuyushchikh), Bragar adopts the indirect route and methods of the serpent.

One of these methods is the misleading association of names. For example, Bragar at one point links Archbishop Valentine with odious personalities like Michael Ardov and Gleb Yakunin [odiozniye lichnosti kak Mikhail Ardov i Gleb Yakunin]. The highly-respected Moscow Protopriest Michael Ardov is indeed under the omophorion of Archbishop Valentine, and his frequent and impressive appearances on television and radio have evidently been a thorn in the side of the MPs propaganda bosses. But what has he to do with Gleb Yakunin? Nothing at all. Not only does Fr. Gleb not belong to the ROAC, but rather to the schismatic Kievan Patriarchate of Philaret Denisenko, which the ROAC does not recognize: his views are quite different from Fr. Michaels. Yakunin is a democrat: Ardov is a monarchist. Yakunin is an ecumenist: Ardov is an anti-ecumenist. So what is the purpose of linking two such different men, and both with Archbishop Valentine? To smear Archbishop Valentine by association with the unpopular democrat and ecumenist Yakunin. Both are opponents of the patriarchate: but there the resemblance ends. One opposes the patriarchate for one set of reasons: the other for a different set of reasons. But only a few readers will be expected to know these differences. The association has been planted in the readers minds, and there, it is hoped, it will fester and bring forth evil fruit...

Another well-tried method of the evil one is: divide and conquer. Thus the recent (1995) schism between the ROAC and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA) is exploited for all its worth by Bragar. His history of the schism is confused and confusing whether deliberately or not, it is difficult to tell. However, his purpose is clear: to represent Archbishop Valentine as a power-loving schismatic, whose ambition is to prevent the reunion of the ROCA with the mother church of the Moscow Patriarchate. As he writes: His purpose is by all means to hinder this rapprochement, to deepen the schism in the relations between the two parts of the one Russian Orthodox Church [Ego zadacha vsyacheski meshat etomu sblizheniyu, uglublyat raskol v otnosheniyakh mezhdu chastyami edinoj Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi] (p. 9).

What a revealing admission! So Archbishop Valentine and the ROAC are seen by the Moscow Patriarchate as the main stumbling-block to the final apostasy of the ROCA through its union with the false church! So Archbishop Valentine stands like a contemporary St. Mark of Ephesus, whose decisive nyet to the unia with the contemporary eastern pope of sergianist-ecumenist papism, Alexis Ridiger, is so worrying to the latter that he must first, through his fifth columnists in the ROCA such as Archbishop Mark of Germany and Great Britain (Bragars praise of Mark is embarrassingly oleaginous), engineer his expulsion from the ROCA, and then, when the ROCA has been effectively neutralized and the remaining opponents of the unia have regrouped under the banner of the ROAC, portray him as a traitor to the glorious traditions of the ROCA!

There are many ironies here. The ROCA, which once was bad, is now good because its foreign hierarchs have now all adopted positions of greater or lesser compromise in relation to the MP, and, above all, because they have fulfilled the task given them by Moscow of expelling Moscows most dangerous enemy from their midst. The ROCA is now good for another important reason: in the person of Archbishop Mark it has renounced the Catacomb Church, loyalty to which was the ROCAs raison dtre for so many years. Thus he quotes with approval Marks unbelievable slander: The real Catacomb Church no longer exists. It in effect disappeared in the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s Only individuals have been preserved from it, and in essence everything that arose after it is only pitiful reflections, and people who take what they desire for what is real. [Nastoyashchej katakombnej tserkvi bolshe nyet. Ona fakticheski ischezla v 40-e ili v samom nachale 50-x godov Ot etogo sokhranilis lish otdelniye lyudi, a, v sushchnosti, vse, chto vozniklo posle sego lish zhalkiye otobrazheniya, i lyudi, kotoriye vydayut zhelaemoye za dejstvitelnoye]

Even while trying to whiten the ROCA and blacken the ROAC, Bragar makes some very important admissions. Thus he admits that Archbishop Mark, though a foreign bishop, created two deaneries [blagochinnicheskiye okrugi] on the territory of Russian bishops inside Russia, and that the Hierarchical Synod of the ROCA did not object [Arkhierejskij Synod RPTsZ ne vozrazhala] to this flagrantly uncanonical action (p. 8). Again, he admits that Bishop Barnabas of Cannes, another foreign bishop with no right to interfere in the dioceses of the Russian bishops, considered himself the first arrival on the Russian land and decided that he had the complete right to subject to his administration all the catacombniks and the newly formed parishes on the territory of the former USSR (p. 8) [schel sebya pervoprokhodtsem na russkoj zemlye i reshil, chto imeet polnoye pravo podchinit svoyeumu upravleniyu vse katakombniye i vnov obrazovanniye prikhody zarubezhnoj tserkvi na territorii byvshego SSSR]. Archbishop Mark and Bishop Barnabas were Archbishop Valentines chief enemies and slanderers.

Again, Bragar admits that Archbishop Valentine smelt a rat (pochuyal podvokh) in the Act that the Lesna Sobor forced him to sign in December, 1994 and he explains why there was indeed a rat at the bottom of that barrel: It was proposed that the parishes of the ROCA on the territory of Russia be divided into 6 dioceses, and that at the head of three of them should be placed [the newly ordained] Bishop Eutyches (p. 9) [bylo predlozheno razdelit vse prikhody RPTsZ na territorii Rossii na 6 eparkhii, i vo glave trekh iz nikh postavit.. ep. Evtikhiya] which meant a further invasion into the dioceses of the existing Russian bishops and the threat that all the parishes would be forced to re-register with the authorities, which in turn meant that the MP would be able to stop the re-registration and even demand that the parish churches be handed over to it!

An intelligent person, even one not well acquainted with the history of these events, might well draw the conclusion the correct conclusion - from Bragars account that Archbishop Valentine was under concerted attack from the foreign bishops, that this attack was orchestrated by Archbishop Mark, and that his expulsion from the ROCA was perfectly in the interests of the MP. So thank you, Fr. Alexander! Unwittingly and unwillingly, you have been a witness to the truth!

And indeed the truth is more powerful than any slander or cunning. Even while under fierce attack from both the MP and the ROCA, the ROAC under Archbishop Valentine continues to grow in strength. A steady stream of catacomb and former ROCA parishes continues to join it. Many now see that the ROAC is the true heir of the traditions both of the Catacomb Church inside Russia and of the true ROCA the ROCA of Metropolitans Anthony, Anastasy and Philaret outside Russia. The church built by Stalin can never prevail against the Church built by God Himself, Whose strength is made perfect in weakness (II Corinthians 12.9).

June 30 / July 13, 2000.