The Church without a Protector

Without a Christian king to defend Her - a King Ælfred, Prince Vladimir, etc. - the Church is at the mercy of her enemies, just as she was in her infancy before the first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great.

Father Andrew Phillips’s essay on the conflict between Orthodox Christian Greece and the EU, ‘The Fate of Christian Europe Hangs in the Balance in Greece’ (posted 30 Dec. 2013), offers yet more striking proof of this, and is something all Christians in the Western world (including the South) should pay careful attention to.  For we may soon come under the same persecution for our faith, so long as the godless, corporate-bankster Elite are in power in the Western nations, so long as we reject the monarchic principle in government for a national democracy, which weakens, not strengthens, the powers of good in a country.

 

Greece had the misfortune of being the first Orthodox country to be betrayed by its political elite and sold for a mess of pottage to the EU. Current events in Greece point to the fate that awaits all the other Orthodox countries, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania and others, which have already taken or still in their folly wish to take, that same path of apostasy. Thus:

Greece’s international creditors are setting it ever more anti-Christian ultimatums: it has been decreed by EU order that priests must no longer visit schools and groups of school pupils have been banned from attending services; Sundays will now be desecrated and businesses opened; priests have lost 20% of their paid leave; the number of ordinations allowed has been cut; the mention of religion has been removed from passports; a mosque must be built in Athens; certain Church properties may be privatised or else auctioned off by order of EU bureaucrats and their atheist quislings in the Greek government; laws on ‘free unions’ and others forbidding ‘insulting language’, the latter including calls to patriotism and quotations from the Gospels, are under discussion.

Little wonder that some bishops are preparing their flock to ‘to resist Antichrist’ in a new wave of persecution. Metropolitan Nicholas of Phtiotidis has spoken clearly of a possible popular revolt. Metropolitan Kosmas has said that if the law on same sex unions is passed, then the people must protest and become confessors of Christ. Like the Patriarchate of Antioch in Syria, today the Church of Greece has to stop compromising the Faith and stand up and be counted. The easy, consumerist times of previous years, when decadent practices were introduced from Western Europe and gradually everything was allowed – the Catholic calendar was introduced, the Liturgy was abbreviated, confession before communion was no longer obligatory, seating was introduced in all the churches, little girls were allowed to serve in the altar – are over. In reality the Church is not Consumerism, for the Church is the ascetic principle, not the rationalist and secularist one.

Greeks are finally waking up to the fact that their obsessive dream of ‘Europe’ has turned out to be a nightmare – just as their ignored monastic elders had forewarned. A wave of new barbarianism, this time of the liberal sort, is unfurling on Greece and massive immigration is destroying what remains of the local, Orthodox way of life and culture. Greece is entering the spiritual winter of Western Europe, as anti-EU Greek politicians are removed by ‘auditors’ from Brussels, Berlin and Paris. Only the Church of Greece remains independent from EU tyranny. Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus has threatened to excommunicate any politician who votes for laws which trample underfoot traditional moral standards. Many Church figures are finally asking that Greece leave the EU. It is no longer an economic struggle, but a spiritual, moral and cultural one.

Resistance now is vital for the future of European history. Given the apostasy of Protestants (and they are often in the forefront of the new decadence in any case) and the open abandonment of the Christian cause by most Roman Catholics (they see the EU has a pro-Cathoolic project and its flag as a Catholic banner), the struggle for Christ against those who are preparing the coming of Antichrist is now concentrated on the Orthodox world. Orthodox resistance to the Babylon of Brussels and its globalist ‘liberal’ project may be severely repressed, individual bishops and theologians may be ‘removed’, using contemporary technological controls. Other Local Orthodox Churches, already compromised by calendar change, should look carefully – they will be next to have to submit to the ‘New World Order’, that is, the restoration of the Old Pagan Order.

Resistance by Greece to the ethnocentric atheism of Western Europe is vital. Geopolitically, Greece is the key. If it falls, then the rest of the Balkans will also fall. And the EU tyrants know this. For if Greece is after all corageous and does choose freedom from the EU, then all the Balkans will also look north to Russia and the developing Eurasian Union, as the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has already pointed out and as was evident when bankrupt Cyprus almost chose Russia instead of the EU to come to its rescue.

Let us pray for courage in the Church of Greece.

Source:  http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/the-fate-of-christian-europe-hangs-in-the-balance-in-greece/, accessed 13 Jan. 2014.  Reprinted in full with the kind permission of the author.