Rudyard Kipling’s words, “Oh! East is East and West is
West, and never the twain shall meet,” are exemplified in the great Orthodox
Christian bloc ‑ the remnant of the Byzantine Empire ‑ which
separated Roman Catholicism in the west from the Islamic Ottoman empire in the
This bloc, which extends from Russia in the north, through the Ukraine, Romania, Greater Serbia and Bulgaria to Greece in the south, cannot be dismissed as mere history. Its revival, with Orthodox Christianity as
its glue, is a live issue.
Milorad Pavic’s novel Dictionary of the Khazars has
now been translated from Cyrillic into 41 languages. The novel introduces the
Khazars, a race that spread from the Dnepr to the Volga rivers between the 7th
and l0th centuries. They were knit together by their alliance with the
Byzantines against the Arabs. The Khazar presence is said to have stalled the
Islamic invasion of Russia and changed the course of history.
The Khazars lost their unity and then disappeared
without trace. The memory of this strengthened the resolve of the fiercely
anti-Roman Catholic Serbs within Tito’s old Yugoslavia to stand together
against the virulent Serbophobia that prevailed at the time of Yugoslavia’s break‑up. And it awoke memories of the Byzantine empire.
In 1993 a Russian, Oleg Rumyantsev, Called for a
“Conference of Spiritually Close Peoples”. It was subtitled “Russia is looking for Allies”.
Rumyantsev maintains that, “the peoples of the post
Byzantine region have always constituted a continent between the West and the
East,” and he called for the “mutual support of peoples and governments within
the framework of our own world”. The Conference revived the concept of
The term Byzantism was actually coined by Leontyev, a
Russian philosopher who died in 1891. He sought to counter the “degenerating
influence of the West” characterised by effete Roman Catholicism.
President Putin and his circle have embraced Byzantism
and it also finds echoes in Greece at the south of the Orthodox bloc. Rome fears Byzantism with its identification of the pope as the Antichrist and arch enemy.
Therefore the Vatican and Benedict XVI wage a relentless campaign to neutralise
and consume Orthodoxy.
We turn first to Kosovo. Kosovo is Serbia’s historic heartland. Here the Vatican helped to destroy Serbian influence, using
Nato and the CIA. Former peace keepers allege ‑ off the record ‑
that the, “CIA encouraged the KLA (the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army) to
launch a rebellion in southern Serbia to undermine the then Yugoslav
When Kosovo came under Nato protection, Orthodox
churches and shrines were destroyed. A current round of talks in Vienna aims at giving Kosovo full independence from Serbia.
The Serbian population of Kosovo in 2003 was estimated
at about 400,000 out of a total population of two million. This has fallen to
120,000, living in constant fear and practically ghettoised. The Serbian
Orthodox Church stands to lose its great historical shrines, and churches and
In the January elections, the Serb nationalist party
gained the largest single vote ‑ 28.5%. But the pro‑EU Democratic
Party (DS) and Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) were credited with 22% and 17%
respectively. Together, as a coalition, they polled 39% between them. The EU
foreign policy chief Javier Solana boasted, “The majority voted for forces that
are democratic and pro‑European,” thus neutralising the Serbian voice.
The Vatican will have listened with great satisfaction.
President Ahtisaari is Special Envoy for Kosovo’s
future status. His alleged remarks about the “collective guilt” of the Serbian
nation, that the Serbs are “guilty as a people” and that Serbia is “sabre‑rattling”, are hardly impartial. Critics of his plan for Kosovo are
told, “If somebody says that my proposal gives a worse future for Kosovo, then
they haven’t read (it) or they don’t understand the language . . . the closest
comparison I have is, (the) Devil reading the Bible”.
Rome’s migration Office
Bulgaria and Romania have now joined the EEC. Rome’s deadly Migration Office
is in command of Roman Catholic dispersion. It directs and facilitates poor
Roman Catholic migrants to beef up the RC presence in otherwise unwelcoming
areas. The Migration Office is more than satisfied with the recent Polish
immigrant influx into the UK. So great has it been that devout Poles may be
seen kneeling in the streets, even in the rain, outside revived Roman Catholic
churches too packed to accommodate them for Mass.
It is therefore unlikely that Rome will easily
countenance an Orthodox influx from Bulgaria and Romania alongside her own
people. Headlines such as, “Catholics set to surpass Anglicans as
leading UK church,” and, “Is Protestant England on its last legs?” proclaim a
victory not to be jeopardised.
Bulgaria’s Roman Catholic population is less than 50,000 out of a total
population of seven million. This sounds small but Rome still comes third
after Orthodoxy and Islam. The Vatican has been able to exploit Bulgaria’s desire for EEC membership.
Fierce Roman Catholic missionary efforts in the 9th century
and, again, in the 16 and 17th centuries, have paid off. Rome established diplomatic relations
with Bulgaria in 1990. On May 22, 2006 the Bulgarian government announced
that, “Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev (has) met with the Vatican’s Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano. Bulgaria appreciates the position
voiced by the Holy See, and Pope Benedict XVI in person, in favour of the
enlargement of the EU as a zone of stability and prosperity”.
“We highly appreciate your stance and do hope it will
be followed by EU membership,” said Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev on meeting
Sodano who incidentally seized the opportunity to consecrate the RC Cathedral
of St Joseph in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. The consecration took the form
of a glittering mass attended by Bulgaria’s ambassador to the Vatican and key government officials.
is more than twice the size of Bulgaria with the same per capita income. Roman
Catholics number a million out of a total population of 22 million, which is
proportionately a third less than Bulgaria. During the iron curtain years the
small Romanian Roman Catholic church became very independent of Rome. From 1948 onwards, severe communist suppression by the state and numerous
privations and executions of priests, led to a robust antipapal mindset among
the general population.
But in 1990, John Paul II exploited the Romanian
desire to re‑establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican. He used it to apply pressure on Romania to re‑accept papal domination.
When the EEC pay out of over £6 billion was announced,
a disproportionate third is expected to go to Bulgaria. Rome has
counterbalanced this with an interesting move involving her immensely powerful
Iosefina Cristina Loghin, Secretary General of Caritas
Romania, suddenly emerged from obscurity in 2002 as Vice‑President of
Caritas Europa. Then in Brussels, in May 2005, further lightening promotion
followed as she became President with vast potential to aid Romania.
In Caritas Europa’s Newsletter of December 2005 Loghin
laid out her vision for Rome Caritas operations in the enlarged EEC. An upbeat
editorial appeared, ominously entitled Looking Forward to a
New Heaven and a New Earth ‑ the Home of Righteousness.
To any Orthodox Serb that title would be a bristling
challenge. The Serb defeat at Kosovo in 1389 is at the heart of the Serb
psyche. At that time their leader Prince Lazar is understood to have preferred
defeat and death to victory in order to receive the promise of a “Heavenly Kingdom” and an “Earthly Kingdom”. This spirit is described by a modern Serb
theologian as “Orthodoxy ennobled by a healthy Serbian nationalism”.
The vision of a “Heavenly Serbia” where church and
state, heaven and earth, are one, is the essence of Serbian identity. The
notion of a Roman Catholic controlled New Heaven and New Earth can only be
construed as a challenge. In January this year Loghin spoke of Caritas
adopting, “a multi‑faith approach in a relatively peaceful country like Armenia, Albania, Georgia, Serbia and Montenegro”. That is a threat to the Orthodox bloc and its
But what of the northern end of the historic Orthodox
bloc ‑ Russia and the Volga river? The bitter hostility between the
Russian Orthodox church and the Vatican continues relentlessly. But, planning
for centuries and millennia, Rome has made an apparently insignificant but in
fact remarkable inroad into the Russian Orthodox carapace.
It is a well known fact that when communism collapsed
a plethora of churches and sects swarmed in. Traditional Orthodox communities
suffered an onslaught, made worse by the vastness of the area. Before the
Communist revolution, the 19th century Russian Orthodox church solved the
problem of servicing this vast area by means of a church ship the St Nicholas
which plied the 2,200 miles of the Volga. The Volga is Europe’s longest river
which drains all of western Russia down into the Caspian sea.
During the 1990s a Russian businessman, Vladimir
Karetsky, who, with many of the post Soviet elite from Putin downwards, had
embraced Russian Orthodoxy, was perishing in a yacht on the Atlantic with his
14 year old son. Karetsky told his son “If there was a God we would be
saved”. He vowed, “I would build a church boat to thank Him”. The new St
Nicholas is a remarkable sight with a triple golden onion domed church
occupying all of mid ships. Its interior is exactly like a terrestrial
orthodox church ‑ a spectacular venue for marriages and baptisms. The St
Nicholas was joined by the Saint Vladimir in 2004, and the distinctly un‑Russian
named Werenfried in 2005, along with two Church barges that can be towed to
venues in summer when the river is not frozen.
The amazing truth is that the Orthodox church is so
desperate to stop this haemorrhage of its people that it welcomed co‑operation
between Karetsky who was unable fully to finance his votive ship and the Roman
Catholic charity ‘Aid to the Church in Need’. This charity describes itself
as, “an international Catholic charity dependent on the Holy See, providing
pastoral relief to needy and oppressed churches”.
Thomas Koetter, spokesman for the Roman Catholic
charity, said at the launch of St Vladimir, “It is meant to reach out to the
people in remote areas where churches can’t be built for financial or
Jesuits, as well as Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons,
have already trudged to these areas where “churches can’t be built for
financial or environmental reasons”, and are actively proselytising. Clearly
no JW or Mormon would ever be granted use of a church boat should it anchor
nearby, but might it not under the circumstances be churlish to refuse a Jesuit