In our previous post we reproduced a lecture Blessed Seraphim Rose had on “The future of Russia and the end of the world”. Due to the importance of the subject, with fear of the Almighty God and with humility in our hearts we find appropriate to make a few comments on the subject:

• The article in its whole makes it very clear that the restoration of Holy Russia cannot happen without re-instating a lawful political system – a Monarchy and a God anointed Tsar. Outside these boundaries there is no restoration, but continuation of lawlessness.
• The current official Church of Russia, the Moscow Patriarchate (MP), is not what Blessed Seraphim referred to in his lecture when he said “‘A great miracle of God will be manifested. And all the splinters and fragments, by the will of God and His power, will come together and be united, and the ship will be rebuilt in its beauty and will go on its own way as foreordained by God. And this will be a miracle evident to everyone”, although that is what MP would like people to believe. MP never clearly denounced in a synod the mistake they did by siding with the communists through Metropolitan Sergius, and thus recognizing the atheist regime as lawful (from an orthodox point of view). Having infiltrated most dioceses in the diaspora (through KGB agents) and having lured most bishops of the ROCOR to join them in 2000, they pretend that this prophecy has been fulfilled, but it is lacking the most important aspect of it – the restoration of monarchy. The prophecy says the ship “will go on its own way as foreordained by God”, meaning it will not be part of the mainstream, worldy and ecumenist Orthodoxy, but it will continue to preserve the Truth unchanged and uncompromised.
• Fr Seraphim makes it quite clear that the process of restoring Holy Russia will not be the result of some sort of political effort at the top (like it was the case with ROCOR bishops), but rather a grass-roots movement, starting from the bottom, from the people, originating from a specific location (Diveyevo) and will be bound up with the resurrection of St Seraphim of Sarov: “Having revealed to me this great and fearful mystery, the great Elder informed me that after his resurrection he would go from Sarov to Diveyevo and there he would begin the preaching of world-wide repentance. For this preaching, and above all because of the miracle of resurrection, a great multitude of people will assemble from all the ends of the earth; Diveyevo will become a lavra, Vertyanova will become a city, and Arzamas a province. And preaching repentance in Diveyevo, Batiushka Seraphim will uncover four relics in it, and after uncovering them he himself will lie down in their midst. And then soon will come the end of everything.
• As a result of lawlessness being instated in Russia by the murdering of Tsar Nicolai (a situation that is unchanged today), the ship of the Church was smashed to pieces: “There will be a storm. And the Russian ship will be smashed to pieces. But people can be saved even on splinters and fragments. And not everyone will perish. One must pray, everyone must repent and pray fervently. And what happens after a storm? …There will be a calm.’ At this everyone said: ‘But there is no more ship, it is shattered to pieces; it has perished, everything has perished.’ ‘It is not so,’ said Batiushka. ‘A great miracle of God will be manifested. And all the splinters and fragments, by the will of God and His power, will come together and be united, and the ship will be rebuilt in its beauty and will go on its own way as foreordained by God. And this will be a miracle evident to everyone”. What this means is the Church ceased to exist in an organized form, and therefore it cannot be considered that the Moscow Patriarchate continued as a True Church. Rather the ship was smashed to pieces that spread throughout the whole world in the form of (whatever is left of from) ROCOR and The Catacomb Church of Russia. These pieces, as St John Maximovich said, have an “apocalyptic mission” of spreading of Orthodoxy to the whole world. We covered this subject on other occasions.
• The process of the revival of Orthodoxy in Holy Russia should not be seen as the creation of a “global center of Christianity” (as many seem to suggest), but rather as a “gathering together” of the splinters and pieces the Church broke into at the beginning of the 20th century. The Orthodox Church will be once again a whole ship, “going on its own way as foreordained by God” (meaning it will not part of any ecumenist unity and certainly not the center of any global Christianity union), and have Churches throughout the whole world – a position made possible by the preservation of true Orthodoxy by various fragments of the Church in diaspora that will be joined together by this grass-roots, popular movement.