Here are a few quotes that appeared in an editorial published at the Orthodox Christian News Service website ( www.orthodoxnews.netfirms.com/164/Greg.htm ):
St. Nilus the myrrhstreamer: "After the year 1900, toward the middle of the 20th century... Christian pastors, bishops, and priests will become vain men, completely failing to distinguish the right-hand way from the left. At that time the morals and traditions of Christians and of the Church will change... The Churches of God will be deprived of God-fearing and pious pastors, and woe to the Christians remaining in the world at that time; they will completely lose their faith because they will lack the opportunity of seeing the light of knowledge from anyone at all. Then they will separate themselves out of the world in holy refuges..."
St. Anatoly the younger of Optina: "...From that heresies will spread everywhere and deceive many people. The enemy of the human race will act with cunning in order to draw into heresy, if possible, even the elect...He will not begin by crudely rejecting the dogmas of the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Jesus Christ and the virtue of the Theotokos, but he will begin imperceptibly to distort the teachings and statutes of the Church and their very spirit, handed down to us by the Holy Fathers through the Holy Spirit. Few will notice these wiles of the enemy, only those more experienced in the spiritual life. HERETCS WILL SEIZE POWER OVER THE CHURCH and will place their servants everywhere; the pious will be regarded with contempt. Therefore, my son, when you see the violation of patristic tradition and the divine order in the Church, the order established by God, know that the heretics have already appeared, although for the time being they may conceal their impiety, or they will distort the Divine Faith imperceptibly, in order to succeed better in seducing and enticing the inexperienced into the net... True Christians will remain until the end of this age, only they will choose to live in secluded, deserted places."
Elder Lavrenty of Chernigov: "Not long before antichrist is enthroned, even those churches that have been closed will be repaired and restored not only their exteriors, but their interiors, as well. They will gild the cupolas of bell-towers and cathedrals, alike; and when they have completed the main one, then will the time have come for antichrist to be enthroned. Pray that the Lord might lengthen that time, that we might be encouraged and sustained: it is a frightful time that awaits us. The restoration of the cathedrals will continue up to the very moment that antichrist is crowned. We will have unprecedented splendor," starets Lavrentii of Chernigov would say.
"Do you see how craftily and insidiously all this is being prepared?" batiushka would continue, tearfully. "All the cathedrals will be exceedingly splendid, as never before, but you must not attend these cathedrals, for the Bloodless Sacrifice of Jesus Christ will not be offered there. Remember: there will be churches, but Orthodox Christians must not attend them, as the entire 'synagogue of Satan' (Apoc. 2.9) will be gathered there! I repeat yet again that one must not attend those cathedrals: there will be no grace in them!"
St. Ignatius Brianchaninov: "Among church shepherds exists merely a weak, unclear, and inconsistent understanding of the Word, which is destroying spiritual life." "Judging by the spirit of the age and the intellectual ferment, one must suppose that the structure of the Church, which has long been wavering, will collapse terribly and quickly. There is no one to stop or oppose this. The means adopted to support it are borrowed from the elements of the world which are hostile to the Church and will hasten its fall rather than prevent it. May the merciful Lord defend the remnant of those who believe in Him. But this remnant is tiny, and it becomes more and more so."
Abba Pambo: " The clergy will be thrown into anarchy, and the monks will be inclined more to negligence. The church leaders will consider useless anything concerned with salvation, as much for their own souls as for the souls of their flocks, and they will despise any such concern. All will show eagerness and energy for every matter regarding their dining table and their appetites. They'll be lazy in their prayers and casual in their criticisms. As for the lives and teachings of the Holy Fathers, they'll not have any interest to imitate them, nor even to hear them. But rather they will complain and say that "if we had lived in those times, then we'd have behaved like that." And the Bishops shall give way to the powerful of the world, giving answers on different matters only after taking gifts from everywhere and consulting the rational logic of the academics."
St. Seraphim of Sarov: "But since toward that time the bishops will become so impious that in their impiety they will surpass the Greek bishops of the time of Theodosius the Younger, so that they will no longer even believe in the chief dogma of the Christian faith..."
Bishop Theophan of Poltava: " The Lord has fore chosen the future Tsar'. He will be a man of burning faith, of brilliant mind and of iron will. First of all, he will bring about order in the Orthodox Church, by removing all the false, heresy-preaching and lukewarm hierarchs. And very many indeed --almost all, with few exceptions -- will be those removed by him;"... Regarding the Church life it is indicated to us by Savior, as one of the most incredible phenomena of last times, that then "the stars will fall from heavens" (Mat. 24,29) According to the explanation of Savior Himself, "stars: are Angels of Churches, that is, Bishops (Rev. 1,20). The religious and moral fall of Bishops appears, as it were, one of the most characteristic signs of the last times. Especially horrible is the fall of Bishops when they fall away from the dogmas of faith or, as the Apostle puts it, when they "want to pervert the Gospel of Christ" (Gal. 1,7) To those the Apostle commands to proclaim "anathema": "He who dares to preach not what we're preaching, -- he says, -- let him be anathema" (Gal. 1,9). And it is not right to procrastinate this either, he continues: "From a heretic, after the first and the second admonition, turn away, knowing that he's depraved and sinning unto his condemnation" (***. 3,10-11) Otherwise, that is, for indifference and apostasy from the truth, God's judgment may befall you: "inasmuch as you're lukewarm and neither hot, nor cold, I shall spew you out of My mouth" (Rev. 3,15-16) The dark clouds on the world horizon are thickening. Nearing is the God's judgment of nations and hypocrite Christians, starting from heretical and lukewarm hierarchs."
Fr. Seraphim Rose: The enemy of man's salvation, the devil, attacks on all fronts and strives by all means not merely to divert believers from the path of salvation shown by the Church, but even to conquer the Church of Christ itself, despite the Saviour's promise (Matt. 16:18), and to convert the very Body of Christ into an "ecumenical" organization preparing for the coming of his own chosen one, Antichrist, the great world-ruler of the last days.... now the Orthodox people have been long prepared for the approaching "ecumenical" merger of all churches and religions by decades of laxness, indifference, worldliness, and indulgence in the ruinous falsehood that "nothing really separates us" from all others who call themselves Christians. The Orthodox Church survived the false Union of Florence, and even knew a time of outward prosperity and inward spiritual flourishing after that; but after the new false Union, now being pursued with ever-increasing momentum, will Orthodoxy exist at all save in the catacombs and the desert?...
Elder Ephraim Of Philotheou: "Papists, Protestants, Jehovah witnesses, Free Masons, Unionists, ECUMENISTS and any other "root of bitterness"-all these have one mind and shall give their strength and power unto the beast"...the only god to demand a tribute at the WCC will be the fallen Beelzebub who through his representative among men, the Antichrist, will try to substitute his own will for the faith and worship of the true God"
St. Justin Popovich: "How long will we slavishly degrade our Holy Orthodox Church of the Holy Fathers and St. Sava through our pitifully and dreadfully anti-traditional stance towards ecumenism and the so-called Ecumenical [i.e., World] Council of Churches? Any sincere Orthodox Christian reared under the guidance of the Holy Fathers is overcome by embarrassment when he reads that the Orthodox members of the Fifth Pan-Orthodox Consultation in Geneva (8-.6 July .968), with regard to the participation of Orthodox in the work of the World Council of Churches, decided, at that time, to express the common recognition of the Orthodox Church that she is an organic member of the World Council of Churches (see Glasnik S.D. Crkve [a periodical published by the Serbian Orthodox ChurchTrans.] [Belgrade], No. 8 [.968], p. .68). This decision is apocalyptically horrendous in its unorthodoxy and anti-Orthodoxy. Was it really necessary for the Orthodox Church, the all-immaculate Theanthropic Body and organism of the God-Man Christ, to be so monstrously humiliated that Her theological representatives, including even Hierarchs¹¹ (among whom were also Serbs), should seek after organic participation and inclusion in the World Council of Churches, which thus becomes a new ecclesiastical organism, a new Church above the churches, of which the Orthodox
Church and non-Orthodox churches are merely members, organically joined to each other? Alas, an unprecedented betrayal! We reject thereby the Orthodox Theanthropic Faith, this organic bond with the Lord Jesus, the God-man, and His all-immaculate Bodythe Orthodox Church of the Holy Apostles, Fathers, and Ecumenical Synodsand wish to become organic members of a heretical, humanistic, man-made and man-worshipping assembly, which is composed of 263 heresies, each one of them spiritual death!
Protopresbyter St. Valentin Sventsitsky: "Both the 'Living Church, ' which has seized the power of the Patriarch and Gregorianism which has seized the power of the locum tenens, and you (Metropolitan Sergius) who are abusing his faith in you, -you're all doing the one and the same anti-church thing; besides, you have become the founders of its most dangerous form, since, while you are rejecting freedom for the Church, you are at the same time preserving the fiction of its canonicity and of its Orthodoxy. This is greater than the violation of individual canons."
Archbishop St. Andrei Ufimsky: "All followers of the lying Metropolitan Sergei, are themselves filled with lies and evil, and have fallen away from the truth of Christ they have fallen away from Christ's Church. The Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church-is somewhere, in some other place, but not with Metropolitan Sergei, not with 'his synod.' ...The holy Church will remember with horror the sins of Sergei and his fellow activists, having placed his name next to the names of ecumenical pseudo-Patriarchs Nestorius, Dioscorus, and other terrible traitors to Orthodoxy.
Bishop St. Paul (Kratirov) : "Concerning the modernized church or concerning Sergian 'Orthodoxy,' I, a sinner, believe that, as regards such church activists, we must call them not only heretics and schismatics, but as those who have departed from God. Metropolitan Sergei brings into the Church service, a heresy unheard of in the history of the Church, the heresy of modernized departure from God, -of which the natural consequence became confusion and division in the Church. Can one, after this, affirm that the declaration and the activity of Metropolitan Sergei concerns only the external life of the Church, and do not touch in any way the essence of the Church's Orthodoxy? In no way can this be said. Metropolitan Sergei, by his self-wise and evil-worshipping declaration and the anti-Church work which followed it, has created a new modernized schism or Sergian modernism, which while preserving for the 'little ones' a fiction of Orthodoxy and canonicity is even more criminal than the first two modernizations of 1922 and 1925. And so Metropolitan Sergei has put under his feet not only the external, but also the very inner essence of the Orthodoxy of the Church. Since his 'hosanna' to Christ and Antichrist, which is now being performed in Christian churches, touches the very essence of Christian Faith and presents by itself clear apostasy, the falling away from the Faith, and the departure from God."
Metropolitan Anthony Kraphivitsky: "Now everywhere two epistles are being published in the newspapers and are being read in many churches which until recently were Orthodox epistles of two, alas, former beloved pupils of mine with whom I was once in agreement, Metropolitans Sergius and Eulogius, who have now fallen away from the saving unity of the Church and have bound themselves to the enemies of Christ and the Holy Church the disgusting blaspheming Bolsheviks, who have submitted themselves in everything to the representatives of the Jewish false teaching which everywhere goes under the name of communism or materialism Let these new deceivers not justify themselves by declaring that they are not the friends of the Bolsheviks and Jews who stand at the head of the Bolshevik kingdom: in their souls they may not be their friends, but they have submitted, albeit unwillingly, to these enemies of Christ, and they are trying to increase their power not only over the hapless inhabitants of Holy Russia, but also over all Russian people, even though they have departed far from the Russian land." On July 5, 1928, the Hierarchical Synod of the ROCA decreed: "The present ukaz introduces nothing new into the position of the Church Abroad. It repeats the same notorious ukaz of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon in 1922, which was decisively rejected by the whole Church Abroad in its time."
St. Theophan the Recluse quoted by Met. Philaret: "The hierarch Theophan the Recluse in his own day warned that a terrible time was approaching when people would behold before their eyes all the appearance of church grandeur solemn services, church order, and such while on the inside there would be total betrayal of the Spirit of Christ. Is this not what we see in the Soviet church? Patriarchs, Metropolitans, all the priestly and monastic orders and at the very same time, an alliance with the God-haters, that is, a manifest betrayal of Christ.
We all know things will get rough, but this is alarming, as it should be, I guess. Lord, have mercy on us.
Basil
St. Nilus the myrrhstreamer: "After the year 1900, toward the middle of the 20th century... Christian pastors, bishops, and priests will become vain men, completely failing to distinguish the right-hand way from the left. At that time the morals and traditions of Christians and of the Church will change... The Churches of God will be deprived of God-fearing and pious pastors, and woe to the Christians remaining in the world at that time; they will completely lose their faith because they will lack the opportunity of seeing the light of knowledge from anyone at all. Then they will separate themselves out of the world in holy refuges..."
St. Anatoly the younger of Optina: "...From that heresies will spread everywhere and deceive many people. The enemy of the human race will act with cunning in order to draw into heresy, if possible, even the elect...He will not begin by crudely rejecting the dogmas of the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Jesus Christ and the virtue of the Theotokos, but he will begin imperceptibly to distort the teachings and statutes of the Church and their very spirit, handed down to us by the Holy Fathers through the Holy Spirit. Few will notice these wiles of the enemy, only those more experienced in the spiritual life. HERETCS WILL SEIZE POWER OVER THE CHURCH and will place their servants everywhere; the pious will be regarded with contempt. Therefore, my son, when you see the violation of patristic tradition and the divine order in the Church, the order established by God, know that the heretics have already appeared, although for the time being they may conceal their impiety, or they will distort the Divine Faith imperceptibly, in order to succeed better in seducing and enticing the inexperienced into the net... True Christians will remain until the end of this age, only they will choose to live in secluded, deserted places."
Elder Lavrenty of Chernigov: "Not long before antichrist is enthroned, even those churches that have been closed will be repaired and restored not only their exteriors, but their interiors, as well. They will gild the cupolas of bell-towers and cathedrals, alike; and when they have completed the main one, then will the time have come for antichrist to be enthroned. Pray that the Lord might lengthen that time, that we might be encouraged and sustained: it is a frightful time that awaits us. The restoration of the cathedrals will continue up to the very moment that antichrist is crowned. We will have unprecedented splendor," starets Lavrentii of Chernigov would say.
"Do you see how craftily and insidiously all this is being prepared?" batiushka would continue, tearfully. "All the cathedrals will be exceedingly splendid, as never before, but you must not attend these cathedrals, for the Bloodless Sacrifice of Jesus Christ will not be offered there. Remember: there will be churches, but Orthodox Christians must not attend them, as the entire 'synagogue of Satan' (Apoc. 2.9) will be gathered there! I repeat yet again that one must not attend those cathedrals: there will be no grace in them!"
St. Ignatius Brianchaninov: "Among church shepherds exists merely a weak, unclear, and inconsistent understanding of the Word, which is destroying spiritual life." "Judging by the spirit of the age and the intellectual ferment, one must suppose that the structure of the Church, which has long been wavering, will collapse terribly and quickly. There is no one to stop or oppose this. The means adopted to support it are borrowed from the elements of the world which are hostile to the Church and will hasten its fall rather than prevent it. May the merciful Lord defend the remnant of those who believe in Him. But this remnant is tiny, and it becomes more and more so."
Abba Pambo: " The clergy will be thrown into anarchy, and the monks will be inclined more to negligence. The church leaders will consider useless anything concerned with salvation, as much for their own souls as for the souls of their flocks, and they will despise any such concern. All will show eagerness and energy for every matter regarding their dining table and their appetites. They'll be lazy in their prayers and casual in their criticisms. As for the lives and teachings of the Holy Fathers, they'll not have any interest to imitate them, nor even to hear them. But rather they will complain and say that "if we had lived in those times, then we'd have behaved like that." And the Bishops shall give way to the powerful of the world, giving answers on different matters only after taking gifts from everywhere and consulting the rational logic of the academics."
St. Seraphim of Sarov: "But since toward that time the bishops will become so impious that in their impiety they will surpass the Greek bishops of the time of Theodosius the Younger, so that they will no longer even believe in the chief dogma of the Christian faith..."
Bishop Theophan of Poltava: " The Lord has fore chosen the future Tsar'. He will be a man of burning faith, of brilliant mind and of iron will. First of all, he will bring about order in the Orthodox Church, by removing all the false, heresy-preaching and lukewarm hierarchs. And very many indeed --almost all, with few exceptions -- will be those removed by him;"... Regarding the Church life it is indicated to us by Savior, as one of the most incredible phenomena of last times, that then "the stars will fall from heavens" (Mat. 24,29) According to the explanation of Savior Himself, "stars: are Angels of Churches, that is, Bishops (Rev. 1,20). The religious and moral fall of Bishops appears, as it were, one of the most characteristic signs of the last times. Especially horrible is the fall of Bishops when they fall away from the dogmas of faith or, as the Apostle puts it, when they "want to pervert the Gospel of Christ" (Gal. 1,7) To those the Apostle commands to proclaim "anathema": "He who dares to preach not what we're preaching, -- he says, -- let him be anathema" (Gal. 1,9). And it is not right to procrastinate this either, he continues: "From a heretic, after the first and the second admonition, turn away, knowing that he's depraved and sinning unto his condemnation" (***. 3,10-11) Otherwise, that is, for indifference and apostasy from the truth, God's judgment may befall you: "inasmuch as you're lukewarm and neither hot, nor cold, I shall spew you out of My mouth" (Rev. 3,15-16) The dark clouds on the world horizon are thickening. Nearing is the God's judgment of nations and hypocrite Christians, starting from heretical and lukewarm hierarchs."
Fr. Seraphim Rose: The enemy of man's salvation, the devil, attacks on all fronts and strives by all means not merely to divert believers from the path of salvation shown by the Church, but even to conquer the Church of Christ itself, despite the Saviour's promise (Matt. 16:18), and to convert the very Body of Christ into an "ecumenical" organization preparing for the coming of his own chosen one, Antichrist, the great world-ruler of the last days.... now the Orthodox people have been long prepared for the approaching "ecumenical" merger of all churches and religions by decades of laxness, indifference, worldliness, and indulgence in the ruinous falsehood that "nothing really separates us" from all others who call themselves Christians. The Orthodox Church survived the false Union of Florence, and even knew a time of outward prosperity and inward spiritual flourishing after that; but after the new false Union, now being pursued with ever-increasing momentum, will Orthodoxy exist at all save in the catacombs and the desert?...
Elder Ephraim Of Philotheou: "Papists, Protestants, Jehovah witnesses, Free Masons, Unionists, ECUMENISTS and any other "root of bitterness"-all these have one mind and shall give their strength and power unto the beast"...the only god to demand a tribute at the WCC will be the fallen Beelzebub who through his representative among men, the Antichrist, will try to substitute his own will for the faith and worship of the true God"
St. Justin Popovich: "How long will we slavishly degrade our Holy Orthodox Church of the Holy Fathers and St. Sava through our pitifully and dreadfully anti-traditional stance towards ecumenism and the so-called Ecumenical [i.e., World] Council of Churches? Any sincere Orthodox Christian reared under the guidance of the Holy Fathers is overcome by embarrassment when he reads that the Orthodox members of the Fifth Pan-Orthodox Consultation in Geneva (8-.6 July .968), with regard to the participation of Orthodox in the work of the World Council of Churches, decided, at that time, to express the common recognition of the Orthodox Church that she is an organic member of the World Council of Churches (see Glasnik S.D. Crkve [a periodical published by the Serbian Orthodox ChurchTrans.] [Belgrade], No. 8 [.968], p. .68). This decision is apocalyptically horrendous in its unorthodoxy and anti-Orthodoxy. Was it really necessary for the Orthodox Church, the all-immaculate Theanthropic Body and organism of the God-Man Christ, to be so monstrously humiliated that Her theological representatives, including even Hierarchs¹¹ (among whom were also Serbs), should seek after organic participation and inclusion in the World Council of Churches, which thus becomes a new ecclesiastical organism, a new Church above the churches, of which the Orthodox
Church and non-Orthodox churches are merely members, organically joined to each other? Alas, an unprecedented betrayal! We reject thereby the Orthodox Theanthropic Faith, this organic bond with the Lord Jesus, the God-man, and His all-immaculate Bodythe Orthodox Church of the Holy Apostles, Fathers, and Ecumenical Synodsand wish to become organic members of a heretical, humanistic, man-made and man-worshipping assembly, which is composed of 263 heresies, each one of them spiritual death!
Protopresbyter St. Valentin Sventsitsky: "Both the 'Living Church, ' which has seized the power of the Patriarch and Gregorianism which has seized the power of the locum tenens, and you (Metropolitan Sergius) who are abusing his faith in you, -you're all doing the one and the same anti-church thing; besides, you have become the founders of its most dangerous form, since, while you are rejecting freedom for the Church, you are at the same time preserving the fiction of its canonicity and of its Orthodoxy. This is greater than the violation of individual canons."
Archbishop St. Andrei Ufimsky: "All followers of the lying Metropolitan Sergei, are themselves filled with lies and evil, and have fallen away from the truth of Christ they have fallen away from Christ's Church. The Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church-is somewhere, in some other place, but not with Metropolitan Sergei, not with 'his synod.' ...The holy Church will remember with horror the sins of Sergei and his fellow activists, having placed his name next to the names of ecumenical pseudo-Patriarchs Nestorius, Dioscorus, and other terrible traitors to Orthodoxy.
Bishop St. Paul (Kratirov) : "Concerning the modernized church or concerning Sergian 'Orthodoxy,' I, a sinner, believe that, as regards such church activists, we must call them not only heretics and schismatics, but as those who have departed from God. Metropolitan Sergei brings into the Church service, a heresy unheard of in the history of the Church, the heresy of modernized departure from God, -of which the natural consequence became confusion and division in the Church. Can one, after this, affirm that the declaration and the activity of Metropolitan Sergei concerns only the external life of the Church, and do not touch in any way the essence of the Church's Orthodoxy? In no way can this be said. Metropolitan Sergei, by his self-wise and evil-worshipping declaration and the anti-Church work which followed it, has created a new modernized schism or Sergian modernism, which while preserving for the 'little ones' a fiction of Orthodoxy and canonicity is even more criminal than the first two modernizations of 1922 and 1925. And so Metropolitan Sergei has put under his feet not only the external, but also the very inner essence of the Orthodoxy of the Church. Since his 'hosanna' to Christ and Antichrist, which is now being performed in Christian churches, touches the very essence of Christian Faith and presents by itself clear apostasy, the falling away from the Faith, and the departure from God."
Metropolitan Anthony Kraphivitsky: "Now everywhere two epistles are being published in the newspapers and are being read in many churches which until recently were Orthodox epistles of two, alas, former beloved pupils of mine with whom I was once in agreement, Metropolitans Sergius and Eulogius, who have now fallen away from the saving unity of the Church and have bound themselves to the enemies of Christ and the Holy Church the disgusting blaspheming Bolsheviks, who have submitted themselves in everything to the representatives of the Jewish false teaching which everywhere goes under the name of communism or materialism Let these new deceivers not justify themselves by declaring that they are not the friends of the Bolsheviks and Jews who stand at the head of the Bolshevik kingdom: in their souls they may not be their friends, but they have submitted, albeit unwillingly, to these enemies of Christ, and they are trying to increase their power not only over the hapless inhabitants of Holy Russia, but also over all Russian people, even though they have departed far from the Russian land." On July 5, 1928, the Hierarchical Synod of the ROCA decreed: "The present ukaz introduces nothing new into the position of the Church Abroad. It repeats the same notorious ukaz of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon in 1922, which was decisively rejected by the whole Church Abroad in its time."
St. Theophan the Recluse quoted by Met. Philaret: "The hierarch Theophan the Recluse in his own day warned that a terrible time was approaching when people would behold before their eyes all the appearance of church grandeur solemn services, church order, and such while on the inside there would be total betrayal of the Spirit of Christ. Is this not what we see in the Soviet church? Patriarchs, Metropolitans, all the priestly and monastic orders and at the very same time, an alliance with the God-haters, that is, a manifest betrayal of Christ.
We all know things will get rough, but this is alarming, as it should be, I guess. Lord, have mercy on us.
Basil
