Antichrist & Big Pharma

Dr. Ardis explains the antichrist m.o. and the antichrist deception as it is actualized in Big Pharma today.

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The Cult of Control: Exposing Big Pharma & the Mormon Church w/ Dr. Bryan Ardis

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2ZVs07HxBY
1 hour: 37 minutes

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In this jaw-dropping interview, Dr. Bryan Ardis rips the veil off the medical industry’s deceptive practices, drawing chilling parallels to his escape from the Mormon Church after uncovering its hidden truths. From a faith-shattering visit to a Mormon historical site in Illinois, to exposing Big Pharma’s cult-like control tactics—media manipulation, isolation, and even mandated clothing like masks—Dr. Ardis reveals how narratives are weaponized to enforce compliance. He dives into the shocking reality of vaccine “ingredients” like animal DNA, aborted fetal tissue, and toxins like polysorbate 80, designed to breach the blood-brain barrier and wreak havoc on God’s perfect design.

Dr. Ardis drops bombshell after bombshell, exposing drugs like Ozempic as venom-based poisons directly linked to cancer and blindness, and unmasking the pharmaceutical industry’s agenda to undermine natural immunity and deceive the nations. With unwavering faith in God’s pharmacy—nature itself—he empowers viewers to break free from Big Pharma’s lies, detox from harmful substances, and reclaim their health and spiritual freedom. This episode is a must-watch wake-up call for anyone ready to challenge deception and embrace the truth!

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video archived here:
https://archive.org/details/the-cult-of-control-exposing-big-pharma-u-0026-the-mormon-church-w-dr.-bryan-ardis

related article: St. Metr. Philaret of New York on Heart Transplants 
(The same spiritual principles apply to gmo and gene manipulation-violation.)
https://blessedphilaret.blogspot.com/2008/12/orthodox-view-of-heart-transplantations.html

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related You Tube: demon-possession
A girl who is possessed after receiving covid vaccine sits with an exorcist who contacts the demon inside her and asks it questions.
https://archive.org/details/devil-posession

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Disappeared People – the Russians

.Vl Agafangel Internet Sobor post
[Google machine translation 2025 ~jh]

http://internetsobor.org/index.php/stati/avtorskaya-kolonka/mitropolit-agafangel-ischeznuvshij-narod-russkie
Metropolitan Agathangel: The Disappeared People – the Russians
Author: Metropolitan Agathangel. Date of publication: September 1, 2025. Category: Author's column.

It's well known that over time, eras and cultures change, life itself changes—everything changes. Nations, too, undergo changes. Not only life and worldviews change—the essence and mentality of a people changes, as they cease to be the bearers of a single culture and embrace something different, sometimes even the opposite of what once constituted their essence. We are familiar with many ancient cultures—Egypt, Greece, Rome, for example—that did not leave behind a legacy but transformed into something entirely different.

A similar thing happened with Orthodox Rus'—beginning in ancient Kiev and ending in what is now modern Petrograd—in the historical period from the first Orthodox ruler of our people, Grand Duke Vladimir, to the last Orthodox Emperor, Nicholas II.  It was a truly great and unique culture of a single, great Orthodox people—beginning with the adoption of Orthodoxy and ceasing to exist with the loss of Orthodoxy.

During this historical period, the Orthodox Church was the primary foundation of the state—it represented both the spiritual component of the people's soul—their faith—and their cultural component—education and schooling (reading was learned from the Slavonic Psalter), ecclesiastical fine and applied arts, singing, architecture, and construction. During this period of our spiritual flourishing, the Tsarist Vladimir-Nikolaev reigned over the Orthodox Church. The Church Slavonic liturgical language was a common, understandable, and unifying language for all the peoples who made up the single Orthodox nation. The vast number of icons and ecclesiastical objects (crosses, oil lamps, etc.) far exceeds the applied and fine arts of other world cultures. But the most important fruit of this culture was the Orthodox believers who made up what we call Holy Russia. Of course, not all the people were holy, but a significant portion of them were—and it was these saints of God who constituted the most precious gift to the Creator from our Slavic community. Rus' is the name of an Orthodox people who lived in a specific geographical area. Our neighboring peoples called us Rus', understanding this word as an exclusively independent Orthodox people.

* * * *

Of course, over the centuries, numerous internal changes (or rather, deviations from God) gradually prepared the way for the abrupt collapse of the Orthodox state.  Our great history ended in catastrophe, which began with the rise to power of the God-fighters in the Russian Empire.  With diabolical energy, they set about destroying entire classes of Russian society—the estates, the intelligentsia, "priests and capitalists," those who were even slightly well-off, and, in reality, all believers in God.  And, unfortunately, they achieved their goal—in place of the Orthodox Russian people, with the help of the devil and his servants, they artificially  created a "new historical community"—an embittered and impoverished Soviet people, God-fighters, completely opposed to the Orthodox Russian people who once lived on this land.

The repressions of the godless exterminated virtually all true believers in our country, and those attending the Soviet Church of the Moscow Patriarchate were reduced to a docile, controlled minimum.  Many Orthodox Christians were driven beyond the country's borders.  Moreover, after the demise of the Catacomb Church, so few true Orthodox believers remained in the USSR that there was no one left to revive them after the fall of the USSR (as many had sincerely hoped).

* * * *

I was born and raised in the USSR, going to school and college.  There, we were taught that there were different nationalities that, taken together, constituted the Soviet people (as opposed to the former Orthodox people).  Religion was never discussed at school, and the default assumption was that being a believer meant being mentally retarded.  Back then, I considered myself Russian only by language and culture.  We weren't taught what it really meant to be Russian or a member of any other nationality.  We lived during the time of the godless International, the pinnacle, the apotheosis of which was the poet's phrase, "By nationality, I am Soviet."  We (my generation) were born into this, lived through it, and never even suspected that it could be untrue.

* * * *

When I first came to the United States, I was truly amazed—I actually met representatives of a completely different people there—I saw with my own eyes the remnants of the genuine Russian Orthodox people.  I met bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, priests, and laity, and I saw how different they were from us Soviets.  They truly were representatives of a different people—they spoke a language different from ours, they behaved completely differently with others, they had different values, they even wrote exclusively using the old orthography.  But, most importantly, they were distinguished by their inner integrity and constancy, their Orthodox faith, unostentatious—which was the direct opposite of what we Soviets were inclined to—with shifty eyes and efforts to adapt to the surrounding circumstances, to please the right person, and always keeping their own personal gain in mind.  People from abroad certainly couldn't live and survive in the USSR—they would have been quickly exterminated by "Soviet authorities," or they would have been forced to degenerate, adapt, and become "like everyone else" for the sake of survival—there was no other option (typical examples include Soviet academics Losev and Likhachev, believers in their youth but who served time in the Gulag and adapted).  It's perfectly clear that the USSR and the simple, straightforward Russian Orthodox Christian, even at the lowest social level, are incompatible.


Since true Orthodoxy can only be transmitted from person to person, I realized I had met true Orthodox people.  It somehow dawned on me that Christ and the Truth were with them, and therefore I, too, wanted to be with Christ along with them.  In other words, I realized that the Lord had led me here, and that in the United States, I had found the true Orthodox Church in the form of the Old Orthodox diaspora.

Of course, the emigration was very diverse—it even included such monsters as defeated revolutionaries like Leo Trotsky, Freemasons, and other atheists and heretics of various ranks and categories.  But in this case, I am speaking exclusively of the Russian Orthodox diaspora.

This Orthodox émigré community lived primarily in the hope of returning Orthodoxy to Russia (as they understood it within the borders of the Russian Empire).  But when they saw representatives of this modern Russia, who, since the early 1990s, began frequently coming to America with a great desire to stay, settle in, forget their language, and become Americans as quickly as possible, the older émigrés were horrified.  For them, the Soviet people they suddenly encountered was probably the greatest disappointment of their lives—an entirely different people, completely unfamiliar to them and incomparable to the true Russian people.

When Metropolitan Vitaly introduced me to the Council of Bishops, he said only this: "You know, you'd never guess he came from there. He's like an old émigré." At first, I was surprised by this description. Only later did I realize that, in their eyes, this was probably the highest possible assessment.


* * * *

By now, Putin's Soviet-era "Russian World" program has unfortunately achieved its original goal—the destruction of the old anti-Soviet Orthodox Russian emigration and the creation of a diaspora loyal to the Kremlin.

The diaspora (unlike the catacomb dwellers in the USSR) had no immunity to Sovietness; they believed in everything Soviet and, unfortunately, easily became infected with this Sovietness (a clear example is the recent metamorphosis of the ROCOR clergy who joined the Moscow Patriarchate). In this regard, Metropolitan Anastassy's warning in his "Testament" was prophetic: avoid having "even casual contact" with representatives of the Soviet Church. When dealing with Soviets, it always comes out in the words of the Savior: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you compass sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he has made one, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves." (Matthew 23:15) Such are the fruits of the preaching emanating from the former USSR to this day.


Of course, modern Soviet people will, unfortunately, continue to be called "Russians" "out of inertia," but we must remember that this name now represents a completely different people, one that no longer elevates that name, but only desecrates it.  We must remember it for the sake of the departed Russian people, who served God so much and left behind a great, global-scale culture.

The Soviet people's rejection of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and everything that the former émigrés sought to bring back to their homeland—primarily the Orthodox faith and tradition, which differ greatly from that propagated by the Moscow Patriarchate—is sad testimony to the fact that by the early 1990s, the seeds of revival were already absent here, and our land was barren and barren.  Now, even a potential source of rebirth for the Orthodox Russian people no longer exists.  To our great regret, objectively thinking Orthodox believers, in order not to deceive themselves, must accept this as a sad reality.

* * * *

Our people have undergone radical changes even within the eyes of a single generation—one category of people has died out, and a completely different one has emerged—there are no longer any true bishops, priests, or laypeople.  Even here, where the USSR once stood, the once numerous believing grandmothers—the last remaining representatives of a vanished people, whose white headscarves filled churches and who tried with all their might to instill the Orthodox faith in their grandchildren—have long since died out.  They lived by God and Orthodoxy.  They have been replaced by modern "consumers of virtual culture," who no longer believe in anything and live, for the most part, exclusively on the lies and horrors offered by the internet.

Russians and Ukrainians today are completely different peoples. It would be more accurate to state: the Russian people no longer exist—for the modern inhabitants of the Russian Federation are not Russian Orthodox, just as the inhabitants of Ukraine are not Russian Orthodox.  Just as the Russian Federation is not a Russian Orthodox state, so too is Ukraine not a Russian Orthodox state.  The Russian Orthodox people and state no longer exist—its remnants died out in the USSR, primarily along with the Catacomb Church, and they have also died out in exile.  Only isolated individuals and small groups of this once-great people survive to this day.  They should have gathered together on the eve of the end of this world and the Second Coming of our Savior.
* * * *

A great mistake, even a tragedy, lies in the fact that the modern Russian Federation is perceived throughout the world not as a murderer (which is in reality), but as the heir and successor of the Orthodox people and state that once existed on our land.

A category of people who consider themselves Russians is now asserting itself in the Russian Federation, simultaneously merging in their consciousness the Orthodox culture "that existed before the revolution" with the Soviet culture that destroyed and defiled it. Many of them resemble Russians and even Orthodox.  However, they lack the very essence of the Russian Orthodox—the childlike simplicity of faith—and represent only an outward imitation of the Russian people.  Even the slightest trace of Soviet elements destroys the essence of the Orthodox, turning them into Soviet individuals.

It is also a grave lie that virtually everyone in the world considers the President of the Russian Federation to be the head of the Russian state and the Patriarch of the Moscow Patriarchate to be the head of the Russian Orthodox Church—even though one gives orders to kill millions of people (including Orthodox Christians), while the other calls it a "holy deed."  Both of them, like all their supporters, are not Russians, and they are murderers to the same degree, and Christ spoke directly about them to His disciples: "The hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is doing God a service.  This they do because they have not known the Father or Me" (John 16:2-3). May Christ's words be a judgment on all non-Russian and non-Orthodox people who have lost their conscience, "who have not known the Father or Me."


* * * *

All that remains is for us to await the Coming of Christ, shielding ourselves from the temptations of this world.  In the words of Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, spoken in the distant 19th century, when many, many holy God-pleasers still lived among people in our land.  

 "Apostasy is permitted by God: do not attempt to stop it with your feeble hand. Retreat, guard yourself from it: that is enough for you. Familiarize yourself with the spirit of the times, study it, so that you may, if possible, escape its influence."

To protect ourselves from the spirit of the times and await God's Judgment on this world and on ourselves—help us, Lord!

+ Metropolitan Agathangel
September 1, 2025



commentary:
http://internetsobor.org/index.php/stati/avtorskaya-kolonka/protodiakon-german-ischeznuvshaya-rossiya
Archdeacon Herman: Vanished Russia
Автор: Митрополит Агафангел. Дата публикации: 01 октября 2025. Категория: Авторская колонка.

Metropolitan Agathangel expresses profound and truthful thoughts in his article "A Vanished People—Russians." 

At first glance, the title might surprise, outrage, or even be misunderstood, but in reality, the article is very balanced and accurate.  There's no other way to put it: Russia has fallen, and so have the Russian people.

It's no accident that we always speak and write about "our" Russia, thereby emphasizing that, when we speak of Russia, we are speaking of "the other" Russia, which disappeared with the forced abdication of the Russian Tsar.  Yes, Russia is not the USSR and not all that it spawned.  The Soviet Union is not Russia, as I.A. Ilyin wrote, leaving us all with his work of the same name for edification.  After all, the Bolsheviks, above all, agreed with this in the era when they still believed in the triumph of their satanic ideology throughout the world.  Only now, after the complete collapse of this inhuman experiment, have those yearning for this "lost paradise" begun to speak of the millennia-long continuity of Russian history, conflating Russia with something that in no way can be called Russia.

And we will never agree with this. Russia, after all, is a country, a culture, a people, a language, a unique worldview, and, most importantly, a single Orthodox faith.  Back in the early 19th century, V. A. Zhukovsky wrote: "Rus is not a state, but a family, where everyone shared one fatherland, one faith, one language, the same memories and traditions."  To be Russian is to be Orthodox, as F. M. Dostoevsky said a century and a half ago.  Nationalities or political boundaries, especially if they were inherited from the Bolsheviks, are irrelevant here.  Russia was and is triune in likeness—we say this, naturally, only in the form of an image—of the Triune Godhead.  But this, of course, is only for the time being, as long as the peoples inhabiting Russia remain true to their roots.  Therefore, the Soviet Union cannot in any way be called Russia and has nothing in common with it.  This isn't just not Russia, it's anti-Russia in the truest sense of the word.  After all, the Bolsheviks themselves erased the very word "Russia" from use.  We are not Russia, we are the Union, we are the ugly, meaningless acronym "USSR"!  We are not Russians, we are Soviets.  And they achieved their goal.  We have written more than once that when Western journalists refer to a certain contemporary as a "Russian tsar," they are once again demonstrating their Russophobia.

Soviet patriotism has nothing in common with Russian patriotism.  Soviet culture, if one can even speak of such a thing, has nothing in common with Russian culture.  Moreover, what remains of culture in the Soviet and post-Soviet context is in no way indebted to the "conquests of October."  Professor Ivan Andreevich Esaulov puts it this way: "Soviet culture is not a continuation of Russian Orthodox culture.  All that remains of the great Russian culture is perhaps a small chapel—something indestructible."  Furthermore, a "Russian" is not a Soviet-speaking layperson, for the Russian language is not a Soviet language.  And so the concepts of "Russian" and "Soviet" could be contrasted at length.  In reality, is it possible to combine, as a single whole, a Russian and a homo-Sovieticus?  The Metropolitan writes quite correctly about one of the main achievements of the Bolsheviks:  “And they, to our great regret, achieved their goal - instead of the Russian people, with the help of the devil and his servants, they artificially created a “new historical community” — an embittered and impoverished the Soviet people-fighters against God, completely opposite to what once lived on this earth to the Orthodox Russian people". One is tempted to illustrate this metropolitan assertion with a personal testimony from the same Professor I.A. Esaulov. When his father died in the Siberian hinterland, he took the trouble to bring a priest for the funeral service, but "some perceived this as a strange eccentricity on my part. They said I had become so overindulgent that I didn't allow him to bury his father properly—with the priest I brought." "Perfectly," meaning with a bottle of vodka and a red flag, not a cross and a prayer...

And it's not just us who say this, but also the very best, the rarest people from modern Russia. Let us listen to the ever-memorable Archpriest Father Lev Lebedev, who died suddenly in 1998 in the Synodal building in New York, where he arrived for the Council to defend the Church Abroad and St. Metropolitan Vitaly: "Although I was born and raised under the Soviet regime, and in many ways am as much of a 'Sovok' as everyone else living in Russia today, I have rejected everything Soviet in my soul (I hate it in myself). /.../ There are no longer any Russian people in Russia." And, moving on to the ecclesiastical issue close to his heart and the significance of the Church Abroad, he writes: "If, even in today's Russian Federation (erroneously called Russia), our Church manages to convert at least a few who are still capable of perceiving the Truth, then that too is good!"

Father Lev is echoed by someone not a priest who converted to the Church Abroad, but a renowned contemporary film director,Stanislav Govorukhin.  Let's highlight a few thoughts from the introduction to his utterly unique film, "Russia We Lost," released at the very beginning of the fateful 1990s.  "Russia. A mysterious and unfamiliar country.  It just so happens that we know nothing about it.  That's probably why we live so hard and so foolishly... The more you learn about this unfamiliar country, the more you fall in love with it.  This happens involuntarily...  What we will show is like the impressions of someone who began to learn the history of his country in adulthood.  And everything we learned during filming turned our souls upside down.  How did this happen, why did God take away people's minds, how was it possible to plunder and destroy such a rich country?  And why, why did we know nothing about it, about our Homeland?"

The film contrasts two Russias—the one that existed before the Bolshevik invasion and the one they defiled.  The film, full screen, echoes with bitter, truthful, and hopeless thoughts: "Lenin succeeded in purging Russia of intelligent, educated, and thoughtful people for a long time.  He not only carried out a coup d'état, but also a revolution in the soul of the people.  A new anthropological type was born in Russia, a new expression appeared on the faces of Soviet people.  Thus began the degeneration of the nation."  From time to time, sobs could be heard erupting from the souls of the audience, spreading throughout the entire auditorium.  If anyone hasn't seen the film, they should definitely go.

But let's return again to Father Lev Lebedev, with whom we had the good fortune of maintaining a friendly and sympathetic correspondence.  In a letter dated December 25, 1996, he wrote to us about the contents of his completed and not yet published major book.  As you will see, his thoughts fit perfectly with the theme developed by Metropolitan Agathangel.  "And the essence comes down to the fact that the Russian people no longer exist in Russia: they were physically destroyed from 1917 to 1945.  After that, a new, artificially  grown "Soviet" people lives in Russia, which, in essence, is not even a people, but an unfortunate Russian-speaking rabble, which also applies to the faithful parishioners of the MP.  Although they want to be Orthodox, they do not accept any heretical (ecumenical) teachings, but stubbornly believe the lie that the MP is the real Russian Church.  Why? The general, average mood is approximately this: even though there, abroad in the ROCOR, there are also Russian and also Orthodox people, but they are not our people, not like that like us.  So we'll be with your own bishops as they are, because they are  ours.   But we don’t know and don’t want to know those abroad!  It’s easy to see that in such reasoning, the main thing is not the feeling of unity in faith and the Church, but the feeling of unity by birth, upbringing and life in the USSR, in the “Soviet” regime...  All this is one of the reasons (not the only one!) that allows us to assert that if before 1937, when many legitimate bishops of the Russian Church were still alive, albeit in prisons and exile, and a significant part of the genuine (surviving) Russian People was alive, the position that the ROCOR is part of the Russian Church was completely correct; if such a notion could be partly true even before the mid-1970s, then after that, and especially after 1990, such a position is already not generally accepted.  

 Father Lev boldly writes:

 "...Now the ROCOR is not a 'part' but rather it is in reality [all that remains of] the only legitimate Local Russian Orthodox Church.   And we, who have joined it in Russia, are part of it.  For the Local Church is not the Church of a geographical territory, but the Church people.  Therefore, the Church of the Russian People must be recognized as the one that consistently preserves the unity of the doctrinal, canonical, and liturgical order of church life that the Russian People have always possessed, even before 1917 and even before 1927—that is, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.  This is what our hierarchs, and indeed all of us Orthodox, must clearly understand,"

Even then, in 1998, it was felt that in the consciousness of some bishops the understanding of the very essence of the Church Abroad had been shaken, which ultimately led to our ecclesiastical tragedy, sealed by the signing of the union with the Moscow Patriarchate in May 2007.  Father Lev convincingly argued that the "Russian people" as such, that is, the "people-Church" (this is his favorite expression), no longer existed: it finally disappeared 28 years after the satanic Bolshevik revolution.

But then, as always, we add: if Russia no longer exists, if the Russian people as such no longer exist in the space of the former, vanished Russia, then undoubtedly, Russians remain, scattered throughout Russia, like islands of foreigners in their own country.  And Father Lev, from his own experience, testifies to how one can become Russian, born in the Soviet Union—one must reject with one's soul everything Soviet in oneself, and not try to merge White with Red, as many are trying to do today.  And how can one not cite here the testimony of Vladyka Metropolitan Agathangel: "When I first came to the United States, I was truly amazed—I actually met representatives of an entirely different people there—I saw with my own eyes the remnants of the genuine Russian Orthodox people /.../ they spoke a language that was different from ours, the Soviet language, they behaved completely differently with others, they had different values." We can support these words with other testimony. In the early 90s, for several years, one of our zealous parishioners was a former Soviet an officer who once admitted that Russian he came to us in Lyon.

Such was it, correctly understood "Mission of the Russian Emigration"  From the book of the same name by M.V. Nazarov, about which we have written many times.  Whether this mission was accomplished is not for us to say, but it would be wrong to judge it solely by today, but by examining the fruits it bore over the past century.  To preserve the Russian Church, to preserve Russian values, to preserve Russian culture, to preserve the memory of Russia.  To preserve and to pass on.  This was the primary goal of this Mission, but it was beyond its control, as there was little to pass on to.

Meanwhile, the hope for the resurrection and rebirth of Russia remains in full force, about which a touching prayer is offered at every Divine Liturgy in the churches abroad.  "Prayer for the Salvation of Russia."  And should it be emphasized that this Prayer does not have any political character that could be applied to modern events, and that it does not refer to Putin’s Russian Federation, nor to Ukrainian phantasmagorias, but specifically to Russia in the form and concept as it has been perceived over the centuries.

Archdeacon Herman Ivanov-Thirteenth

Wayback Machine since last July is yet unable to archive Internet Sobor articles.  The error message says that the site might be blocking access.  Until this is fixed, I will keep my own archive here of the original Russian


Протодиакон Герман: Исчезнувшая Россия 
Автор: Митрополит Агафангел. Дата публикации: 01 октября 2025. Категория: Авторская колонка.

Верные, глубокие мысли излагает Владыка Митрополит Агафангел в статье "Исчезнувший народ — русские". При первом впечатлении заглавие может кого удивить, кого возмутить, и быть неправильно понято, а на самом деле статья очень уравновешенная и правильная. Иначе не скажешь : Россия пала, пал и русский народ.
Не зря мы всегда говорим и пишем о "нашей" России, тем самым подчёркивая, что, говоря о России мы говорим о "той", исчезнувшей с вынужденным отречением Государя России. Да, Россия — не СССР и не всё то, что было порождено им. Советский Союз не Россия, как писал И.А. Ильин, оставив всем нам в назидание одноименный труд. С этим ведь в первую очередь соглашались большевики в эпоху, когда ещё верили в победу своей сатанинской идеологии во всём мiре. Это только сейчас, после полного краха этого безчеловечного эксперимента, тоскующие по этому "потерянному раю" сталиговорить о тысячелетней преемственности истории России, смешивая Россию с тем, что никак не может ею являться.
И с этим мы никогда не согласимся. Россия, ведь, это и страна, и культура, и народ, и язык, и особое мiровоззрение и, что самое главное, это — единая вера православная. Ещё в начале XIX-го века, В. А. Жуковский писал : "Русь, есть не государство, а семейство, где у всех были одна отчизна, одна вера, один язык, одинакия воспоминания и предания". Быть Русским это быть Православным, полтора века назад сказал Ф. М. Достоевский. Никакие национальности или политические границы, особенно если они унаследованы от большевиков, значения тут не имеют. Россия была и есть триедина по подобию — говорим это естественно только в виде образа — Триединого Божества. Но это, конечно, до поры до времени, пока народы населяющие Россию остаются верны своим корням. Поэтому Советский Союз никак быть названным Россией не может и общего с нею ничего не имеет. Это не только не Россия, а в полном смысле анти-Россия. Да ведь сами большевики вычеркнули из употребления само слово Россия. Мы не Россия, мы — Союз, мы уродливый, ничего не значащий акроним СССР ! Мы не Русские, мы — Советские. И добились своего. Мы не раз писали, что, когда западные журналисты говорят о таком-то современнике, называя его "русским царём", они тем самым в очередной раз расписываются в русофобстве.
Советский патриотизм ничего общего не имеет с русским патриотизмом. Советская культура, если даже можно о таковой говорить, общего ничего не имеет с русской культурой. К тому же то, что осталось культурного в советской и пост-советской обстановке никоим образом не обязано "завоеваниям октября". Профессор Иван Андреевич Есаулов так и говорит :"Советская культура не является продолжением русской православной культуры. От великой русской культуры осталась разве что маленькая часовенка — что-то неуничтожимое". Далее — русский человек, это не советскоговорящий обыватель, ибо русский язык, не советский язык. И так можно было бы долго противопоставлять понятия Русский и Советский. На самом деле — можно ли совместить, как одно целое, русского человека и гомо-советикуса ? Совершенно верно Владыка Митрополит пишет об одном из главных достижений большевиков : "И они, к великому сожалению, добились своей цели — вместо русского народа, с помощью диавола и слуг его, ими была искусственно выведена "новая историческая общность" — озлобленный и нищий советский народ-богоборец, совершенно противоположный жившему когда-то на этой земле православному русскому народу". Так и хочется иллюстрировать это митрополичье утверждение свидетельством из собственной жизни того же профессора И.А. Есаулова. Когда в сибирской глубинке скончался его отец, он потрудился привезти священника для отпевания, то "некоторые восприняли это как мое странное чудачество. Говорили, что я заучился до такой степени, что не дал по-человечески похоронить своего отца — тем, что попа привёз". "По-человечески", то-есть с бутылкой водки и красным флагом, а не с крестом и молитвой ...
И это не только мы говорим, но и самые лучшие, редкие, люди из современной России. Прислушаемся к приснопамятному протоиерею отцу Льву Лебедеву, внезапно скончавшемуся в 1998 г. в синодальном здании в Нью-Йорке, куда он прибыл на Собор для защиты Зарубежной Церкви и св. Митрополита Виталия :"Хотя я родился и вырос при советском режиме, и в ряде свойств — такой же "совок", как и все ныне в России живущие, но душой отверг всё советское (ненавижу его и в себе самом). /.../ В России Русского Народа больше нет" и, переходя к близкому его сердцу церковному вопросу и значению Зарубежной Церкви, пишет :"Если же и в самой нынешней РФ (по ошибке называемой Россией), нашей Церкви удастся обратить хотя некоторых, ещё способных к восприятию Истины, то и сие хорошо !".
Отцу Льву вторит такой человек, не из перешедших в Зарубежную Церковь священник, а прославленный современный кино-режиссёр, как Станислав Говорухин. Выделим несколько мыслей из вступления к его совершенно уникальному фильму "Россия, которую мы потеряли", вышедшему в самом начале судьбоносных девяностых годов. "Россия. Загадочная и незнакомая страна. Так уж получилось, что мы ничего не знаем о ней. Поэтому, наверное, и живём так трудно и так глупо… Чем больше узнаёшь эту незнакомую страну, тем крепче влюбляешься в неё. Это происходит невольно… То, что покажем мы — это как бы впечатления человека, который начал узнавать историю своей страны в зрелом возрасте. И всё, что мы узнавали в процессе съёмок, переворачивало душу. Как так случилось, почему Господь отнял у людей разум, как можно было разграбить и уничтожить такую богатую страну? И почему, почему мы ничего не знали о ней, о своей Родине?".
В фильме контрастно соседствует две России — та, что существовала до нашествия большевиков, и та, что изгажена ими. В фильме, в полный экран, сопровождая кадры звучат такие горькие, правдивые и безнадёжные мысли :"Ленину удалось на долго очистить Россию от умных, образованных и мыслящих людей. Он не только совершил государственный переворот, он совершил и переворот в душе народа. В России был заложен новый антропологический тип, новое выражение лиц появилось у советских людей. Так началось вырождение нации". Время от времени слышалось, как из душ зрителей вырывались на весь зал рыдания. Если кто фильм не видел — пойдите непременно.
Но вернёмся опять к отцу Льву Лебедеву, с которым мы имели счастье быть в дружеской и единомысленной переписке. В письме от 25 декабря 1996 г. пишет он нам о содержании оконченной и ещё не изданной его капитальной книге. Как увидите, его мысли точно вписываются в развитую Владыкой Митрополитом Агафангелом тему. "А содержание сводится к тому, что Русского Народа в России больше не существует : он физически уничтожен с 1917 по 1945 гг. После этого в России живёт новый, искусственно выращенный "советский" народ, который, в сущности, даже и не народ, а несчастный русскоязычный сброд, что относится и к верующим-прихожанам МП. Хотя они хотят быть православными, не приемлют никаких еретических (экуменических) учений, но упорно верят лжи, что МП — это и есть настоящая Русская Церковь. Почему ? Общее, среднее настроение примерно таково : пусть там, заграницей в РПЦЗ, — тоже русские и тоже православные люди, но это не наши люди, не такие как мы. Поэтому будем со своими архиереями уж как они есть, т.к. они наши. А Зарубежных мы не знаем и знать не хотим ! Нетрудно видеть, что в подобном рассуждении главным является не чувствование единства в вере и Церкви, а чувствование единства по рождению, воспитанию и жизни в СССР, в "советском" режиме ... Всё это одна из причин (не единственная!), которая позволяет утверждать, что если до 1937 г., когда ещё были живы, хотя и в тюрьмах и ссылках, многие законные епископы Русской Церкви и жива была значительная часть подлинного (недобитого) Русского Народа, — полностью верным являлось положение о том, что РПЦЗ — есть часть Российской Церкви ; если такое представление отчасти могло быть верным даже до середины 1970-ых годов, то после этого, а наипаче — после 1990 г., такое положение уже неверно. Теперь РПЦЗ — не часть, а она и есть единственная, законная Поместная Русская Православная Церковь. А мы, в России к ней присоединившиеся, суть часть её. Ибо Поместная Церковь не есть Церковь географической территории, но Церковь народа. Поэтому Церковью Русского Народа должна быть признана та, которая неизменно хранит в единстве тот вероучительный, канонический, литургический строй церковной жизни, который искони и был у Русского Народа до 1917 и даже до 1927 года, то есть Русская Зарубежная Церковь. Вот, что нужно хорошо осознать нашим иерархам, да и всем нам, православным", дерзновенно пишет отец Лев.
Уже тогда, в 1998-ом году, чувствовалось, что в сознании некоторых Архиереев пошатнулось понимание самой сущности Зарубежной Церкви, что в итоге привело к нашей церковной трагедии, запечатлённой подписанием унии с Московской Патриархией в мае 2007 года. Отец Лев убедительными доводами говорил, что "русского народа" как такового, то-есть "народа-Церкви" (это его любимое выражение), больше нет : он окончательно исчез 28 лет спустя сатанинской большевицкой революции.
Но тут же, как всегда, мы добавляем — если России больше нет, если на пространстве бывшей, исчезнувшей России русского народа, как такового, нет, зато, несомненно, остались, разбросанные по всей России русские люди, словно чужеземные островки в собственной стране. И отец Лев, на собственном опыте, свидетельствует о том, как можно стать русским, родившемуся в Советском Союзе — душой надо отвергнуть всё советское в самом себе, а не пытаться сливать Белое с Красным, как многие пытаются сегодня делать. И как не привести тут свидетельство Вл. Митрополита Агафангела :"Когда я впервые приехал в США, то был по-настоящему поражён — я реально там встретил представителей совершенно другого народа — воочию увидел остаток подлинного русского православного народа /.../ они говорили на языке, который отличался от нашего, советского, они совершенно по-другому себя вели с окружающими, у них были другие ценности". Эти слова мы можем подкрепить другим свидетельством. В начале 90-ых годов, в течении нескольких лет нашим усердным прихожанином был один бывший советский офицер, однажды признавшийся, что Русским он стал у нас, в Лионе.
Такова была, правильно понятая "Миссия Русской Эмиграции" по одноименному названию книги М.В. Назарова, о которой мы не раз писали. Была ли эта миссия выполнена — не нам отвечать, но судить об этом неправильно было бы только по сегодняшнему дню, а изучая принесённые ею плоды в течении истекшего века. Сохранить Русскую Церковь, сохранить Русские ценности, сохранить Русскую культуру, сохранить память о России. Сохранить и передать. Это было основной задачей этой Миссии, но не от неё зависело, что мало нашлось кому передать.
А тем временем в полной силе остаётся упование на воскрешение и возрождение России, о чём на каждой Божественной Литургии возносится в Зарубежных храмах трогательная "Молитва о Спасении России". И следует ли подчёркивать, что эта Молитва не носит никакого политического характера, который можно было бы применять к современным событиям, и что не относится она ни к путинской РФ, ни к украинским фантасмагориям, а именно к России в том виде и понятии, каковыми воспринималась она в течение веков.
Протодиакон Герман Иванов-Тринадцатый

Metropolitan Agafangel: The missing people are Russians
Author: Metropolitan Agafangel. Date of publication: September 01, 2025. Category: Author's column.

Хорошо известно, что с течением времени меняются эпохи, культуры, сама жизнь становится иной — меняется всё. В том числе, претерпевают изменения и народы. Меняется не только жизнь и мировоззрение — меняется сущность, менталитет народа, который со временем перестаёт быть носителем одной культуры, и воспринимает нечто иное, подчас, даже противоположное тому, что составляло его сущность раньше. Нам знакомы многие древние культуры — Египет, Греция, Рим, например, которые не оставили после себя продолжения, а видоизменились в нечто совершенно иное.
Похожее произошло и с Православной Русью — начавшейся в древнем Киеве и закончившей своё существование в почти современном Петрограде — в исторический период от первого православного правителя нашего народа Великого Князя Владимира, до последнего Православного Императора Николая II. Это была воистину великая и уникальная культура единого великого православного народа, — начавшаяся принятием православия, и с утратой православия прекратившая своё существование.
    В этот исторический период Православная Церковь была главным государствообразующем началом — это и духовная составляющая души народа — его вера, и культурная — образование и школа (читать учились по славянской Псалтыри), церковное изобразительное и прикладное искусство, пение, архитектура и строительство — в этот царский Владимиро-Николаевский период нашего духовного расцвета Православная Церковь была сердцем народа. Богослужебный церковнославянский язык был общим, понятным и объединяющим языком для всех народностей, входивших в состав единого православного народа. Огромное количество икон и церковных предметов (крестов, лампад и проч.) — намного больше, чем изделий прикладного и изобразительного искусства других мировых культур. Но самый главный плод этой культуры — православные верующие люди, составившие собою то, что мы именуем Святой Русью. Конечно, далеко не весь народ был свят, но свята была довольно значительная часть его, — и именно эти угодники Божии составили драгоценнейший дар Творцу от нашей славянской общности. Русь — это название именно православного народа, жившего на определённой географической территории — соседние с нами народы называли нас Русью, понимая под этим словом исключительно самостоятельный православный народ.
* * * *.   Конечно, с течением веков, многочисленные внутренние изменения (вернее — отступления от Бога), постепенно готовили резкое обрушение православной державы. Завершилось наша великая история катастрофой, которая наступила с момента прихода к власти в Российской империи богоборцев, с дьявольской энергией принявшихся за уничтожение целых классов русского общества — сословий, интеллигенции, "попов и капиталистов", просто мало-мальски зажиточных людей, а в действительности — всех верующих в Бога. И они, к великому сожалению, добились своей цели — вместо православного русского народа, с помощью диавола и слуг его, ими была искусственно выведена "новая историческая общность" — озлобленный и нищий советский народ-богоборец, совершенно противоположный жившему когда-то на этой земле православному русскому народу.
Репрессии богоборцев уничтожили практически всех истинно-верующих в нашей стране, а посещавших советскую церковь МП свели до послушного подконтрольного минимума. Множество православных оказались вытесненными за пределы страны. Причём, настоящих православных верующих в СССР, после умирания Катакомбной Церкви, осталось настолько мало, что возрождаться здесь после падения СССР (на что многие искренне надеялись), уже было некому и нечему.
* * * *.   Я родился и вырос в СССР, ходил в школу и институт. Там нас учили, что есть разные национальности, которые в своей совокупности составляют советский народ (в противовес бывшему ранее православному народу). О религии в школе вообще никогда не говорили, а по умолчанию считалось, что, если верующий — значит умственно отсталый. Я тогда считал себя русским только по языку и по культуре. Нас не учили, что в действительности значит быть русским или представителем любой другой национальности. Мы жили во времена богоборческого Интернационала, вершиной, апофеозом которого стала фраза поэта — "по национальности я советский". Мы (моё поколение) в этом родились, жили и даже не подозревали того, что в этом может быть заключена неправда.
* * * *.   Когда я впервые приехал в США то был по-настоящему поражён — я реально там встретил представителей совершенно другого народа — воочию увидел остаток подлинного русского православного народа. Я познакомился с архиереями РПЦЗ, священниками и мирянами, я увидел, насколько сильно они от нас, советских, отличаются. Это, действительно, были представители иного народа — они говорили на языке, который отличался от нашего, советского, они совершенно по-другому себя вели с окружающими, у них были другие ценности, даже писали только по старой орфографии. Но, самое главное, они отличались внутренней целостностью и постоянством, своей православной непоказной верой — что было прямо противоположным тому, к чему были склонны мы, советские, — с бегающими глазами и стараниями приспособиться к окружающим обстоятельствам, угодить нужному собеседнику, и везде иметь ввиду свою личную выгоду. Люди из зарубежья, безусловно, не могли бы жить и выжить в СССР — их здесь весьма "оперативно" уничтожили бы "советские органы", или они должны были деградировать, приспособиться, и стать, ради своего выживания, "как все" — иного варианта быть не могло (характерные тому примеры — советские академики Лосев и Лихачёв, в юности верующие, но отсидевшие в ГУЛАГе и приспособившиеся). Это совершенно очевидно — СССР и русский простой безхитростный православный человек, даже на самых низших социальных ступенях, — несовместимы.
Поскольку подлинное православие может передаваться только от человека к человеку, я понял, что встретил настоящих православных людей, мне, как-то, само собой открылось, что Христос и Истина пребывает с ними, поэтому и я хочу быть со Христом вместе с ними. То есть, я осознал, что Господь меня сюда привёл и что в США я обрёл настоящую Православную Церковь в лице старых православных зарубежников.
Конечно, эмиграция была очень разнообразна — в ней оказались даже такие чудовища, как, например, проигравшие революционеры, вроде Лейбы Троцкого, масоны и прочие безбожники и еретики разных степеней и категорий. Но, в данном случае, я говорю исключительно о русской православной эмиграции.
Эта православная эмиграция жила в первую очередь тем, что надеялась вернуть православие в Россию (каковую они понимали в границах Российской Империи). Но, когда они увидели представителей этой современной России, которые с начала 90-х годов прошлого века стали часто приезжать в Америку с огромным желанием там остаться, пристроиться, забыть свой язык и стать как можно скорее американцами, старые эмигранты пришли в ужас. Для них советский народ, с которым они вдруг столкнулись, был, наверное, самым большим в их жизни разочарованием — это был совершенно другой народ, совершенно им ранее незнакомый и с подлинным русским народом несопоставимый.
Когда митрополит Виталий представлял меня Архиерейскому Собору, он сказал только это: "Знаете, никогда не скажешь, что он приехал оттуда. Он как старый эмигрант". Вначале я удивился такой характеристике. Только потом понял, что эта была, наверное, в их глазах наивысшая оценка из всех возможных.
* * * *.  К настоящему времени, запущенная Путиным советская программа "Русский мир", к сожалению, добилась поставленной перед ней изначальной цели — уничтожение старой антисоветской православной русской эмиграции и создание лояльной к кремлю диаспоры.
У зарубежников (в отличие от катакомбников в СССР), не было иммунитета против советскости, они во всём верили советским и легко, к сожалению, заражались этой советскостью (наглядный пример — происшедшая метаморфоза присоединившихся к МП клириков РПЦЗ). В этом плане пророческим было предостережение митрополита Анастасия, высказанное им в "Завещании": не иметь с представителями советской церкви "даже просто бытового общения". В случае общения с советскими всегда выходит по слову Спасителя: "Горе вам, книжники и фарисеи, лицемеры, что обходите море и сушу, дабы обратить хотя одного; и когда это случится, делаете его сыном геенны, вдвое худшим вас." (Мф 23.15). Таковы плоды проповеди, исходящей из бывшего СССР, по сей день.
Конечно, современных советских людей, к сожалению, будут продолжать "по инерции" называть "русскими", но следует помнить, что под этим именем сейчас совершенно другой народ, который уже не возвышает этого имени, а только оскверняет его. Помнить ради того, ушедшего русского народа, который так много послужил Богу и оставил после себя великую, всемирного масштаба, культуру.
То, что советский народ отверг Русскую Зарубежную Церковь и всё то, что хотели вернуть на Родину старые эмигранты, — прежде всего, православную веру и традицию, которые очень сильно отличаются от того, что транслируются Московской патриархией, явилось печальным свидетельством, что в начале 90-х годов прошлого века здесь уже отсутствовали зёрна возрождения, и земля наша оказалась пуста и бесплодна. Теперь даже потенциального источника возрождения православного русского народа не существует. К огромному сожалению, объективно мыслящим верующим православным, чтобы себя не обманывать, это следует принять, как скорбную реальность.
* * * *.   Наш народ претерпел кардинальные изменения даже на глазах одного поколения — вымерла одна категория людей и явилась совершенно другая — уже нет ни архиереев настоящих, ни священников, ни мирян. Даже у нас, где раньше был СССР, уже давно вымерли некогда многочисленные верующие бабушки — последние остававшиеся представительницы исчезнувшего народа, белые платочки которых наполняли собою храмы и которые всеми силами пытались привить православную веру своим внукам. Они жили Богом и православием. На смену им пришли современные "потребители виртуальной культуры", которые ни во что уже не верят и живут по большей части исключительно ложью и ужасами, предлагаемыми интернетом.
Русские и украинцы сегодня совершенно разные народы. Правильнее будет констатировать: больше не существует русского народа — так как современные жители РФ — это не русский православный народ, как и жители Украины — это не русский православный народ. Как Российская федерация — это не Русское Православное государство, так и Украина — не Русское Православное государство. Русского православного народа и государства больше нет — его остатки вымерли в СССР, прежде всего, вместе с Катакомбной Церковью, вымерли они к сегодняшнему дню и в эмиграции. Дожили до наших дней только отдельные личности и малые группы этого некогда великого народа. Вот они и должны были бы собраться вместе в преддверии конца этого мира и Второго Пришествия нашего Спасителя.    * * * *
Большая ошибка, даже трагедия, заключена в том, что современную Российскую федерацию во всём мире воспринимают не как убийцу (что есть в действительности), а как наследницу и восприемницу некогда бывшего на нашей земле Православного народа и государства.
Сейчас в РФ заявляет о себе категория людей, считающих себя русскими и, при этом, объединяющая с своём сознании православную культуру "бывшую до революции" с уничтожившей и осквернившей её советской культурой. Многие из них похожи на русских и даже похожи на православных. Но, они лишены самой сущности русского православного человека — детской простоты веры, и представляют собою лишь внешнюю имитацию русского человека. Даже малейшее присутствие в человеке советского начала, уничтожает в нём сущность православного человека, превращая его в человека советского.
Величайшей неправдой является также то, что практически все в мире считают президента РФ — возглавителем Русского государства а патриарха МП — возглавителем Русской Православной Церкви, — при том, что один даёт команды убивать миллионы людей (в том числе, православных), а другой именует это "святым делом". Оба они, как и все их сторонники, не есть русские, и убийцы в одинаковой степени, и прямо о них сказано Христом Своим ученикам: "Наступает время, когда всякий, убивающий вас, будет думать, что он тем служит Богу. Так будут поступать, потому что не познали ни Отца, ни Меня" (Ин 16.2-3). Пусть слова Христа будут судом всем утратившим совесть не русским и не православным людям, "не познавшим ни Отца, ни Меня".
* * * *.   Нам остаётся только ждать Пришествия Христова, оградившись от соблазнов мира сего. По слову святителя Игнатия Брянчанинова, сказанному им в далёком XIX веке, когда жили ещё среди людей на нашей земле многие и многие святые угодники Божии: "Отступление попущено Богом: не покусись остановить его немощною рукою твоею. Устранись, охранись от него сам: и этого с тебя достаточно. Ознакомься с духом времени, изучи его, чтоб по возможности избегнуть влияния его".
Защититься от духа времени и ожидать Суда Божьего над этим миром и над нами самими — помоги, Господи!
+ Митрополит Агафангел
1 сентября 2025 года

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The Time is Here When Even The Elect Could Be Fooled

.Vl Agafangel Internet Sobor post
[Google machine translation 2025 ~jh]

Архимандрит Константин: Время прельщения избранных
13tАвтор: Митрополит Агафангел. Дата публикации: 20 февраля 2025. Категория: Архив РПЦЗ.
http://internetsobor.org/index.php/istoriya/rptsz/arkhiv-rptsz/arkhimandrit-konstantin-vremya-prelshcheniya-izbrannykh

     Archimandrite Constantine (Zaitsev), in his article written over 70 years ago, prophetically pointed out what we, as a Christian community, have now come to, something he warned us against back then. The mission of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia is to preserve the purity of the Orthodox faith and resist any attempt to "replace" Christ with world Orthodoxy and the global Bolshevism and globalism. Things are much worse now than they were in Fr. Constantine's time. Nevertheless, we must stand firm in this Truth, for only in it lies our salvation.

     For greater accessibility, I have reproduced the text in modern spelling with stylistic corrections, while fully preserving the meaning of what was said.
     +M.A.

The time of the seduction of the chosen ones

A book reviewer, one of the most qualified and spiritually upright representatives of the "Eastern Rite," makes a humorous jab at our "ego."  In a brief review in the Cheveton journal "Irepikon" of Father John Chrysostom's scholarly work on the Old Believer "Pomor Answers," published by the Oriental Institute in Rome, we suddenly stumble upon an attack on "Orthodox Rus."  It turns out that our ideas share a common root with the ideology of "Pomor Answers," testifying to the persistence of this "archaism."  "Every fifteen days, you close this publication ("Orthodox Rus") with suspicion: do its editors doubt that genuine Orthodoxy still exists outside their jurisdiction — which was a characteristic trait of the Old Believers, as the author of the work under review so clearly demonstrates?"

The majority of the Christian community, striving to embrace the universe with its gaze, has no idea about "Orthodox Rus" and deliberately ignores the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.  This often applies to those who don't discount Russian Orthodoxy and even turn to it with a deliberately heightened interest, often possessing a knowledge of Russian.  But our modest existence is a thorn in the side of those few who, keeping pace with the world, still follow us, casting a cursory glance at our publications.  They are disturbed by our "caeterum censeo" ["I think differently" - Latin], echoing from a corner of consciously preserved antiquity — an antiquity that never decays, eternally young, eternally fresh, invariably exalted to the top of the mountain, no matter how it is buried by oppression, neglect, silence, and all possible means of permitted and prohibited struggle by participants in global communication, seduced by novelty and united under its sign.

Indeed, there is a formal commonality between our and the Old Believers' consciousness.  After all, what is the divergence between Orthodoxy and the Old Believers' schism?  It is only that the Old Believers attribute the consciousness of the Church's truth not to the Church itself, but to that part of it that has broken away from the True Church, imagining itself the guardian of the Truth based on outward fidelity to certain values ​​preserved by it, rather than to the Church itself.  In this regard, it is the "Eastern Rite" [among the Catholic papists] that essentially offers a complete analogy to the Old Believers, and not us. The "Eastern Rite" places primary importance not on belonging to the true Church, but on maintaining outward fidelity to the primarily external values ​​of the Orthodox Church—regardless of one's affiliation with it! Our consciousness, however, is entirely different: we place primary importance precisely and exclusively on our belonging to the true Church, which the Russian Local Church undoubtedly was, and of which we are also undoubtedly the heirs and successors. And we preserve ourselves in this certainty, considering it the foundation of our existence.  Our preservation of both the individual external values ​​of Orthodoxy and its entire content is merely a consequence, a deduction, an application to life, an embodiment — call it what you will! — of our formal belonging to the true Church.

The world is changing, but we remain in the same position: this is our salvation!  We have the practical opportunity to bear witness to this, stemming from the fact, providentially arranged by Providence, that our lives unfold in conditions of formal freedom.  We consider ourselves obligated to use this freedom for the purpose of confessing our churchliness, and this confession naturally and necessarily includes recognizing the temptations that surround us and that are spreading, noting them, discovering them, and revealing them — for the salvation of ourselves and those who share our views.  We are thus saved and help others to be saved: this is the meaning of our existence.  Reality reveals how even churches, denominations, and all manner of human organizations, even those who cloak themselves in the name of Christ, are slipping further and further from God's path.  We feel increasingly marginalized from the mainstream of ecclesiastical society.  Is it the pride of arrogance when we acknowledge this?  "To live" — that is our task, the one that exhausts our entire being: to live in Christ!  — in the true Christ!

From this perspective, a great temptation arises for us — one might not say new, but one that stands before us in all its force for the first time.  We have repeatedly noted that the antichrist principle has a dual form, as defined by the dual meaning of the prefix "anti": resistance to Christ and the substitution of Christ.  The principle of resistance ("struggle") does not cease, but this reality, in its extreme crudeness, comes to the forefront only when truly necessary, looming everywhere as a threat from which — by default—there is no escape. Everyday life is permeated by another reality, namely, the "substitution" of Christ, manifested in infinitely varied forms. And one shouldn't think that some malicious "antichrist" plot is always and inevitably at work here. No — here, too, the image of an angel of light is transformed into darkness.  Not the least important role here is played by feelings of love, condescension, pity, mercy, and all manner of human good feelings, promising and delivering in the name of Christ a variety of "earthly" things.  In this fullness of earthly blessings brought to humanity, the true Christ-like essence simultaneously dissolves and is consciously sacrificed.

It's enough to examine modern missionary work from this perspective, as it is carried out in Asia and Africa.  Here, a kind of forced "ecumenism" emerges, reducing the essence of Christ to a minimum that even the most primitive Protestant consciousness can accept only at the cost of renouncing its Christian essence.  A sacrifice is made in the name of a goal that is supposedly holy, but in practice is reduced to the level of adaptation to a primitive, earthly consciousness.

It's enough to examine from this perspective another kind of missionary work — the "internal" missionary work, directed toward an environment that has departed from Christ.  Here, too, the same good feelings prompt leniency, ultimately leading to coarsening, to ecclesiasticalization, to secularization, if not to the outright denial of the essence of Christ, the authentic one, as it still remained among the heterodox.  And isn’t it precisely from this point of view that the displacement of the clergy by “laic” elements [a laic is a layman, an amateur, a hobbyist], which is becoming characteristic even of Catholicism, is symptomatic?

Christianity is becoming a kind of social "bargaining chip," circulating everywhere, providing an outlet for "human" feelings.  Because of this, against the backdrop of modern brutality, it even seems somewhat comforting.  However, it no longer offers almost nothing, and increasingly nothing at all, to genuine Christianity, which leads earthly man from earth to Heaven and connects him to Heaven.

This is the atmosphere in which we live, but which does not directly affect us in the sense of requiring any internal decisions — perhaps not formal, but nonetheless responsible, and sometimes determining our fate.

* * * *
We are now facing something else — a purely "our" threat.  The enemy approaches the inner walls of our hearts, attempting to undermine the very source of our life in Christ.  This is the so-called "cultural" communion with Sovietism, in those guises that take the form of an angel of light.

The most striking form of this temptation is the so-called "infidelity."  The Soviet Church, which occupies a decisive place in the great game currently being waged by the Bolsheviks to disarm the free world, is removed from the scene.  Removing the Moscow Patriarchate, with which, unlike the Soviet regime, all Christian forces in the world are willing to communicate, albeit with occasional rhetorical reservations, as the representative of the true Russian people, both in its past and its present, what will remain of the sinister idea of ​​"coexistence"?  But we must not underestimate the power of this temptation on the Russian Orthodox community abroad, sometimes the most qualified.  However, a more subtle temptation is growing, clothed in the most accessible form: literary persuasiveness, artistic "truth," cultural appeal.  And right there, the incessant voice of "blood," of a common historical root, of the inseparability of historical destiny, continues to speak... Its impressive power is immeasurable.  Isn't this the very thing that gives birth to the fiction of German unity among the German people, and in particular the Church, which, in practice, is the main obstacle to its genuine unification, serving the Bolsheviks in great service?  This force also acts destructively in our midst, being overcome only at the heights of the spirit.  And the action of this higher principle threatens the temptation of cultural communion with enslaved Russia.  For in this way, our Church conscience is stripped of its fundamental safeguard: the conviction of our unconditional intransigence in guarding the Church's Russianness.

The destinies of enslaved and free Russia are separate: this is the axiom of a healthy Russian-Church consciousness.

"There," true life is lived only in secret.  Everything that is allowed to emerge "there" bears the stamp of lies.  By this, we are not yet passing judgment on anything or anyone, but merely stating an incontrovertible fact, which does not exclude the possibility that any action that arose openly on Soviet soil, that is, if permitted, may bring relative benefit, in terms of both personal salvation and general liberation.

"Here" we create life freely, and we are obligated, regardless of any circumstances, to remain completely faithful to our Orthodox Russianness.  Let our enemies call this fanaticism, narrow-mindedness, and so on.  This is our mission.  This is the meaning of our life, both in terms of personal salvation and general liberation.

And suddenly — a bridge is thrown to us "from there," in the form of literary works, supposedly representing the growth of the spiritual self-awareness of Russian society, the growth of inner Russia, the ecclesiastical and national maturation of the Russian people — a growth that occurs, is realized, and manifests itself openly within the framework of Soviet rule and, as it were, organically transcends it.  Is this not a stab in the back of the origins of intransigence?  Is this not a gift from the Greeks? Is this not the liberation of our conscience from the duty of self-reliance in our truth, in our loyalty?  Such material is pouring forth in a vast stream beyond the borders of the USSR and in foreign languages ​​in the form of all kinds of literature — fiction, memoirs, political works, purely journalistic works, and reportage.  But even in the Russian language, in the name of the Russian people, this offspring is emerging, expanding, growing, and multiplying — and a powerful poison, often independent of the intentions of the authors and publishers, is pouring into our consciousness!  This wave of disinformation — so captivatingly convincing — does a great service to the Soviet regime...

It was once a common belief: an external war is what will overthrow the Bolsheviks, regardless of the war's outcome.  It is enough for a Russian to get his hands on a weapon, and it will inevitably be turned against the common enemy within.  Experience has shown that the power of the historical past, which we discussed above, ultimately served the Bolsheviks, immediately raising them to new, previously unattainable heights.  Today, there remains real reason to believe that a military operation affecting Russia could become the pretext for events that will ultimately end the Soviet era: Hungary has taught a convincing lesson.  But even in our hearts, those of us who are staunch defenders of the truth of irreconcilability, there flows a sweet confidence that Russia is digesting Bolshevism — and it is only a matter of time before it finally disappears.

We mustn't think that everything rushing toward us in its endless, seductive diversity is necessarily the fruit of some evil, organized campaign.  There was a time when evil was precisely prepared and carried out in this way — both openly and covertly.  Let there remain personnel and centers for such work — even independent of the grandiose Soviet universal enterprise. No eye will penetrate the secrets of this work, the scope and expertise of which will steadily grow until the coming of the Antichrist, destined to embody all this evil within himself, openly spreading his power throughout the world.  Characteristic of our time — and this is the essence of "retreat," since it is already assuming a universal character — is that this or that "firmness" in evil is a ubiquitous phenomenon, changing only in form.  Therefore, anyone who arrogantly relies on their "sense" of perceiving evil, based on their search for and recognition of its authors, instigators, organizers—whatever you call them — is doomed to impotence.  Now, the only true path to salvation is to humbly withdraw from evil and humbly do good, entrenching themselves internally and externally in your citadel, your Russian churchliness — live by it, grow in it, and be strengthened: christen your life, finding meaning in this task — your life beginning, continuing, and ending.

Now is a particularly favorable time for self-reflection.  The Church calls us to repentance, to an awareness of our sins, to ask forgiveness from those we have offended, and to forgive those who have offended us.  She calls us to an awareness of Orthodoxy and to affirm ourselves within it.  This task is filled with an exhaustive and boundless content — and its expression will teach us everything, lead us to everything, lead us away from all evil, and show us the only practical path to serving the Motherland, devoid of destructive fantasies.  It calls us to the feat of prayer and fasting.  It calls us to see Christ in His true nature, and thereby turn away from the world and look upward.  It calls us to ensure that we, our homes, our everyday interactions, our very conjectures about the earthly future, both personal and national, do not distract us from the true Christ, who embodies the Church in Himself and makes us all members of His Body.  It calls us to renounce not only the evil that prevails in the world, but also the hope of finding peace in a better world here, and to strive to meet the Risen Christ, having first united with the Church in the preparatory feat of self-purification.

Blessed are those who, having desired all this, have the opportunity to fully realize it.  There are few such.  But if each one fulfills this to the fullest extent of their abilities, the Lord, who knows all, will console them and receive them at His Triumph.  Let us, however, not, trusting in God's mercy, shirk the feats of fasting and prayer beforehand, lest we stray into carelessness, which the Holy Fathers considered a mortal sin.  Let us be imbued with the consciousness of our "chosenness" — for how else can we appreciate our presence within the Church, which is indisputable in its truth? "The Lord awaits us to prove ourselves worthy of this chosenness. Only inspired by the power of grace poured upon us by the Church will we be able to remain unharmed in the face of the temptations now permitted by God, which seem to call us to account within.  Are we truly Christ's?  Do we truly want to be and remain alive in Christ?"
     Archim. Constantine.
     Orthodox Rus', No. 4, 1958.

Related post on this blog:
The Future of Russian & The End of the World 
     by Fr. Seraphim Rose

.Архимандрит Константин (Зайцев), в своей статье, написанной более 70-ти лет назад, с пророческой силой указал на то, к чему мы, как христианское сообщество, пришли сейчас, от чего он нас предостерегал ещё в те годы. Миссия Русской Зарубежной Церкви — хранить чистоту православной веры, и сопротивляться всякой попытке "подмены" Христа мировым православием и мировыми большевизмом и глобализмом. Сейчас уже всё намного хуже, чем было во времена о.  Константина. Но, тем не менее, мы должны стоять в этой Истине, поскольку только в ней наше спасение.
Для большей доступности, я привожу текст в современной орфографии со стилистическими правками, полностью сохраняя смысл сказанного.
+М.А.
     Забавный укол нашему "самолюбию" делает книжный обозреватель из числа наиболее квалифицированных и духовно-подтянутых представителей "восточного обряда". В краткой рецензии шеветонского журнала "Ирепикон" на научный труд о. Иоанна Хризостома о старообрядческих "Поморских ответах", изданный Восточным Институтом в Риме, мы внезапно натыкаемся на выпад против "Православной Руси". Оказывается, наши идеи имеют общий корень с идеологией "Поморских ответов", свидетельствуя о живучести этого "архаизма". "Каждые пятнадцать дней закрываешь это издание ("Православную Русь") с подозрением: не сомневаются ли редакторы его в том, что имеется ещё подлинное Православие вне их юрисдикции — что и было характерной чертой старообрядцев, как это с очевидностью показывает автор реферируемого труда".
Большинство христианского сообщества, стремящегося обнять своим взором вселенную, не имеет представления о "Православной Руси" и сознательно оставляет вне своего зрения Русскую Зарубежную Церковь. Это нередко относится и к тем, кто не сбрасывают со своих счетов Русского Православия и даже с нарочито-повышенным интересом к нему обращаются, обладая часто и знанием русского языка. Но наше скромное существование является бельмом в глазу для тех немногих, кто, идя в ногу с миром, всё же следят и за нами, бросая беглый взгляд и на наши издания. Лишает их покоя наше "caeterum censeo" ["Я думаю иначе" — лат.] раздающееся из уголка осознанно хранимой старины — старины неветшающей, вечно-юной, вечно-свежей, неизменно на верх горы возносимой, как бы её ни погребали утеснением, небрежением, замалчиванием и всеми возможными способами дозволенной и недозволенной борьбы участники мирового общения, новизной прельщённого и под её знаком объединяемого.
     Действительно, есть формальная общность нашей и старообрядческой установки сознания. Ведь в чём расхождение Православия с расколом старообрядчества? Только в том, что сознание истинности Церкви старообрядцы относят не к самой Церкви, а к оторвавшейся от Истинной Церкви её части, возомнившей себя хранительницей Истины по признаку внешней верности хранимым её некоторым ценностям, а не самой Церкви. В этом отношении полную аналогию, по существу, являет старообрядчеству именно "восточный обряд" [у папистов-католиков], а никак не мы. "Восточный обряд" во главу угла ставит не принадлежность к истинной Церкви, а соблюдение наружной верности внешним, по преимуществу, ценностям Православной Церкви — независимо от принадлежности к ней! Наша же установка сознания является совершенно иной: во главу угла мы ставим именно и только принадлежность нашу к истинной Церкви, какой бесспорно была Русская Поместная Церковь, наследниками и преемниками которой мы тоже бесспорно являемся. И мы в этой бесспорности себя и храним, полагая её основой нашего бытия. И хранение нами как отдельных внешних ценностей Православия, так и всего его содержания в целом, есть лишь следствие, вывод, приложение к жизни, воплощение — как угодно назовите! — этой нашей формальной принадлежности к истинной Церкви.
     Мир меняется, мы же остаёмся всё в том же положении: в этом наше спасение! Мы имеем практическую возможность об этом свидетельствовать, вытекающую из того факта, промыслительно устроенного Провидением, что протекает наша жизнь в условиях формальной свободы. Мы почитаем себя обязанными её использовать в целях исповедничества нашей церковности, а в состав этого исповедничества естественно и необходимо входит и распознание нас окружающих и ширящихся соблазнов, фиксирование их, обнаружение, раскрытие — во спасение нас самих и тех, кто с нами единомысленны. Спасаемся мы сами таким образом и другим помогаем спасаться: в этом смысл нашего существования. Действительность обнаруживает, как соскальзывают всё больше и уклоняются всё дальше с путей Божиих даже Именем Христа себя покрывающие церкви, деноминации и всевозможные человеческие организации. Всё более оттесняемыми чувствуем мы себя от больших дорог церковной общественности. Есть ли это гордыня превозношения, когда мы это констатируем? Быть бы живу — вот наша задача, исчерпывающая всё наше бытие: быть бы живу во Христе! в истинном Христе!
     Под этим углом зрения большой соблазн для нас возникает — нельзя сказать, новый, но впервые перед нами становящийся во всей своей силе. Мы не раз отмечали, что антихристово начало имеет двоякий вид, как это определяется двояким смыслом приставки "анти": противления Христу и подмены Христа. Не прекращается начало противления ("борчества"), но эта реальность выходит в предельной своей грубости на авансцену только в меру действительной необходимости, повсеместно нависая лишь как угроза, от которой — по умолчанию — нет спасения. Обыденность пронизывается другой реальностью, а именно, в бесконечно разнообразных формах проявляющейся "подменой" Христа. И не надо думать, будто всегда и непременно здесь налицо заведомо злостный "антихристов" замысел. Нет — и тут образ ангела светла принимает тьма. Не последнюю роль играют тут чувства любви, снисхождения, жалости, милосердия, всяческие человеческие добрые чувства, обещающие и дающие во имя Христа многообразное "земное". В этой полноте несомых человечеству земных благ, одновременно растворяется истинное Христово начало и сознательно приносится в жертву.
     Достаточно под этим углом зрения всмотреться в современное миссионерство, как оно осуществляется в Азии и Африке. Тут возникает некий принудительный "экуменизм", сводящий Христово начало к такому минимуму, которое самое примитивное протестантское сознание может принять только ценой отказа от своей христианской сущности. Жертва приносится — во имя цели, предположительно святой, но практически низводимой до уровня приспособленчества к примитивно-земному сознанию.
     Достаточно всмотреться под этим углом зрения и в миссионерство другого порядка — в "внутреннее" миссионерство, обращённое к своей среде, отошедшей от Христа. И здесь те же добрые чувства побуждают к снисхождению, ведущему  в итоге к огрублению, к расцерковлению, к обмирщению, если не к прямому отрицанию Христова начала, подлинного, как оно ещё сохранялось и у инославных. И разве именно под этим углом зрения не симптоматично, становящееся характерным даже для католицизма, оттеснение духовенства элементами "лаическими" [лаик — мирянин, дилетант, любитель]?
Христианство превращается в некую социальную "разменную монету", имеющую хождение везде, дающую выход "человеческим" чувствам, и из-за этого, на фоне современного озверения даже и кажущуюся чем-то отрадным, но к подлинному христианству, от земли к Небу ведущего и к Небу земного человека уже и приобщающего, почти ничего, а всё чаще и вовсе ничего, уже не имеющую.
Это та атмосфера, в которой мы живём, но которая нас непосредственно не касается, в смысле требования каких-то внутренних решений, пусть и не формальных, но всё же ответственных, а иногда определяющих нашу судьбу.
* * * *     Нам сейчас грозит иное — чисто "наше". Враг подходит к внутренним оградам нашего сердца, пытаясь подточить самый источник нашей жизни во Христе. Это — т.н. "культурное" общение с советчиной, в тех её обличиях,  
     Самый яркий облик этого соблазна — т.н. Советская Церковь, которая занимает решающее место в большой игре, которая сейчас ведётся большевиками по разоружению свободного мира. Уберите со сцены московскую патриархию, с которой, как с представительницей подлинного Русского народа, и в его прошлом, и в его настоящем — в отличие от советской власти — готовы общаться, пусть и с риторическими иногда оговорками, решительно все христианские силы мира: что останется от зловещей идеи "сосуществования"? Но не надо преуменьшать силу действия этого соблазна и на русскую православную зарубежную среду, иногда самую квалифицированную. Растёт, однако, соблазн и более тонкий, облекаемый в форму самую доходчивую: литературной убедительности, художественной "правды", культурной привлекательности. А тут же рядом продолжает действовать неумолкающий голос "крови", общности исторического корня, неразрывности исторической судьбы... Его впечатляющая сила неизмерима. Не она ли рождает в германском народе, в частности и церковном, фикцию единства Германии, которая, практически, является главным препятствием для действительного её объединения, служа великую службу большевикам? Эта сила разрушительно действует и в нашей среде, поддаваясь преодолению лишь на высотах духа. А действие этого начала, высшего, угрожает соблазном культурного общения с подъяремной Россией. Поскольку так снимается с нашей церковной совести её основное ограждение: убеждённость в нашей безоговорочной непримиримости на страже церковной русскости.
     Судьбы России подъяремной и свободной — раздельные: это — аксиома здорового русско-церковного сознания.
"Там" творится истинная жизнь только втайне. Всё, что "там" допускается наружу, носит на себе печать лжи. Этим мы не произносим ещё приговора ничему и никому, а констатируем лишь факт непреложный, не исключающий того, что относительную пользу, в плане и личного спасения и общего освобождения, может принести то или иное действие, возникшее на советской почве открыто, то есть, будучи дозволено.
     "Здесь" мы творим жизнь свободно, и обязаны, вне зависимости от каких бы то ни было обстоятельств, хранить всецелую верность нашей православной русскости. Пусть враги назовут это фанатизмом, узколобостью и т.д. Это — наша миссия. В этом смысл нашей жизни, как в плане личного спасения, так и в плане общего освобождения.
И вдруг — перебрасывается к нам "оттуда" мостик, в образе литературных произведений, якобы являющих рост духовного самосознания русского общества, рост внутренней России, созревание церковно-национальное русского народа — рост, протекающий, осуществляющийся, являющий себя открыто в рамках советчины и её, как бы, органически преодолевающий.
Это ли не нож в спину началу непримиримости? Это ли не дар данайцев? Это ли не высвобождение нашей совести от долга само-стояния в своей истине, в своей верности? Обширной струёй изливается подобный материал за рубежи СССР и на иностранных языках в форме всевозможной литературы — художественной, мемуарной, политической, чисто публицистической, репортёрской. Но и на русском языке от имени русских людей возникает, ширится, растёт, множится эта поросль — и крепкий яд, пусть нередко и независимо от намерений авторов и издателей, вливается в наше сознание! Великую услугу оказывает советской власти эта волна дезинформации — так увлекательно убедительная...
     Когда-то общим убеждением было: война внешняя — вот, что сбросит большевиков, независимо от итога войны. Достаточно, чтобы русский человек получил в руки оружие, и оно обязательно обратится против общего внутреннего врага. Опыт же показал, что сила исторического прошлого, о которой мы говорили выше — послужила, в конечном счёте, большевикам, и сразу подняла их на новую, ранее для них недосягаемую высоту. Ныне ещё остаётся реальное основание думать, что военная операция, задевающая Россию, способна оказаться поводом для событий, концом которых будет конец советчины: Венгрия дала урок достаточно убедительный. Но вот даже в наше сердце заведомых стояльцев за истину непримиримости, втекает сладостная уверенность в том, что переваривает Россия большевизм — и лишь дело времени его окончательное исчезновение на каком то величественном пути внутреннего обновления Советской России, ведущего её к новой жизни... Пусть читатель под этим углом зрения перечтёт то, что — пусть с полным правом — только что перевернуло его душу, раскрывая перед ним самую изнанку советской жизни, пусть перечтёт не эмоционально, а ответственно-политически, духовно-критически, церковно-требовательно. Не станет ли ему страшно и за себя, и за других, и за самого автора произведения, только что его пленившего?..
     Не надо думать, будто всё на нас устремляющееся в своём бесконечном прельстительном разнообразии, есть непременно плод какой-то злой организованной кампании. Было время, когда зло именно так и подготовлялось и осуществлялось — и явно, и потаённо. Пусть остались и кадры, и центры подобной работы — независимо даже от грандиозной советской вселенской антрепризы. Никакой глаз не проникнет в тайны этой работы, объём и квалифицированность которой будут неизменно расти, пока не придёт человек-Антихрист, имеющий всё это зло воплотить в себе, распространяя уже открыто свою власть на весь мир. Для нашего времени характерно, и в этом сущность "отступления", поскольку оно уже принимает характер вселенскости, — та или иная "твёрдость" во зле есть явление повсеместное, меняющее только форму. Поэтому обречён на бессилие всякий, кто захочет горделиво руководствоваться своим "чутьём" проницательности на злое, по признаку поисков и распознания его авторов, инспираторов, организаторов — как их ни назови. Сейчас единственный верный способ спасения — отойди скромно от зла и скромно сотвори благо, внутренне и внешне окопавшись в своей цитадели, в своей русской церковности — ею живи, в ней расти и крепись: оцерковляй свою жизнь, в этом задании обретая смысл своей, и начинающейся, и длящейся, и завершающейся жизни.
     Сейчас время особо благоприятное для сосредоточения над собой. Зовёт нас Церковь к покаянию, к осознанию своих грехов, к испрошению прощения у нами обиженных и к прощению обидчиков. Зовёт она нас к осознанию Православия и самоутверждению в нём. Эта задача исполнена исчерпывающего и необъятного содержания — и выражение её всему нас научит, ко всему приведёт, от всего злого отведёт и покажет нам единственный практический путь служения Родине, лишённый губительного мечтательства. Зовёт она нас к подвигу молитвы и поста. Зовёт она нас к тому, чтобы мы Христа узрели в Его подлинном естестве, а тем самым отвлеклись от мира и воззрели горе́. Зовёт она нас к тому, чтобы мы и себя, и свои домы́, и наши житейские общения, самые наши домыслы о земном будущем, как личном, так и национальном, не отвлекали от истинного Христа, который воплощает в Себе Церковь, и нас всех делает членами Своего Тела. Зовёт она нас к тому, чтобы мы, отрешившись не только от того зла, которое торжествует в мире, но и от надежды в улучшенном здешнем мире найти себе упокоение, устремились к встрече Воскресшего Христа, предварительно слившись с Церковью в подготовительном подвиге самоочищения.
     Счастливы те, кто, пожелав всего этого, имеют возможность в полной мере это осуществить. Немного таких. Но если каждый это выполнит во всю меру открывающихся ему возможностей — Господь, вся ве́дый, утешит его и примет на Своё Торжество. Не будем лишь загодя, уповая на милость Божию, уклоняться от подвигов поста и молитвы, дабы не уклониться в беспечность, которую святые отцы почитали смертным грехом. Проникнемся сознанием своего "избранничества" — поскольку как иначе оценить наше пребывание в составе Церкви, непререкаемой в своей истинности? — Господь ждёт от нас, чтобы мы показали себя достойными этого избранничества. Только окрылённые силой благодати, на нас изливаемой Церковью, сумеем мы остаться неповреждёнными перед лицом прельщений, ныне попускаемых Богом и как бы к ответу призывающих внутренняя наша. Действительно ли Христовы мы? Действительно ли хотим быть и остаться живыми во Христе.
Архим. Константин.          Православная Русь-№4-1958г.

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Mother Agapia Interview with Tucker Carlson

Understanding End Times today

August 2025

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I remember once around 2003 reading something from a trusted modern Holy Church Father speaking about end times and telling us to watch what is happening in the Middle East.  He said that USA is not so involved in End Times, but for us to keep an eye on what is happening in Jerusalem area.   He did not use the word "action" but the message was that in the Middle East is where all the action is.  I wish I had recorded this.  All I know is that the source is reliable.  I do not let false elders or world-orthodoxy tell me anything.  The neo-elders are all false elders, and we should not listen to anything they say — even if what they say could be true, remember that evil can use even truth to lead us astray.  There were no true elders after the Optina elders.  Except maybe a very few isolated ones, but they will be hidden.  Certainly, if there are any true elders in our wicked times, they will not be writing books or giving interviews or even known to exist.  ~jh

 

A sober Orthodox understanding of current end times.

Tucker Carlson Interview with Mother Agapia
Here’s What It’s Really Like to Live as a Christian in the Holy Land
https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-mother-agapia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y79CfG2R_3g

I tried over and over to upload the video here, but it is not going to happen.  You'll have to find it on the internet or download it from my Shared Library.  Sorry.

2025 Tucker M.Agapia interview   

download 203.8 MB
https://app.box.com/s/5jn18dlddajxipezsh96cpxvly8rbg5d

Box will not let you view the video.  You have to download it.
Box will allow you to use their search box in my Shared Library if you sign in.

 

In the meantime, here is a transcript.(not verified yet).

 The Current Situation for Christians in Palestine

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you for doing this. So you first moved to the holy land in 1996?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Correct. Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: As a nun. How are Christians doing in the Holy Land?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, it’s become a very difficult time for them there. Basically the Christians are in the same situation as the Muslims being a Palestinian. So the problem is there are two different things. If you live in Israel, you’re a citizen, and so they can live there and work. But there’s sort of some petty grievances that people might have.

But if you’re a Christian in Palestine, which is where most of the activities of the life of Christ are – Bethlehem, Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives, Jericho, Jacob’s Well – that’s all within Palestine. And so there’s many. That’s the predominance of the Christian population there. And they’re treated with the effects of the occupation, which means you have checkpoints around you.

A Christian who lives in Bethlehem cannot go to Jerusalem, to the Holy Sepulcher without a permit by Israel. And they don’t usually give those permits especially now.

TUCKER CARLSON: A Christian can’t.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: No. Without permission from Israel.

          The Indigenous Christian Population

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s interesting because, I mean, those Christians that you’re describing, they are the descendants of the…

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Absolutely. They’ve been there from the beginning. Yeah. I mean, right. Christ came as a Jew, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Went to the temple. But the people that converted and have lived there for centuries are – in fact, I think there’s been studies done that if you look at Palestinians living there now, and they are the Canaanite descendants, they’re people that have been there for centuries, or the greater part, not just Palestine included, Syria and Lebanon, at a different time, under different empires and things.

     So, yeah, they’re the first Christians, the Christians at the time of Christ.

     And it’s very difficult to practice their faith. It’s sort of like you’re in a gilded cage. And that’s how I look at Bethlehem – within Bethlehem, you can live there, but you can’t go and visit your friend who lives near Jacob’s well in Nablus without taking it.

     In fact, the priest in Bethlehem just told me the other day his wife is from near Jenin, which normally would take you about an hour and a half to get between the two. Her father has prostate cancer. In order to get treatment, there was only hospitals. Nothing in the northwest bank could deal with it, either in Jerusalem or in Hebron, which is south of Bethlehem.

     And last year or a couple years ago, he was able to go to Jerusalem with a permit to get the treatment. But this year, the Israelis wouldn’t let him. So it took him over five hours to get down to Hebron. And a man who’s old and sick to doing things. So whether it’s for those kind of activities or practicing your faith or visiting your relatives, which is part of Christian life, too, right. You want to celebrate the holidays with your family and friends. It becomes very difficult to do.


          The Decline of Christian Population

TUCKER CARLSON: The reason I’m asking these questions – well, first, I think it’s worth worrying about Christians who are the minority population. Well, it’s worthwhile Christians in general. But the United States is a majority Christian country that pays for a huge percentage of the Israeli economy, both through trade and direct grants and military assistance and all the rest. Israel couldn’t exist without the United States, so. And it has the support of so many Christians in the United States.

     And I don’t know if they’re fully aware. I want to think they would care if they knew how the Christians are doing. And I keep reading that the Christian population in the region has declined dramatically since Israel became a State in 1948, and I’m not quite sure why.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, again, I think it has to do because the whole issue is that Israel has continued to grow and think that they can dominate the Christian areas, the areas of Palestine, so they make it very difficult for anyone else to be able to live there. As simple as that.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you would think Christians would get a special pass or dispensation because the United States is the great patron and it’s a Christian country.

          The Settlement Expansion Problem

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: No, because – well, the problem you have is one with the Christian Zionists, the ones who don’t recognize the Christians in the Holy Land as being fully Christian, apparently. Because why would a – I have a very hard time understanding why someone who calls themselves a Christian and then gives money to support the building of settlements.

     Do we understand what that means? The settlements are in the areas of Palestine. They’re taking over the land that belongs to the people of Palestine. And this has been going on, like I said, I’ve been there since 1996, and I’ve seen the continued growth of the settlement.

     I lived in Bethany, Biblical Bethany. And over the mountain, Mount of Olives was the convent I was in in Jerusalem. And to the east of me was the settlement of Maale Adumim in 1998. It was a relatively small settlement then. And then you go down the road to Jericho. It was one lane. It’s now a larger highway.

     And that settlement of Adumim is like a huge city and has closed off the people of Bethany. We are closed off In Bethany from going to our convent in Jerusalem because of the wall that was built on Palestinian land, on Christian land, there’s a Christian home for boys that the Israelis just took over and cut up to make part of the wall that separated. So they weren’t – it wasn’t done for security to build that wall. It was done simply to expand the borders of Israel.

          The Wall Through Christian Land

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, so they went right through Christian land? Did Christians in the west say anything about this?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Very few. I mean, there was – and also on that stretch at the lower end of the Mount of Olives, there was a nursing home run by a Catholic church. And the nun that was in charge, she spoke to the French press and soon after she was told she was sent to Lebanon or to another post. Wasn’t allowed to be there.

     At the same time, we had – the wall was built right beyond Lazarus Tomb. Our school is walking distance from Lazarus Tomb from where Martha and Mary lived. And they built the wall right above where the tomb is. So that separated some of our teachers from being able to come to school. It separated our families on either side of the wall.

     So in April, I went to Washington and spoke to some congresspeople, not to demean Jews or not to even demean the state of Israel to say, “Look, we are being affected by this wall. It’s affecting our religious life. I can’t go to visit my convent easily anymore because of this wall. It’s disrupting our school life and we’d like to see – it’s not for security. It’s not separating Israel from Palestine. It’s separating Palestine from Palestine.”

          Reception in Washington

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sorry, what kind of reception did you see? You went to Congress?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah, and there are a handful, actually. I remember a very sweet occurrence. He’s died since, but Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, I was scheduled to meet him and he wasn’t there. But then he came and he literally ran down the hall to catch me. So there are a few people that were sympathetic, but overall, no.

     And I even felt the sense when I was talking to people that, like, I went to a meeting where there were a few aides there of different Congress people. Right. Not just one office. And just felt as if there was someone there watching what he was saying or doing going on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you meet with any Christian church leaders here in the U.S.?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Unfortunately, I mean, the Catholic Church has done a lot and said a lot, but sad to say, I feel the Orthodox Church in America has been very reluctant to speak out on this issue or to begin involved, maybe sometimes we – I think it’s partly just simply awareness.

     Even when people go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, they probably have Israeli tour guides and they don’t – you know, it’s an amazing experience to go to the Holy Land. It’s overwhelming to be, you know, a pious person to go there. And you’re thinking about going to see where Jesus was. And here I’m on the Sea of Galilee and you don’t really, really perceive what that wall means or who are those people living over there, or how come there’s only cars with yellow plates here. And then we were in Jericho and I saw these green and white plates. What does that mean going on? They don’t understand it, so they don’t get the concept for two weeks.

          The License Plate System

TUCKER CARLSON: What license plate mean?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yellow plate is for people who live in the state of Israel and they can go on certain roads, all roads. And for Palestinians who have a Jerusalem ID are allowed to have a car with a yellow plate. And then Palestinians have green and white plates and they cannot use – so over that time that I’ve been here, as the settlements have grown, you build the infrastructure for it, the electricity, the roads, separate roads that are used only by people that have yellow plates.

     As a foreigner and part of a foreign church, we were entitled to have either those or they also have white diplomatic plates that kind of diplomatic and religious plates that are there. So there’s very much an apartheid system, very much so, which gave me the freedom to help my Christians friends in Bethlehem and other places.

     Like one time there was a woman who, her daughter, they were from Bethlehem, married a Christian who lived in Jerusalem, so he had rights to be in the city of Jerusalem, have blue ID. But the mother, when the daughter gave birth to their first child, she didn’t have any way to go to see her daughter because it would be illegal for her to go into Jerusalem to get there.

     So I had the school van and I went to Bethlehem, go get her. And a lot of times we’d have a little more leeway. You know, if I get – go through a checkpoint, they’ll see it’s a nun and I go pass through a lot easier than someone else would. So I was able to get her through to be able to go see her daughter at the birth of her granddaughter.

          The Question of Christian Treatment

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ll just be totally blunt with you. Most Americans are aware that there’s a system, something like what you just described. But the pretext for it, the justification for it, is that there’s a lot of Islamic terrorism. There are a couple intifadas, there are a lot of suicide bombings, and it’s Islamic terror. And most Americans have been taught for 25 years Islamic terror is, this is a threat. And you know, there’s some truth in that, of course, but.

     So we assume the Christians would be getting an exemption from all this. Why would Christians who were not responsible for Christian terror? There’s no such thing. Why would they be penalized for this? Why wouldn’t they? Again, when the patron saint state is majority Christian, why wouldn’t the Christians there be getting some kind of special pass? I just don’t understand that. Why punish the Christians for Islamic terror?

          Understanding the Real Situation

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Because I don’t think it’s Islamic terror that’s taking place in the first place. I think we have to disabuse ourselves of that notion that this is a battle between Muslim and Jew or that, you know, constantly, you heard after October, the October event was that “Hamas, Hamas, Hamas.” Even to this day we hear it’s “Hamas, Hamas.” What is Hamas?

     Hamas are people who have had their homes taken from them, who, if they live in Gaza, have not been able basically been in an open air prison for certainly the last 20 years going on. Even when Israelis withdrew from Gaza, they didn’t leave open borders. There was no freedom for people in Gaza to develop their economy. I know people who wanted to try to go to school in America and couldn’t get out of Gaza, you know, had a Fulbright scholarship and weren’t able.

TUCKER CARLSON: To leave, couldn’t get out.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Israel didn’t give her permission. So what kind of freedom is that if you live in Gaza?

TUCKER CARLSON: They couldn’t even fly out.

          Christian Life Under Israeli Rule

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: No. And their airport had been bombed in what, 2000. And early on there was an airport built soon after the Oslo Accords. But Israel has intervened many times in Gaza and little by little, destroyed.

     You know, when I first went there in 2002, after the second intifada started, I remember saying to my mother back home, “You know, this is genocide, even that genocide by Chinese water torture.” But now we’re seeing genocide on steroids. What’s going on?

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re American, I should say.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, I’m born in America. Yeah. Lived in America and so getting back to Hamas. So also the school I was at has 350 girls. It’s in a town that’s 98% Muslim, though it has roots. I mean, it’s the roots of where Bethany, on our school grounds is a stone from the 6th century. This is where Christ met Martha at the Resurrection. You know, so we’re talking about. And it’s the road leading. There’s still part of the road, the road that existed when Christ walked during that time and would have seen Lazarus and Martha and Mary. Lazarus’s tomb is down the road. Right.

     But it’s.  And so permeated, even with Palestinian Muslim culture is the sense that Christians lived here and they recognized Jesus as a prophet, so they respect him. And so there’s. I’m not saying that everything is perfect. You can’t have divisions between. Just like even with Christians, you know, some Christians might think we should have… allow politics to be in the church or legislate Christian morality, and others would think totally different. So you can have sort of differences opinion, if you will, and we can all live with each other between that. So with Muslim and Christian, they can have their differences, but overall the Palestinian culture is infused with both there.

          Living as a Christian Nun in a Muslim Community

TUCKER CARLSON: So you were a nun in a majority Muslim town, a Christian nun in your habit.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: And which also was to an advantage because pious Muslims are not jihadists. The ones that I know, I’m not saying other parts of the world that may be the case, but in Palestine, it’s simply not the case. Or, or Syria or Lebanon or Iraq. The Muslims that for the most part are. They’ve all grown up together the Christians and the Muslims. And there’s a certain amount of commonality and respect.

     And so me wearing being dressed like this was just like many of the women there. Right. So they kind of respected that. There’s the same sort of conservative culture. There’s the same sort of idea that we’re both have some same basic values of compassion for our neighbor, of taking care of our families and trying to live. They have their form of fasting and almsgiving and it’s actually very important to them. And I think the best parts of Islam come from its development from Christian ideas that Muhammad came to know. I’m sure of that. You can sense it.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is a very different story from the one that we’re told in the American media that Christians are imperiled by Muslims in the Middle East.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: They are not imperiled by Muslims in Palestine. That is an absolute fact. Yeah, that’s just simply not the case. And again, going back to my school, in our school we had icons which are part of the Orthodox tradition. Pictures of saints and crosses in every classroom. No problem with that. I could show you a photograph, I can’t now, but of the graduates of the latest high school graduation. And they’re embracing the nuns there. They’re dressed actually in a more secular way. And yeah, it all, it all.

TUCKER CARLSON: So a lot of your students were Muslim?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Oh yeah, 98%. The only question of your students were Muslims. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And about half the tea and about half the teachers during the time I was there, some Muslims, some Christian in a Christian school. Yes. And actually that’s all throughout Palestine. The Orthodox is relatively small. We do have schools in many of the Palestinian towns, but also Catholic schools, Lutheran schools, and most of the population, most of the students are Muslims.

     And the beautiful thing about where the great danger is if the Christians continue to diminish a key part of Palestinian society and within Israel as well, you go to Nazareth, you’ll see many Catholic run hospitals, schools. And so it’s a fabric, it’s a part of the whole character.

          The Decline of Christian Population Under Israeli Rule

TUCKER CARLSON: But I’m just still confused by the idea that the Christian population is declining under Israeli rule. You would think just the opposite.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: What gives them. What I observed from my time in Israel and going back every year is that they do not want any Palestinians there. So the majority of Christians in Israel and Palestine are Palestinian. So they have to leave too.

     What grieves me is that the Holocaust is horrible, horrible thing that happened. People slaughtered mo fairly quickly. Sometimes the thought comes to me when I’ve driven between… I’m a drive, there’s a tunnel road that leads, goes from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. And it’s only for the settlers to go on down to the continued settlements that lead down further south than Israel to Hebron, or actually I shouldn’t say Israel into Palestine, other Palestinian territory.

     As you’re going. That tunnel road has been carved out of land that belongs to people in Bethlehem, in Beit Jala, which you’re passing by on that tunnel road. So it’s like a living death. How would you like to be a man? That was your grandfather’s olive trees. But now it’s controlled by Israel and you’re not even allowed to drive on that road.

     And on that very same road, I remember another poignant picture. There was a woman that worked at our convent, a nurse and took care of the nuns. And she had a home, a very typical stone Arab home, beautiful home with grapevines. I remember going to pick the grapes at the house that is now part of is they just confiscated the land. She fought it. She fought as long as she could to try to keep her property. And I remember passing by there some years and there’s slowly, slowly new Israel homes are being built that look very different. And there’s her something that looks out of as if it belongs to biblical Palestine.

     And so what I was getting at is that these people, they’re dying as they’re living. And I remember sitting at the home of one of those people in Beit Jala, and they had lived in the center of town. It was his father’s home. And then he built a new one near the Talitha Kumi Lutheran School. And I literally was sitting with them one afternoon and he gets a call from his brother. “The Israelis are here. They’re pulling up our olive trees, cutting them down on some of their land.”

     And he ran over, he collected as many of the trees as he could. Military order, that’s what it was. They just go and do it, even though it’s not their land. And then military order, nothing you can do. They have jeeps and weapons. You’re not going to stop them. But he was able to take some of those trees. This shows the resiliency. And the word is Samud. It’s like it’s a quiet persistence. “This is our land and we’re going to stay here.”

     And this man is a doctor who studied in Hungary. He took those olive trees and they now are on a plot of land next to his new house and trying to grow. So it’s like this is. I’m not sure what Israel is trying to do, I mean, it’s horrific. What’s going on in Gaza and what is very concerning to me and why I’m grateful to be on your show, is that what is going to happen, the people that I know in the West Bank, Christian and Muslim, it’s not said, but it’s like “we’re next” that what they’ve done to Gaza is going to come to us. Because who’s going to stop them?

     Already in the northern parts, where the UNRWA, the refugee camps were, I was there in September. They’d already been making raids. I was in the center of Jenin, right in front of the Catholic Church. They had bulldozed the middle of the road and broken the water pipes. No bullet holes. I lived in 2002 during the intifada in Bethlehem. The whole city was full of bullet holes. So there hadn’t been any confrontations, but they were still bulldozing and doing what they wanted to do to wreck the infrastructure to make it harder for people to go to work up there.

     But now in the last eight months, they’ve cleared out at least 15,000 people in Tulkaram and Jenin in the northern part. They’re not in their homes. Do you hear those stories? And these affect Christians as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: So why do American Christian churches send money to a government that does this to Christians?

          Christian Zionism and American Churches

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I think the ones that send money that support the settlements are obviously the Christian Zionists. There’s an organization called Christians United for Israel. Pastor John Hagee. I was in Washington a few weeks ago because, well, they had a conference in Baltimore. So it’s slowly growing an awareness by other Christians in America that just like many Jews are protesting and saying “not in our name” and Jewish, you know, the Jewish voice for peace.

     There has to be much more done by the Christians in America because these Christian Zionists are speaking in our name. Someone like Ted Cruz, Senator Cruz is staying and doing what he’s doing because he’s following a Christianity that is not the Christianity of the Holy Land. It’s not the Christianity of a Catholic or an Orthodox or a traditional Christian. It’s a heretical belief.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is Christian Zionism?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: As far as I understand it, they believe in the idea of the Rapture. They believe that it’s sort of this cruel bargain they have going with Israel because basically what they say, that they’re going to be swooped up into heaven. Right. And then there’s going to be a thousand year kingdom and then there’ll be the end of the world and the judgment by Christ and he’ll come back.

     This is a false. It was, it was condemned as a heresy in 381 because basically there is no thousand year millennium to come. No thousand year period. The end. Look, we are in that time period now. And so it’s a false belief there. And the, the.

TUCKER CARLSON: So basically they’re arguing is that Jesus coming the first time wasn’t enough.

          The Denial of the Messiah and Christian Persecution

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah. And it’s like in a way it’s denying the Messiah. As an Orthodox Christian, the most important thing in my life is that we receive the body and blood of Christ and we prepare ourselves to receive that body because Christ came as God and as man.

     And if you read John, it’s actually 6:66. First he says, “Take, eat this is my body and drink this is my blood.” And many a people that heard the saying and found it to be a hard saying and turned away from him. Yeah. So everybody was Jewish then. Right. But some believed and some didn’t and some continued to follow only the law. And some said, and Christ superseded the law. He said, “There’s something more than that law. I Am the law. I fulfill the law and the prophets.”

      We believe in the Feast of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. It takes place near Nazareth. I’ve been there many times. And in our icons, in our images, you see Moses and you see Elijah aside Jesus, because the law and the prophets have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. He came and said, “I’m the Church, I’m your salvation.”

     And you know what I think often about is where I lived in the Mount of Olives St. Mary Magdalene Convent. Right above it is a Catholic monastery called Dominus Flavit. Christ wept. It’s where Christ wept. And I think of it often now because to some degree, with Muslims, to a lesser degree, because they retain some of the Christian sensibility. But he’s weeping over the people that didn’t see him, that didn’t understand who he was.

          The Hardness of Heart and Modern Persecution

     Okay, so they follow only the law. And I think that’s why, you see, these are people that can somehow justify allowing for the starvation and ethnic cleansing of so many people. Because think of the stories from the Gospels where Christ heals the man with the withered hand, and he’s looking behind him are the Pharisees. And he’s grieved at their hardness of heart because he was healing, doing a work on the Sabbath day. And that was against the law.

     And so now these Christians of wrong belief believe that they need to rebuild the temple as part of their plan. So they believe that the current state of Israel, which has nothing to do with the biblical Israel, is needed to be built up so that then somehow they can restore and build that temple, fulfill an obligation of the law. And the price of that, they’re willing to forego the compassion that Christ talked about and allow people to be starved and wiped out.

     And Christians in America have to understand that you’re allowing both people who support the state of Israel or are Jewish, and those Christians who think they’re doing something in the name of Christ when it’s far from the name of Christ and it’s actually causing the end of the Christian population in the Holy Land. It’s going to be. The numbers have dwindled. Now we’re getting to the small thousands.

          The Destruction of Christian Businesses

     I just received a call the other day. Jacob’s well is in the large city of Nablus in the center of the west bank, which has been grievously. Raids take place all the time, and it’s very difficult. But what happened the other day was that a Christian run factory in Naples, there’s about 600 families, around 600 Christians number of churches and Jacob’s well, which is a very important site to us. We always go there on a pilgrimage when we can.

     And their factory, no warning, no permit. First on June 26, I believe Israeli army came in and confiscated some of the factory equipment. And then two weeks later, they came and blew up a big portion of the factory. So how are people supposed to have. They gave no reason. There was no permit. They have a lawyer. They have lawyers. There has been, as far as I know, to this state, no court order, no reason.

     And the only thing, I mean, quickly, what popped into my head, because it is a metal making factory. Okay. They must be using it to make weapons. Right. These are Christians who have been there for decades, the centuries, I think even the family. And it’s a well known business. All right. And no order was given. And quite. I almost feel a little worried about saying anything because I don’t know what the repercussions will be with that family because they have no recourse. Who do they go to?

TUCKER CARLSON: Where’s Ted Cruz in all this? Ted Cruz talks about how he’s a Christian. Mike Johnson is the speaker of the House, talks about how he’s a Christian. They talk about it a lot, actually.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: I think they have to. We have to. I’m not sure that it can be done by. We have to battle AIPAC and the Christian Zionists by the Christians standing up say, “Not in my name.” We can’t be doing this. So if they’re getting money from these organizations, then Christians have to have enough concern to say, “I don’t want this happening in my name.”

TUCKER CARLSON: No. And to my brothers in Christ.

          The Destruction of Christian Heritage

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Right, exactly. And not only it’s the real people, the living stones that are there that keep the churches open, that keep things going, but also for our Christian legacy. We’re supposedly a country based on a Judeo Christian heritage. Right. But so where is that Judeo Christian heritage when you’re destroying the very foundations of it?

     St. Jerome translated the Bible in Bethlehem. The cells where he was at are under the Church of the Nativity. The very roots of our Christian heritage are there. And we’re letting it be destroyed. Not physically and physically by killing the people.

     But also there’s a wonderful person. When you talk about resistance. This all started with Hamas. So for the most part, I would say they’re a resistance move. They’re simply people fighting for their people, trying to protect their land. And I don’t know if we want to reach into the area of. The whole problem is that was never defined What Palestine is. The Oslo Accords took place and then there was nothing to, there was area A, B and C and you didn’t have a Palestine.

     So little by little Israel just keeps taking over the land as they confiscating, building the settlement, adding the checkpoints and making, strangling the life of anybody living there. Now I lost my train of thought. I’m going to say, well here’s a.

TUCKER CARLSON: Story you probably haven’t heard a lot about. The Chinese mafia is exploiting rural America to create a drug empire. This is not available on cable news. The network’s not telling you about this but it’s totally real. Communist affiliated drug gangs destroying parts of the United States, the parts that Washington ignores to sell drugs, laundering money and building a black market network inside this country’s most beautiful but least served areas.

     We’ve got a brand new documentary on this. It’s called High the Chinese Mafia Takeover of Rural America. It’s available now on tuckercarlson.com it’s excellent. The purchase of churches and schools to aid the operation. Operation. The jerry rigging of power boxes to steal electricity, foreign pesticides, collusion with the Mexican cartels. It’s, it’s unbelievable. By the way, one of the drug houses is like walking distance from my house. I didn’t know that. It’s a layered and fascinating story. Head to Tucker Carlson.com to watch now. We think you’ll love it.

          The Seizure of Christian Land

     The state of Israel, you know, is less than 80 years old, but that area is thousands of years old. Controls by various empires as you’ve said. And then finally the British up until 1948. During all that time huge pieces of land were owned by various Christian churches, particularly in Jerusalem. What happened to that? Do they still own that land?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: They own the land but this is where it’s sort of a lesser kind of persecution is that they use legal means or semi legal means because you have land that was under the Ottoman Empire and there might be some documents or certain le. And they say well the lease is up now we have to renegotiate it. And suddenly the Christians have lost a portion of their land or they’ll use middlemen and say.

     And it’s sort of acts of deceit and they end up buying large. These, these front companies come and buy off some of the land and you don’t realize that it’s going to not Christians or not to Palestinians and being used in another way in Jerusalem all. Yeah, primarily around Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Bethlehem. There’s large chunks that have been taken. The Knesset sits on the own land. Land owned by the Jerusalem Patriarchate.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah, well, it was their land. Yeah. And they have a lease. They have a lease for it.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did they get it?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, obviously they allowed them to have that. That was a legal operation. That was done. Yeah. To have that land.

TUCKER CARLSON: When you first got there 30 years ago, were there more Christians than there are now?

          The Declining Christian Population

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: There were more. I mean, it still has been a relatively small population in the tens of thousands, I think, in Palestine overall. But it’s certainly, I think the greater degree. And little by little it’s decreased. But it’s really getting frightening now because I think these last two years, it’s sort of like almost pushed people over the edge.

     But then you hear of families in communities like five or 10 families that are leaving now going to Europe, sometimes the US or Canada or Australia. And that’s not only Christians, of course, Muslims are a bigger population because there are people, if you’re raising your child and there’s no job opportunities for them, and quite frankly, there’s a good likelihood that they, if you’re a teenage boy, that you could get shot.

     I mean, I know a number of kids in Al Azaria, where I was 14, 15 year olds, who have been shot. And look at the difference in that. Supposedly throwing a Molotov cocktail. And think about when the war started with Ukraine and Russia. I remember a story in the New York Times, it was a huge story celebrating that a beer factory was now generating Molotov cocktails to throw against the Russians. And that was celebrated in Palestine. Hundreds of teenage boys have been killed because Israel will say they were throwing a Molotov cocktail.

     And I know of one case he wasn’t even. I think he was 12 years old last year. I know a beautiful man, a Dr. Saleem, who’s Muslim, but who used to take care of the nuns at our convent. He lives in Shofat refugee camp, which is part of Jerusalem. They pay Jerusalem taxes, but a wall surrounds them. They’re guarded by Israeli soldiers. He tries to run a disability center, but they’re constantly being raided. People being detained by the Israelis and the infrastructure there.

     If you can tell when you’re a Palestine, East Jerusalem versus the west, one has sidewalk, nice sidewalks, good schools. The other is decrepit. Anyway, the Dr. Saleem, there was a boy at the camp there, 12 years old. It was a Muslim holiday and he was shot dead. And what they said was he had thrown a molotov cocktail. He was 200 yards from any soldier and they shot him down. But that literally happens every day.

     I have a young man that we just helped come to America a year and a half ago who lives north of Hebron, the Christian and his family. He went to school a half hour north in Shepherd’s Field. We wanted to bring him to America because he was at that age where you look the wrong way at a soldier and it’s possibility of getting shot. He’s Christian, but he could be Muslim. It doesn’t, you know, the point is that this is what happens to them.

     So any normal family, they want to stay in their land. It’s difficult to immigrate. How are you going to be treated, going to another country and have to pick up your livelihood and leave other family members? It’s not an easy thing to do. But yeah, it is happening that the population is declining and the priests are very concerned. I’ve talked to a number of priests in the west bank and they are aware of the situation.

          The Root of the Problem

     So what we’re hoping to do, there’s sort of a latent movement of Christians that don’t have this Christian Zionist perspective. And, you know, the Catholic Church has always done some to support the communities over there, but we haven’t done anything politically because ultimately it’s not the money that’s needed now. It has to be the change that we have to change the support of Israel. If you allow the settlements continue. If you continue.

     You know, James Carville, right, he was under Clinton and he came up with a phrase for the campaign. “It’s the economy, stupid.” The problem with Israel and Palestine is not Muslim versus Jew, it’s the occupation, stupid. That’s really what it comes down to.

     And unless we get something where a sovereign Palestinian state, where they’re granted their freedom is created, and maybe that’ll be two states with the boundary, or maybe it’ll be some sort of confederation. That’s up to the politicians to decide. But unless there’s freedom and an ability for the Palestinians to develop and be free to have their country, Christians will continue to leave.

     And what will happen, not only those living stones will leave, but the holy sites. What gives me the greatest pleasure is after I left Jerusalem, I’ve lived in America. But two times a year I bring pilgrims, people who want to come and visit the holy sites, go and see where Jesus Christ was crucified and resurrected, go see where he was born, go up to the Sea of Galilee, be a part of that.

     And one of our saints says taking a pilgrimage to the Holy Land is like the fifth gospel, so we can read the Bible. All we want. But it’s when we go there and really are at the places where our Lord walked and lived and performed his miracles that you really. It deepens your Christianity and your sense of.

     One of the loveliest things is I take people of all ages and I’ll ask them younger people at the end of the trip so what, what you like the most and some people might say the Dead Sea or something but I’ve also been struck that 15 year old boys will come back and tell me it’s when we went to the Holy Sepulcher into the tomb of Christ.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: So there’s obviously something there that’s important to our Christian heritage. And what’s happening is if the Christians are forced to leave, if Israel takes greater control, what we will have is museums. They won’t be living places of prayer. And that will be a great tragedy not only for the Christians but I think for the whole world.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, because they’re not owned by a government. I mean these are pre existing.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: They’ve been there for centuries and they have gone down in up. I mean there have been times over the centuries where Christians have had difficult times and then rose up again and did So I think actually we’re in one of those dark times. I mean we could go into a whole explanation of why the world it is. Why do we even allow. This is mind boggling to me. It’s getting painful. I can’t look at anything right now. And I think a lot of people every day these stories of what is happening and people justifying it to anyone with a conscience it’s sort of like what are we doing and how has this evil been allowed to grow and develop?

          Religious Conversion and Orthodox Witness

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you make any converts in Palestine ever? Did you mean of Muslims converting to Christians?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: You have to be careful with it. But I will say that I don’t know those Muslims that converted to Christianity. But it’s not something you can do openly. Not that they’re going to be killed but it’s not. It won’t be looked upon well and it’s not easy to do. Is it legal to process? Yeah, we’re in Palestine.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: You can talk to people. I guess it doesn’t. You know the interesting thing is I’m orthodox and in orthodoxy we don’t aren’t really a proselytizing faith. It’s a faith that becomes of what you are and how you live. You know what I mean? It says that you don’t actively do missionary work. In a lot of cases. Mostly it’s just by your example.

     And that was the first Christians. Right. And who were martyrs or their way of life, because they weren’t pagans, because they were trying to treat people decently. And people responded to that. You were following the message of Christ and that people said, “Oh, yeah, well, we really don’t want to live like the sybaritic life that we were living before.” And that looked appealing to people.

     So that’s. That is what the witness of Christianity is. And that’s another reason why, if it’s gone, it’ll only hasten the bloodshed and the destruction in the Middle East. Because I think that Christians are a buffer between Muslim and Jew in Palestine.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, that makes sense.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Absolutely.

          The Siege of Bethlehem

TUCKER CARLSON: Were you there? There was a siege at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus, maybe 2002.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Oh, yes, I was there. Yeah. That’s where I became especially close to the Palestinian Christian community, because in Bethany, there aren’t that many Christians, but we had teachers from there and students from there, the boarding students.

     And when the siege happened, it wasn’t just a siege on the church itself. What they claimed was that there were some fighters that were in the church, which actually, that’s a Christian tradition, you know, for people to take refuge in a church. But the Israelis used that as a way to. Well, they besieged the church, but the whole town was under siege, not just the church.

     So that meant that the teachers who lived in the Bethlehem area couldn’t get out of Bethlehem to come over to Bethany. People couldn’t get food and medicines. After a while, it became. I would get calls and saying, you know, “My neighbor has epilepsy and we cannot get a new medication for her. Can you find a way to get something in, you know, through a care organization into us?”

     And finally, when the siege end, during that time, I remember a doctor telling me how. Describing how someone had been shot in his house and he was bleeding to death, and he was calling the doctor, you know, “What do I do? What can I do?” And the doctor literally heard him just bleed to death during that, because no ambulance, nothing was allowed.

     And after the 40 days, roughly 40 days, which is ironic, I went in there and I met up with some of the people. Everything was strewn with garbage all over the streets, the bullet holes. You know, what Israel likes to do is destroy. Not only did they. Do they control the place, but they almost take glee.

     And we’re not talking about Hamas time. We’re not talking about, you know, 2023. We’re talking about 2002. They would go through the town of Bethlehem and purposely with their tanks apiece, the smaller ones, like knock over the light poles or the things that are garnished with Christmas trees, you know, decorations and things, and knock them over in the middle of town or pull their bulldozer and S.M. hashakar.

     But again, that same resiliency of the Palestinians, the Samud. I have a photograph. He’s actually the father of one of the priests now in Bethlehem and he’s sitting on his car that had been smashed by the Israelis, just with a smile, kind of like, “You’re not going to stop us, we’re going to carry on.” You know, “You did this to me, but I’m going to carry on.”

TUCKER CARLSON: There were people shot inside the church.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah. The bell ringer there was shot dead. Yeah. And I know most people there, of course. Yeah, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that was the moment.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: And Christians were shot outside the church. I don’t know if it was exactly during those 40 days, but a young 16 year old boy who, an altar boy of the church, you know, there were curfews going on and they had tanks all around the city circling them and he was out with his 70 year old cousin, I think it was, and they were just kicking a soccer ball. He was shot dead by a sniper. 16 year old Johnny Taljia, you remember.

TUCKER CARLSON: His name, of course.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: And also there was another Christine Saada. Her father was the principal of the Orthodox school in Betsahur, Shepherd’s Field. They were driving. And the Israeli soldiers, who. That is area A, right? If you want to talk about the politics of it, technically that means it was under full Palestinian control. They should have their police and everything. No Israeli jeeps were there and they mistakenly thought that was a car of some militant. So they shot up the car. His wife was injured, he was injured as well. And his 12 year old daughter Christine was killed.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did they do wrong?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: They thought, the Israelis thought that was somebody that was going to do something bad.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was anyone ever punished for it?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Of course not. Of course not. I had an incident in front of our school where they had put us on curfew and our girls, the bedroom of the border girls were on the main street. And I look out, it was curfew time. But I saw and there were soldiers sort of marching up and down the street, a handful of them, not like a brigade.

     And there was a man walking up to the soldier and I thought, “Oh my goodness, it’s a Palestinian man.” It turned out he was deaf, mute and he wasn’t from Bethany, he was from Hebron, but he had relatives there. He didn’t understand what was going on because they call curfew anytime and then you got to get off the street. So the soldier shot him in the guy, the man’s a deaf mute and he ended up getting shot in the eye. He survived, but he was shot in the eye right outside our door. And for all for a couple of years we had a tank in front of the school and often I had to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why was. Were the girls dangerous at the school?

          The Reality of Life for Palestinians

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the town. The Palestinians are dangerous. All Palestinians. Yeah, yeah. Five year old girls are dangerous. But what was danger to us is Mount of Olives. This was before the OR while the process of the wall being built.

     There had been a situation where some settlers, probably the followers of Ben Gvir, they had taken a little truck and they had explosives and they had gone in front of a high school on the top of the Mount of Olives. Fortunately it was stopped before they blew it up.

     So every day I remember for at least six months because they’d also done something similar near us, near the Ma’ale Adumim settlement. I would actually go. We had a fairly large property and there’s gates on either side where the girls would come in every morning. I’d be up at 6 in the morning and go make sure that I didn’t see like a little bomb someplace because that was what was going on. And totally with this settlers.

TUCKER CARLSON: You worried the settlers would bomb the school?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: They attempted to, they attempted to. There were a couple occasions Palestinians, but kids, doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter at all.

          American Weapons Used Against Christian Sites

TUCKER CARLSON: I remember thinking in 2002 when the bell ringer was shot in the church on the site where Jesus was born. So it’s kind of the center of Christianity and that in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher where he was buried. Remember thinking like American Christians in the United States whose weapons literally they were using AR15 platforms for this. American rifles, American ammunition, caterpillar bulldozers, American bulldozers. Are they really going to put up with this? Was there any pushback from the United States?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: The problem is, is the, the lack of awareness that our mass media.

TUCKER CARLSON: I worked at CNN at the time and I interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu about this at the time. I’ll never forget it.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: And what was his response?

TUCKER CARLSON: “Terrorists like we do, we have to do no apologies.” But I said “but that’s our church and it’s also nothing to do with this. So what are you doing?” And it was like “shut up, anti Semite.” But I remember thinking maybe, I mean I’m just some like Semi agnostic news Douche from CNN. But like, where are the ministers on this, the church?

          Media Distortion and Personal Attacks

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: I think a lot of times they didn’t want to get involved. The same fear that the mainstream media seems to have is that we don’t want to rock the boat. And also, to be fair, because the mainstream media doesn’t do its job fully, people are given a very distorted picture of events, so they don’t know what’s happened or going on.

     Or this is a kind of a minor example, but at that time period, my brother was coming up for a job at ABC News, and there was a story on the Page Six New York Post, “George’s crazy.” My name at that time was Maria, “George’s crazy sister Maria.” And what they said, it was like the Drudge Report and said that’s where it came from, that kind of thing. That I had said that Israeli soldiers were raping women in Bethlehem.

     Point of fact, someone had contacted me about that in an email from America and said, “did you hear anything about anything going on like that?” And I said, “no, we have a lot of difficulties. I do know where they’ve gone into doctor’s clinics and they’ve broken the sonogram machine and they put graffiti on, just went to the bathroom on there.” The same kind of things that they’re doing in Gaza. They were doing it in the early 2000s, raiding people’s homes for to have a vantage point and then steal the things in there and herd the family into one room.

     And so I said, but, you know, I said, “well, let me check it out. I haven’t heard any stories like that.” And I contacted friends in Bethel. I said, “no, no.” The Christian said, “no, nothing like that has happened.” And I wrote back to that person and said that, but it didn’t matter. They put it. That’s what comes out on the news, is what they want to come out on the news.

TUCKER CARLSON: So this was someone trying to keep your brother from getting a job at.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: ABC News, either to keep it or to keep him in line. Right. You don’t want to step out and say anything against Israel.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you talk to your brother about it?

          The Current Crisis and Media Coverage

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: It’s a difficult conversation and I think it’s probably better for him to say why or he does. I think it’s not his problem. I think it’s a problem in all of mainstream media, and it’s certainly a great problem right now. I mean, and even with this we’re dealing now, it’s becoming a lot of publicity on the start, even though it’s being distorted.

     I actually watched the news this morning, and James Tavridis is on and he’s talking all Hamas and they show the emaciated hostage. And as if, you know, we would, Everything would be okay if only Hamas would release the hostage. And that’s the starvation when it’s taking place. Millions of people are being starved, babies are dying there, and we’re focused. God, I hope the hostage gets freed. He should get freed and he should get freed. And Israel should remove themselves from Gaza and allow the food to get in. And Christians should be pushing for that.

     And I think we are seeing that to some degree now, but it’s still obscuring the main point. Like I said, the unspoken thing when I talk to all my friends on the west bank now is that they know we’re next, that it’s going to happen and it will happen. Maybe we’ll go back to that time where it’ll be more like they play a long game, even with this settlement building we’ll build. And then if America gives a little bit of pushback, okay, we stop for a while and then we start again.

     So maybe even in the west bank for now, if there’s. Hopefully will be some resolution with a ceasefire and bringing food into Gaza, that in the west bank, that they’ll step back for a little while. But that doesn’t mean that in another few months there’ll be some provocation. Like I said, they’ve already wiped out thousands of people from refugee camps in Tulkarm and Jenin. They’re making life very difficult in many towns.

     In Taiba, in Bethlehem, water is not given to the city. So you don’t have water unless you have your water tanks and there’s no rain. You know, when I first moved to Jerusalem and you do your laundry, you hang it outside, and I come there in May, there don’t rain until October, if you’re lucky. So those water tanks aren’t getting filled during the summertime. And so if. And Israel controls the access to the water to the Palestinian towns. So if they decide they only get it once a week, you only get it once a week while they have swimming pools in their settlements and green plush grass that Christian Zionists are paying for.

          Palestinian Christian Views on Israeli Government

TUCKER CARLSON: Have you, you know, a lot of Christians in the Holy Land? How many support the government of Israel?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: That, you know, the Palestinians within Israel.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, Christians support the government of Israel.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: I can’t. I. I don’t know that they would be any. That really would. Any. What’s the. What’s the. Especially now, any. I mean, they’re literally throwing out Palestinian representatives.

TUCKER CARLSON: So in the US There’s a sense that Christians support this program.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Of course not. And to the credit, you know, when I first moved there in 98, there was hope for peace, and there was a much stronger peace movement within Israel. People who recognized not just a cold peace, but that we can live together and we should work towards that. But that’s certainly been abolished.

          The Contrast with Soviet Jewish Advocacy

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just so strange. I lived in D.C. for all this, but like at the, you know, the final decade of the Cold War, there were a lot of Jews in the Soviet Union who were being persecuted. Everyone in the Soviet Union is being persecuted, including the Jews. And.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: And they came to Israel.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, they came to Israel. They came to the United States. And there were Jewish groups in the US and in Israel that I supported then and I support now. Who said “we got to get our people out of there and help them?” They’re called refuseniks, right? Yeah. And my dad worked in this, actually, and I thought that was great.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t see that with any Christian group with Christians in the Middle East. There’s no Christian group in the United States that I’m aware of. It’s like, “hey, those are our people. Maybe we should help them.”

          Christian Advocacy Groups and Church Response

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: No, they are. But in fact, there was just a conference down in Atlanta. There’s something called Churches for Middle East Peace. And there’s a group like Telos group, there’s Christians for a Free Palestine. But they’re very small and they’re not so much part of the institute, you know, the hierarchy of the church. But to us, we had. Pope Francis did speak out, and I think certainly the Catholic Church in America has to do a lot more as an institution. I mean, we should have a Christian APAC group. Of course. Yeah. Going on like, you’re not allowed to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Shoot up the Church of the Nativity. Sorry. I mean, and even if you’re agnostic on the politics of it or whatever, which is fine, maybe preferable, but you can’t do that to Christians. How about.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: No, I agree 100%, so we have to move to that. But again, to be. That gets back to the thing, though, is that people don’t always see the whole story and we’re just flooded with this message that those terrorists are coming to get us next, which is absurd. Has any member of Hamas or anybody of Palestinian come and threatened America as an American? No, that’s not their. That’s not what they’re about. The thing is that. But that’s the, the tactic that’s Used is that we have to plaster them as being these jihadists when they’re nothing like that.

          The Reality of Hamas and Palestinian Resistance

TUCKER CARLSON: Are they? I mean, I’m sure you’ve dealt with Hamas or. No. People who. Right. Are they religious fanatics? Are they jihadis?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Not the people that I know. Like I said, when I was again at the school, we had a couple teachers, Muslim men, and there were some elections going on. And it wasn’t Hamas then, it was the social party or something, but it was definitely a Muslim religious party. I would have voted for those guys because they weren’t corrupt. They wanted to serve their people and that’s what it was about.

     So I’m not saying it doesn’t happen anywhere. I’m not. Not totally ingrained in. In the community, but I don’t. It doesn’t. The vibe there isn’t one of wanting everybody to convert to Islam and forcing it upon them at all. At all. And the purpose of Hamas is primarily to resist and to protect their people and their land.

          The Broader Decline of Christians in the Levant

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not just Palestine and Israel where the Christian population has shrunk, it seems like throughout the Levant.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes. And I think that’s part of the whole Greater Israel project. You know, isn’t it so ironic that they’ve made such a big.

TUCKER CARLSON: Targeting Christians.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Targeting Christians. Yeah, well, targeting to make control for Israel. For example, in Syria, I went to Syria in 2004 and I went to the place, the Convent of St. Thecla outside of Damascus in Malula, where the nuns were kidnapped by ISIS. Right. And the population is over 10% Christian. And you have ancient Christian sites as well as vibrant monastic communities there and vibrant churches and hospitals that were run by the church in Syria and Lebanon. Right.

     And now what have we done? And so Assad wasn’t perfect, Saddam Hussein wasn’t perfect, but the Middle east is not the United States. And we tried to impose ourselves there and get rid of these governments who for all the repression also kept the people together, allowed minorities to survive there.

TUCKER CARLSON: Including Christians.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Including Christians, yeah. And Christians. Yeah. And this. And just recently. And so I find it mind boggling that now we take sanctions off after Assad is gone and we put in place someone who was Daesh, who was part of ISIS. Does a leopard change its spots?

TUCKER CARLSON: And how are the Christians?

          The Patriarch’s Bold Statement

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, we had the bombing. We had the actually very. If you may, I’d like to look for the statement from Patriarch John Antioch, whose brother was a bishop and was kidnapped in 2010 and presumed to be dead now. And in June there was a bombing, a suicide bombing in the Church in Damascus. Mary and Patriarch John, he didn’t pull any punches. He came and he said to the. He gave a eulogy, but he also called out the government because they didn’t really condemn the act at all, the ISIS government.

     And he says, “Apostle Paul in his epistle to the Romans, for whether we live, we live to the Lord, and whether we die, we die to the Lord. The rock of our faith is the Lord who rose from the dead. And the martyrs who lie before us today are children of the resurrection. They dwell in the divine light. They did not die. They are alive. They have passed on, even if in this horrific way, to the one whom they loved.” And he’s living like we’re supposed to live, as Christians is talking at it, the Christians there.

     But then he says. But I will say boldly, Mr. President, Abu Jelani Ashara, the former head of HTS, head of ISIS group. “We deeply regret, Mr. President, that in the immediate aftermath of the crime, not a single government or state official was present at the scene, except for Mrs. Hind Kabawat, a Christian. We regret that deeply. We are an integral component of this nation and we are here to stay. Let me remind you, the two archbishops of Aleppo, Boulos and Johanna were kidnapped. And much was said at the time. The Molula nuns were also kidnapped. And here we still are. This heinous crime was committed the day before yesterday, and we will remain here. We appeal to you, Mr. President, for a government that does not get distracted by issuing unnecessary decisions unworthy of mention from the sacred royal door. We call for a government that takes responsibility and shares in the suffering of its people. Mr. President, the people are hungry. If some have not told you, I am telling you, honorable, come and take care of your people.”

     I think that’s pretty bold for a guy who had his brother kidnapped, just had a number of parishioners bombed, and he’s telling someone who has been known to be a terrorist, calling him out, that’s pretty bold.

TUCKER CARLSON: I would say that’s pretty bold. So the government of Syria now the. The government run by the former ISIS leader is pro Israel.

          The Greater Israel Plan

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the whole plan. And you know, when you get to it, they talked about from the river to the sea, Right? Where did that statement come from? Look at the charter of Likud, the party of Netanyahu. They very clearly say, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean is going to be Israel. And really from the Nile to the Euphrates, which means going into Iraq, into the edges of Egypt, and Up to Salah.

     So that’s why we had the war in Iraq. Why did our young people have to die? Why did we have to spend so much money on a war? I was supposed to visit Iraq in early 2000s. Our school secretary, her father was born in Mosul, and he was an Assyrian Christian. And so this is an opportunity to go and visit him. And that’s when they started chopping off the heads and doing things. So we thought better of making that part of the trip. But how many Christians were displaced from Iraq during that time?

TUCKER CARLSON: Almost all of them.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Almost all of them. And now in Syria, you’re seeing the same thing, which in 2004, I saw vibrant communities. I saw people who could live even under Assad as Christians. Now they’re in fear for what’s going to happen to them.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, it’s hard to see this as an accident. So West Bank, Gaza, Iraq, some sort of plan. Syria, Lebanon. All places where U.S. foreign policy chutzers at the behest of Israel see the destruction of Christian communities. I’m guessing that’s not an accident.

          The Militarization of Israeli Society

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: No, not at all. It’s definitely part of a plan. But the thing is, why should we be supporting that plan? And also, you know, we’re focusing on the Christians, but I said we had two girls who are Russian background who lived in the cities of Israel. And what you’ve seen the last 20 years, too, is instead of that nascent peace movement, instead of people who tolerated their neighbor and could live with their neighbor, it’s become a totally militant society.

     The girls I know that are there now, it’s a lot of aggression and a lot of hatred. And how many Israelis have done. You’re having big problems in Greece now. I don’t know if you’ve seen the demos. I’m a Greek, right? People are parading through the straits because Israelis have left Israel, even though they’re the ones that have all the defense. Right. All the protection, even. What kind of a country is Netanyahu trying to have? Do you really want to live in a militarized country that’s always in. In fear and always thinking that they should? They’re under attack when they don’t have to be.

          Attacks on Christians in Jerusalem

TUCKER CARLSON: You say it’s more hostile. You see these videos of Christians, priests with crucifixes around their necks getting spit on in Jerusalem? Are those real?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes. And I mean, that’s happened before. You know, even from the first days that I would. There. There’d be occasionally something like that, and occasionally there were graffiti put on walls and yeah, sprayed on Jesus, a monkey 2013 on the church. Yeah, that was right in Tabka, where the multiplication of the loaves and the fish. A Catholic community, graffiti there talking about getting rid of the idols or something like that, some sort of Old Testament statement. And burning. Burning a statue of the Virgin Mary in parts of the monastery there.

     But that was a small segment. Even at that time, Ben GVIR and Smotrich were sort of outcasts in Israel. They weren’t the prominent members of Israeli society and what they represented in those religious zealots. But now they are in power and they’re dominating everything. And, you know, they say sometimes that if. If the Israelis didn’t have the Palestinians, there’d be a civil war between the secular and the religious Jews. Which is true. That’s what happened.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do. There’s enormous tension. Yeah, enormous. Do you know anyone who’s been spit on? Any Christians who’ve been spit on?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Me.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’ve been spit on?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Of course, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you mean, of course? That’s disgusting.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah, well, well. But that’s the least of it. That’s the least of it.

TUCKER CARLSON: But again, I’m saying this as a perspective, from the perspective of someone who lives in a majority Christian country that’s paying for all of this. So that’s kind of the.

          The Story of Taiba

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: That’s the. Or I’ll tell you a story. My father is a priest, right. A Greek Orthodox, which means. And he was wearing a collar suit. He visited one time and we village, the town of. We visited the town of Taiba. And there was a checkpoint before you enter into the town.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you give us perspective? Where is Taiba?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Taiba is biblical Ephraim. It’s when Christ, after he ra from the dead, he went about 10 miles to the northeast of Jerusalem, Bethany area, to prepare himself before he would come back to Jerusalem for his crucifixion. Ephraim is known as the town of compassion, of solace. Even in the time of Saladin, they came. They actually was called Ephraim. It’s now called Taiba, which means the good or the beautiful. So it sort of had that reputation. So he went there to prepare himself for his crucifixion. 20 miles, not even 20 miles from Jerusalem.

TUCKER CARLSON: Interesting. So with your father, who was my dad. Yeah.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: An American priest. Yeah. Dressed as a priest. And my mom was there too, so we were going to drive it. So there’s a checkpoint sort of at the entrance of the town and then you have many olive groves, which, by the way, I was just talking to someone the other day, they have about 8,000 acres of land, let’s say, and over a quarter of it has been confiscated either by settlers and the army, allowing them to take their olive groves. And they have no recourse. There’s nothing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who owns the land?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: The Palestinian Christian families.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s been confiscated from Christian families.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, confiscate. What do you do when they have guns and you don’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: You.

TUCKER CARLSON: You call your patron church in the west and you say raise a stink. Call Ted Cruz. Well, and others described Christian came.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Right. And then the only thing the.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what did Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, he said he was.

          Ambassador Huckabee’s Visit

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Very concerned because also it happened which there’s three churches in Taiba, an Orthodox, Greek, Catholic and Catholic. And there’s also the ruins of a 4th century church that still partially stands and people will still go there sometimes not full services, but just to be at the spot. It’s a place that was built by St. Helen in the 4th century church of St. George. Settlers burned the brush and also there’s a cemetery right next to it. Burned that area.

TUCKER CARLSON: They burn the cemetery.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Everything’s stoned there, so nothing burns. But they burn the area around there. So you have grass and brush that was burned. And not only that, I was shocked when I saw how much they’ve infiltrated. It’s one thing the entrance of town and you’ve taken the open land, the olive groves. They have Bedouins in that town. There’s a beer factory, a distillery, a hotel. And Bedouins are living, have been forced off their land around there and are now living with allowance of the Christians to be there because they have no place else to go and no one to protect them.

     So Ambassador Huckabee comes and he’s very concerned because an attack on a church. And also that same week a Palestinian American had been shot dead by settlers or beaten to death. Saif Musalat, 20 miles, not even a couple miles away. And he was going to address that as a Palestinian American to see that Israel would investigate. Nobody’s been arrested or died.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s an American citizen.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, he’s from Florida. Often, just like I’m a American citizen, was beaten to death by settlers.

TUCKER CARLSON: And no one was arrested?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: No. Never happens down in Hebron to stay. And the concern, my concern in talking to him.

TUCKER CARLSON: And we’re sure that happened.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: We’re absolutely sure that happened.

TUCKER CARLSON: How can an American citizen be beaten to death in an Israeli controlled area paid for by the United States, and nobody does anything about it.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, this is our problem, isn’t it? It.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sorry, I keep stepping on your story. So. So Ambassador Huckabee shows up.

          Continued Settler Violence

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: He shows up and he says, you know, he’s very concerned about what happened, and we’re going to check it. You know, the next day, settlers were there with cows, marching through the town with their cows. So it shows that they. They are in control. In control.

     And not only that, just a couple days ago, this is a week after he’s been there. You know, in the Bible, there’s a story of Ruth. One of the women in Taiba is married to a. She’s a Greek American, married. They met in school in Boston. They got married. He was going to business school. Her husband, he came back to Palestine to establish the business. She goes with. Her husband becomes Palestinian, you know, going to care for the people of his nation. She was. She got a PhD at Harvard. She’s written books about the Holy Land. And. And with the sales of those books, little by little, she visited parishes in America, and she raised money so that they could build 30 homes for Orthodox people.

     So those homes were. Cars of. The people in those homes were burned the other day. And there’s graffiti again on the wall, and it says. It names another village, and it says, “you’re going to regret this.” And the rest. I talked to two Israeli people who are from Israel, and they couldn’t even decipher. So, you know, because it’s very interesting, a lot of the settlers are actually people from Brooklyn, New York.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: They have dual citizenship, and they go back and forth between is freely. They can go to Ben Gurion Airport, go through Tel Aviv to come to the settlements in the West Bank. But those people in Taiba, who are actually American citizens as well, they can’t go through Ben Gurion Airport.

TUCKER CARLSON: How is it that an American citizen can’t go through Ben Gurion Airport?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Because he’s also a Palestinian.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you sure?

          The Reality of Palestinian Movement and Freedom

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m absolutely sure, yes. They have to go through Jordan and right now through a border that is controlled on one side by Israel. And right now it’s so difficult. They only open for, I’ve been told, from eight to one or two. And you’ve got thousands of people trying to come through. So you could be there for hours, and you may not get through that day.

     People make plans to… You know, the only way Palestinians can do anything to be free is to go to another country. I mean, even for a vacation or something, you don’t feel free in your own country. I used to feel that when I was living there in the summertimes. That’s why I would travel to different countries. Because within Israel and Palestine you feel like you’re in prison. You can’t feel like a person. And so if you have the opportunity to go away to breathe a little bit, you do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Since you are an American and you obviously know people in positions of authority, when you come back to the US and tell these stories at dinner, what do people say at dinner?

          American Political Response and Congressional Resistance

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: They show concern when you tell the story, but again, maybe it seems too distant for people or I have also, you know what, since I’ve talked to people in our churches and I’m trying really now to focus on organizing because people say, “How can we help?” Now they’re really seeing the gross things that are going on. “Where do we send money? What do we do?”

     Yes, people need money, but what we really need is political change. So I’m sort of bordering on three different congressional districts and we’ve tried to set up appointments with our congressmen. They’ve thrown us off. I’m talking about middle aged women trying to go see their congressmen. They don’t want, when you tell them what you want to talk about, they don’t want to make an appointment for you to be able to educate them.

     And then I wrote a letter to my congressman, Nicholas Langworthy. He writes back an Israeli bullet point, an AIPAC bullet point reply, basically saying, you know, “Hamas is the problem and it’s okay to send weapons over there.” But little by little we have to go and keep educating. If enough people keep knocking on the doors and saying we don’t like what we’re doing, why are we sending billions of dollars to Israel and then we’re cutting Medicaid, we’re cutting… people don’t have jobs in his district.

     In fact, I was listening in on, he did a phone town meeting or whatever and most of the people were concerned because they didn’t have enough money for groceries or what was going to be done with their healthcare in the coming months and years. And then no questions about… He didn’t take my question on the thing I wanted to ask about Israel and why we were sending more offensive weapons.

     We’re not talking about… don’t play this game. Nothing wrong with the Iron Dome and protecting yourself. You’re in a tough neighborhood. I’m talking about assault rifles, which was just passed again to give assault rifles that Ben Gvir then just gives into the settlers who then kill the Palestinians in the west bank. And we’re financing that. So some of the people… Have you not had enough? You really want this done in your name?

     But the politicians make it hard, too. They don’t want to hear it. And I understand. When I lived there in the early 2000s, Congressman Darlisa and Carolyn Maloney was still in office at the time. They were there on an Israeli junket. I think it was a 60th anniversary of something. But they were willing to come and see me, but they wouldn’t come to Bethany because that was over the wall or the wall was being built then. That was in the West Bank.

     So we met on the Mount of Olives, and they actually came with me and they saw the wall was being constructed then, and they saw how people were passing through the rocks and they had not good things to say about Israel. But do you think their vote would have changed? No, not going to happen. Not going to happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: I once again threw you off track when you were explaining visiting with your parents.

          Israeli Military Checkpoints and American Citizens

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Right. So we come in, we’re heading into Taiba, and the soldiers… The reason the soldiers are there because just outside of Taiba, on one side you have the settlement of Rimonim, swimming pools and beautiful homes, and the other direction, the huge settlement of Ofra. So these are in the west bank in areas that’s supposed to be Palestinian. And so the soldiers there are supposedly protecting them, but they block the entrance to Taiba, or, you know, check who’s going in and out.

     So we drove. They first weren’t going to let us go. They said, “No, no, no, you can’t come through this way. You got to go around Ofra, go like 20 miles and come back another road to get into Taiba.” I said, “No, no, they’re only in the country for a couple weeks. They’re only here for a few hours. We’re going in this way.” Finally, they let us in, and then when we go and we said, “We’re only going to be a couple hours. We’re visiting families there and we’ll come back out.”

     When we come back out, the same game, the soldiers just standing there. They play this game where to show that they’re in control. There was no other cars behind us. They just said, “No,” they wouldn’t let us pass. They’re just going to wait for a while. And finally my father, temperamental Greek, got out of the car and went up to the soldier and said, “What is this? I’m an American citizen. We just want to go back to Jerusalem.” And they basically just laughed in his face.

     That’s horrible. Eventually we were able to move. But the scorn they have for Americans is really something else all the time. That’s not the only incident where I’ve seen something like that, where they mock America, mock America.

TUCKER CARLSON: America pays for the whole thing.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, thank you very much, but there’s…

TUCKER CARLSON: No love for America.

          Israeli Attitudes Toward Americans

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, look, look, I have seen, sadly, to say, during that time, American soldiers, veterans that would be at the checkpoints and they’d be sort of joking with the soldiers. So there was probably some camaraderie with certain people who were probably Christian Zionists or of that mentality. So they were pro Israel. If you have that view, then it’s okay. But in general, no, they don’t have any love for Americans. Really. Yeah, well, that was my perception.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think most Americans would be surprised to learn that.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah, it’s about time that it changes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why do you think there’s scorn for Americans in a country supported by Israel? I mean, supported by America, I think.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: I think that’s just a part of the arrogance of the country. I think they think they’re due for everything. There’s not much gratitude. We’re past that time, you know, because he’s bringing up something now. When I think about it, the time period when Joe Biden was a young politician and there was that warm feeling towards Israel and it was sort of the underdog. But we’re way beyond that time now, you know, so that’s where the sense of before, but there might have been a sense “we’re thankful to America.” But over the years, as this whole progression of the greater land of Israel and the dominance of another people and having the power to do it, there’s no more of that gratitude.

          Personal Attacks and Media Censorship

TUCKER CARLSON: Have you been attacked for saying things like this? In which way in the United States?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, like that little slander then. I mean, I’m sure I… Well, we’ll see what happens after this, I’m sure. I actually, come to think of it, we talked before about in the early 2000s. My father was a priest at a large church in New York City, and there was a gathering of a few hundred people. And I talked about the situation in Palestine and everybody was receptive. But then there was a newspaper that I believe was controlled by John Katsumtides. He was a big fellow in New York City. They reported what I said, but they also watered it down a lot. There’s like this idea we don’t want to go too far and say anything negative about Israel. And that was back then. That’s 15 years ago. 20 years ago. Yeah. So it’s not being attacked necessarily, but it’s not letting you be truthful about things.

          Christians in Arab Countries vs. Israel-Palestine

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think Christians in other Arab countries are treated better than Christians in Israel and Palestine?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I can only go from my times of being there in Lebanon too, at the time I was there, there were churches and they were part of the society, so there was nothing wrong with being a Christian. And in Syria, when I would… now, now who knows what’s going to happen, but certainly the time when I was there.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, Israel controls those countries now.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, they’re trying to make inroads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, what did they do? First? They bombed after Assad went down, they get rid of all the military. So what is the Abu Jelani being there now? The ISIS head without… Who is he? Who is he serving? Is he serving the Syrian people or the Israeli people?

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the answer?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Right now it looks like he’s serving Israel.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s so surprising is that you think of, or in the United States, people think of Israel as like this foothold of Western civilization in the Middle East. And so you would imagine the Christians would do a lot better under Israeli control than they would under Assad’s control.

          The Spiritual Character of Palestinian People

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: But no, that’s not the case at all. All that’s it. Definitely not the case at all. That’s… I’d like to talk a little bit more about the Palestinians themselves. I would love to form of resistance because I think one of the reasons I was grateful to be able to come on is to really give a picture of them and the people as they are.

     And one thing that’s really struck me, I know Muslims, I know Bedouins, I know all during this time where they’ve really been suffering. What I really get from them is their real belief in God and that their life is in God’s hands. And there’s such a humility and an obedience to their creator and an understanding that this life is not the only one. And there’s a real beauty to that that I think so much of the world is missing.

     And I think even in sort of there’s a deeper sense to all that’s even going on right now. Right. We’re in the heart of Jerusalem, in the heart of where Christ came. There was a reason for that. And now we have a situation where the people who were the closest to God are being destroyed.

     In a simple sense, you know, I live next to the Mount of Olives, and when you go down the Mount of Olives, it’s where they said, “Hosanna in the highest, here comes Christ.” And often I’ve gone to parish churches in Palestine, and the whole community is… they know all the service, and they’re singing it themselves. And it reminds me as those people that were on the Mount of Olives greeting the Creator, greeting the Messiah, who is coming for their salvation and honoring him. And that’s what they’re doing to this day. And what we’re doing instead is destroying that.

     And what does that mean for the world when we let that go? The last time I was there, I went through Amman, not through Tel Aviv, so I had to go through the border. And then I spent a night, and in the early morning, I was being driven to the airport from Madaba, where there’s a mosaic from the 6th century that shows you the places in the Holy Land, the map in Madaba.

     And Madaba is not a very big city. And as I’m going out of it, you very quickly, before you get to the airport, come to lands that are still being grazed by shepherds. And I started to weep because to me, that’s so emblematic of what the Lord really wanted us to be like. In touch with the land, recognizing that our life depends on what we grow and what we produce and what we do.

     And those kind of people are the ones who I hear from now who say they’re suffering, they’re literally going to be killed. But they have so much more courage and faith than you find in so much of America and in the west, which we’ve lost. And to me, it’s sort of like this whole war is, in a way, we’re killing the Christ message. And that message, whatever your theology is, is one of compassion and tolerance and love. And the world is becoming smaller in that way.

     And I think people sense that, right? How we act to each other and to our neighbor. There’s so… And the very fact that people, politicians and people can listen to doctors, listen to what’s going on, and still somehow have a blank face and think it’s okay. How did we come to such a point of darkness?

          The Spiritual War

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I mean, it does seem like part of the broader spiritual war.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, absolutely, I think so.

TUCKER CARLSON: What happens to the 2 million people who live in Gaza?

          The Path Forward: Political and Spiritual Solutions

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I can’t say that I’m a Trump fan, but he’s a wheeler dealer. He wants to get that Nobel Peace Prize. He’s got people with a lot of money in Saudi Arabia and Qatar that have money. We don’t have to build a Riviera, build it for the Palestinians. They go and rebuild the area and let it be and reconstruct for a Palestinian nation.

     Why is that such an outrageous idea? Why does Israel think that the people of Palestine have to be their enemy? They say, “Go to Jordan, go to Egypt.” What’s the difference? Another 20km in. That’s really what we’re talking about. The difference between Amman and Tel Aviv is 20 miles at the most to drive between the two.

     So what are the difference between the people that live in Palestine, that live in Jericho and Bethlehem and someone who lives in Amman? And what’s the difference between someone who lives in Gaza? So give them a defined border and have the people of other countries, the Arabs too should support the rebuilding of Gaza and have Israel remove their military from there and let Gaza have their freedom to be able to develop those people.

     There are some of the most educated people in Gaza. I mean, how many of us have read the stories of Mosab Abu Toha or Refaat, who was killed, the poet, beautiful, graceful people, Bisan Owda, now who’s on every day? Maybe not everybody sees her, not in the mainstream media. But these are beautiful young Palestinians who are still trying to live and have joy and see something beautiful in the midst of all their suffering.

     So there’s no reason that the money can’t be there. And if Trump, he’s not a politician, he’s a businessman, work it out. I mean, I don’t know that that’s going to happen, but our politicians certainly haven’t done it.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the current plan for those people? It’s probably not to raise a trillion dollars and rebuild them a model.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: But I mean, so what is a plan? Are we in such a world where we can look on live TV that too many people are just slowly going to die now? Or are you going to transfer them? And why should they be transferred? Why should they have to leave their land that they’ve been in for centuries?

     And in Gaza, Gaza is as much as the West Bank Gaza, the Saint Porphyrius Church from the third century was bombed. We also have in the Orthodox.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did a Christian church get bombed?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Because it’s part of Palestine, the Palestinians and all there. I’ve been there before and basically it’s the Holy Family Church and the Baptist church. They’re all pretty much in the same area. So you can’t make a mistake. And Christians through.

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t think that was an accident?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: No, no. Nothing’s an accident. I mean, occasionally a shell might go off, but no, and certainly the last time with the one where they pointed at the cross. You don’t miss that. Well, at the Holy Family Church, the cross didn’t topple, but literally inches from it.

     And I have, in Nablus at Jacob’s well, there’s a large church now and there’s crosses on the front face in circles. And the monk always points out to us, when I go there, there’s a tank shell that was pointed, that was aimed at that cross. You can still see it from an earlier confrontation in Nablus. So don’t tell me these soldiers make mistakes.

     The church in Gaza has, it’s pointed and the cross is there in the middle of it by itself. So it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t.

          Christian Values and Political Support

TUCKER CARLSON: So what would you say to Ted Cruz, the self proclaimed Christian, supporting tank shells fired at crosses? Like, what is that?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I would say, again, it’s to disabuse of the notion it’s those same talking points Congressman gave. “Well, but Hamas is the problem and they’re terrorists.” Well, Hamas is not the problem. So don’t use that as an excuse anymore. And we have to defend Christian values, American values and dignity, freedom for people. Isn’t that what we’re all about, having their rights?

          The Temple Mount: A Sacred Crossroads

TUCKER CARLSON: What happens on the Temple Mountain Mount? What is the Temple Mount? Can you explain what that is?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the Temple Mount is the area where the Temple existed at the time of Christ.

TUCKER CARLSON: In Jerusalem.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: In Jerusalem. Right. Directly I lived in the Convent of St. Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives. Directly in front of me is the Dome of the Rock and there’s the Old Wall, the walls of the Old City. And within that is the area where the temple was, had been existed. Right.

     There was also a Byzantine church at one point in the 5th century, because where the Dome of the Rock is, is where Abraham sacrificed or was going to sacrifice his son Isaac. So it’s holy to all monotheistic traditions.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: And so on the left side, if you’re looking from the convent where I was at, is the Wailing Wall. That’s a portion of the temple that still exists, a wall. And so some, just like the Christian Zionists, the Jews want the temple rebuilt. So I know Christians who have been there who will take a sign and go take the crescent off the dome and say, “We’ll put a cross on there.”

     It’s natural to all of them to do so. There is this movement to rebuild the temple. All the time I was there, I heard about that and there was small movement of it.

TUCKER CARLSON: But there’s a mosque where the temple was.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah. Now it’s Al Aqsa mosque. It’s the third holiest site for Muslims in the world. And a lot of confrontations you have is because Israel will control getting in and out, being able to go there. So. Or they’ll say only men over 50 can go to the mosque today. And there’s a lot of confrontations there and people have been killed. So it is a mosque. Yeah. There’s a functioning Al Aqsa mosque there.

TUCKER CARLSON: But so you can’t build the temple with a mosque there.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: No. And they say that they have the plans for rebuilding the temple and everything. And people like Ben Gvir, the minister, who’s originally religious zealot, have gone on the Temple Mount and it’s a provocation. The area is controlled religiously by Jordan, but there’s an organization that’s responsible for that area.

          The Third Temple and Its Implications

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. So you hear people say we’re going to rebuild the temple, the third Temple, but there’s a mosque there. So what’s the plan for the mosque?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I guess it would be to blow it up.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then you just said that’s the third holiest site of Islam.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Of course this would be a dark day for anybody.

TUCKER CARLSON: So then what would happen if you blew up the third holiest site?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, you could probably answer that better than me. It certainly would ignite a great conflict in the world.

TUCKER CARLSON: I just want to say this out loud because people sort of blithely talk about it.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Oh, what we’re really coming to. And I think that’s the problem with the Christian Zionist is, what is your end game here?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Their belief tells them that’s okay. “We want to have this third World war because we’re going to be taken away and we’ll be okay. And we’ll come back later after all the fighting’s done.” That’s sort of basically what their theology tells them. And in the meantime, all the Jews are supposed to convert to their brand of Christianity or die in the conflagration.

          True Christian Teaching vs. Modern Heresy

TUCKER CARLSON: And so I’m asking you this because you’re a nun.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s not a Christian. That’s not a.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: It’s not a Christian belief. No. Or precept.

TUCKER CARLSON: Any idea where that came from?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: That idea, the Rapture.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, like I said originally, the idea of having the Thousand year kingdom is a heresy. That was in the early church. But the real push of all that becomes from the 1830s, James Darby Scofield or John Darby Scofield. So it’s a new theology that has no basis in the foundations of Christianity, has nothing to do with it.

          How This Story Ends

TUCKER CARLSON: How do you think this story ends?

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: It depends on us. And that’s why, maybe I, part of me wants to have that message that we have to do something politically. The Christians have to wake up and tell their because it’s all in the hands of the United States. It doesn’t matter what any other country in the world does. If US protects Israel, this will continue and we will get to that conclusion of the Denouement which will lead to a third world war or something of that sort for sure.

     But also in a spiritual sense, then we also have to recognize what do we want to be as people. Do we want to follow the way of Christ or do we want to follow the way of Christ who leads us to a better world? We live in this world as best we can in order to prepare for the world to come.

     Look, Christ came and said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” So if you’re truly a believing Christian, you want to do all the things that will put you in good graces with God when it comes to judgment Day. Right. And that doesn’t mean rebuilding the temple. It means living like a Christian and trying to build a society that lives by Christian principles. And your government acting as one that acts by Christian principles. And so that doesn’t mean slaughtering other people and leading to their cleansing.

          A Call for Witness and Action

TUCKER CARLSON: I really appreciate you taking this time.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: I think that there’s a lot. I appreciate you. I hope it does a little bit to open people’s eyes. And I just want to end with one thing. Of course, I think the only way, there was the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who you may have differences opinion on other things, but what really opened his eyes, he went with a writers group to the west bank and went and saw how the Palestinians were living and what the reality of the occupation was. And that got him to understand we have to make some changes.

     And there have been changes in the black church communities definitely reaching out. I would like one. I think that we have to have many more people come and see and not go on an AIPAC junket, but really go. And as Christians, tell your communities we want to go and we want to go and visit our Palestinian Christian communities.

     And this might be a little. You could decide what you want to do with it. My dream thing would be to have a chance trip. Perhaps have you come on the trip. Perhaps have Mel Gibson, Cat Stevens. It’s a funny kind of thing, but he’s a guy who was born in the Greek church and is now a Muslim. And Vivek and Brad Lander and try to give the idea. And Marjorie Taylor Greene. The point is, we have to expose.

TUCKER CARLSON: I want to go to that dinner.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: All right. Not just a dinner. You got to come visit with my friends in Bethlehem. And then we’re going to. You’re going to go tell the world what’s going on there, because you’re all much better communicators than I am.

     And the world really has. Aren’t we horrified by the idea. Aren’t you, as a media person, horrified? Why can’t reporters go into Gaza? Why can’t. And reporters are not allowed in large portions of the west bank now. They call them military zones. What kind of press freedom is that? And what are they trying to hide?

     So the only way that’s going to break that is by enough of us saying, enough influencers going over there and saying, “I want to see what’s going on” and then report back. And I thank you for giving me at least this little opportunity. Hope moves things in the right direction.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you.

AGAPIA STEPHANOPOULOS: All right. Thank you very much.

source:
this above transcript was laboriously copy-pasted by me, paragraph-by paragraph from the ornery ad-laden website: https://singjupost.com/transcript-mother-agapia-stephanopoulos-interview-on-the-tucker-carlson-show/
The transcript has not YET been checked for accuracy.  First, somebody needs to check it against the audio. After that hopefully Mother Agapia will look it over.

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