Moscow, January 16, 2017
Thanks to the intercession of the Church, a child abandoned by its mother in Khakassia in August due to personal and family difficulties has been returned to its mother, reports patrairchia.ru.
Patriarch Kirill himself took a personal interest in the matter, blessing the Synodal Department for Church Charity and Social Services to spare no expense and effort to help reunite the family.
Employees of the Krasnoyarsk diocese helped the woman find a lawyer, accompanied her during meetings with governmental authorities, and paid for DNA testing, among other things. The Church has pledged to continue helping the family in the future, including in the ongoing legal case against the mother for abandoning the child in danger.
In August 2016 the new mother was beleaguered by family conflicts, the abandonment of the child’s father, and a severe psychological condition. Having been denied help by the local maternity hospital she fell into despair and left her child near an orphanage in Krasnoyarsk. She immediately regretted the act, leaving a note with the child that the decision to leave her child was “the most terrible” of her life and that she would certainly return for her daughter.
The Synodal Department for Charity announced in the media in August that if the mother returned for the child then the Church was prepared to render all necessary legal, psychological, social, and material support. A few days later the mother contacted Fr. Paul Boginsky, spiritual father of the regional public organization “Center for the Protection of Motherhood and Childhood of Sts. Peter and Fevronia,” and the center’s head Marina Gudoshnikova, who immediately began helping the suffering family.
Family conditions have improved and the mother and daughter are now staying with the grandmother in Khakassia. The Church is committed to continuing to help the newly-reunited family, including seeking to close the criminal case against the mother, who stayed nearby until she was certain another woman had taken on care for her child, that the family could stay together.
Over the past five years forty-five shelters for women in crisis have been opened in Russia with the help of the Church. There are also more than sixty Church humanitarian aid centers in Russia, with dozens of new centers to be built on Church-wide fundraising, according to Patriarch Kirill.
