Prayer service for the health of HIV/AIDS infected to be held in Moscow

A prayer service for the health of people living with HIV/AIDS and their relatives will be conducted in the Moscow Church of the Life-Giving Trinity in Khoroshevo on November 30 on the eve of World AIDS Awareness Day. If someone cannot attend the service, the names for prayer (people baptized in the Russian Church) can be sent by e-mail to molebenhiv@mail.ru, the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations (DECR) has told Interfax-Religion on Friday.

The Russian Orthodox Church has known of cases in which AIDS has been miraculously healed.

‘I myself know of at least three cases in which a person who had this diagnosis suddenly turned out healthy', DECR Deputy Chairman Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin said earlier at a press conference in Moscow.

He explained that such healing might happen through the prayers of the diseased or his or her relatives as well as through touching a shrine or the cross.

Margarita Nelyubova, a DECR staff member, said that sometimes doctors stated the absence of HIV from those who had been found carrying it earlier, with the antibodies remaining in their blood though. ‘But in cases of miraculous healing even the antibodies disappear', she stressed.

According to some data, over thirty drug-dependent people who underwent a rehabilitation course at the Orthodox Center of St. John of Kronstadt, have been cured of AIDS after they turned to the Church for help.

"We observed four thousand rehabilitants of this kind and four hundreds of them were HIV infected. Thirty young boys and girls had their positive reaction to AIDS vanished in the course of their churching," Rev. Anatoly Berestov, head of the Center, said at a round-table conference.

The Russian Orthodox Church developed its own concept for participation in overcoming the spreading of HIV/AIDS and for work with people infected with this virus. In the Church opinion, the social and medical factors and developments contributing to the formation of the so-called risk-groups are only indirect and secondary causes of the HIV epidemic.

"The real first cause and source of the rapid spreading of the epidemic is the unprecedented growth of sin and lawlessness, the loss of fundamental spiritual values, moral traditions and guidelines in society', the concept stated.

Source: Interfax religion