Daily Journal:

The most important indicator that things are moving forward is the separation of the section for prison ministry from the general church department for interaction with the Armed Forces into a special synodal department. The department will now have to collect and summarize all existing experience, disseminate the experience of working projects so that people understand that some things can be done with small efforts, and start some new programs. What’s bad... Almost every colony and almost every village has a church, but this does not mean that services are going on there all the time. And even if sometimes it happens, as a rule, irregularly, even in Moscow pre-trial detention centers it is irregular, despite the fact that each pre-trial detention center has a priest attached to it, and sometimes more than one, but one got sick, and the other went on vacation, and the third did something else, and they don’t always replace each other, so it turns out that the service has passed, and the next one may be in a month and a half - people in the pre-trial detention center may already have changed. It’s better in the colonies, but even there there is a catastrophic lack of priests who would go there regularly, who would know what was happening there, and not just come, serve and leave. People need to get used to him, so that he recognizes them. There are very few of them; there should be many more priests. Lay people must go with the priest, because the priest cannot do everything. People always want to talk, tell them what problems they have, what requests they have, so write it down, do what you can. It’s very good that a special department has been created, that so many people have gathered here today, we will work more purposefully.