According to official statistics, in the Russian Federation there are currently fourteen and a half million people with disabilities. Thus, every tenth Russian citizen - invalid. About 700 thousand of them - the children. In St. Petersburg, currently reside 772,655 people with disabilities, including people of retirement age - 640,109 people. (82.8%), citizens of working age - 118154 people. (15.3%), disabled children - 14392 people. (1.9%). However, these dry figures there are different, unique and sometimes tragic fate of people whom society considers "not such as all".
I remember a scene from Victor Hugo's novel "Notre Dame de Paris": around a disabled child, foundling on the porch of the temple, a crowd gathers, which gives him the most unflattering epithets: "something wicked", "vile monster," "this is not a baby" , "look at him, and a sin", "it should be cast either in the water or into the fire." On the doorstep of God's people who call themselves Christians reject and even willing to take the life of someone who does not like them. It was only a young priest who adopts a child picks up and saves his life. Indeed, as in the XV century., Which narrates the novel, and now lives and often the survival of people with disabilities is dependent on the surrounding society, from his relationship to the "otherness".
Antique statues of perfect people deified bodies, modern TV and advertising, promoting the cult of youth, strength and beauty, and will determine the mass ideal of what should be a man. It is not surprising that do not meet this standard, people in ancient times were considered unworthy of the image, moreover, is often thought that if you remove them from the field of view, the principle of "no man - no problem" automatically bring the desired result (for example, one of the important functions of children boarding schools for children with multiple disabilities in Soviet times was precisely the isolation of disabled children from the surrounding). Some political regimes went even further, considering the disabled heavy and too expensive a burden to society and, therefore, unworthy of even the right to life. If the great philosopher Plato called the parents to leave their children who were born with disabilities, the "humane and enlightened» XX century was the era of the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities. Eugenics is the science of creating the "ideal man" and maintaining racial purity, it became part of the state policy of national socialism in the Third Reich. This led to the fact that within the framework of the T-4 (named after the address of the main office in Berlin Tiergartenstrasse 4) in the period from 1939 to 1945 in Germany, was destroyed over 200 thousand disabled people, about one million patients have been tortured by hunger in German psychiatric hospitals, and about half were subjected to forced sterilization. The number of "biologically threatening the health of the country" people (that's what they were called in official documents) included people with physical and mental disabilities, terminally ill patients, as well as children with neurological and somatic diseases. Characteristically, it is in the framework of the implementation of this program for the first time (before the application of the concentration camps) Nazi gas chambers were used.
Of course, our Russian society is now based on other legal and social positions, but cautious, negative attitudes towards people with disabilities can hardly be considered fully overcome. Therefore, the question of whether his or someone else are people with disabilities in the Church, should be seen in the broader context of their socialization in general. Low-profile people with disabilities in social life, the inability for them to the needs of the key objects of social structures (institutions, shops, public transport), lack of social support (not only and not so much the material) of the state - these and other problems are obvious to all those who once faced with the problems of disabled people.