A single mother of three young boys has appealed to Pope Benedict XVI to send exorcists to her Volgograd region town after the mayor failed to provide suitable housing for her family.
The letter by Svetlana Shults, a Russian Orthodox believer living in Kamyshin, a town of 117,300 residents located about 200 kilometers north of Volgograd, was published in Novaya Gazeta on Monday.
Shults said she decided to appeal to Benedict after Kamyshin Mayor Alexander Chunakov told her that he would not help her find a new home even if she wrote to the pope.
Shults said her dilapidated apartment building on Molodyozhnaya Ulitsa has been scheduled for demolition since 1990, but local authorities have refused to relocate her under a federal program.
Pictures of her building published in Novaya Gazeta showed decaying walls and crumbling concrete.
Shults said Chunakov, who announced completing the town's relocation program on national television in March, has refused to help her even though he once admitted that her complaints had bothered him in his dreams.
She also accused the mayor of threatening her three sons, aged 6 to 9, by asking her, “All right, so you're bananas, but aren't you afraid for your children?”
"My only hope is you. There is no one else I can write to," Shults wrote in her appeal to Benedict.
She also threatened to burn herself alive in public if the situation does not change, despite the fact that suicide is a cardinal sin for Orthodox believers.
A Vatican spokeswoman in Russia told The Moscow Times that the pope had not received the letter by mail yet but church officials had read it in Novaya Gazeta.
The pontiff's intervention may not be necessary.
Kamyshin's administration promised Monday that Shults would soon get new housing.
A statement signed by First Deputy Mayor Stanislav Zinchenko says "the district administration has found means to relocate residents to safe housing" by “approximately” Oct. 1.
Shults was not included in this year's relocation program because it covered residents of buildings deemed dangerous before 2007, and the building on Molodyozhnaya Ulitsa was only designated unsafe in December, not 20 years ago, the statement said.
It also said Shults had been offered new housing twice this year already but she had refused.
Shults said in her letter that both options were abandoned nonresidential places without running water and other conveniences.