Well certainly it does but there are circumstances where it definitely shouldn’t and the tale I am about to tell is one of these circumstances.
“Caritas Internationalis is a confederation of 164 Roman Catholic relief, development and social service organizations operating in over 200 countries and territories worldwide. Collectively and individually their mission is to work to build a better world, especially for the poor and oppressed”.
That is the Caritas definition according to Wikipedia and a truly inspiring mission statement if ever there was one. A well run charitable organization with a wonderful management system in place caring for Catholics and all “poor and oppressed” christians and not so christian people worldwide. I know St Bede’s College in Manchester used to pride itself on the help and the very generous donations, garnered by the pupils, it gave to this wonderful charity every year.
But what happens when an organization offering such altruism suffers from arrythmia, when its backside does not know what its mouth had for breakfast. Take the case of a venerable old Bedian alumnus, down on his luck, nowhere to go, after serving four and a half years of a prison sentence. What would you do? And the only honest christian answer would be to open your arms, invite him into the fold, let his fall from grace be as gentle as possible. That person needs all the help he can get to smooth his passage into this now horrible big wide world in which we all live.
That was the mouth speaking but this is what the backside says. Well this poor old alumnus needs help definitely but he is a paedophile, it is not easy for paedophiles to re-enter the big wide world but what we will do, to make it easy on him, we will put him up at our cosy little house which is just down the road from the site of his many foul misdeeds. That will make him more comfortable knowing how close he is to home, so close to so many, lovely for him, memories. So that is what good old Caritas did, they put our vulnerable old alumnus into a house only a stone’s throw from his old House of Horrors (for pupils not him).
Our man, our alumnus, the poor man trying his best is none other than William Green, once teacher of religion at St Bede’s College but now and unfortunately for ever a convicted paedophile after running amok at St Bede’s for nearly 20 years. A convicted paedophile, newly released from his six year prison sentence leveled on him in October 2008 after serving just over four and a half years.
Here is the yet unpublished comment I received on my blog yesterday. The posting on which it was lodged I wrote last September and was quaintly named The Honesty Of The Catholic Church????????. I have kept the name of the writer anonymous for obvious reasons but I know him.
“Until April I was living in a house in Moss Side that is managed by Caritas. Myself and another resident found out that a third resident was William Green. The Catholic Church had rehoused him in a property less than one mile from St Bede’s.
When we confronted the manager about this, we were eventually forced out of the property. I have been told that this would be investigated by the safeguarding commission on the 16th May. After what I have read (on your Blog) I have little confidence in their own enquiry”
Bedian parents please note you have a paedophile in your children’s midst once again, of course there might be hundreds of paedophiles scattered about Moss Side and Whalley Range but none with such an ignominious and local history as Green’s. The man is now 72 years old but old paedophiles like old cowboys always die with their boots on. They cannot be cured of their itch and the Church have known this to be fact for over 50 years.
The above, unpublished as yet, comment leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth. For a start why put a convicted paedophile back in his old happy hunting grounds and why , oh why, persecute upright people for asking honest questions. Why were these men excluded from their accommodation? Did they not need Caritas as much as Green? And is the commentator not right in suspecting the Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese or any other diocese for that matter? My own experience of these people, led in Salford by the very able but shifty lawyer Michael Devlin, showed them to be an obfuscating, duplicitous, uncaring bunch of skunks as you would ever likely meet. I do hope that the LADO lady from Rochdale, who became its Coordinator 18 months ago is making a better fist of it than her predecessor, Fr Barry O’Sullivan, who was consigned to Strangeways Prison after frigging up the whole ethos of the Commission for more than ten years but I doubt it. This case in point is a good example of same old, same old!!
It is early days in this particular circumstance and their is still a lot to learn but I would ask every good Catholic and especially every parent with a pupil at the College to start asking big questions of Mr Daniel Kearney and his florid room mate Monsignor Michael Quinlan and the Bishop of Salford, Terence Brain. I know their answer, “well we did not know, we are not Caritas”. Well our answer to them is “well you should have, Paul Malpas bloody well knew and neither is he”. I apologise for my tone this morning but I am so bloody angry. If ever there was a red flag to a bull situation, this is it.