Director, CAFOD
Christine Allen was appointed director of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) in 2019. She said she felt she was “coming home”, having discovered Catholic social teaching when she first worked for CAFOD years prior.
Chief executive, CSAN
Raymond Friel was a headteacher in several Catholic schools in England before becoming general secretary of the Catholic Independent Schools’ Conference. In 2021 he was appointed Chief Executive of Caritas Social Action Network (CSAN), which works with 54 Catholic grassroots charities across England and Wales. He has authored several books on Catholic education, including How to Survive in Leadership in a Catholic School and Gospel Values for Catholic Schools, as well as Formation of the Heart, published this year.
Field Marshal
One of Britain’s highest-ranking army officers, Charles Guthrie was head of the British armed forces from 1997 to 2001 as Chief of the Defence Staff. He was received into the Church in his 40s and authored The Just War Tradition, integrating his work and faith. Appointed GCB in 1994 and GCVO in 2019, he is also a Knight of Malta and a patron of the Cardinal Hume Centre and Caritas Anchor House.
National director, Aid to the Church in Need
“I work every day to promote awareness and raise support for the persecuted Church around the world,” says Caroline Hull, who took over as national director of Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) from Neville Kyrke-Smith in April 2022. Her recent work for the charity, which she joined in 2014, includes creating a collection of online Bible stories for young people, for which she enlisted bishops, clergy and TV celebrities as audio readers.
Former director, Aid to the Church in Need
A former Anglican clergyman, Neville Kyrke-Smith converted to Catholicism nearly 30 years ago, becoming director of ACN almost simultaneously. His work visiting persecuted Christians has taken him across the world, most recently to the Middle East where ACN has been rebuilding communities destroyed by ISIS. He was made a Knight of St Gregory in 2021 for his services to the persecuted Church.
Founder, Mary’s Meals
A pilgrimage in 1983 renewed Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow’s family’s Catholic faith and inspired them to begin charity work. MacFarlane-Barrow and his brother Fergus founded Mary’s Meals, named after Our Lady, in 2002 to feed 200 children in Malawi. Twenty years on, it now feeds more than two million children across 19 countries.
Founder, Team Domenica
Rosa Monckton supports several charities dedicated to helping people with Down’s syndrome. She founded one of these, Team Domenica, which is named after her own daughter who has the condition. The charity’s aim is to help young adults with learning difficulties gain employment. Last year, 100 per cent of their candidates passed their employment qualifications.
Founder, FARA
After converting to Catholicism in 1991, Jane Nicholson founded the British-based charity FARA, which raises money for and helps Romania’s poorest families. “I don’t know how I would ever have done the work in Romania without being Catholic,” she said, “and the support of the Church, of the sacraments, of my faith, they all seemed part of every decision I made.” She recently returned from the Ukrainian-Romanian border, welcoming traumatised refugees fleeing Ukraine as a result of Russia’s invasion.
CEO, St Vincent de Paul Society
As CEO of the poverty-care charity St Vincent de Paul (SVP), Elizabeth Palmer oversees over 10,000 volunteers across the UK, who visit the lonely, support young people, provide community services and promote social justice in every aspect of life. She was inspired in her faith and to become involved with SVP by her father, who was a member for almost 50 years.
Executive director, Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales
Greg Pope was Labour MP for Hyndburn from 1992 to his retirement in 2010. Deputy director of the Catholic Education Service from 2010 to 2017, he was appointed assistant general secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in 2017, becoming its executive director in 2019.
Founder, Life
A former professor of history at Warwick University, Jack Scarisbrick has specialised in Tudor history and is known for writing a definitive biography of Henry VIII. He founded Life with his late wife Nuala in 1970 to provide holistic support for both babies and mothers. Fifty years later, Life has 23 houses nationwide, housing over 100 women. They went on to found Zoë’s Place in 1995, a hospice for infants and babies.
CEO, CCLA
Peter Hugh Smith went to Ampleforth College and Reading University before going straight into fund management, following in his father Andrew Hugh Smith’s footsteps by choosing a career in the City of London. Hugh Smith credits his father, a practising Catholic and former chairman of the London Stock Exchange, with making him the man he is today. “He was a religious man, and I believe that my personal ethics and how I look at the world have come to a large extent from him.”
CCLA is an unusual investment management company in that it looks after investments for charities, religious organisations and the public sector. With over 36,000 not-for-profit clients, it is UK’s largest manager of charity funds.
It traces its roots back to 1958 with the launch of the Church of England Investment Fund, which allowed church organisations to pool their funds and access professional fund management services. Local authorities and the Charity Commission soon followed suit. Still going strong today, CCLA last year launched the Catholic Investment Fund in response to increasing demand from Catholic clients.
“I’m very pleased, being a Catholic that we can do this,” says Hugh Smith, who was headhunted for the role of CEO from his job as managing director of Link Asset Services, one of a string of top roles he has held in the City over the course of his 30-year career.
While he concedes that the City has come on by leaps and bounds in terms of its understanding of ethical investment from the 1980s and 1990s, he believes that it has a lot to learn regarding social issues. “We are stewards of our clients’ capital,” he says, “and I don’t think we are fulfilling that responsibility, getting companies we invest in to address those issues.” Which is where CCLA comes in.
The Catholic Investment Fund was launched to do exactly this for CCLA’s increasing quantity of Catholic clients. The idea is to invest only in companies that act in alignment with Catholic social teaching and to avoid those which undermine Catholic doctrine, such as companies producing abortion facilitation drugs or engaging in human stem-cell research. To ensure nothing is missed, CCLA appointed a “faith-consistent investment committee” comprised of senior and respected figures from the Catholic Church, whose job is to oversee that the companies proposed by CCLA for investment align with Catholic values.
Alongside investing money for its clients, CCLA is involved with a number of causes as part of its mantra to do good. Recently, it has been raising awareness among companies and actively engaging with them to try and stop modern slavery which, Hugh Smith says, is present in the supply chains of almost every company in Britain.
Inspired by this work at CCLA, he is in the process of becoming a trustee of the Mary Ward Loreto UK charity, which supports six centres in Albania dedicated to ending sex trafficking and forced labour by raising awareness and providing aftercare for victims.
Another area of interest is on improving mental health in the workplace. In May 2022, CCLA launched the CCLA Corporate Mental Health Benchmark, which assesses and ranks 100 of the UK’s largest employers listed on the London Stock Exchange – who together account for approximately five million global employees – on how they are approaching and managing workplace mental health.
Under the management of Hugh Smith, CCLA continues to innovate to find new and better ways of leveraging capital for the greater good. In line with this aim, they have just launched the Better World Global Equity Fund, which brings CCLA’s investment expertise, previously exclusive to charities, local authorities and the Church of England, to UK retail investors for the first time. “We are excited to be bringing our Good Investment approach to individuals, so that together we can invest to create a better world for both today and the next generation,” says Hugh Smith.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.