David Marr; 3/1/09
Hard to know what to do with old clothes and toasters in this season of shedding now that Vinnies has gone hardline Catholic. Those of us who thought the shop up the road was all about helping the poor stand corrected. “The primary function of the society,” said St Vincent de Paul’s lawyers, “is to inculcate the Catholic faith in its members.” This was rotten news for Linda Walsh. A rather fragile woman with a history of depressive illness, Walsh threw herself so enthusiastically into the work of the society that after six years she was running three committees around Brisbane and Vinnies was asking her to focus her volunteer efforts on just one. She choose to remain president of the Migrants and Refugees Logan Centre. She said: “It was my reason to get up in the morning.” That she wasn’t a Catholic was neither a secret nor a problem as she organised her team to find furniture for new arrivals, show them how to operate a toaster, ferry them to doctors and dentists, etc. Some qualms of a local priest were settled in November 2003 when she assured him she had Christian belief in Mary, the Holy Trinity and the Holy Catholic Church.
Tags: Australia, Christianity