Raymond Barber, from St Ambrose parish in Kidderminster, in the Archdiocese of Birmingham, is the National President of the Catholic Men's Society of Great Britain and is appealing for your help:

To date the Society has raised over £3.6m for the Let the Children Live! charity, which helps the street children and families of Colombia.

But now the charity is facing the results of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.

Donations are down by 30% and in Colombia inflation is running at 20%. That makes a difference of 50%; in other words our money only goes half as far as it did.

So we can only help half of the children we once did and if our income keeps falling things can only get worse.

Read latest report from Colombia by Pauline Allen

ALERT! Due to a temporary banking issue, donations to Let the Children Live cannot be received at this time. This notice will be removed when they can be received again.

Let the Children Live! website and donate

The Catholic Men’s Society and Let the Children Live!

In September 1998 at our annual conference in Leeds our Society adopted the Let the Children Live! charity as our new promotion.

The young Fr Peter Walters, the founder of the charity, was invited to be our guest speaker.

This was through our Chaplain Fr John Daly who had previously met him and recommended that we invite him to talk about the work he was doing among the street children in the city of Medellin, Colombia.

Fr Peter impressed us and moved us so much that an emergency motion was raised that our Society should adopt his charity and try to support him any way we could, especially financially. The motion was accepted, and the executive decided to donate £1,000.

Conference asked George McAleenan, one of our Scottish members, if he would be the National Promoter for this new promotion and he was happy to accept. He thought that we could raise some money to help Fr Peter with the great work he was doing among the street children and the poor families living in the shanty towns in Medellin.

Let the Children Live! had only been in existence for about seven or eight years and Fr Peter had been a Catholic priest for about five years after having been a priest in the Church of England and a vicar at the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham.

25 years later we have raised over £3.6m. This money has helped educate children who would have had no chance in life.

Your help is needed to make sure everyone has the chance to live the life they deserve.

Read latest report from Colombia by Pauline Allen

Let the Children Live! website and donate