“For me, life began at 40,” laughs Fr. Tony Coney, remembering how he arrived in Lima on August 30, the Feast Day of the city’s patron, St. Rose of Lima, which also coincided with his fortieth birthday. Fr. Tony came as a man with a mission. For years he had dreamed of setting up a project to help needy children. He knew all about children, coming from a family of seven.
However, his interest in disadvantaged children sprang from his experiences as a newly ordained priest working in his native Belfast during the early 1990s, where the poverty and violence of the “Troubles” had taken its toll especially on the young.
Fr. Tony was also inspired by the writings of pioneer Scottish educationalist AS Neill who, in his seminal work Summerhill, had advocated a whole new approach to rearing difficult children. “The idea was for those children to be given freedom and scope for self-expression. This really resonated with me,” Fr. Tony recalls.
In Peru he found himself in a huge parish on the northern outskirts of the capital, where shanty towns sprawled endlessly over the barren hills. Here, the children suffered from poor diet, poor housing, poor education – poor everything. Fr. Tony’s chance came in 1997. “A house became available. I bought it with my ordination money.”
He made it into a day center for needy youngsters. “We started with six volunteers and about 100 children. In a few months, we had 300. After a year, we had to extend. Irish Aid paid for the extension.”
Fr. Tony also increased the services on offer, employing psychologists, speech therapists and social workers. The latter staffed a “defense desk” to cater for children at risk. “Nowadays we receive up to 400 kids a day from a weekly pool of 1,200.” As to the day-to-day activities, Fr. Tony has adopted the “AS Neill system.” “The kids do whatever they want — arts and crafts, play, homework, reading, theatre, music, dance, computers, the lot. There are no ‘closed doors.’ Children get the chance to be children, with no adults telling them what they have to do.” Instead, the children themselves come together to agree their own norms and rules.
Fr. Tony called it, St. Bernadette’s Children’s Center. “After buying the house, I had no money to renovate it, so I wrote to my home parish in Belfast — St. Bernadette’s. Theirs was the first donation I ever got, so I adopted their name.” Unfortunately, it soon became clear that child sexual abuse was rife in the area and the abuser was often living under the same roof as the child victim. The subject was taboo; no one wanted to listen.
Meanwhile, the kids remained in abusive situations. Consequently, “the idea arose that we needed a residential home, where the child could be separated from the abuse and get therapy until the legal set-up in the family could be resolved.” And so it was that a second center was born: St. Bernadette’s Home, with capacity to care for 36 children.
“Now, attitudes have changed,” explains Fr. Tony. “People are more conscious of the problem and open to doing something about it. We work with the government. It is they who refer cases to us. We still meet with resistance from the police for instance, but that’s where our defense desk comes in. We more or less force them to act.”
Meantime, St. Bernadette’s Child Protection Program seeks to combat the threat of child abuse in the wider community. “We go into schools, do formation courses for pupils, teachers and parents, get them to set up protection teams.” They have gone into some 30 schools and prepared thousands of children. “In 2019 we reached exactly 10,016 children,” adds Fr. Tony proudly.
But, as you address one issue, another appears. Fr. Tony’s team quickly noticed that many of the youngsters in the day center displayed learning difficulties, not necessarily because they weren’t bright, but because of the emotional difficulties they were experiencing at home. This awareness moved Fr. Tony to found a third premises, St. Bernadette’s Remedial School.
Here, he explains, children can, “attend for a year or so, come up to standard and go back into mainstream education, given that they’ve often been thrown out of the state system because of low grades.” Up to 120 pupils at a time reap the benefits of this initiative.
Taking stock after over 25 years, Fr. Tony’s dream has realized itself in the form of three centers, 65 paid staff and a child protection outreach program, almost all financed by overseas donors. He says that the priority now is, “to sustain all this. The goal is to make it permanent. We’ve achieved a lot, but there is a way to go yet!”
Fr. John Boles was ordained a Columban priest in 1996. He ministered in Peru and Chile from then until 2021, when he returned to Britain to take up the role of Regional Director.