i tore up my Catholic Charities envelope

I stopped giving to Catholic Charities some time ago because a lot of what they do isn't Catholic and frankly I'd rather give directly to a real Catholic charity that I trust. Last year we had the scandal of Catholic Charities workers helping a girl get an abortion. This year in Roanoke a group refugee teens brought there by a Catholic resettlement agency, decided to repay this mercy by kidnapping a woman and holding her for ransom. The plot fell apart and the woman escaped but she was badly truamatized and is afraid to leave her house now.

I'll bet that no-one from Catholic Charites apologized to poor Mrs. Levicki and sadly, I'll bet that her opinion of the Catholic Churh is pretty darn low at this point.

Apparently there have been a number of unpleasant incidents in Roanoake since the refugees arrived and it's not because the locals are mean or racist, some of the biggest complaints have come from black Americans. My own experience with a sudden refugee drop was no picnic either. A few years ago a church group (I used to think it was the Episcopalians but now I'm not so sure), settled Somali refugees in my building. The result was horrible. The wives and mothers had never seen stoves before and the fire department had to come once or twice a week for months. One awful night we had two kitchen fires a few hours apart. The smells in the hallway were sickening because goat tripe is apparently a staple of the Somali diet. The neighbors complained vigorously and the resettlement people moved the refugees out of here. Nobody asked the neighbors if we were prepared to live in constant fear of fire. Nobody apparently prepared the Somalis for modern life. Nobody apologized. It was a miserable mess for everyone. Soft hearts shoudn't mean soft minds.