A RELIGIOUS group wants to set up a “Gospel-based” community where former drug addicts, alcoholics and others can rebuild their lives at a secluded church in a South Lakeland village, reports Justin Hawkins.

The group called Friends of a UK Cenacolo Community has applied to South Lakeland District Council for permission to turn Dodding Green Presbytery and Chapel at Meal Bank, Kendal, into a community where eventually around a dozen young men will live an ascetic life of hard physical work and prayer without television, newspapers or many of the luxuries of modern life.

“It’s a very simple life,” Friends founder member Bryan Ingleby told the Gazette. “They get up at 6am and those who want to pray, pray, and then they are involved in hard physical work.

“They literally do everything for them-selves. They keep a few chickens and cows to provide for themselves, growing vegetables and learn skills like carpentry. They get support and compan-ionship from people who understand.

“A lot of young people go into communities because they have destroyed their lives through drink, drugs, prostitution and homelessness. We try to help them turn their lives around,” he said. “People come into a community for various reasons, but they all have to want to change their lives.” Gaining entry to a Cenacolo community, however, is not easy and members have to convince the group that they are sincere and have to be free from any addiction before they are accepted.

Most members tend to stay for around two years, but many go on to “give something back” in another community and several have trained for the priesthood. Religion, however, is not compulsory in the community.

The inspiration for the group is the Italian nun, Sister Elvira Petrozzi, who founded the first Cenacolo community in Italy in 1983. Her followers have since established around 40 Cenacolo communities all over the world, including Italy, Southern Ireland, Russia, Mexico, Brazil and Bosnia-Herzegovina. If the application is successful, Dodding Green will become the first such community in Britain.

Mr Ingleby, from Cabus, near Preston, said the group had searched the UK from Inverness to Norfolk - looking for a suitable place - before finding Dodding Green.

The historic Dodding Green site has been associated with Catholicism from the 14th Century when Catholic recusants were persecuted by the state – it even contains a secret chapel and a priest hole where Abbe Rea hid during a Protestant raid in 1696. Its former residents include the Catholic writer and broadcaster Michael Ffinch and his wife, Patricia.

Dodding Green is part of the Robert Stephenson Estate owned by the Catholic Church Diocese of Lancaster. Estate trustees have backed the Cenacolo community plan and Bishop Patrick O’Donaghue, Bishop of Lancaster, has given it his blessing. He said the trust was set up more than 200 years ago to help the poor and the Cenacolo Community was an “entirely appropriate” use for Dodding Green. He said he had been very impressed with the work at other Cenacolo communities he had visited.

“It is a sensitive issue because when people see the words drug abuse and substance abuse they get worried,” he said. “But these people must be off drugs before they go in – it is not a ‘way-out’ community or anything like that” The current tenants of Dodding Green are Michael Burke and his partner. The couple’s two-year lease has come to an end and they have been told that it will not be renewed. But Mr Burke, a self-employed bookbinder, said: “It’s a very peaceful place, I think for people who have been traumatised by drugs or alcohol or whatever, it would be a place of healing for them.” He said he and his partner had not wanted to leave, but if someone else needed the place “so be it”.

SLDC is due to discuss the application at the planning committee meeting in October or November.

Any inquiries about Dodding Green should be made to Carter Jonas in Kendal.