Rome: SCIAF boss to head up Caritas Internationalis

In a display of papal power earlier this year, Pope Francis fired senior managers at the organisation over bullying allegations, ousting the secretary general, the Caritas president, vice presidents, the treasurer and ecclesiastic assistant.

Now Mr Dutton, who has headed SCIAF for the past nine years, will take over a role that will see him faced with repairing relationships at the Vatican-based charity where an investigation ordered by the Holy See found “real deficiencies” in management that had affected staff morale.

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The former Jesuit novice was sworn into the role on May 30, having been nominated by Caritas Ethiopia, and has divided the time since between Scotland and Rome.

"It will be nice to be just doing one," he said, "You're always in the wrong place for when someone wants to talk to you." 

During his career with SCIAF; CAFOD, the English and Welsh equivalent of SCIAF; and Christian Aid, Mr Dutton has experienced many major emergency responses, from Liberia, Kuwait during the Iraq war or the Boxing Day tsunami, the Darfur crisis, to the earthquake in Gujarat. 

But his working life began as a chartered engineer in the chemical industry.

He said: "I loved what I was doing, but I wasn't really clear what my 'why' was.

"And so having grown up Catholic, that led to me spending five years training with the Jesuits for the Catholic priesthood, during which time I was in Nepal working with refugees from Bhutan."

That was enough to tell him that a humanitarian career was right for him - but the priesthood was not. 

Mr Dutton added: "I think if you grow up Catholic, the idea of vocation is very much associated with the priesthood. 

"After five years of exploring that, I realised I wanted to spend my time working more in humanitarian development, refugee work. I didn't need to be celibate and a priest to do that. 

"Then I met my wife, and the two things came together and the rest is history." 

His wife, Elisabeth, is a professor of philology at the University of Fribourg, and the couple is used to living in multiple locations, moving between Oxford, Glasgow and Switzerland.

Rome, he says, is his wife's "happy place" and she is delighted at the chance to spend more time there.

Mr Dutton makes his happy place where he can find it, preferably near or on the sea, and he keeps a stone in his pocket to remind him of his favourite beach in Cornwall.

He said: "It transports me actually. When the world is going crazy, I will just grab that [stone] in my pocket. 

"And I will just spend 30 seconds on that beach. And it just holds the world at bay for a moment, it reminds you that there's a quieter place, a still a place where you can be still and centred and not get caught up in the noise."

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The stone has been to 70 countries with him and, in his new role, will travel to many more.

He added: "I'm embarrassed after all the work we've been doing pushing for climate justice and all the work we have to do to stay within 1.5 degrees, that I have to take so many flights.

"My travelling is a bitter pill to swallow but it is what it is to be in charge of a global organisation."

Mr Dutton will miss Glasgow and the city's people but is looking forward to the heat and food of Rome, along with the significant new challenge.

It is, as it often is in the city, a time of persistent news headlines about issues affecting or conflicting with Catholic values - abortion buffer zones to counter prayer vigils and the annual tensions of the Orange Order marching season. 

Mr Dutton said: "I've never felt that sectarianism in Scotland but it saddens me profoundly. 

"I think one of the greatest sins on the earth is that the Church isn't one and it is divided in these ways but I personally, am aware of it, am aware of stories of sectarianism, but it's nothing I've experienced." 

It is perhaps fitting that the secretary-general nomination came from the Horn of Africa as SCIAF has just launched an emergency appeal in Ethiopia, which is facing its biggest drought since the 1980s.

Partner agencies in the country, where 90% of the cattle is dead, report appalling scenes such as men trying to pull ploughs over hard, scorched earth where the oxen have died.

Mr Dutton visited in February to see the situation first hand. 

He said: "This is now the fifth failed rain season. Previously you'd have a drought once every seven years and people would time it to have children just after a drought so that the kids were older than five by the time the next one came. 

"Now they've had five successive droughts. So nobody's got any time to recover from the last one and it's becoming cumulative. 

"Water was just running out while we were there with horrific consequences for everything: for crops, for people, for animals."

Mr Dutton describes his role as "flying in to these places at the worst time" so this was not the first food crisis he had experienced in Ethiopia but, he added, "the scale of that, the density of it was far greater."

In the first week of the emergency appeal some £100,000 was raised but far more is needed to support Ethiopia through the current crisis.

Despite the cost of living crisis, SCIAF said the donations so far have been "exceptionally high" but, while donors are still giving generously to emergency appeals, they are less able to also support long term work.

Mr Dutton said: "And the trouble is, it's the long term work that really gets people out of poverty. 

"The emergency appeals are absolutely essential if people aren't to die in the meantime, but it's not the answer, or it's a short fix. 

"In the first week, people have been very generous. Let's hope they continue to be."