Construction and configuration

I have several classes in my project that rely on configuration files in the same format. All of them are created once only during setup. They are not related, some of them represent simple data structures, others are more complex.
It feels redundant to copy basic file reading/xml parsing across all these classes' constructors, and I want to manage my IO centrally e.g. I don't want client code be able to modify configuration files.
Any cool design patterns that deal with this?

Is/was Angela Beesley a man?