UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Joshua J. McElwee | Mar. 22, 2014
Pope Francis on Saturday announced eight members of a new commission in the Catholic church’s central bureaucracy tasked with advising the pontiff on safeguarding children from sex abuse and working pastorally with abuse victims.
Among the members are Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, four laywomen, one Italian professor, and two priests.
One of the laywomen, Marie Collins, is herself a survivor of clergy sexual abuse. An Irishwoman who has campaigned for more thorough investigation of clergy accused of abuse, Collins struggled for years to bring her own abuser to justice. …
During that summit, Collins detailed her own abuse by a priest at the age of 13 and said there must be “acknowledgement and accountability for the harm and destruction that has been done to the life of victims and their families.”
Collins said then she had decided to report the abuse at the age of 47 to a parish priest, who refused to take her name or even make a report of the accusation. She said she then turned to the archbishop of the Dublin, at the time Cardinal Desmond Connell, with no better results.
“The priest who had sexually assaulted me was protected by his superiors from prosecution,” she said in 2012. “He was left for months in his parish ministry which included mentoring children preparing for confirmation — the safety of those children ignored by his superiors.”
The priest was later convicted, Collins said in 2012, for assaulting another young girl.
Collins’ experience with Connell may raise the question inside the commission of whether it will respond to bishops who do not act when informed of inappropriate conduct by one of their priests.
That question has been raised many times in the U.S., where several bishops are accused of mishandling priests accused of abuse. Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., Bishop Robert Finn, for example, was convicted in 2012 of a misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse in the case of a local priest who had been known to be in possession of lewd images of children.
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