VATICAN CITY
Associated Press
BY NICOLE WINFIELD
ASSOCIATED PRESS
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The clash between a former member of Pope Francis’ sex abuse advisory commission and the Vatican heated up Tuesday, as prominent Irish abuse survivor Marie Collins challenged a top Vatican cardinal over his claims that his office had cooperated with the commission.
In an open letter, Collins pressed her case that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had ignored or scuttled commission proposals to protect children and care for abuse victims that had been approved by the pope.
Collins pointedly corrected Cardinal Gerhard Mueller’s assertion that one of the congregation’s staffers was a member of the board, when in fact he had stopped participating in 2015. And she noted that the commission’s 2015 invitation to have another congregation official attend its meetings was flat-out rejected, though someone eventually attended a session last year.
Collins resigned from the commission March 1 citing the “unacceptable” lack of cooperation from Mueller’s office, which processes canonical cases against pedophile priests. Her departure left the commission without any abuse survivors and dealt another blow to Francis’ record on combatting sex abuse.
In the days after Collins’ departure, Mueller responded to her criticisms by telling Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper that it was time to do away with what he called the “cliche” that the Vatican bureaucracy was resisting Francis’ initiatives.
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