IRELAND
Irish Times
Patsy McGarry
Mon, Mar 24, 2014
Abuse survivor Marie Collins, who has been appointed to the Vatican’s new Pontifical Council for the Protection of Minors, is daunted at the opportunity offered by Pope Francis but also recognises the opportunity offered to her.
Ms Collins was invited to become a member in a phone call from Rome last Friday afternoon. She was “gobsmacked”, she said.
Ms Collins feels it is “a huge responsibility where all abuse survivors are concerned and I don’t want to let them down. But then I just want to get in there and speak up for what I believe to be right. It’s an opportunity not to be missed,” she said last night. She met the new council’s chairman, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, twice when he led an apostolic visitation to Dublin three years ago, following publication of the Murphy report. “I told him exactly what was wrong and what I felt should be done” on the abuse issue, she said.
She attended a Vatican symposium on the matter in Rome two years ago with two other members of the new council, Jesuit Fr Hans Zollner, head of psychology at Rome’s Gregorian University, and psychiatrist Baroness Sheila Hollins from the Archdiocese of Westminster. Ms Collins accompanied then Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor when he led the apostolic visitation to Armagh archdiocese in 2011.
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