ROME
Catholic Herald (United Kingdom)
By Madeleine Teahan on Monday, 6 February 2012
When Marie Collins first found the strength to tell her secret she was racked with trepidation. Living from day to day, leaving the house or talking to her next-door neighbour was intimidating enough, but telling an archbishop that a hospital chaplain had sexually abused her when she was 13 years old was almost unthinkable.
Next week, at the invitation of the Vatican, she will stand up in Rome and address some of the world’s most senior bishops, telling them the unwelcome truth that few wanted to hear 27 years before.
“I don’t feel nervous or intimidated,” she tells me just days before her address. “I feel more hope that something I say might help. No matter how much help you receive as a survivor that 13-year-old child is still inside somewhere and still comes up, that little voice saying: ‘You’re not really a good person. You’re worthless.’ That never really goes away. But I’ve had a lot of help to become the person I would have been had I not been abused.”
Marie continued to practise her Catholic faith long after she was abused. She married a Catholic and they brought up their son in the faith. He served as an altar boy at Mass. But it was not until she experienced the Church’s response to her anguish that she became disheartened and could not bring herself to continue practising. This is one of the things she is quietly determined to explain in Rome next week.
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