UNITED KINGDOM
The Tablet
22 March 2014 by Robert Mickens
Marie Collins, an Irish sex-abuse survivor and founder of the One in Four victims support group, and Baroness Sheila Hollins, a British psychiatrist and life peer, are among those who were appointed today to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Poland’s former Prime Minister and Ambassador to the Holy See, Hanna Suchocka, and French child psychologist, Dr Catherine Bonnet, are the other two women on the commission. The fifth layperson is Claudio Papale, an Italian civil and canon lawyer that works at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Pope Francis today also appointed Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston and two Jesuit priests from the Gregorian University — Humberto Miguel Yáñez from Argentina and Hans Zollner from Germany — to round out the eight-member commission. A Vatican communiqué said more members “from various geographical areas of the world” would eventually be added to the commission.
Francis announced on 5 December that he had accepted a request from his eight-member Council of Cardinals (C8) to set up the new child protection commission. Cardinal O’Malley is a member of the C8 advisory council and has a reputation as one of the bishops most credible in dealing with clergy sex abuse of minors. Fr Zollner is a psychologist and head of the Gregorian-based “Centre for Child Protection”, a data base and e-learning curriculum set up in early 2012 with strong financial backing from the Archdiocese of Munich. The archdiocesan ordinary, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, also a member of the C8 advisory council, is believed to be the one that persuaded Pope Francis to establish the new commission for child protection. Fr Yáñez, meanwhile, is an Argentinian Jesuit like Francis and directs the Gregorian University’s department of moral theology.
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