ROME
National Catholic Reporter
Joshua J. McElwee | Feb. 10, 2016
ROME
One of the members of Pope Francis’ commission on issues of clergy sexual abuse has responded to the controversy sparked by the group’s decision to ask another of its members to take a leave of absence from their work.
Marie Collins, an Irish abuse survivor who is one of the 17 members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, writes Wednesday in a statement for NCR that the leave of absence request arose after a “difference in understanding of the mission and the powers” of the group.
The decision taken by the group, she states, was to ask fellow member Peter Saunders to “take leave of absence to decide how he could contribute to the Commission.”
Collins also strongly refutes allegations made by other abuse survivors that members of the commission believe the sexual abuse crisis has ended and is “behind us already.”
“This is not true,” she writes. “It’s for the very reason that it is NOT behind us that the Commission members are working so hard to change things.”
Collins is writing Wednesday in the first public response from a commission member to the controversy over the leave request for Saunders, a British abuse survivor and founder of the UK’s National Association for People Abused in Childhood.
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