ROME
GMA News

Published March 7, 2017

ROME, Italy – Pope Francis was urged by a prominent church reform group Monday to oust the head of a powerful Vatican department after accusations that senior officials blocked reforms approved by the pontiff to curb sex abuse.

The row follows the resignation last week of Marie Collins, an Irish survivor of clerical sex abuse, who stepped down from Francis’s child protection panel slamming a “shameful” high-level obstruction of change in apparent defiance of the pope’s wishes.

Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), replied Sunday to Collins’s claim that his department had ignored Francis’s decision in 2015 to create a new tribunal to judge bishops who cover up sexual abuse cases.

In an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera daily, he said the tribunal was merely a “project” which Vatican departments felt would needlessly…