UNITED STATES
Boston Globe
By Lisa Wangsness GLOBE STAFF MARCH 01, 2017
The only abuse survivor serving on Pope Francis’s commission to address the clergy sexual abuse crisis resigned Wednesday, citing a “shameful” lack of cooperation from elements of the Vatican bureaucracy.
The departure of Marie Collins leaves Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston and a newly appointed member of a key Vatican department that handles abuse, under pressure to marshal support for the commission’s work inside the fractious church power structure.
Collins’s resignation highlights the stubborn resistance among some in the Vatican to work coooperatively to address important aspects of the clergy abuse crisis, four years into Francis’s papacy and more than 15 years after the abuse crisis exploded into the headlines in the United States.
Collins, an Irish woman who suffered abuse by a priest during a hospital stay as a child, is a widely respected and blunt-spoken voice in the survivor community. She said in a statement that the commission’s work has been hampered by “constant setbacks” that were “directly due to the resistance by some members of the Vatican Curia to the work of the commission.”
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