UNITED KINGDOM
Catholic Herald
by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith
posted Thursday, 2 Mar 2017
The Pope’s commission has failed to deliver. Marie Collins’s resignation is just the latest example
Marie Collins has resigned from the Pope’s Commission for the Protection of Minors, and her explanation makes damning reading. While some commentators have been pessimistic, others take the view that this is by no means a major piece of news, and is not a sign of trouble for the Pope. John Allen goes so far as to think it may be a blessing in disguise. Austen Ivereigh insists that the resignation is not a sign that the Commission is not working.
We have been here before. Marie Collins is not the first abuse survivor to leave the Commission. Last year Peter Saunders left the Commission on “leave of absence”, and has been discouraged from returning. Some two years ago, John Allen himself pointed out:
It’s not clear if Francis fully grasped this at the time, but when he named survivors to that group, he was handing them significant control over his reputation. If Collins and Saunders were ever to walk out, saying they’d lost confidence or feeling that they’d been exploited for a PR exercise, it would have a vast media echo.
That judgment, from just under two years ago, is surely the right one. The credibility of the Commission depended on its ability to get things done; and the confidence that it would get things done rested largely on the fact that Peter Saunders and Marie Collins were among its members. Now Saunders and Collins have walked, and the reason in both cases is the same: the Commission was not bearing fruit. It was all talk, no action.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.