KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
Sept. 12, 2019
By Tom Roberts
The Catholic Church has reached a crossroads. Its leaders can either change, become open and accountable, or maintain the status quo: an institution lacking transparency, wrapped in secrecy and beholden to a clerical culture that is at the heart of the institution’s problems.
That bleak assessment was made by Marie Collins, the Irish clerical sexual abuse survivor who was an original member of a papal commission dealing with the sex abuse crisis, and who said she is “hanging on by my fingernails.”
The scandal, she said in remarks Sept. 8 opening a five-city U.S. tour, is both systemic and global, and clericalism remains at its core.
“The church is at a crossroads. It can either continue to behave as it has for centuries, protecting itself, or open up and become the church we all want it to be, the church that it should be.”
Collins, in a separate interview with NCR following the news conference, expanded on her understanding of clericalism and how it played into her decision to resign, after serving for three years, from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
During the past 20 years, she said, the church “has been reactive” and “has not changed one single thing unless forced to by survivors and those in the media. … I don’t believe the church has made any changes of its own volition.” She made her remarks at the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill at the outset of her tour, titled, “A Crisis of Culture: Seeking Justice to Reclaim the Church.”
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