ROME
Crux
Austen Ivereigh March 8, 2017
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
When abuse survivor Marie Collins resigned last week from the pope’s anti-abuse advisory board she cited the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s failure to implement a tribunal for trying bishops who cover up abuse. But was that idea actually scrapped, or simply modified to achieve the same result?
The widely admired Irish clerical abuse survivor Marie Collins who resigned last week from the pope’s safeguarding commission in protest at Vatican obstruction was especially dismayed by two roadblocks in particular. Both were the result, in her view, of the resistance to Pope Francis by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).
One was that the CDF had not agreed to respond directly to complaints from victims. Collins believes that the pope asked for this, and was rebuffed. “Last year at our request, the pope instructed all departments in the Vatican to ensure all correspondence from victims/survivors receives a response,” she wrote in a statement for the National Catholic Reporter, adding: “I learned in a letter from this particular dicastery last month that they are refusing to do so.”
In response, the CDF prefect, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, said he knew only that the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors had requested that his department write to victims to express their closeness to them in their suffering.
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