AN IRISH WOMEN who resigned from a Vatican Commission on protecting minors due to lack of cooperation from Church officials has questioned the methodology of its pilot annual report.
Marie Collins was a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors but resigned in 2017 over what she described as a “shameful” lack of cooperation.
Collins is a child sexual abuse survivor and brought the priest who abused her in the 1960s to justice in 1997.
She is a founder Trustee of the Marie Collins Foundation and has campaigned for the protection of children and justice for survivors of clerical sexual abuse.
“I may have resigned from the Commission,” said O’Malley, “but I’ve always wished it well because I want to see things improve.
“There’s a lot of good plans in the report and it’s certainly better than having nothing at all,” she added.
The Commission presented its first annual report this morning and at a press conference launching the report, Cardinal Sean O’Malley was asked about Collins’s resignation.
He said “Marie Collins was one of our most beloved and valuable members of the Commission” and that he was “sorry when she decided to step away”.
“We understood the reasons and all of us have felt that frustration of the slowness of change coming about, but we believe that the change is taking place, even though it’s often an uphill climb,” said O’Malley.
‘Resented our independence’
Pope Francis established the Commission, consisting of an independent panel of experts, in December 2014, amid pressure for more action to tackle clerical child sex abuse.
Marie Collins resigned from the Commission in 2017 “because there was so much resistance within the Roman Curia its work because it was independent of the Curia”.
Speaking to The Journal, Collins said: “The Roman Curia wouldn’t cooperate with us because they resented our independence and wanted to be in control of the Commission.
“Those in the Vatican who had always been doing it their way did not want an independent group bringing in new policies and documents.
“So that was one of the reasons I left, because everything we proposed and that the Pope agreed to, the department refused to actually implement, so it was going nowhere.”
Collins added: “When I was on the Commission, the attitude you got was, ‘well, this is way we’ve done it for 100 years, it doesn’t need to be changed’.
“And if you’re a woman, of course there was even less chance that you would be listened to.
“But they seem to have improved in that respect, they’ve moved on, and this report could be very valuable.”
The Commission has since been embedded within the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is a department of the Roman Curia in charge of the religious discipline of the Catholic Church.
Cardinal Sean O’Malley today the “permanent status” granted to the Commission “will be very helpful to our work”.
‘Marking your own homework’
While Collins described the report as “comprehensive”, she said a “problem” is that the Commission “gets its information from a questionnaire that’s given to the bishops when they come to the Vatican on their ‘ad limina’ visit”.
Ad limina visits to the Vatican are undertaken every five years by bishops of the various Episcopal Conferences and include submitting a written report to the pope.
As part of the ad limina process during the Commission’s reporting period during last year, the Commission developed a series of “statistical and descriptive questions regarding the diocesan safeguarding program that it sends to bishops preparing for the ad limina visit”.
There are 114 episcopal conferences worldwide and the Commission plans to review 15 to 20 each year, with the aim of covering each of them every five to six years.
“The report is based on what the bishops are saying is happening in their local church and to me, that’s not an outside, objective view of what is actually happening,” said Collins.
“It’s a bit like marking your own homework and that’s a difficulty I would have with the report.”
She added: “If you’re just depending on what you’re told, it would not be the normal way of auditing or investigating the practices in any particular area.
“So it’s not as if they’re going in and looking into the files in a particular church, they’re just getting the church to report on what it’s doing.
She added: “I’m sure that if you went back 30 years and asked the bishop if everything was fine in his diocese as far as the protection of children was concerned, he’d say ‘yes’, and we know that wasn’t the case.
“I’m sure most bishops will be forthcoming in the reality of whatever is happening but I think there should be an outside, objective view and that survivors in the same areas should be asked for their comments during the reporting period.”
The Commission’s report acknowledged that this ad limina process and questionnaire is “incomplete as a means of finding the truth.”
The report also said it’s vital that victims and survivors can provide feedback and that “focus groups could be invited to comment directly on aspects of the Annual Report and/or the Annual Report process”.
Delays in processing cases
The first “challenge” highlighted by the Commission is delays in processing abuse cases at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith within the Vatican.
Collins told The Journal: “When I resigned seven years ago, the Dicastery was two or three years behind in its work.
“In other words, if my case had gone to them, I could wait years before I found out what was happening to the priest who’d abused me.
“They have said they have brought in more staff and more money, but yet it is the first item on the challenges, so they haven’t improved on that, and justice delayed is justice denied.”
Reputation over survivor support
Another challenge listed is the prioritisation of the Church’s reputation over victim/survivor support.
Collins noted that the Murphy report also “said the Church in Dublin had put the reputation of the Church before the safety of children”.
The Murphy Report was a Commission of Investigation into sexual abuse scandals the archdiocese of Dublin.
“And here we are in 2024,” said Collins, “and this is still the case, according to this report, in many places.”
Collins also called for more statistics about how many abuse cases are being reported and on how many priests are removed.
“They would be statistics you could judge on as the next report comes out and you’d have a very definite criteria to judge if things are improving,” said Collins.
The Commission noted that the pilot report is “not intended as an audit of the incidence of abuse within Church contexts”.
It pointed to “time and capacity constraints”, as well as a “lack of reliable data in some countries”.
However, the Commission expressed hope that future reports “will address the incidence of abuse, including the question of progress in reducing and preventing abuse”.
The Commission also pointed to a Memorandum of Understanding implemented by Pope Francis last year which requires Episcopal conferences to provide statistics on abuse reports received, victim/survivor accompaniment services delivered, and the provision of safeguarding courses.
The report notes: “In time, the Memorare Initiative will provide an important and reliable source of data from victims/survivors within a local Church.”