Greg Daly
Marie Collins Consistency, accountability and concrete commitments to global implementation of safeguarding policies should be priorities for next month’s Vatican assembly of the heads of the world’s bishops’ conferences, child protection campaigner Marie Collins has said.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic, Mrs Collins said: “I think they have to come out of the meeting with something concrete, not more promises, because we’re 20 years down the line now.”
Consistency and accountability are key to this, she said, “so that everything is consistent across the Church, that they don’t have different levels of accountability in different parts of the world, that the safeguarding is the same in Africa as it is in America, that they update canon law so that it covers all types of child abuse, which it doesn’t at the moment”.
At the most basic level, she said, every bishops’ conference in the world should have a set of safeguarding guidelines, these being consistent with each other.
Calling for these to include ‘zero tolerance’, she said it was crucial that “at this meeting they get some commitment from the leaders of each of the conferences that they will actually implement proper policies because there’s no good just having them on paper, you have to have implementation”.
Marie Collins will be speaking in Dublin’s Mercy Centre International at 7.30pm on Monday, January 14.