Chai Brady
Marie Collins Leading child protection campaigner Marie Collins said she was “very angry” after seeing claims by a German cardinal that she had called him a liar in a recently published book.
Dublin-born Ms Collins, who is an abuse survivor, was responding to comments attributed to Cardinal Gerhard Müller by journalist Franca Giansoldati in her book Vatican Confidential: A Candid Conversation with Cardinal Gerhard Müller.
After sending legal letters to the author and the publisher of the book and receiving no response, Ms Collins decided to publicly defend herself.
This comes after a 2017 controversy which saw Ms Collins leave the Pope’s Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, saying there was resistance from members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to the commission’s recommendations.
Cardinal Müller, head of the CDF at that time, rejected her criticisms in an Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra. Ms Collins subsequently wrote an open letter to the cardinal outlining her position but she says it received no response.
Ms Collins told The Irish Catholic: “Years later a book comes out and he’s saying all the same things again. I think it’s based on him being very raw about the whole thing, I mean he didn’t last much longer in the CDC as far as I can remember. I think he’s still sore, he must be a man that carries a grudge.
“I have certainly put it behind me, I wrote the open letter, I addressed every point he had brought up and I had given the facts and if he wanted to, he could have come back and said ‘this is not right’ and ‘that is not right’, but he did not because he could not, because everything I said was true.
“All the years I was with the commission or since, I have always been very, very careful to have my facts right before I go public. I was never someone who went out and flew off into fancies about things or people, I would be very careful anything I said was fact before I said it,” she said.
Ms Collins sent solicitors letters to both author and publisher after the 2023 book was published –disputing the assertion she had called Cardinal Müller a liar – but says she has not received a response. Ms Collins added she will not be able to pursue a defamation case due to the cost.
“When I saw this book I was very, very angry because I felt he was just taking these shots at me, trying to make me look bad with this sort of false patting me on the head… it’s quite sickening. He’s really having a go at me,” she said.
“It [the book] makes me look like somebody who was in the commission for three years but had not got a clue about how the Vatican worked, about how Canon Law worked, did not know what I was talking about. We had proposed an accountability tribunal to hold negligent bishops and priests to account, the Pope had approved it and when it had gone to the CDC it had been blocked and it did not go further. When I had said this – and I think this is what Cardinal Muller is referring to [in the book] he’s saying this never happened. But of course it did happen because as we know the accountability tribunal never came about.”
However, in the book Cardinal Müller, dubbed Ms Collin’s criticisms as “unjust” and that they were “the fruit of a partial vision of how the Roman Curia works”.
“Obviously, Collins was speaking as a victim, weighed down by pain and her desire for justice, without knowing how the various congregations intervene in such cases,” Cardinal Müller said.
In the same paragraph the cardinal said: “I have never spoken personally with Ms Collins; I would have liked to converse with her. It would have been productive, and I could have illustrated to her the state of things. We could have collaborated. I was sorry to hear her call me a liar, and I don’t even know why she did so.”