‘Nothing has changed’

MARIE COLLINS, who was 13 years of age when she was raped in hospital by a priest, has said she is shattered by the silence of the Vatican and the response of the Church leadership in Ireland to the report on abuse in the Dublin diocese.

It is almost one week since the 720-page report of the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, and in that time, “nothing has changed”.

“We have got the drawbridges pulled up, we have got closing of ranks; we have bishops who have not even bothered to read the report, and we have had all the apologies again about what these men did, the abusers. But we have had nothing that has said, ‘we the leadership of the Church are sorry for our actions’,” Ms Collins said yesterday.