MARIE COLLINS is a brave Irish Catholic woman. In 1960, when she was a 13-year-old patient in a Catholic children’s hospital, she was abused, and photographed in a predatory way, by a hospital chaplain. For the remainder of her childhood and early adult life, she suffered from depression. Some 25 years on, when she found the courage to discuss the experience with representatives of the church, they were defensive and unhelpful. Now she is an internationally known figure in the campaign to bring succour to abuse victims and hold to account both clerical wrongdoers and bishops who cover up such crimes.

This week, it emerged that she had stepped down from a papal panel that is supposed to be tackling child abuse. To put it mildly, this is a body-blow to the credibility of the Holy See's efforts in this desperately important area. Ms Collins has been serving since 2014 on a Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. But as her resignation statements made clear, the panel's work has encountered massive bureaucratic resistance from a much older and more powerful agency of the Vatican, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Ms Collins felt she could not denounce this resistance with the necessary frankness as long as she remained, in some loose sense, a Vatican insider.

She told the New York-based America magazine, a liberal-minded Catholic publication, of one frustration after another. In June 2015, Pope Francis announced the establishment of a tribunal which would hold bishops accountable for negligence. But the CDF managed to stop the tribunal's creation, citing legal technalities. Then her commission, with backing from the pontiff, proposed a simple procedural change: it should be agreed that all letters from abuse survivors, to the CDF or other Vatican agencies, should at least receive a decent acknowledgement. But the CDF rejected this rule and nothing changed. Yet another complaint was that two years of work by her panel on a "template" or set of guidelines for dealing with child abuse, supposedly to be shared with Catholic bishops in every country in the world, had been sabotaged by the CDF. The CDF insisted that it had drawn up its own guidelines, and it had no interest in any input from her commission.

Ms Collins stopped short of directly criticising Pope Francis, although she thought he had "made some mistakes in this area" such as a speech in the United States in which, to critics, he seemed more concerned about the cloud of suspicion hanging over the clergy than about the suffering of abuse victims. But she added:

I think he really does get it. He really has learned over time. He understands the dreadful effect of abuse on people's lives. I believe that what he has said about abuse in the church, and "zero tolerance" is very sincere....But we know that administrations, particularly in the Vatican with hundreds of years of experience, can slow things down or stop them altogether....

For sceptical observers of the church scene, the news of Ms Collins' resignation confirmed their worst suspicions about the Holy See's inability to clean up its own act. In the view of Keith Porteous Wood, director of Britain's National Secular Society, the latest development "destroys the little remaining credibility of the Commission's power, or even resolve, to force the church to bring perpetrators to account in secular courts....it is now clear that in respect of clerical child abuse, the church and the Vatican are both unwilling to and incapable of following international norms of justice and human rights."

John L Allen, a writer for the Catholic news service Cruxnow, suggested a slightly more optimistic interpretation. Deeply embarrassing as it was, the departure from the papal commission of Ms Collins (and of another abuse survivor who has ceased to play an active role) might lead to a more open, frank and ultimately fruitful dialogue on how to crack down on abusers. Having victims serve on Vatican bodies, however well-intentioned, was never going to work because it put those survivors in a "politically untenable spot" where they would always be conflicted about how bluntly to express their views in public. "Survivors...need to be free to speak out and to help keep the church honest, cajoling it to remain eternally vigilant, if necessary even shaming it into action."

Shaming the church into action, and exposing the forces which are holding up such action, is presumably the very thing that Ms Collins desperately hopes to do. Those hopes will be shared by many, many people inside and outside the church.