THE FIRST multinational protest by clerical sex abuse victims in the Vatican ended with a symbolic candlelit march last Sunday night.
Carrying
large candles, two survivors, Gary Bergeron and Paula Leerschool,
walked the entire length of the Via Della Conciliazione, into St Peter’s
Square and right up to the bronze door entrance to the Apostolic
Palace.
“Part of what survivors asked was that we deliver letters
from them, from all around the world, to the pope and that was our
attempt to do that,” said Mr Bergeron.
“They wouldn’t let us go up to the bronze door but . . . somebody in security asked us for our passports.
“They
took the letters from us but whether or not the pope receives them is
up to the [security] men we handed them to,” said Mr Bergeron, one of
the co-founders of Survivors’ Voice, the group which organised Sunday’s “Reformation Day” protest.
Approximately 60 to 70
victims from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Italy and
the UK gathered outside Castel Sant’Angelo, just 500m from the Vatican,
last Sunday night for a peaceful meeting addressed by both Mr Bergeron and
co-founder Bernie McDaid.
Calling paedophilia a “world problem”,
Mr McDaid said the purpose of yesterday’s protest was to raise
international awareness of the child sex abuse issue.
Saying that
all the protesters were “part of history tonight”, Mr McDaid argued that
the Catholic Church had failed to embrace the problem openly.
“Somewhere
tonight in Africa, a missionary is having his way with a boy or a girl,
taking their bodies for pleasure, robbing their souls and destroying
the innocent spirit of that child,” he said.
“Nothing will be done
to stop him and the act will go unnoticed like in the case of thousands
of children before him . . ,” he continued.
“Clerical sex abuse will
continue wherever these predators roam; the abuse will go undetected as
long as the Catholic hierarchy is allowed to cover up these crimes.
“People need to stand up and say ‘enough’, ‘basta’.
“It has taken the Catholic Church years to acknowledge that it has a paedophile problem,” he said.
“In
no other institution has the sexual abuse of children been covered up
on such a global level; the numbers of the victims are staggering and
still growing all over the world.
“This is a perverted misuse of
power, these men of the cloth continue to avoid their responsibility for
the cover up [of clerical sex abuse] . . . This is not the church I was
brought up in, to believe in. This church has lost its way. Our anger
is justified.”
Mr McDaid also said that the Irish experience of
clerical sex abuse, highlighted so vividly by the Ryan and Murphy
reports, had prompted him and Mr Bergeron to organise the
protest.
Declaring the opening of the Year of the Survivor, Mr
McDaid, a sex abuse victim who met with Pope Benedict XVI in Washington
in 2008, promised that he “would be back”.
After the protest, papal spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi met Mr Bergeron and Mr McDaid at Vatican Radio headquarters.
Pope Benedict made no reference to the Reformation Day protest during his Angelus address Sunday.
Two Irish protesters, Margaret Kennedy and Brendan Butler, also also had their passports checked at the bronze door.