Victims of priest sex abuse to march on Vatican

By Philip Pullella

ROME (Reuters) - Victims of abuse by Roman Catholic priests will try to march on the Vatican on Sunday despite the lack of a police permit, to demand the Church do more to protect children and hold abusers accountable.

Bernie McDaid and Gary Bergeron, founders of www.survivorsvoice.org, told a news conference on Friday they would start a petition drive to ask the United Nations to declare systemic paedophilia a crime against humanity.

"We are not crippled. We are injured people who are willing to talk about it now. The guilt and the shame is in the cover-up," said McDaid, who become one of the first abuse victims to meet with Pope Benedict in Washington in 2008.

Revelations about children who were sexually abused by priests over the past decades has rocked the church this year, particularly in Europe, the United States and Australia.

McDaid, 54 and Bergeron, 47, were abused by the same priest as children in different cities in the Boston area some seven years apart in the 1960s.

Both were altar boys and both said they were molested by a priest who was first denounced as an abuser in 1962 but was shifted from parish to parish instead of being defrocked.

They met as adults in 2002 when the Church sex abuse scandal first swept the United States, with its epicentre in Boston.

This year, a new chapter in the scandal came to light as victims in other countries, including Ireland, Austria, Italy and the pope's native Germany, came forward. Bishops in several European countries have resigned either because they were unmasked as abusers or had mishandled abuse cases.