A victim advocate makes a pilgrimage

ROME -- On Sunday morning, Bill Gately of Plymouth stood in the rain in front of an uncharacteristically bland-looking Catholic church on a narrow, cobblestone street here, handing out leaflets to exiting worshipers.

Inside the church, Gately believed, a group of priests might be sheltering an American cleric who is accused in a lawsuit of sexually abusing minors. Gately, along with other advocates for victims of clergy sexual abuse, wants the religious order to send the priest back to the United States to face his accusers.

Two days earlier, just after stepping off the plane, Gately and two other victim advocates knocked on the doors of two religious orders thought to be home to priests accused of abuse in the United States, then stood at St. Peter's Square and called for a Vatican investigation into another accused cleric. He and two other victim advocates also held a news conference to announce a list of prelates they believed should not become pope because of their remarks about or behavior in the abuse crisis, and they sent a letter to US cardinals complaining about the participation of Boston's former archbishop, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, in a memorial Mass for Pope John Paul II.

But the church's only response, Gately said, was to hustle two victim advocates out of St. Peter's Square; otherwise, they were met with silence, their letters to the cardinals unanswered.

Gately, a 54-year-old therapist who said that as an adolescent in Canton he was molested by a priest of a religious order, had never been to Italy before -- he joked that his only previous trip outside the United States was to Walt Disney World's Epcot theme park. He had decided to fly to Rome late last week in an effort to call attention to the plight of victims as the cardinals of the Catholic Church met to select a new pope.

He said his time in Rome was frustrating, because it was difficult to get attention from either church officials or the news media, but also instructive.

''I had been of the mistaken belief that the issue of sexual abuse of children would grab the attention of the world, but I realized that for Catholics who listen to Rome, this is not an issue of significance yet," he said.

Gately, the New England cocoordinator of the support group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, never filed a criminal complaint or civil suit against his alleged abuser. He had told his family of the abuse, said he notified the priest's religious order, and said he even confronted the priest in person before the clergy abuse scandal exploded in Boston in 2002. Gately said he was 14 when the priest, a missionary who had befriended his parents and was staying in his house, first molested him; he said he recalls being abused four times over two years, whenever the missionary would visit to seek support for his ministry.

He said he ''lost my childhood," abandoned plans to become a priest -- instead he became a Canton police officer, a funeral home director, and then a counselor -- and left the Catholic Church. But he had never been an activist until other victims and their advocates responded to a letter he wrote to the Globe in 2002, describing his victimization. ''I was content to move forward, but I think those of us who can speak have an obligation to speak for those who cannot," he said. ''The church has done nothing, from a pastoral sense, compared to the amount of damage they did."

Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com.