Seventy-two-year-old Gordon Hill hopes looking Cardinal George Pell in the eye will finally bring him peace.
Mr Hill wants closure, and believes being one of the clergy abuse survivors sitting in a Rome hotel with Cardinal Pell when he gives videolink evidence to a royal commission will deliver it.
"I'm making that a goal, in my book, because if I don't it's going to send me to the grave," he said.
"At my time of life - I'm 73 in April - I've got to have some sort of peace."
Mr Hill had hoped to see Cardinal Pell appear in person before the child sex abuse royal commission in Melbourne in December, before a heart condition stopped the former Ballarat priest and Melbourne archbishop from taking the long-haul flight.
"I wanted to eyeball him, just to let him know that they haven't beaten us," Mr Hill told AAP in Ballarat.
Now Mr Hill, or Hilly as he's known, will be a kind of father figure among the 15 survivors who have been crowdfunded to be in Rome next week for what will be the cardinal's third royal commission appearance.
For Mr Hill, it is not so much what Cardinal Pell says that is important but rather his body language.
"I've got to have body language that he is properly remorseful about it."
Sexually abused by three priests and beaten by nuns during his 16 years in Victorian orphanages, Mr Hill has twice driven the 3600km from his Geraldton home in Western Australia to Victoria to be at the commission hearings into the Diocese of Ballarat.
A cracked windscreen forced him to fly to this week's hearing in Ballarat.
Each time it is an emotional roller-coaster.
"It's like a time warp where you can actually go back in time and be that person that they're talking about," Mr Hill said.
"There's certain times when I go back to a five-year-old just by somebody saying something, or a smell.
"It can be very daunting because you've got to be able to learn to come out of that as well."
Mr Hill's group leaves on Friday night, while other survivors and the parents of victims have arranged their own flights.
Cardinal Pell, who is now in charge of the Vatican's finances, will give evidence about the church's handling of abuse in the Ballarat diocese and Melbourne archdiocese on Monday (Australia time).
"He's worked his way right through the hierarchy right up to the top of the Catholic Church so we really want to hear the truth about what happened," Anthony Foster, whose daughters were abused, told the ABC.
Being in Rome could again be traumatising for victims but Mr Hill said they had to be strong.
"We have to be, in my book, we have to be ambassadors for all the ones left behind," he said.
"We're the voice of the many thousands that didn't have a voice."
