Apparently, this was one of those religious schools that doesn't cover "forgiveness" until the later grades.
Now, Tom didn't tell us all this to make us feel sorry for him. The fact that he was unpopular and lonely is precisely why he was targeted. As Tom said, "Predators look for the weakest link. There is a reason jackals prey on the sick and wounded; they make great targets."
Tom's jackal was a "Kevin Spacey lookalike [named] Marion Francis Helowicz. I have to use all three names, the way we say 'John Wayne Gacy.' He was a young priest, he was cool, and everyone, especially the boys, would do anything to be his best bud."
Tom does not think he was the first kid his abuser molested, and believes "... he had done it before, [and] they had moved him from one church to another."
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The ol' "Rotate your tires to fix a flat" approach.
We've been unable to find any independent verification of this claim. But the Catholic Church has been caught moving abusive priests to other parishes. This investigation, published last September, found five cases of priests being shuffled off to poorer parishes in Latin America, like the world's worst case of musical chairs. We also spoke with Thomas Doyle, a Catholic priest who wrote the Church's "manual" for dealing with abusive priests back in the 1980s. He told us that, at the time, "secret transfers" were the "traditional way" of dealing with abusive priests.