"I was angry at myself for allowing it to happen, and because I felt it was my fault, I held it in for so long. I also felt like I had no ally in the church to tell and trust."
"He was my spiritual director and a father figure in my life. I trusted him a lot."
"It went from sexual jokes to sexual stories to sexual questions to wanting me to see him without his clothes on. He knew I was loyal to him and always bragged about my obedience. He had me."
"It was an out-of-body experience. I knew it was eventually going to come, but I was in denial as the grooming escalated. One day, he asked me to sit in front of him, and that's when he started touching me inappropriately."
Carmine Megaro experienced a vocational calling to the priesthood but encountered grooming and sexual abuse by Father Philip Pizzo beginning during his late teens. Pizzo served as Megaro's spiritual director and father figure, and grooming escalated from jokes and stories to explicit requests and inappropriate touching. In 2017, at age 19, Megaro says Pizzo sexually assaulted him at St. Benedict Joseph Labre Parish in Richmond Hill. The abuse triggered prolonged guilt, depression, self-harm and suicidal thoughts, and Megaro left the seminary after less than a semester. Megaro went public in July, and the Brooklyn Diocese now finds the claims credible.
Read at News 12 - Default
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]