BOSTON (MA)
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: January 13, 2013
BOSTON — When he was a boy in North Carolina in the 1960s, Michael Mack wanted to be a priest, until his priest sexually molested him. He prayed he would forget the experience, but, he said, “the memory tingled like a phantom limb.”
As he grew up, he revisited the moment over and over in his mind. He told no one about it, this secret that was obsessing him, “binding me to someone I never talked to, never saw, but who lived and breathed in my memory.”
In 2002, The Boston Globe began documenting the widespread sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests. The articles, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, prompted Mr. Mack, who was by then living in Cambridge, to consider finding the priest who had abused him.
In 2005, he plugged the name into Google and discovered that the priest was living less than an hour away. Eventually, he arrived on the priest’s doorstep.
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