KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter

February 22, 2018

By Peter Feuerherd

After three metro area dioceses offered programs to compensate victims of church sex abuse, Brian Toale was one of those who applied.

Toale, on his personal website at https://briantoale.com/, describes a horrific series of events in the early 1970s when, he wrote, as a student at Chaminade High School in Mineola, Long Island, New York, he was systematically groomed and abused by the Marianist school’s radio club moderator. According to Toale, the alleged abuser, a layman now deceased for 27 years, took Polaroids of the abuse and threatened to expose the then-16-year-old if he told anyone.

Now 64, Toale has endured decades of therapy and struggles with alcohol, which he has addressed via Alcoholics Anonymous.

“My survival strategy was if I didn’t tell anyone, no one would know. On the day I graduated, I could then just…