NEW YORK (NY)
CNN
Dec 3, 2019
By Nima Elbagir,Barbara Arvanitidis, Katie Polglase,Bryony Jones and Alex Platt
Two boys, born into deeply religious families, both sent to Catholic school, and both abused by the very priests and teachers meant to protect them.
George Stein and Joey Piscitelli grew up a decade apart, but they are connected by their abuse at the hands of priests and brothers from a Catholic order founded to help and support vulnerable children.
Their experiences reveal a pattern of abuse and cover-up going back more than half a century.
A year-long CNN investigation into the Salesians of Don Bosco discovered that for decades, abuser priests and brothers were repeatedly protected and transferred from school to school at the expense of their young victims who were pressured and threatened not to report what had happened to them.
On multiple occasions Salesian leaders withheld cases of abuse from the authorities and even from other parts of the Catholic Church.
A cluster of abusers
The oldest of eight children Stein grew up believing it was his calling to become a priest.
He was 13 in 1958 when he began studying at Don Bosco College, later renamed Salesian High School, in Richmond, California. It was there that he met Brother Bernard Dabbene.
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