Tom Cruise remembered at reunion of seminarians

Exclusive: Tom Cruise's Year at the Seminary

Jul 9, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

Long before he embraced Scientology, Cruise studied for the priesthood. Michael Daly talks to the priests who instructed the future star about his surprising religious leap.

Before Tom Cruise was a Scientologist, he was as devout a Roman Catholic as was his now estranged wife, Katie Holmes.

And just in time for Cruise’s 50th birthday and just as his third marriage was unraveling, the priest who recruited him for the seminary more than three decades ago mailed him a photo. 

Courtesy of Father Ric Schneider

“I found an address online in Los Angeles,” says Father Ric Schneider of the Order of Friars Minor. “Probably an agent, I guess.”

Father Ric took the photo of Cruise at the age of 14, when the man who is now the most famous of Scientologists was still among the best of Catholics and known by his family name, Mapother.

Not that Father Ric was sending Cruise a message. The priest just thought the star might enjoy this captured memory of him in earth shoes and an unbuttoned shirt, standing beside another boy by a pond. A smiling Cruise is holding a radio-controlled boat the boys built in the hobby shop at St. Francis Seminary just outside Cincinnati in Mt. Healthy, Ohio.

“A cute little kid,” Father Ric says... Link to the rest of the story HERE