I remember when I was a teen I thought anybody over 30 was ancient. The thought of having sex with some old person was ridiculous, given all the teen hotties at school.
Turns out I was completely wrong. There was no sex with the hotties, none with the “old” people, & I had to get old myself to realize that sex with “old” people is great.
The priest in my former parish was in his forties when he made advances to a number of boys.
What Fr. Groeschel said was that some boys may seek a father figure, and the physical affection they lack. If both the boy and the priest are vulnerable to homosexual attraction, they can be seduced by the physical contact. Groeschel very improperly put the focus on the boy, and given that many, probably most, of the priests were serial abusers it is ridiculous to focus on the first offense.
It is very hard to go through life without physical affection - those priests with a large family near by are fortunate, but that was more the old days. A priest I loved and respected dearly had a dog that was nearly always with him except for the mass.
Anyway, it IS proper to speculate, how a man who does not start out intending to do something evil, who was not initially a predator, can become enmeshed in evil and justify it to himself. But Groeschel probably would have done better to look at the seminaries, rather than at vulnerable teenage boys, who are unlikely to have been the first homosexual contact for these priests. Still it’s a big world, and Groeschel probably counselled some for who that was the case - if they weren’t lying to him and justifying themselves.