Penn State’s Catholic Church Problem, by Anthony L. Hall, iPinions Journal, November 10, 2011

Penn State’s Catholic Church Problem

By Anthony L. Hall
iPinions Journal
November 10, 2011

http://www.theipinionsjournal.com/index.php/2011/11/penn-state%E2%80%99s-catholic-church-problem/

It stems from allegations that Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant coach of the storied Nittany Lions football team, used a group home he founded for troubled boys as a plucking ground for his pedophile pleasure.

Reports are that he abused 9 boys over a 15-year period (1994-2009). But anyone who knows anything about pederasts must suspect that Sandusky has many other victims who are still too traumatized or just too embarrassed to come forward.

To make matters worse, if that’s even possible, all of the top officials associated with the team / university, most notably Head Coach Joe Paterno, allegedly knew about this abuse almost from the outset, but decided not to report it to the police. This, even though these officials were told by a credible eye witness that he caught Sandusky raping one of these boys in the men’s locker room on campus.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing

(Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace)

All too belatedly, Sandusky was outed and finally arrested on Saturday along with Athletic Director Tim Curly and Vice President for Finance Gary Shultz – both of whom were charged with not reporting the sexual abuse to police and lying to a grand jury under oath during the investigation. And Paterno announced just moments ago that he will resign at the end of the season.

But all of them were clearly involved in a conspiracy to cover up the ongoing sexual abuse of little boys. And truth be told, I’m wondering if they refused to report Sandusky because he was procuring these boys for their pedophile pleasure too…?

After all, my humanity is such that I can only imagine other pedophiles working and socializing (as Paterno and others did) with a man they have good reason to suspect is going back to his group home for little boys and raping them every friggin’ night?!

Which brings me to the God-must-be-dead precedent set by the Catholic church.

Albert Einstein is credited with saying that “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Well, in an admittedly cynical way, this logic might be applied to those who keep reacting to revelations about child sex abuse over and over again with the same moral outrage.

Frankly, I don’t see how anyone can have any moral outrage left after revelations that one of the biggest pedophile rings the world has ever known was comprised of Catholic bishops and priests….

This is why, instead of wasting what little moral outrage I can still muster on child sex abusers, I just react by wishing them a fair trial followed by a lifetime in prison having “big” men do to them what they did to little children. And Sandusky will surely get his.

But let me hasten to add that I believe the same fate should befall all of those who knew about this abuse and failed to report it … not to university officials, but to the police. That clearly includes Sandusky’s three conspiring stooges Paterno, Curly and Shultz. But just as I suspect there are more victims, I suspect there are other professed good men (and they almost always are) who knew about this abuse and did nothing.

I appreciate of course that many will consider it punishment enough that Paterno is resigning in disgrace. The outpouring of support by misguided students for whom football is a religion and Paterno is god is testament to this fact.

But, here again, just as decades of pastoring is not sufficient mitigation to grant leniency to a Catholic bishop who stood by and allowed a pedophile priest to continue raping little boys, decades of coaching (46 years – racking up the most number of wins) is not sufficient mitigation to grant leniency to Paterno who stood by and allowed his assistant coach to do the same.

Accordingly, not only should the university force him to resign immediately, but prosecutors should have him arrested too.

Beyond this I think the NCAA should give the Nittany Lions the “death penalty” (i.e., indefinite expulsion) – since this child sex abuse scandal makes all of the booster-paying-player infractions for which other schools have been expelled seem petty by comparison.