Column: Penn State Case Bad, but Church Sex Abuse Worse

By DeWayne Wickham
USA Today
July 31, 2012

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-07-30/priests-penn-state-sex-abuse/56595192/1

I didn't have much sympathy for people who complained about the punishment the NCAA doled out to Penn State, until I discovered how an even larger institution in the Keystone State has escaped punishment for shielding dozens of pedophiles in its midst.

In June, Jerry Sandusky, a longtime assistant football coach at Penn State, was found guilty of raping and sodomizing 10 young boys. Top university officials were told of Sandusky's deviant behavior years earlier and did nothing to stop him. They, apparently, were more worried about the damage that exposing him would do to the school's reputation than the harm he was doing to his victims.

For its inaction, Penn State on July 23 was fined $60 million, its football team was banned from post-season play for four years and the games it won from 1998 through 2011 — the span of time during which university officials were aware of Sandusky's pedophilia and looked the other way — were wiped off the record books.

Another troubling case

The next day, an even more troubling case of child sex abuse — given that so many more predators were involved — played out in a Philadelphia courtroom without any hint that justice would reach beyond a low-level official of that city's Catholic archdiocese.

Monsignor William Lynn was sentenced to three to six years in prison for covering up the actions of pedophile priests he was supposed to root out of the church. Instead, he sent them to unsuspecting parishes where other sexual assaults took place — an action his lawyers said was ordered by Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, who headed Philadelphia's archdiocese from 1988 to 2003. He died in January.

In 2011, a grand jury said it had "no doubt that (Bevilacqua's) knowing and deliberate actions during his tenure as archbishop also endangered thousands of children in the Philadelphia Archdiocese." Lynn, it said, was carrying out Bevilacqua's policies exactly as he directed. But Bevilacqua, who was in poor health, was not indicted along with his aide.

Church coverup

According to that grand jury report — and another in 2003 and 2005 — the Philadelphia archdiocese's coverup of pedophile priests started before Bevilacqua became its leader and lasted after he was replaced.

So why hasn't it been penalized in some way for its bad acts — for sending pedophile priests to counseling instead of turning them in to the cops? Why hasn't its tax-exempt status been revoked for a number of years? That might be a real deterrent against a repeat of such harmful indifference in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

But the Philadelphia archdiocese is not likely to suffer the same fate as Penn State, even though three grand juries found it left pedophile priests free to prey upon children for years after church officials became aware of them. That's because saving the church from scorn was more important to them than protecting children from those monsters.

"As powerful as Penn State officials are, their power pales before the power of the Catholic hierarchy," David Clohessy, director and spokesman for the Survivor's Network of those Abused by Priests, told me. "When sex abuse happens in a religious setting, many people back away. I think a degree of fatigue has set it."

I hope for the sake of the children who were abused, and those who might be victimized in the future if nothing is done, that what happened in Philadelphia will produce enough outrage to force the archdiocese there — like Penn State — to pay a hefty price for its indifference to the sexual abuse of children.