Quick Thoughts on the Penn State Controversy

It's been interesting to follow the story out of Penn State regarding assistant coach Jerry Sandusky's child molestation charges and the fallout from all that. Considering the cross blog focus on All Things Catholic between us, it's interesting to have a secular parallel to hold up for comparison. A couple of quick thoughts:

1. The line occasionally used by Catholics - that while it's a serious problem within the Church, the media goes out of it's way to blow up the controversy for the sake of discrediting Her - is shown to be false. The situation here is virtually identical to a Priest molestation case, just lacking the elements of faith, church and clergy. It's every bit as sensational news, and the blowback has got to be at least equal, pound-for-pound, as each individual Priest molestation case.

2. The parallels regarding how this guy positioned himself in such a way as to have access to kids, and also access to the vast resources of a large organization are also startling. He had his own charity that directly involved kids from 4th grade to high school, and he basically had free run of campus resources for years. It really goes to show how people like this are very adept at covering themselves with a cloak of virtue and kindness, expressly for the purpose of gratifying themselves. So adept that they can act so boldly and yet escape justice for years.

3. What's most important, what is most relevant, is the coverup. That's one thing in the Church controversy that Catholics don't always get. It's not so much about the criminals or the crimes, it's the coverup by the authorities within the organization. The lack of a will to take the matter to police, really rankles. When this happens within the Church, it especially offends secularists because the Catholic Church has in the past, maintained it's own clerical law and attempted to protect it's clergy from civil authorities. The existence of the Vatican State allows this to continue (Cardinal Law) sometimes.

But, to be fair, here we have a completely secular case and the exact same thing happened. Why? I can only guess that officials didn't want to disgrace the organization with a scandal. Any rational outsider can see how short-sighted (the eventual scandal was magnified at least 10 fold), and just plain wrong this was. They had to have been aware that children were in real danger, for over 10 years, yet they did nothing besides bar him from taking children onto the main campus. One could argue that Joe Paterno technically did the right thing (in a bare minimum sense) by reporting a known incident to the athletic director immediately. Yet he'll be ending his long and illustrious (I'm told) career under a cloud of disgrace because he did not do everything that he could to see the crime was reported to the police.

Rather than repeat the too-often quoted trope "power corrupts", I'd say that this is evidence that power messes with ones priorities. It changes your perception of right and wrong. Every one who is under scrutiny at Penn State had a chance to do the right thing, but put the image of the school ahead of the safety of innocents. Much the same as the Catholic Church, in past and present. The major difference between the two is that public scrutiny following criminal charges has been much quicker and more efficient in holding those individuals responsible, than the focus on the Vatican over the past several years. Penn state is reacting immediately to popular condemnation. The Vatican continues to obfuscate investigates, and issues nothing but double-talk statements, apologising but offering no real accountability.