What can the church learn from Penn State?
Two articles in Catholic publications - not written, of course, by the clergy -
Catholics of good conscience have had it with the failure of the Church hierarchy to demand and impose accountability for pedophilia acts by priests.
Regarding any institution or person, secular or religious, that engages in pedophilia or covers up for known pedophiles: SHAME. YOU are as much to blame as the perpetrator for the pain caused by these acts.
Many victims of this sort of abuse are so traumatized that they fall into an irreversible depression and commit suicide, to the horror of their families and friends. One act of pedophilia can cause so much widespread pain.
Those who cover up for pedophiles, who allow evil to continue to be done, are as much to blame for the pain of the victims, their families and friends, as the pedophiles themselves.
The first article is at US Catholic: What Can the Church Learn from Penn State? A portion appears below:
It didn’t take long after news broke of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky being charged with the sexual abuse of male students for pundits to make the inevitable comparison to the Catholic Church’s own abuse scandal. But with as many similarities as there were early on, they came to a screeching halt when the university’s Board of Trustees last night announced the firing of both legendary head coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier.
In a story that’s now been widely reported, Sandusky was arrested last weekend and two additional employees of the university were charged with perjury and failing to offer up details they had on allegations against the former coach. Paterno and Spanier, both of whom allegedly knew of allegations and referred them to others within the university, aren’t being charged with any legal wrongdoing. But the university sent a loud and clear message that even if the law doesn’t hold them accountable, there’s still a serious moral issue with their behavior.
All of this likely sounds too familiar to those who closely followed the church’s cover up of abuse allegations. There were many priests and bishops who, like Paterno and Spanier, decided that handling things internally was more appropriate than calling the police. Most of them still hold positions of authority in the church, like former Boston archbishop Cardinal Bernard Law, who just last week had a plush celebration for his 80th birthday in Rome. The result, nearly a decade after the abuse scandal in the church first became national news, has been ongoing pain for the victims and a disillusionment with the church and its leadership among many in the pews—if they’re even still coming to Mass.
The second article is at National Catholic Reporter: Abuse and cover-up: Penn State’s Catholic-like scandal
Here is the beginning of the article; the whole thing is well worth a read:
It is rare, if not unprecedented, that the Catholic church could take a lesson from a secular university’s football program. But the recent events surrounding Penn State’s vaunted football culture is indeed instructive on several levels.
…
Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach at Pennsylvania State University, has been charged with sexually abusing eight young boys over a 15-year period. Two university officials, former athletic director Tim Curley and former finance official Gary Schultz, have been charged with failing to report Sandusky to police after they were told of an incident in 2002.
The parallels between what happened at Penn State and what has happened for decades throughout the Catholic community in the United States and in other countries are striking.
The patterns outlined in the 40-count indictment charging Sandusky are familiar: the grooming of vulnerable youth, using a trusted position and stature within the community to gain access to children and to fend off suspicion, descriptions of fondling and rape of children, reports of abuse being minimized, and a continued toleration of the abuser within a protective culture.
The charges, the description of the offenses and the reactions of those with the authority and power to report the alleged offender to police are interchangeable with those in the grand jury reports and documents both released and still hidden within the culture of the Catholic hierarchy.
The impulses also appear identical. The instinct is to protect first the institution and its prevailing culture at all costs, minimize the offense and ignore the damage to the children involved.
The differences, too, are striking. Penn State University has a board of directors, and it demanded accountability.