A lot of this has been coming over my transom, today. I’m not going to go into any detail about the child molestation scandal at Penn State that has resulted in the firing of previously revered football coach Joe Paterno and student riots—in outrage at the firing of the coach, whose failing is not to have pursued punishment of his former assistant, Sandusky, rather than at the alleged molestation of children. The reason is, because we’ll all be hearing the beyond-tawdry-into-horrifying details of that story for the next few months. Instead, I’d like to consider the comparisons with the Catholic Church:
The liberal media is very eager to underline the parallels between the Penn State sex-abuse scandal and the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal. There are some. But the media elite betrays their enthusiasm to drag the church through the P.R. mud again by dwelling overwhelmingly on anti-Catholic activists to offer a rerun of everything that went wrong, and very little about what has gone right since newspapers blew the lid off the American church scandal in 2002.
No one should be shocked that CNN’s so-called “Belief Blog” — which of late has made an enormous deal out of promoting liberal “reforms” in the Catholic Church like throwing out all the biblical injunctions against homosexuality — jumped eagerly in line. Dan Gilgoff, CNN.com Religion Editor, awarded 12 church-bashing paragraphs to not one, not two, but three “advocates for abuse victims.” Faithful Catholics just got a space for an official no-comment:
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which represents the American Roman Catholic hierarchy, declined to respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Many abuse victims applauded Penn State for firing top officials and criticized the Roman Catholic Church for not taking similarly dramatic action.
I can understand why the Church’s scandal comes to mind, but is it really the same thing?
Over at League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Tod Kelly entitles his piece on our tribalisms “Crushing Our Better Angels: How Tribalism & Self-Identity Force Us to Support Penn State, Herman Cain and Rick Perry.” He begins by talking about his childhood admiration for Steve Garvey, and how deeply in denial he was about the facts that later emerged about “Mr. Clean.” Then, he’s off to the races.
Oh, yeah, he mentions Clinton before getting to Perry and Cain, and throwing a good deal of dirt on the Catholic Church, but . . . hey, what about Eric Holder and all those dead Mexicans?
Oh, never mind. The point is that football programs, and Penn State’s in particular, are male dominated institutions and they’re bad, just like the Catholic Church. The problem is, Penn State is much more reflective of secular educational institutions than it is the Catholic Church, football or no football, and despite the paternalistic Catholic undercurrents of the Italian (!) name, Paterno.
And here’s where liberals are in deep, deep denial: this is a failure of secular institutions. I don’t care whether or not Mr. Kelly thinks that the response is always to blame the media when the media deserves some of the blame. How often or systematically has the MSM reported the widespread sexual abuse of children within public schools? Since Penn State isn’t a religious-affiliated institution, doesn’t it make sense to use this moment to contemplate, not the sins of the Catholic Church, but those of secular institutions? If not, why not? Am I the one who is changing the subject, or are they?
For some time, now, I’ve been writing about how the Obama administration means to drive the Catholic Church in particular (and other churches that resist their values, generally) out of medicine, out of adoption, out of charity. For much of this time, I’ve been told that I’m paranoid, reactionary, and so forth, but we now see unmistakable evidence that that is this administration’s design. We will be lectured about how all of our conventional forms of self-organization are merely tribalisms, whereas secularism is true diversity.
Really, when it comes right down to it, isn’t the TEA Party just as bad as the Occupy movement, even though the Occupy movement really has performed the feats of violence that innumerable liberal pundits tried tendentiously to pin on the TEA Party? It must be . . . because it’s, you know, tribal, just like they are.
Baloney. And Herman Cain isn’t Bill Clinton, and hasn’t perjured himself in front of a grand jury. And whoever in the DOJ and Homeland Security are behind Fast and Furious are worse than Sandusky. And all you people who claimed in comments to earlier posts that Fast and Furious was a continuation of Wide Receiver, I’d like you to view Holder’s testimony from Tuesday, and rethink that.
Because not all situations are analogous, even if you group them under a rubric like “male dominated” or “paternalistic.”
UPDATE: Many thanks to Glenn for the ‘lanche!
REUPDATE: And many thanks to Eric Scheie from Classical Values, who has some important reflections on the Sandusky scandal and Tod’s piece.
jefferson101 on November 11, 2011 at 9:48 am said:
The automatic leap into coverup mode has the same source in both cases. It’s the default mode for any Bureaucracy. The Iron Law always controls their actions. If the media wanted to actually report on something, instead of flogging whatever prejudices they personally hold, there is that angle to explore.
What is it, exactly, that causes the Bureaucrats who run totally different types of institutions to react in exactly the same way to any potentially adverse publicity?
But that would require that the media types put down their preferences for precisely that type of institution. Such being the case, any actual reportage is quite unlikely.
The really telling point in the whole Penn State thing is that the University fired their President and Joe Paterno, who are charged with no crime. The two University officials who are actually charged with crimes? Penn State is going to pay for their Defense for them.
Any questions?
Starless on November 11, 2011 at 9:55 am said:
Talk about taking advantage of a well-publicized tragedy to flog a particular, and unrelated, dead hobby horse.
If they want to use this obscene affair to look at some Big Picture issue, we’d all be better served if they looked at the overwhelming financial power football programs have on public university campuses. If they want to talk about tribalism, talk about the tribalism which makes winning the Big Game more important than making sure each and every student a) graduates and b) graduates with the ability to write a coherent paragraph. If they want to look at analogies, how about comparing the lack of sexual abuse scandals in the Penn State Debate Society or some similar competitive student organization.
Joy McCann on November 11, 2011 at 12:40 pm said:
The main difference between the Church and the Penn State scandal is that the Church consulted psychiatrists and psychologists who advised that it was possible to isolate pedophiles, and those with an attraction to adolescents, change their external circumstances, and thereby prevent the crimes from recurring–they were advised that it was possible to “contain the damage,” remove the offending priests from the environments, and thereby take care of the problem without publicly humiliating the offenders/besmirching the Church.
By 1998-2002, social sciences had progressed to the point that all psychologists and psychiatrists (and a lot of laypeople) realized that this couldn’t be done–that abusers would find a way to continue abusing unless actually prosecuted, punished, and closely monitored. So the coaches and administrators at Penn State–particularly those in 2002 who did not report this to law enforcement, even campus law enforcement–had every reason to realize that their (weak, inadequate) attempts to keep Sandusky from victimizing kids on campus would only result in him doing it elsewhere.
Their behavior was clearly tailored to “keeping this off the premises” rather than “stopping this.”
RTod on November 11, 2011 at 12:49 pm said:
Dan- Not to challenge but more out of curiosity, what was it about what my musings on tribalism led you to believe I am a liberal?
I’m not.
Joy McCann on November 11, 2011 at 1:11 pm said:
I can’t speak for Dan’s reading of your article, but I can tell you why I came away thinking you might be a liberal Democrat: making Rick Perry the poster boy for “crony capitalism,” rather than Barack Obama–who would have been a much better fit with the point about tribalism.
Dan Collins on November 11, 2011 at 2:07 pm said:
There are truths in what you wrote. All of us invest in our tribes. What we opt into and out of in a large sense defines who we are. We all root for other people who share those links and, presumably, values, and we all get defensive, even if only momentarily, when we imagine those people to have been unfairly criticized.
But when I look at the examples here, I see what Joy sees, a reaching for resemblances where there are distinct emblemae ready to hand. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not to thrilled about the Republican contenders, either. However, the fact remains that Penn State is a secular institution of the kind that most of us attended for college or graduate school. To say that it’s a recapitulation of the Catholic scandal means that people have categorically set out to isolate the phenomenon of child abuse to “like-Catholic” institutions by summoning the idea of paternalism to rebracket Penn State in with Catholic institutions, and keep the associative contagion apart from other secular institutions. That, to me, seems intellectually dishonest on their part, more than yours, but, as I’ve said above . . . what about Eric Holder? The public outcry regarding Penn State that I’ve witnessed has been far more intense than the outcry regarding the hundreds of Mexican victims of ATF/DOJ walked firearms.
And in my view, that is a manifestation of tribalism that is abetted by journalists. Of the three networks, only CBS has covered Fast and Furious in any kind of detail. None of them bothered to mention, when the MF Global scandal broke, that Jon Corzine was a Democrat bundler for Obama.
These forms of censorship, imposed from without or self-imposed, have real-world consequences. The incidence of sexual (and other) abuse of children in public school settings is much higher than the incidence among Catholic clergy. The self-protectiveness of unions generally operates to the detriment of students. It is shibboleth in the media to say these things, so the abuse continues unabated.
Each of us has had an impulse to shoot the messenger at times. You represent that very well. You do well to remind us that that’s unfair. But rhetorically you seem to seal off the news media from substantive critiques, particularly regarding what they choose not to report, and that in turn (to my mind) abets a widespread failure of the duty to report, which in some ways is not very different from what has happened at Penn State.
In another post, yesterday, I talked about why I’m not swayed by the evidence (such as it is) against Herman Cain. I’m inclined to like Cain. I don’t think he’s anything like an ideal candidate, but the reason that I will defend Cain in the face of the allegations against him is . . . it’s the only way for us to get the facts. Had he folded, or had he been thrown under the bus, nobody ever would be required to provide details of what he is supposed to have done, which we are assured is horrible. The stakes of democracy are too high for me to admit the possibility that insinuation may have sunk an innocent man. The success of murmurings and implication would be an invitation to more of the same. All right, people, you’ve broached the possibility that he is/was a horn-dog. Show us.
I’ve taken part in TEA Party events. They’ve been welcoming affairs, and civil ones. I think that your article conflates the TEA Parties and the Occupy movement in some respects. The violence and hostility towards those that do not share one’s beliefs at Occupy sites goes quite a bit beyond what Thoreau had in mind in “Civil Disobedience.” That Obama and many other leftist politicians who thundered, wailed and wept at the presumed hostility and danger of the TEA Parties now openly support these anarchists really shows that there is nothing they won’t stoop to in order to maintain and consolidate power, and when you couch the comparison between these two movements, one accused of being astroturfed and the other actually astroturfed, you do their intellectual work for them, by way of drawing a moral and civil equivalence.
Two of the primary functions of the intellect are synthesis and antithesis. You’ve got the synthesis down, in this essay. A little more antithesis, please.
RTod on November 11, 2011 at 3:30 pm said:
Thanks for taking the time to reply. (Thanks to you as well, Joy.) I see where you’re coming from, and agree with just about all of it, if not all of it.
FWIW, I know that a lot of people this morning have been confused by my saying that Penn State, Catholics, Cain, Perry, Clinton and Garvey are all the same. That was an error in clear writing on my part; I had tried (but obviously not succeeded) to clearly state that they were all nothing alike. What I was trying to explore, in my think out loud on pixel kind of way, is why people tend to give the benefit of the doubt after all reasonable doubt is gone. (As I said in my Post, I think the Dems w/ Clinton is one of the starkest examples of this I can think of in my life time.) My post was more about part of the foibles of being human than anything else; it was not intended as a political statement of any kind.
As to your point, Joy, it is true that I talked more about Republicans then Dems. (Though I would argue I was trying to talk more about the audience than the candidates.) But this post was a continuation of a post I had done the previous evening on the GOP debate. The intention was not to pick on the GOP; it’s just that all of these events were happening at the same time and swirling around in my head.
Anywho, not that anyone here cares, but that may be where some disconnect happened. I blame my writing.
(I wouldn’t have taken the time to write a response here at all, but I liked your post, and I liked Joys initial comment a lot.)
Dan Collins on November 11, 2011 at 3:53 pm said:
Well, thanks, Tod. I liked a lot of things about your article; it speaks to the core of our deepest failings, which have to do with philauty. Anyway, it’s nice conversing with you, and I’ve added you to my RSS.
Joy McCann on November 12, 2011 at 6:57 pm said:
Thanks for clarifying–and I enjoyed your original essay a great deal.
Dan Collins on November 11, 2011 at 2:21 pm said:
I want to mention as well that there’s a reason I haven’t introduced into evidence, regarding Bialek and Cain, the Bill Kurtis material about her time at CBS, suggesting that she may herself have been prone to making advances in the workplace, because . . . he stated that he was going to bring evidence, and it hasn’t appeared. Today, you can go listen to an interview with Ms. Bialek’s former and perhaps future fiance, who comes across as a straightforward, smart, nice guy.
hitnrun on November 12, 2011 at 2:30 am said:
There’s something to the idea that an old country-reared ethnic-Catholic like Paterno – who, like the adults in the previous scandal, lived in an era before child psychology – failed to do his part in a sex scandal and probably abused his authority to sweep it under the rug.
That doesn’t explain the failure of the all the other persons involved, nor the failure of the University and its football culture which has dozens of cousins across the country, nor does it extend beyond the demographic profile that has little to do with actual religion.
The post-modern analysis is otherwise colonialism-studies, phallic-symbol-hunting, Shakespeare-didn’t-write-his-plays grade poppycock.
Joy McCann on November 12, 2011 at 7:01 pm said:
I don’t give anyone a pass who had that level of responsibility in this day and age, wherein we know what happens when pedophiles are not stopped. No, no, no. No.
jms on November 12, 2011 at 2:31 am said:
People forget or don’t understand that the purpose of the Catholic Church is to deliver as many souls as possible to heaven. This profoundly differentiates it from secular institutions that often do many of the same things but with different moral purpose. If the church thinks that it can save a pedophile priest’s soul by burying his crime and reassigning him, and the alternative is to endanger his soul by having him sent into a secular prison, they will do it. Often the goals of the Catholic Church coincide with the general goals of secular society, but the Catholic Church exists to deliver souls to heaven, not to achieve justice on earth. This is key to understanding the motives and methods of the church, and is one of the reasons to be wary of mixing church and state. Each corrupts the other’s purpose.
Joy McCann on November 12, 2011 at 6:53 pm said:
In this regard, the Church may not please herself; she is bound by the laws of the nations she is active in. She may render unto God what is God’s, but she must then render unto Caesar as well.
In point of fact the Roman Catholic church in this country as very nearly gone too far in the opposite direction: when I was an EM I was obligated to go through the new politically correct “VIRTUS” training, which discusses the awful effects of molestation, and how important it is to report it. Which . . . okay. I actually know a fair amount about that myself. But how exactly was I expected to molest the younger parishioners while serving the host during mass?
dicentra on November 12, 2011 at 3:33 am said:
And whoever in the DOJ and Homeland Security are behind Fast and Furious are worse than Sandusky.
Not really sure about that. The dead at least rest from their labors; the raped get to spend a few decades in hell because of someone else’s sin.
Also, the misdeeds of Eric Holder are not analogous because nobody idolizes Eric Holder. Not even Obama.
Joy McCann on November 12, 2011 at 6:54 pm said:
Yes; Dan was getting a bit apples-and-oranges-ey there.
Jay Tea on November 12, 2011 at 7:09 am said:
Sorry, folks, but as long as Bernard Cardinal Law holds a place of honor and prestige and power in the Catholic Church, I hold the Church responsible for his literal decades of covering up the pedophile scandal in and around Boston. The man should be in prison here in the US, not running one of the few basilicas in the Church and helping elect Popes.
J.
oMan on November 12, 2011 at 8:06 am said:
Great post and discussion. The tribalism hypothesis has enormous explanatory power. But as some have noted, the biggest tribe is the Buckseekers. Follow the money: both the enormous revenue streams from sports that schools promote (broadcast money, gate money, concessions and parking, swag; and especially the alumni giving that comes from a strong sports tribe identity). And also the personal revenue streams: how much is paid to coaches, AD’s, university management?
Rule one for tribes: don’t rock the boat. Don’t show weakness to outsiders. “They” are out to get us, don’t help them. …the pressures to ignore, minimize, throw over the wall, refuse ownership, forget to follow up, depersonalize the situation (what? You mean there was a ‘victim’?), etc, are very strong.
So this happens. I agree that the media are playing this in a perverse way. The only parallel I see with the Church scandals is that football is a secular religion. But the far stronger parallel is to a criminal enterprise. I know it’s off-topic to mention global warming but Penn State has been embroiled in another controversy about alleged academic malfeasance and whitewashing; this has prompted accusations that the school is more interested in protecting its grant funding flow than the integrity of its science. At a certain point one wonders if it is a school with some criminally negligent managers, or a criminal enterprise using a school as a front for its enrichment.
Starless on November 12, 2011 at 9:45 am said:
I’d like to clarify that I hadn’t meant to pick on football-as-football before. We could be talking about competitive underwater basket weaving and it would be the same if competitive underwater basket weaving brought in, and just as importantly cost, as much money for a university. It’s the need to feed a beast which has very little to do with the core mission of the organization which can twist the values of someone to the point where they lose sight of how to act in an ethical, moral, and fundamentally sympathetic manner.
In a more mundane, less grave way we can see this in things like grade inflation and abhorrent graduation rates. Costs rise and university (what used to be) core curriculum subjects are cut, yet football programs seem to always have plenty of money. In my own state, the major university head football coach has a contract for a salary of $1.2 million a year, yet they have a 4-year graduation rate of less than 50 percent. Why aren’t taxpayers, students, and students’ parents up in arms over these two incongruous facts? I have yet to figure that out for certain but my guess is that most have bought into the arguments that the football program brings in a huge amount of money (though, funnily enough, you don’t hear about the cost of the program–like the nearly $300 million stadium they had to have–nearly as often) and that there’s only so much they can do to control students’ academic performance. IOW, there’s been a tacit agreement to cop-out on fulfilling the university’s most basic ethical, yet most difficult and problematic, responsibility in order to keep the Beast alive and well fed.
At a state land grant research university, you could also swap out research programs for the football program and see a similar situation.
jefferson101 on November 12, 2011 at 9:32 pm said:
It could be asked if it is time to start picking on football-as-football yet. The NCAA variety, that is.
I’m not the country’s biggest College Football fan, but I’m probably somewhere in the third standard deviation to the right of the bell curve. Be that as it may, there comes a point at which you look at what is going on and start to wonder.
I have been getting suspicious that something needed to be done for a good long while. Even before this one, I had pretty much concluded that there was way too much money in NCAA sports, not to mention way too much corruption and influence peddling.
Tack this one onto the scale, and one can see just how far they will go to preserve their cash cow. Can this system be saved, and does it deserve to be?
Starless on November 13, 2011 at 8:53 am said:
The twisted values in university athletics is merely a symptom of a much bigger problem: the university system is broken. Take all of the Sandusky cover-up, OWS, education bubble, and abysmal graduation rate stuff, put it all together and I think you see a system which doesn’t need reform (and oh how they love to talk about Education Reform!) but needs a total tear down and rebuild. It’s funny, the Left likes to go on and on about how the bloated, moribund System is fundamentally corrupt and broken and the Right is evil because it insists on preserving that System, yet they refuse to see how their own sacred university system has turned into a giant self-perpetuating scam and how they continually, and slavishly, circle the wagons to preserve that scam.
Trying to drag the Catholic church’s problems, problems which are similar in only the most superficial ways, into this particular unseemly episode is just another ham-fisted way of trying to deflect their culpability somewhere else.
tree hugging sister on November 12, 2011 at 8:57 am said:
Another non-parallel with the Catholic Church is the concept of forgiveness and absolution. By isolating the sinner, he would work toward redemption and atonement.
Those concepts have no meaning at Penn State. They are so isolated in their twisted world, the only “tones” they venerate are the sound of more lucre in the pot and cheers in the ears.
Anybody bother to find that ten year old yet…?
I just have to keep asking. It so burns my ass.
Wonderful, cogent piece, Dan. As always.
Done Gone Galt on November 12, 2011 at 9:52 am said:
The Great Blue Marble
Cities, cultures, Industries, Nations, Tribes
Intricately, connected human snowflakes
Crystal Beauty Incarnate
Splintering to swords
While Angels and hermits weep
Anthony Barca on November 19, 2011 at 4:39 pm said:
To: Dan Collins,
“Born in Boston, grew up in Wisconsin. Dartmouth undergrad, Virginia for Masters, did Ph.D. work at Iowa” – This excerpt from your bio means that you lived in MA, WI, NH, VA and IA. As a conservative Roman Catholic, how did you find a parish that was more conservative politically, economically, religiously and socially than the majority of Catholic parishes in the USA? I have lived in CT for 30 years and grew up in NYC. As a conservative, I’m tired of hearing priests and petitioning congregants promulgating social justice instead of equal justice, referring to illegal aliens as undocumented workers and migrants, banning capital punishment completely, allowing exceptions to abortion and allowing gays to marry and adopt children. As you know, 54% of Roman Catholics voted for Obama. How did you find that conservative parish or did you just grin and bear it?
Joy McCann on November 19, 2011 at 4:51 pm said:
Yes–for a Roman Catholic parish to be against capital punishment would be contrary to all Church teachings . . . oh, wait . . .
jefferson101 on November 19, 2011 at 8:09 pm said:
The one thing that I don’t get is that a lot of Catholics seem to be on the whole “Social Justice” bandwagon to the point where they will vote for the Pro-Abortion candidate.
As I regularly note, I’m not Catholic, but that one puzzles me mightily. I can generally understand the thought process that leads to the Social Justice positions even if I don’t agree with much of it. But the Abortion part? I’m totally lost on that one.
Dan Collins on November 19, 2011 at 8:31 pm said:
There is nothing to say on that score, but that it is grotesque, and that those people who so profess understand virtually nothing of their religion. Most of those are “ethnic” Catholics, who would regard their religion the way that most of us regard the accident of our Irishness, Italianity, or whatever.
It is a horrible ignorance.
Joy McCann on November 20, 2011 at 7:09 pm said:
Well, I’m sure that for some who aren’t in favor of publicly funding abortion–but flirt with the “pro-choice” position–the rationale is that it’s simply a single libertarian position within a larger “Christ-like” ethos. But of course it’s nonsense, since these people are such statists WRT most of their other political views.
Dan Collins on November 19, 2011 at 5:11 pm said:
I don’t know whether my parish priest is exactly conservative. For one thing, he grew up in Boston. But on the other hand, he’s very serious about Church teaching, and he leaves politics at the door. So, we’ve managed to get along.
I don’t think he reads my blog posts.
Enoch_Root on November 20, 2011 at 9:54 am said:
Anthony – what Catherine of Sienna, John of the Cross, Augustine, and all the rest of the Saints have stated is imperative: perseverance is the key. Find a parish with a priest who minds the magisterial teachings. Judas has been with us since the beginning. And he is at one time in vogue and at another ignored. Like any heresy that the Church has had to do battle with, Social Justice will go by the wayside. But the Devil rejoices when Catholics of Properly formed Christian Conscience become tired and give up. My advice to you: find a parish whose shepherd knows his place and the teachings of our beautiful faith. I am praying for you to have fortitude. I have been there: found such a parish after 4 of them in the last 6 years.
serr8d on November 20, 2011 at 12:19 am said:
Taking the Sandusky – Penn State mess and conflating that with the problems some Catholic priests have is, as Ms. McCann said earlier, apples and oranges (I just stole the line without the context!). Sandusky wasn’t forced to celibacy; there’s no clause in college coaching that restricts his sexuality (one of the contributing-to-this-problem issues the Catholic church could easily fix, if only they would do so). Sandusky is a sick, rotten man, a criminal, period. Not that priests who commit crimes with children aren’t, but lumping these all together at this juncture is simply a thinly-nuanced attack on Catholics.
As was, worse so, mentioning Cain and Perry in the same post-title, as did that ‘Ordinary Gentleman’.
«spit»
Joy McCann on November 20, 2011 at 7:23 pm said:
In fairness, he did mean it more in a meditative way, and apparently the politicians he picked out of air were the ones who were on his mind because of the debates. And he did discuss Clinton extensively in the post. So, having heard his explanation, I don’t believe Todd was slagging on Republicans, despite his post title.
The Roman Catholic tradition of having its priests be celibate is not “forced,” and it is not a doctrine. It’s a Church discipline, and this is why we are in full communion with some of the Eastern Orthodox churches whose priests do marry.
It will be interesting to see whether the Church reconsiders this tradition in light of the priest-shortage, but at this point it has learned that there are people who imagine themselves to be immune from sexual temptation because they are not attracted to women (gays and pedophiles), and that a man must know why he feels he can answer this challenge—and must see that the temptation might occur in different contexts for him than it does for his friends.
The Church should hold on to as many of its traditions as it can; it’s a harbor for so many in a rapidly changing world. But I’m sure it will consider changing the celibacy requirement if the priest shortage becomes too much more severe.
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