Here in part is how I framed my suspicions about a conspiracy among Penn State officials when Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant coach of the storied Penn State Nittany Lions, was arrested last November on charges of sexually abusing little boys:
Sandusky… used a group home he founded for troubled boys as a plucking ground for his pedophile pleasure…
All of the top officials associated with the team/university, most notably 84-year-old Head Coach Joe Paterno, allegedly knew about this abuse almost from the outset, but decided not to report it to the police… [A]ll of them were clearly involved in a conspiracy to cover-up the ongoing sexual abuse of little boys…
[I]nstead 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. 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 … men) who knew about this abuse and did nothing. Their motivation of course was to protect the big-money enterprise Penn State football has become.
I know many will consider it punishment enough that Paterno is resigning in disgrace… [But] 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 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, prosecutors should have him arrested too.
(“Penn State’s Catholic Church Problem,” The iPINIONS Journal, November 10, 2011)
Well, you can just imagine the hate mail I got for daring to write so irreverently about Paterno who was revered as a god – not just by people associated with Penn State, but by rabid fans of college football nationwide.
In addition to the predictable fusillade of racial epithets, almost all of them asserted that I had no standing to criticize Penn State: which I suppose means that one has to be a Catholic to criticize child-sex abuse in the Catholic Church…? Apropos of which, none of my e-mail abusers amused me quite like the few (presumably devout Catholics attending this predominantly Catholic state university) who defended Paterno by insisting that “he is even more revered here than the Pope.”
At any rate, I knew it was only a matter of time before my suspicions would be vindicated. Today they were. Specifically, just hours ago former FBI director Louis Freeh issued his seminal report on this scandal, which the Associated Press sums up as follows:
The Freeh Group’s report issued Thursday said that in order to avoid bad publicity, president Graham Spanier, football coach Joe Paterno, athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz ‘repeatedly concealed critical facts.’
The report says the men ‘failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade.’
As I indicated in my November 10 commentary cited above, I fully expect the three stooges (Spanier, Curley, and Schultz) to join Sandusky in prison where he is currently awaiting sentencing. He was convicted last month on 45 counts of child-sex abuse ranging from terrorizing little boys in his charge to anally raping them repeatedly over many years. He’s facing 60 to 442 years.
Of course Paterno escaped justice in this life when he passed away in January – leaving behind a legacy of nothing but shame, shame, shame. But if there is a God, Paterno must be catching a hell of a lot of heat in the afterlife.
Related commentaries:
Penn State’s … problem
Justice for victims…