For the past ten years or more various pedo priests have emerged in the news. Seems like at least one or two pop up every year. The facts are pretty much similar. Usually a stream of young boys and the abuse went on for decades. Many times there is evidence of a cover up by local parish church officials.
I’d gotten a little numbed and jaded to the story. It never seems to end. Every year there’s always a new pedo priest that buggered some boys. The press would report the story for a few weeks and it quietly died. The cops drag the priest off to jail and prosecute. The church is never really held accountable. I feel bad for the victims but it gets mind numbing after awhile. How many more pedo priests are out there? Hundreds? Thousands?
The Penn state thing seems to have exploded. The facts are pretty much the same except it’s a coach and not a priest. A college cover up instead of the worlds biggest organized religion.
Why has this story captured so much attention? Why are the politicians jumping in? There’s wild talk about stopping the football team. The schools reputation is ruined forever. Lots of hyperbole. This will drag on at least a year or more.
Is a pedo coach any worse then a pedo priest? Is the betrayal of a child’s innocence somehow worse when it’s a college coach?
Well, I’m not sure that the Catholic Church scandal didn’t “explode” a good deal in its own right - priests have been indicted, subpoenaed and so on. However, I do agree there’s a qualitative difference here: Penn State doesn’t have nearly the political or cultural clout of the Catholic Church, which makes it possible for the top leadership to be brought down as soon as powerful players (in this case, the Board of Trustees) get sufficiently outraged. Further, Penn State has a measure of transparency built in. Not as much as one might like, but it’s ultimately accountable to the State of Pennsylvania, and thus to the public.
The Catholic Church has a lot of people within its institutions (senior bishops, cardinals, and the Pope) who are difficult or impossible to remove, and those internal institutions don’t have a strong tradition of public accountability or transparency. If the Trustees hadn’t taken strong action at Penn State, the state legislature might have stepped in - for that matter, it still might. But there’s a limit to the pressure that can be brought to bear on the Church.
The pedophile priest scandal did explode, and was as big as Penn State, but that was over a decade ago. It’s just old hat now.
And some big players were brought down - Bernie Law was once thought to be a candidate for the first Pope from the United States - now he turns the lights off at some church in Rome.
This. The story did explode in 2002, IIRC, but further iterations of the same scandal are treated as old news by the media, while the Penn State scandal is an entirely new story. It may involve the same crime, but that’s all the commonality.
The Catholic Church scandal was an enormous story. It was much, much bigger than the Penn State thing is ever going to be. The priest scandal happened first, and it involved the abuse of tens of thousands of kids in the U.S. and Europe. The Penn State abuses involved one person and a couple of others who either looked the other way or covered it up, and nobody outside of the U.S. really cares about college football (or football at all, in fact). It may seem different because there was no Twitter or Facebook when that scandal broke, but it was a bigger deal at the time.
I bolded the part that sums up what I was trying to say.
The original church scandal was ten years ago. But every year since another pedo priest crawls out from under a rock. They are still finding abuse that happened thirty or forty years ago. These more recent cases don’t get the same press attention as the original scandal.
Yes - the Boston archdiocese paid out $85 million in one settlement, and ISTR there have been others.
I misremembered a bit about Law - he resigned, though speculation was rampant that the Vatican had asked him to. They did give him a sinecure in Rome, possibly so he wouldn’t face criminal charges in the US. Certainly he was a lot guiltier of anything that Paterno is - Law knew priests were committing crimes, over & over, and he just kept sending them for counseling and then transferring them to new parishes.
Right, because it’s all 30 year old cases. There’s no surprise that some of the old cases are still coming to light, and they aren’t particularly shocking (and damn, does it suck to write that sentence).
The RC church claims to have cleaned up their act and no longer tolerates such behavior. They’ve got new guidelines in place that crimes must be reported to the police, etc. If recent cases of pedophile priests, being protected by their superiors, came to light, I predict that would make current coverage of the PSU story look like reporting on the opening of a new Pottery Barn.
Because one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
Sandusky is seen as an abberation, and the situation around him is utterly intolerable to almost anyone with any influence on Penn State. Pedophile priests are seen as an enduring social problem. Complaints about them go back at least to Voltaire, and I cannot remember a time when there weren’t jokes about nuns dressing up as altar boys to get laid. The Church still has its defenders in the matter who compare priests to people in other professions and assert that the Church has done as much as any institution to combat this problem. The Penn State scandal is seen as something that utterly should not happen; pedophile priests are seen as a fact of life.
The Bishop Finn/Shawn Ratigan affair suggests that improvement has not been fully implemented and guidelines have not been as effective as hoped. Finn and Ratigan have been indicted for failure to report to police and possession of child pornography, repsectively. While the story generates buzz – and controversy – in the Kansas City area, I doubt it’s had the type of national impact you’ve predicted. There seems to be a significant contingent of Catholics (and possibly others) who feel that pursuing these charges is tantamount to a witch hunt.
I perceive a large degree of inertia in the Catholic Church on this matter. Among the factors involved are the Church’s size and history, and in my observation a relutance of some Catholics to support the sometimes drastic measures that meaningful change requires.
And I remember the jokes we made to (and about) my friends in Catholic school in the old days. That being said, I think you are way off base if you’re saying the RCC scandal was anything other than an enormous shock. There were definitely always rumors about priests touching children and those jokes came from somewhere, but I don’t think a lot of people would have imagined that the RCC was covering up tens of thousands of cases and was simply shuffling abusive priests from one town to another to keep it all quiet. It may be old hat at this point, but the Penn State scandal eventually will be, too- and it’ll happen a lot faster. The Penn State scandal appears to be one child molester and a couple of people who look the other way or didn’t do as much as they could have to stop him. The church scandal involved I-don’t-know-how-many priests and was known to the guy who is now the Pope. The crimes are similar and their effects on the reputation of people who were trusted is similar. Their depth, extent, and scope are not similar at all, and the fallout really won’t be either.
The media likes it because there’s a big name tied to the story. Joe Paterno.
Whereas the priest story was always some random priest from some random church.
Call it a difference in perspective. I’ve thought this for as long as I can remember…well, at least back into the 1980s. The flap you’re referring to was just an intensification of things that had been happening, quite literally, for centuries. It may have shocked some people; I’m sorry to say that it didn’t shock me, though the *degree *of the problem was probably greater than anyone had ever said out loud. I DO remember mothers telling me out loud that they NEVER let their boys be altar boys. These were women with grown children back in the 1990s. They knew.
Back in the 50s and 60s , I would hear church people talking about priests "doing thing to kids’ It was thought of as a peccadillo and never followed up . Somehow it was thought of as a rite of growing up Catholic and not all that harmful.
One difference is that there are a lot of Catholics, many of them with a vested interest in downplaying the scandal. How many people are vested in Penn State in that same way?
True. I’ve written on these boards that Penn State has effectively been purged by the firing of four people, none of whom was ever widely believed to have dominion to bind anyone’s immortal soul (snarky comments about Paterno adoration nonwithstanding). Similar claims could not be made about the Latin church; the sprawl of authority is just too big.