Penn State-Catholic Church comparison

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trmyjs

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There’s a photo some “friends” have posted on Facebook that reads, “If you are going to punish an entire football team for the action of a few perverts… then you gotta lot of work to do with the Catholic Church.”

How do I defend this?
 
That’s an interesting question. Maybe if the Vatican were as swift and severe in it’s punishment of conspiratorial bishops as the NCAA is of conspiratorial college administrators, things wouldn’t have gotten this bad.
 
Good grief.
Tell them that the Catholic Church has been busy doing just that.
 
trmyjs said:
There’s a photo some “friends” have posted on Facebook that reads, “If you are going to punish an entire football team for the action of a few perverts… then you gotta lot of work to do with the Catholic Church.”

How do I defend this?
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When someone (anyone) makes a statement that is so vague, you allow them the opportunity to elaborate. Their response will be surely be fallacious. Then bust them on their explanation of their aforementioned accusation of Holy Mother Church.

In brief, don’t focus on “…then you gotta lot of work to do with the Catholic Church.” focus on their explanation of it.
 
Luckily there isn’t anyone in the world that they could be referring to with the “then you got a lot of work to do”.

Who has a lot of work to do? Who has the power to give harsh punishments to the Catholic Church? No one.

The problem was that the Bishops have a lot of power over their diocese, which has actually been a blessing overall to the Church throughout history. But, when you get bad Bishops it’s not good.

Do dozens or even hundreds of bad Bishops warrant dramatically changing the power granted to the 3,000 Bishops of the world? Not in the eyes of the Vatican. And that’s why not much could be done efficaciously in the short term.

Thankfully, it’s now been the long term since the sex abuse crisis in the 60s and 70s. And in all that time a lot of Bishops have been replaced. And John Paul the Great and Benedict XVI have done a very good job in picking good Bishops to replace them.
 
There is something fishy about this whole Penn State Scandal. From the very start I was suspicious of the way the media handled it. When Louis Freeh was brought in, then I became even more suspicious. The biggest red flag for me was the fact that there is a huge discrepancy between McQ’s statements in the Grand Jury Presentment and his statements under oath in the Perjury Hearing Transcript. If you want to read a very cool, unbiased take on this “scandal” then I would recommend starting with Barry Bozeman’s excellent article, “PSU and Paterno NOT Guilty - McQueary Testimony Proves It.” at opednews.com/articles/PSU-and-Paterno-Not-Guilty-by-Barry-Bozeman-120707-503.html. Bozeman comes to the conclusion that, “the entire media narrative on this was wrong from the beginning in Nov of 2011. Mike McQueary did not see anal rape and report it. He glanced for two seconds after visualizing that he was going to see sex between adults. His report to Joe Paterno, the AD and VP was confused and muddled and a great institution and coach have been unfairly maligned as a result.” And most ironically, Sandusky was NOT convicted on Count 7 (Deviate Sexual Intercourse), the very thing that started the whole media firestorm and put Paterno in the crosshairs.

It is almost as if this “Penn State Scandal” is a test case for taking down the ultimate prize.
 
Well first of all Louis Freeh was hired by the Penn State board of trustees, not the media. Secondly, he and his team interviewed over 400 people at the university, from highly placed administrators down to custodians. They also sifted through more than three and a half million emails and memos. I think I would tend to trust his findings.
 
Crescentinus said:
Good grief.
Tell them that the Catholic Church has been busy doing just that.
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I agree with this. My problem isn’t with the Freeh report, or any of the punishments except the vacating of wins. Taking those games away from the athletes who earned them, without any proof that they somehow cheated is plain wrong. An analogy with the Catholic Church would be something along the lines of saying that because of the abuses and cover-ups, all Catholic baptisms since (pick a date) are vacated. Ridiculous!

Jon
 
The bulk of the cases in the Catholic Church occurred 20+ years ago. At that time, what the Church did was accepted, standard practice. You sent people for counseling, trusted they were rehabilitated then sent them somewhere else. This wasn’t how the Church handled it; this was how everyone handled it. In the wake of the scandal, the Church has altered Her policies and procedures and is now one of, if not the most stringent organization in the US when it comes to handling sexual abuse cases.

With PSU, what Sandusky did allegedly only came to light 14-15 years ago at a time when everyone knew that counseling and rehabilitation weren’t the proper course of action. Paterno sought to protect the school’s image and his reputation instead of looking out for the welfare of Sandusky’s victims. He did the exact thing that the Catholic Church was accused of, although he and the rest of the administration did it with the full knowledge of the fact that Sandusky should have been turned over to the authorities instead.

In other words, in one case you have an organization doing what contemporary common practice said was right (regardless of how wrong we now know it was), versus and organization doing what it absolutely knew was wrong, abetting that activity by allowing a rapist to set up camps for under-privileged kids, and then covering the whole thing up for 15 years, all for personal and monetary gain.
 
What happened at Penn State was truly horrible. And these punishments are severe. But who is being punished? Players and coaches who were not even there and had nothing to do with it.

Ask your friends for the logic of punishing people who are totally innocent. And if he has a coworker who commits a crime shouldn’t he bepunished also?
 
Crescentinus said:
Good grief.
Tell them that the Catholic Church has been busy doing just that.
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Exactly. Have they missed all the cases and law suits over the past decade? You can’t compare Penn State to the whole Catholic Church, the better analogy would be to compare Penn State to one diocese, say the Philadelphia Diocese that had a court ruling the same day as the Sandusky verdict. College Football as a whole wasn’t punished, neither has the whole Catholic Church. There are great people at Penn State that had nothing to do with the cover up or Sandusky. Same as there are some really, really great priests and Catholics in the Catholic Church that would never ever think of harming a child, just as there are former college football coaches that would never think to harm a child. Being a priest does not automatically make a pedophile, being a college football coach does not automatically make a pedophile. Pedophiles are sick individuals, found in every walk of life and every occupation, every neighborhood.

That’s what you tell them.
 
PatriceA said:
Exactly. Have they missed all the cases and law suits over the past decade? You can’t compare Penn State to the whole Catholic Church, the better analogy would be to compare Penn State to one diocese, say the Philadelphia Diocese that had a court ruling the same day as the Sandusky verdict. College Football as a whole wasn’t punished, neither has the whole Catholic Church. There are great people at Penn State that had nothing to do with the cover up or Sandusky. Same as there are some really, really great priests and Catholics in the Catholic Church that would never ever think of harming a child, just as there are former college football coaches that would never think to harm a child. Being a priest does not automatically make a pedophile, being a college football coach does not automatically make a pedophile. Pedophiles are sick individuals, found in every walk of life and every occupation, every neighborhood.

That’s what you tell them.
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Very well said.
 
trmyjs said:
There’s a photo some “friends” have posted on Facebook that reads, “If you are going to punish an entire football team for the action of a few perverts… then you gotta lot of work to do with the Catholic Church.”

How do I defend this?
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You could say, “Why should an entire football team be punished because of 1 pervert?”

Bonus info:
94% of cases are pre-1990, and most of those are from the 1960s and 1970s.
New accusations are shrinking, but media highlights old accusations
 
You could say, “Why should an entire football team be punished because of 1 pervert?”
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Because a very strong, compelling and decisive message needs to be sent to every other college administrator in the country, coaches and players, and the rest of us too.

Children are more important than football.

One child is more important than every football team in the entire country, and all the games they’ve played since the beginning of time.

You want strong authoritative moral clarity? You’re getting it from the NCAA. I say bravo!

The fundamental problem in these kinds of cases is that many people, including many in authority, get swept up in a deep dark fog of endless rationalization, and only determined decisive action will wake folks up, restore their clarity, and force them to pay attention to something other than their own personal limited interest.
 
eightandsand said:
His report to Joe Paterno, the AD and VP was confused and muddled and a great institution and coach have been unfairly maligned as a result."
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Frankly, I don’t see why Paterno is being attacked so much. As you point out, it is unclear what McQueary told Paterno as his story changed. But from Paterno, the case was sent to Gary Schultz - who was not only the finance guy, but - in case you didn’t read it - the head of campus police. I have yet to see any actual evidence of Paterno engaging in cover-up of pedophilia. The 1998 case was dropped by civil police, even according to the Freeh report. 2001 had Schultz involved. Yet people seem to treat Paterno as if he were Dirty Harry and should have run an investigation contrary to the one by police.

If someone knows precisely times and dates or some legal proof that Paterno covered up a crime, I hope that person will share that information here.
 
Typist said:
Because a very strong, compelling and decisive message needs to be sent to every other college administrator in the country, coaches and players, and the rest of us too.
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By that logic, you should be in jail because your fellow Americans have committed crimes. But penalizing the actual culprits would have sent a fine message if you ask me.
 
MarcoPolo said:
By that logic, you should be in jail because your fellow Americans have committed crimes. But penalizing the actual culprits would have sent a fine message if you ask me.
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Ok, thank you for your view. It is a reasonable one.

I reacted strongly because my own upbringing was both football and Catholic based. I played a lot of football as a child and teen, and learned more from the coaches than the priests frankly.

From that viewpoint, the values taught to me by that experience, the ideal outcome would have been…

That the entire Penn State football team walked out of the program voluntarily, proudly, and loudly, refusing to be part of any enterprise that was led by authorities that are so confused. What a glory it would have been to see all of them throw down their helmets and walk off, and refuse to play for Penn State again.

But that didn’t happen. The young players don’t quite get it yet.

And so the NCAA is attempting to provide the missing instruction by the means at it’s disposal.
 
Typist said:
That the entire Penn State football team walked out of the program voluntarily, proudly, and loudly, refusing to be part of any enterprise that was led by authorities that are so confused. What a glory it would have been to see all of them throw down their helmets and walk off, and refuse to play for Penn State again.

But that didn’t happen. The young players don’t quite get it yet.

And so the NCAA is attempting to provide the missing instruction by the means at it’s disposal.
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If they think that the culprits were Sandusky and maybe Schultz or the prez or whoever—who are gone—then they would just be walking out on O’Brien and the fans at this point, no?
 
MarcoPolo said:
If they think that the culprits were Sandusky and maybe Schultz or the prez or whoever—who are gone—then they would just be walking out on O’Brien and the fans at this point, no?
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In my respectful opinion, you’re over thinking it.

Kids are getting raped all over the country. The time for fine point intellectualism is over, and the time for action is here.

Perhaps O’Brien and the fans could walk away from Penn State football too? Take all that money and build a children’s hospital. Decisive action, that’s what we need.

It could be a fantastic message to send the entire country, and would restore the moral example that Paterno long tried to teach.
 
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