The many critics of my article on Joe Paterno proved that some people in our culture, thank God, have not become “non-judgmental.” Some still have a robust moral sense. Same for most sportswriters I have read or heard, who seem to have taken the same tack as my critics, impugning as with one voice Joe Paterno’s moral legacy. At the same time, this readiness to diminish the classic greatness of Joe Paterno’s moralresponsibility exposes the dangers at the opposite extreme.
My critics are correct on one small point: I did choose not to assess whether Coach Paterno was guilty of moral fault. Any such assessment is morally corrupting, and for four reasons. First, Americans react with horror to anything smacking of child abuse, and properly so. But we have recently experienced massive rushes to judgment that turned out to have been calumnious. We have seen psychologists in court misuse “repressed memories” to falsely accuse child-care providers of molesting tots over a long period of time. What an agony for those falsely accused — and later acquitted, too late to get their reputations wholly cleansed.
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Second, we all went through the press stampede to condemn the young men of the lacrosse team at Duke for a deed they did not commit. It took months for the courts to vindicate these men’s innocence. Lesson: Those who falsely accuse athletes frequently go unchallenged for a very long time.
Third, just after my column appeared, my brother sent me Robert Louis Stevenson’s acrid rebuke to the Reverend Hyde, who brandished in a public letter a string of unproven allegations of moral sins by Damien the Leper, who had volunteered to live his whole life on an isolated island, to care alone for lepers avoided by the whole rest of the world. Stevenson had publicly praised Damien’s moral greatness.
Stevenson chose neither to deny nor to argue against Hyde’s allegations. Even if all these accusations are correct in every detail, Stevenson retorted, such was the moral greatness of Damien’s self-sacrifice that retailing his sins in public merely diminished the moral standing of those who did so, including the insufferable Reverend Hyde:
I will suppose — and God forgive me for supposing it — that Damien faltered and stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the horror of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease, he, who was doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter of his priestly oath — he, who was so much a better man than either you or me, who did what we have never dreamed of daring — he too tasted of our common frailty. “O, Iago, the pity of it!” The least tender should be moved to tears; the most incredulous to prayer. And all that you could do was to pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage! [Who published it.]
Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your own heart? I will try yet once again to make it clearer. You had a father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant brought it to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate of your emotional maturity when I suppose you would regret the circumstance? That you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed the author of your days? And that the last thing you would do would be to publish it in the religious press? Well, the man who tried to do what Damien did, is my father . . . and he was your father too, if God had given you grace to see it.
Fourth, the forum for defending moral innocence lies before God alone, who reads all consciences limpidly. And into that forum no other of us has a right to intrude. By contrast, a public forum for “moral responsibility” does not exist. There is no court for it. There are no rules for it. But the so-called court of public opinion does exist, and as far as I can detect, its function is to squeeze from the amorphous feeling “somebody should have done more to stop this” (because such things shouldn’t happen amongst human beings, even though they actually do occur in monstrously disturbing numbers throughout the country) — its function is to squeeze this feeling into an accusation against somebody.
What happened to Paterno is what happens when people turn from loving, worshipping & serving the one true God, Jesus, to imagine that they ARE God. Our Founders promised this would certainly be fatal for our nation.
Joe Paterno this-Joe Paterno that -- where is the DA who declined to prosecute in 1998 (who disappeared without a trace, save for a drowned hard-drive) and why did the current sitting Governor of Pennsylvania slow-walk the investigation while he was AG (only after he was elected did the investigarive team go from 1 state trooper to 8 - if he was still AG we wouldn't kmow any of this and Paterno would have died with his rep intact). Those are the two issues that you ought to wonder about - all of the rest is slight-of-hand.
Are you accusing the author of pederasty because he *dares* to defend an innocent, sweet, Godly and tragically DECEASED old man? What has one to do with the other???
So much froth, so little substance - I see a bunch of people who are doing nothing but parrot the stories that have been sold by the drive-bys for the last three months and froth without substance is all that I see. You see anyone defending Paterno as throwing froth themselves. I have some substance to back up what I say, though...
I commend you for your defense of Mr. Paterno, since in it, among other things, you get to one of the hearts of the matter, the mythology of who controlled Penn State, and it wasn't the demi-god Joe Paterno. Secondly, you point out very well that most of the judgments made on both sides of the issue are coming from the world that people live in as opposed to what the fact in the case are. Certainly the national sports media is speaking from it's world, and the reason why Joe Paterno was who he was was simply the reality that he was from a different place with a different set of beliefs than they are.
The problem you have is this: The media message is set in stone. Unless there is a tape saying that Mr. Paterno did not hear the words 'child sexual abuse' or 'child rape', from Mr. McCreary, he will forever be linked as one who knew about Sandusky and did nothing about it that mattered; i.e. he was an enabler of his behavior. And frankly, until the trial we will not know for a fact he wasn't an enabler, because the record is not clear about what was said.
I would think it proves again another issue for our society as well. If there is no God who knows and makes judgments, then there is no real justice, and so people substitute their own. For so many people in our country, and in our liberal-dominated institutions they have no real conception of what is justice, Justice is simply what they think is right based on their limited knowledge and limited vision of reality, Therefore every sexual event is a crime unless it is considered to be ok in their world-view, or done in circumstances that excuses it.
First rules of holes. When you're in one, stop digging.
That Nowak appears to be analogizing St. Damien of Molokai to St. Joe of Happy Valley suggests a serious loss of perspective. Ministering to lepers in the 19th century can and should earn a lot more defense than ministering to offensive linemen and alumni donors.
"[W]e know now that Coach Paterno later grieved that he might have done more than he did do. I cannot think what that would have been..."
Here's one. Paterno could have asked McQueary, "little boy? shower? over the line? What exactly do you mean?"
Try this thought experiment. Suppose McQueary had reported the same thing, the same way but with this added morsel of information. "Coach, the little boy I saw Sandusky going over the line with in the shower last night was your nine year old grandson."
It is certain that Paterno's old fashioned traditional Catholic sexual mores would not have had him as incurious for details if that had been the case. He certainly would not have turned it over to the cops and wiped his hands of it forever.
But because it was somebody else's kid, Paterno did not follow up because he did not want to know. His reaction was that of the eternal bureaucrat -- get this stinker off my desk and fast.
You might want explicit details of what Jerry Sandusky was doing in the shower with a little boy, but Joe Paterno did not. He referred the matter to people who were supposed to have known how to deal with it.
If it had been his grandson, he could have gotten the kid's version of events. If he hadn't liked what he heard, we'd probably be debating whether he was right to stick up for Sue when she was on trial for murdering Sandusky.
School administration was in charge of the local LEOs... and the same people who worked for Children & Youth Services were the very same who sat as senior staff on Second Mile. They were informed, and Paterno was told they elected to do nothing except bar Sandusky from bringing kids on campus.
"He referred the matter to people who were supposed to have known how to deal with it."
In other words, he passed the buck. He didn't report obvious criminal behavior to law enforcement. Instead, he chose to pass the buck -- and he got caught.
Just because you refuse to believe that University Park Police Services is a fully-functional police force doesn't make it false.
If you report a crime to the police commissioner (which is effectively what Gary Schultz was at University Park) of a town, do you not expect that the matter will receive the full attention of the police? If you're subsequently told that the matter was looked at and it was determined that there was no legal action to be taken, do you not assume that the police were active in the investigation?
Joe Paterno did not expect to see an investigation taking place - not because he expected it to be quashed - but because police investigations are typically handled quietly.
I'm sorry, but can you explain how someone, anyone, could report something like that to the authorities and then just forget about it? No effort to find out what the result was, no follow up with the authorities or with Mcquery or with Sandusky? How does someone simply tell his boss, "Oh by the way, Mike McQuery told me that my old friend Jerry was molesting a little boy in the showers. Would you look into that?" and then simply put it out of his mind? LeeHarvey, could YOU do that?
Who says Paterno just reported it and forgot about it? Tim Curley testified to the Grand Jury that when University President Graham Spanier signed off on the plan to bar Sandusky from bringing kids on campus to prevent any further 'misunderstandings', he notified Paterno and McQueary that the University administration had addressed the matter. You have to assume either gross incompetence (which in hindsight would have been reasonable) or willful coverup to believe that people who were supposed to have known better - both in the University and in Second Mile - would have handled it improperly.
...and please, stop calling Sandusky Paterno's friend. No one who actually knows either man has said that they were anything resembling friends. They had a professional relationship until the mid 1990s, but that relationship going south was part of what led Paterno to push Sandusky out the door.
Obvious to whom? Paterno was not the witness. He advised the witness to report to the proper university officials, including the man with organizational oversight of the university police force. That was exactly the right thing to do, legally and morally.
As for anything being obvious in this particular incident, where's your basis for that argument? What McQueary believed he saw, he saw through a reflection in a mirror. What he told Paterno was vague at best. Often overlooked here is that two highly respected university officials listened to McQueary, met with Sandusky and concluded no crime had been committed. Plus, there is no known victim in this particular incident, at least not known to the prosecution. It has been suggested by Sandusky's attorney that Victim #2 will testify for the defense. It is hardly "obvious" that a crime was even committed in this particular instance.
I think it is worth noting that the charges in the case of Victim #2 are likely to be dropped for lack of a victim. The charges against Curley and Schultz are probably going to be dropped too. That's not to say that Sandusky is innocent in this instance or that McQueary was lying. It does suggest that the AG brought them into the mix because, as a political animal, she sought the publicity associated with bringing Penn State into it even though her case was weak. However, what shouldn't be forgotten is that without Paterno's actions, those charges would have never been brought in the first place.
There are two points of irony in this matter. The first is that Paterno is assumed to have been fired for not doing more by the university that did nothing at all (and had he lived, would have testified against). The second is that Paterno has been judged by the self righteous in the media (what an oxymoron!) and those whose minds they control who have the very benefit of hindsight that Paterno said that had he had it, he would have done more.
William F. Buckley would have banned Novak from National Review for writing an article that said, basically, a great football coach ignored a felony against a child.
I expect such garbage from "Atlantic" magazine. This is NRO and the flagship of the conservative moral voice.
I have struggled to make sense of all of this. In the end, I still believe that Paternoster is guilty of moral cowardice. He simply did not want to confront that he might have harbored a monster under his wing for 40 years. Like Pontius Pilate he washed his hands of it and kicked it upstairs. I don't this it would have been meddling to ask the administration what the outcome of the investigation was. How could he not ask? I also find it hard to believe that no one suspected anything about this man for 40 years
The only error in your tremendously commendable article relates to Joe "going to the outside (local) police," inasmuch as the PSU Campus Police were, and are, the only force legally empowered to deal with crime on the PSU campus, and any report to them would result in the reporter being referred back to the Campus Police. On a broader note, I rode in the funeral cortege for Paterno, and along the five-mile plus route from church to cemetery, the streets and roadways were packed on both sides with throngs of people, some in tears, some others holding up signs saying, "Thanks for Everything, Joe" and "We Love You, Joe." My point is that these were the people who knew him, not the jackals in the sports media and elsewhere, including some of those who, I'm sure, will cynically, if not sneeringly, comment here about Paterno never telling dirty jokes and that none were ever told in his presence. I've known Joe since our days at Brooklyn Prep, and even back then I never heard him use drop the "F" bomb, nor did anyone else. Alas, what we have here, I fear, is not primarily "a failure to communicate," but rather a case in point of the adage that moral midgets can only grow by cutting off the legs of giants.
