Quote of the Day (Jonathan Mahler, on Joe Paterno, ‘The Holy See of Happy Valley’)

“If Penn State was the Catholic Church, [head coach Joe] Paterno was the Holy See of Happy Valley. Unlike two other top university officials implicated in the scandal, he has not been charged with a crime. But he is almost certainly guilty of cowardice and hypocrisy.”—Jonathan Mahler, “Grand Experiment Meets an Inglorious End,” The New York Times, November 9, 2011

Mahler isn’t the only one to notice the similarity between the Penn State child sex-abuse scandal and the one that began to engulf the Roman Catholic Church in earnest nine years ago: His Times colleague Joe Nocera also weighed in on what the latter op-ed columnist termed “The Institutional Pass.” I bet if you go through the blogosphere, you’ll find more than one person also pointing out that the longtime Penn State coach is a devout Catholic and should have understood that the damage that engulfed his own church could likewise occur in the institution to which he devoted nearly a half-century.

So yes, the comparisons are multiple and inevitable. But they‘re also, I’m afraid, superficial. The Penn State scandal does indeed bear some comparison to the Church scandal, but is hardly limited to the institutional aspect--and even that is open to question.

What made me start thinking about this was a comment by Gerald Lauro, an investigator with Pennsylvania’s welfare department, who sought to determine what had happened in what, in retrospect, was an early-warning signal involving Jerry Sandusky: the longtime Penn State assistant coach’s 1998 confession that he had showered with one or two children in his team’s facilities.

According to a NewYork Times account from earlier this week, Lauro said that at the time, all he could see involved were “boundary issues,” not sexual assault.

“Boundary issues”--where had I heard that term before? Then it hit me: Michael Jackson. The term inevitably came up with the late singer whenever anyone had to account for why he engaged in such behavior as sleeping with child visitors at the Neverland Ranch.

Granted, Jackson was acquitted by a jury of charges of child molestation. But it took every cent he ever made to hire sufficient legal help to get him off the charges, and after the publicity about the trial and his sleeping arrangements, parents would have had to have their heads examined if they let their kids stay at his ranch.

Following Jackson’s death, admirers staged frenzied demonstrations in his honor. Nowhere would you find any acknowledgement that his interest in young children was, at best, obsessional. Indeed, when New York Congressman Peter King called the media to account for lionizing the singer, he was bashed.

The Jackson case, then, answers commentators in the last week who find themselves at a loss to explain why Paterno fans at Penn State could admire someone whose action (or, in this case, inaction) put children at risk. And yet Jackson, unlike Penn State or the Catholic Church, was an individual, not an institution.

There are a couple of elements, however, that do unite all three cases:

First, there is the astonishing spectacle of the child-saver becoming the child-endangerer. So many priests in the Church scandal were able to perpetrate their crimes by winning the confidence of at-risk families. Parents were so grateful that someone was taking an interest in their children that they missed the signs that this interest might not be healthy. Before Jackson became a 24-hour tabloid phenomenon, parents of Neverland visitors saw him as the activist who catalyzed the “We Are the World” single. And Jerry Sandusky became a local hero as much for his Second Mile charity as for his years as a Penn State coach.

Second, money served as a magnet for lawyers. If Jackson’s seeming altruism made him a natural hero to many children and their parents, his wealth made him a target for attorneys representing parents claiming he had wronged their children. In January 1994, he agreed to settle, perhaps for as much as $15 million, the first charges that he molested a boy. Likewise, the worldwide influence of the Catholic Church and its members’ willingness to give—along, of course, with its hierarchy’s prevarications about what went on under its watch—made it a natural target of the legal profession. The push to suspend the statute of limitations on reporting abuse cases has opened up the possibility of financial outcomes even more damaging to the Church.

That brings us to significant fallout from the Penn State case. Anyone who imagines that the impact of the litigation will fall only on that university, I think, is going to be gravely mistaken.

Just about any Catholic involved with parish activities will tell you that now it’s not merely the clergy who are being monitored, but even members of the laity who volunteer for any activities involving children. In their own way, universities across the country face their own significant liability issues.

It’s not merely that members of those communities are often involved with organizations that, like Second Mile, deal with child welfare, but those schools often host students visiting campuses for academic as well as athletic activities. The equivalent of Sandusky’s summer football camps will require more regulation, more paperwork, more administration, more money—and more prayer that someone at one of these events hasn’t been harmed. The same thing will go for summer academic programs where students are away from home.

Faced with all this aggravation, this expense, this potential liability, colleges and universities are going to scrutinize the necessity for each of these programs. Don’t be surprised if some fall by the wayside.

But the fate of university programs aimed at the young will not be the only questions facing college programs in the wake of Penn State. For all the other schools enjoying their moment of schadenfreude at the spectacle of Penn State, the big-time football program with a matching high athlete graduation rate, suddenly brought low, the issues that have long plagued college athletics won’t go away—they only become more urgent.

In his Atlantic Monthly article “The Shame of College Sports,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch noted, “Educators are in thrall to their athletic departments because of…television riches and because they respect the political furies that can burst from a locker room.” Penn State President Graham Spanier learned this the hard way several years ago when he unsuccessfully tried to move Paterno aside.

Fat chance of that happening, at least then. It takes an event the force of an earthquake—something along the lines of alleged serial molester Sandusky—for a college president to force out a big-time coach who is still winning. In Paterno, Spanier found someone who, like anchorman Dan Rather and pioneering female journalist Helen Thomas, probably could not imagine a life outside the profession and way of life they’d known virtually their entire adult life. And so, the last acts of their professional careers ended with mistakes that marred their legacies. (Ironically, Spanier also found himself joining Paterno out of a job--and the Pennsylvania State Attorney General has pointedly refused to rule out further action against the former PSU president.)

Penn State also has dealt one of the most devastating hits to date to the notion that sports--and, in particular, football--builds character. The discipline of sports, or so we have been told, could even come to the aid of at-risk youngsters. One exemplar of this notion was Vince Lombardi. His biographer, David Maraniss, observes in When Pride Still Mattered how the future Green Bay Packers coach, in his first head coaching job at St. Cecilia’s High School in Englewood, N.J. (my alma mater), made it a special point to pay “particular attention to scrappy youngsters from working-class families,” even turning one miscreant well-known for outrunning local police into a star at the school.

Now, we find, that notion needs to be suspended. It’s not only that an assistant coach at a major school is an alleged criminal, but that instead of reforming young men, he may have deformed them through the damage left by sexual abuse.

None of the foregoing gets around the fact that the outrage stemming from this scandal has at times become way out of proportion. End the season now! the more hysterical say. Suspend the football program altogether!

And all those people yelling why nobody at Penn State blew the whistle on Sandusky— would they have acted differently in the same circumstances? Would they have been willing to risk their livelihoods, to go to the cops with no assurance that their testimony would be backed by others, to endure withering cross-examination from defense lawyers about how they could accuse such a trusted member of the community as Sandusky? More than a few of the loudest yellers would have either done nothing at all or, like Paterno and Mike McQueary, would have pursued the matter only so far. The fact of the matter is this: If everybody always counteracted evil on its first appearance, it could never gain a foothold. Such is not, sadly, the way of the world.

Through this last week, I’ve sought, mostly in vain, a commentator who offered a sober analysis of the real stakes at Penn State, rather than the prevailing sulphurous odor of sensationalism and self-righteousness. I think I found it in Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell, who noted:

“When the earthquake struck Paterno’s life, it attacked him directly at his flaw lines — his pride in his life’s work and, perhaps, an utter inability to imagine the worst of a lifelong close friend. So in 2002 he appears, and this is actually a generous interpretation, to have reacted with don’t-want-to-know negligence of his ethical responsibilities, as a coach and as a man….

“Something shameful, if everything falls just wrong, could happen to any of us. How do we know? Because it even happened to Joe Paterno.”

As his world crashed around him, the Penn State legend said that in hindsight, he wished he could have done more about the scandal. It is the beginning of his painful but necessary examination of conscience. Would that more of us could remember this as we apply this same concept to ourselves as well as to others. I'm afraid that individuals on the sidelines as well as major institutions are guilty of the same "cowardice and hypocrisy" with which Mahler charges Paterno.