Joe Paterno has been told and retold the story again recently, and I'm not sure I have much interest to add now that Paterno has been sacked by Penn State. I do, however, has a series of questions / insight / feeling that I have not formulated carefully as I hope to do at the time. Because the feeling remains in the formative stages, may be better to call them incomplete reflections on the story rather than a full-blown Paterno's comments on it.
And here they are, for what they are worth:
1. As one commentator after another has been noted, there are clear similarities between what Paterno said to have been done and what many Catholic bishops also performed. Paterno said to have been obstruction of justice by protecting someone she knew had been sodomized a ten-year-old child, who then allegedly went to rape other children because he was protected by those in authority over it.
As conservative commentator Rod Dreher puts the point, Paterno did not do anything less than what Robert Finn is now under indictment for conduct in Kansas City.
2. And there are other connections that, in my opinion, have not been ridiculed by news commentators, which makes me wonder even more about the striking parallels between the story Paterno and the Catholic abuse scandal. There is, first of all, the fact that Joe Paterno is not only Catholic, but a member of the Knights of Columbus .* He was a member of the organization that many victims of clergy sexual abuse has been considered to be their ally, but their enemies in their struggle to hold officials accountable Catholic pastoral for their behavior in the abuse crisis. (And Jerry Sandusky, who Paterno protected, has received coach of the year award from the Knights of Columbus and has been a speaker at the Knights of Columbus events.)
And I wonder what the connection may predict for Paterno story, and if they have any weight at all clear, as one of the options considered Paterno made when he seemed to know that abusing Sandusky is small.
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