We all remember school exams that required us to “compare and contrast” two items. The idea was to demonstrate our understanding of both by identifying their similarities and differences. Are you ready to compare and contrast the Catholic Church with Penn State University?
The Penn State sex abuse scandal, it seems to me, cuts both ways for Catholics. Based on this week’s report by a group led by former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, what happened at Penn State simultaneously (here is “compare”) echoed the cover-up behavior of many U.S. Catholic bishops and (here is “contrast”) differed sharply from the visionary leadership of one Catholic college president.
The Freeh report portrays how Penn State officials either minimized or avoided or outright denied the significance of Jerry Sandusky’s criminal abuse of boys on the Penn State campus over a period of years. In effect, school officials protected Sandusky from exposure and enabled his abuse of more kids. Guilty parties included legendary football Coach Joe Paterno, athletic director Timothy Curley, and then-president Graham Spanier.
The charge against these men is creepily familiar to Catholics: the men in charge feared that the truth would create a scandal which could be damaging to the reputation of the institution, so they did everything they could to keep it quiet. This is, of course, exactly what happened when US bishops covered up for abusing priests. In both cases, the officials’ behavior backfired: eventually the truth emerged anyway, and this caused worse damage to the institution by doubling the scandal, adding cover-up to sexual abuse. In both cases, this outcome exposed a deeper corruption than the abuse itself: an abuse of power where officials atop these institutions failed to hold abusive subordinates accountable. In both cases, those officials also avoided or even blocked attempts to report criminal behavior to the authorities.
The lesson in both cases: power corrupts, so it must be checked by some system of accountability. For both Penn State and the Church, that accountability finally came from the legal system (in the recent verdict against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, a diocesan official was found guilty of criminal conduct for participating in such a cover-up)--but it came too late to protect the victims.
But the Penn State story contains a second lesson, connected to the death last week of John E. Brooks, S.J., the president emeritus of Holy Cross.
Father Brooks has recently been celebrated as a champion of racial justice and social diversity for his role in recruiting and mentoring black students beginning in 1968. This achievement, chronicled in Diane Brady’s book Fraternity, earned him special “Today Show” coverage just two days after his death (see the video at http://news.holycross.edu/blog/2012/07/02/tomorrow-holy-cross-to-be-featured-on-nbcs-today-show/). I wrote about these events in CrossCurrents #346. After becoming president of the college in 1970, he also inaugurated co-education at HC.
But Fr. Brooks first taught at the Cross in the mid 1950s and early 1960s, in an era when Holy Cross football routinely scheduled big-time rivals like Syracuse, Rutgers, Pittsburg, VMI, Boston College and—yes—even Penn state.
By the time Brooks became college president in 1970, he saw trouble on the horizon: the encroachment of big money into big-time college athletics. He feared the dominance of the sports industry over the academic priorities of the institution. He feared the exploitation of athletes at the expense of their education. And he feared the corruption of the culture of colleges and universities in which sports became the driving force for admissions, budgets, alumni support, and expansion.
He foresaw a looming culture in which the president of the college would become less visible, influential, and powerful than the athletic director, the football coach, or the basketball coach.
Father Brooks was right. Over the last 40 years big-time college sports has become a multibillion dollar industry, coaches and athletic directors and are routinely millionaires, graduation rates for their athletes dip well below 50% at many schools, and the college’s entire well being is driven by the way athletics fuels the support of alumni and local communities.
This certainly happened at Penn State. The community of Happy Valley was dominated by the local football program, and Coach Joe Paterno was Happy Valley’s patron saint-in-residence, with a statue honoring him installed even during his lifetime. Employees who witnessed Sandusky’s rapes now say they hesitated to blow the whistle because to take on Paterno would be like “taking on the President of United States.”
Perhaps Penn State is the only campus where a culture corrupted by big-time sports has revealed sex abuse--but it is not the only campus where such corruption thrives.
But if Fr. Brooks was right 40 years ago to fear such corruption, he was not alone. Many college presidents saw the rising lure of money, and its power to seduce colleges into two pudding academic life that the service of big time sports.
So what did Brooks do? First, he began to communicate his concerns to alumni--a community tough to convince, given Holy Cross’ history: the only New England undergraduate school with Division 1 teams in all major sports, past winner of national championships in basketball and baseball, one time Orange Bowl football competitor.
Second, Brooks took the dramatic step of refusing the invitation to join the new Big East basketball league in 1979. None of the other charter schools (Providence, St. John's, Georgetown, Syracuse, Seton Hall, Connecticut, and Boston College) had yet won a national championship, so adding HC was an obvious prestige move. But Brooks believed the Big East was the wrong direction to go.
Finally, Brooks collaborated with several other northeast college presidents to form a league of their own in 1986: the Colonial League, now renamed the Patriot League. These schools had much in common: small size, mostly undergraduate populations, and high academic reputations. But the league itself was built around two dominant principles: (1) schools would field genuine scholar athletes by banning most athletic scholarships; (2) the league would be run by the presidents themselves (league by-laws state: “The business and affairs of this League shall be managed by its Council of Presidents”), not by an independent commissioner or by dominant athletic directors.
Over the years the Patriot League has expanded to all major sports. In football, it has become a sort of second Ivy League: both leagues playing nearly all non-league games against each other.
For Holy Cross, the Patriot League required sacrifices. The cherished football rivalry with Boston College (college football’s oldest Catholic school rivalry) ended in 1986. Holy Cross had to drop football scholarships. Alumni support shifted grudgingly from the traditional sports-fueled loyalty to a new pride in Holy Cross as America’s #1 undergraduate Catholic college. Holy Cross largely disappeared from its former high profile media coverage: (no more front page headlines in the sports sections of the Boston Globe or New York Times--although in 2008 Sports Illustrated ranked it #3 for student athletes after Stanford and Princeton).
But for Fr. Brooks, the move was the right move, and worth the sacrifices. He (and his fellow Patriot League presidents) remained steadfast in the conviction that his school was keeping college sports were it belonged--as an extra-curricular activity, secondary to academics and thus only ancillary to the school’s overall mission.
This meant, of course, that coaches and athletic directors could not function independently. They worked within a chain of command, and in that chain the final accountability was to the president. The buck stopped with him.
It may seem a trivial matter. It may even seem outlandish to contrast a collegiate athletic conference with the Catholic hierarchy. But the Penn State case has shown that abuses of power--and particularly sexual abuse--can occur wherever the chain of command breaks down, where perpetrators are not held accountable. When athletics gets “too big to fail.”
Recent years have taught us this lesson in the most terrific way imaginable. And Penn State reminds us that, in the Catholic Church, the hierarchy failed this lesson miserably, while one heroic Catholic college president showed us how it should be done.
Too bad Penn State’s culture was more like the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (“compare”), and not more like Holy Cross (“contrast”).
©Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012
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