<p>^ If nothing were repeated on this thread it would lose a third or more it’s length.</p>
<p>It seems like the latest apologist tactic (as seen in the linked article) is to claim the Freeah report is “out of context” or provided “scant” evidence. It’s sort of embarrassing to watch. It was obvious what they were talking about. It’s not “scant evidence” when people are writing about “vulnerabilities to Penn State”, “other children?”, “is this opening a Pandora’s box?”, and of course “well, we almost went to CPS but we decided it wouldn’t be humane.”</p>
<p>This isn’t “some guy told some girl that he heard a friend of a friend’s cousin’s uncle’s father say that Spanier knew,” it’s SPANIER’S OWN EMAILS, for crying out loud.</p>
<p>I’m baffled why anyone would defend Spanier anyway. Paterno had the “idolized coach” thing going on, but Spanier??</p>
<p>There isn’t any support for Spanier. That is why he is taking action. </p>
<p>The former Penn State faculty are speaking from their first hand knowledge of academics from whenever they were on campus.</p>
<p>collegekidsmom, I’ve seen comments on news articles in support of him, commenting on how “biased” the Freeah report is and Freeah was just out to get him, etc. (Not on that most recent article, but the one where Spanier first made his “assertions” that he didn’t do anything wrong.) I don’t know how widespread that support is, but I’m surprised there’s any at all.</p>
<p>Then again, maybe they are all accounts made by Spanier himself!</p>
<p>Wolverine86’s post about Spanier’s term at U of Nebraska is revealing. I vividly remember the Lawrence Phillips saga at Nebraska, and yes, Coach, Athletic Director and eventual Congressman Tom Osborne had tremendous power and influence at the university. Osborne was smart enough to cut his losses and the fallout from Phillips’ transgressions. Osborne let Phillips play in the big bowl game, which Nebraska won, and then emphatically gave Phillips the hint that the player should immediately leave school and declare for the NFL draft, which Phillips indeed did. Sad that Paterno, Spanier et al didn’t similarly act to remove Sandusky from the Penn State campus.</p>
<p>Here’s a different take on Sandusky (and child sexual abuse generally) from the Director of the Office of Spiritual Development on the Caholic Archdiocese of NY. (I found it on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.)</p>
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<p>So Jerry Sandusky “this poor guy” !!! Just giving these boys a helping hand, some fatherly concern–not criminal, no, no, not at all.</p>
<p>“Until recent years, people did not register in their minds that it was a crime.” Words fail. But I guess that attitude would help explain why abuse continued for so long in the Catholic Church.</p>
<p>Hey–maybe that was Spanier’s attitude too. No biggie…not my problem…not really a problem AT ALL.</p>
<p>Is Father Groeschel for real? This guy is the director of the “Office of Spiritual Development”? Kids looking for fathers and seducing them? </p>
<p>(I’m trying not to say an anti-Catholic thing, and I won’t).</p>
<p>As sad as it is, I think he’s correct.</p>
<p>Until recently, child abuse was not thought of as a crime. It was thought of as a moral fault, but not a crime. (recently in terms of the 2000+ years of history) </p>
<p>Creepy, just creepy.</p>
<p>From the statement quoted by janesmith:</p>
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<p>Only two minor problems with that statement. First, a number of kids, or their mothers, DID break the ice/report, and were consistently brushed aside. Second, notice how it becomes the victim’s responsibility to stop the crime. Not the perpetrator’s. Not the other adults who know. If abuse doesn’t stop, it’s the kid’s fault.</p>
<p>I’m interested to know if this man espouses the cause of other “poor guys.”</p>
<p>“I mean, this poor guy, he becomes a bank robber–well, what is he supposed to do when the bank is just sitting there every day, filled with money?”</p>
<p>“This poor guy, he killed someone in a DUI . . . look, sometimes when you’re drunk driving, other cars actually leap the barrier to come into your lane! It’s happened to me several times!”</p>
<p>“So this poor guy gets convicted for beating his girlfriend, but what if she just tripped and FELL onto his fist?”</p>
<p>^^^ Yup. Blame the victim - the automatic defense. Not to mention his idea that it’ s the young boys who seduce the helpless men–by being all needy and all. </p>
<p>Maybe Sandusky should have called Father Groelsch as an expert witness instead of going with the histrionic personaity disorder thing. </p>
<p>If nothing else we can see how the duty to report laws need to have real teeth, the Clery Act needs to be enforced, etc. etc.</p>
<p>Unfortunately that is still a common attitude with child abuse, that somehow the child was at fault in these cases, it is one of the reasons those abused by priests and their families didn’t come forward, because they knew that was a common reaction, that the kids were to blame. In Ireland, a priest was accused of sleeping with teenage girls, and the Bishop said the girls must have seduced him, because he wouldn’t have done that. And I don’t doubt that in either the Penn State case or with the church, that part of the attitude was that the kids must be lying or otherwise have an angle or something <em>sigh</em>. </p>
<p>And of course, it leaves out a substantial point, that an adult having sex with a kid is bad, period, and that even assuming the kid ‘seduced’ Sandusky or a priest, as an adult it is their duty to rebuff it and let someone know what happened. An adult is assumed to be responsible…(plus likely the adult went after the child). </p>
<p>With Spanier, I think the defense of him isn’t about him, but people trying to defend the university as a whole, in effect what they are saying is “yeah, sandusky was a scum, but the role of the university, Joe Paterno, etc was overblown by Freeh, ‘we’ are innocent”.</p>
<p>I sort of understand it, people associated with with the university are hurting, their pride has been hurt and they are looking to deflect blame. It is like many Catholics with their church and its role in the scandal, they see the church they look to being dragged through the mud and feel personally attacked by it, and they will try to deflect from the situation as well, trying to make excuses for people they shouldn’t be.</p>
<p>But how can a guy like the Reverend Father be allowed to direct an “office of spiritual development”? Is he Cardinal Dolan’s man?</p>
<p>Who does this remind us of?</p>
<p>“In June 2012 it was revealed that Dolan “authorized payments of as much as $20,000 to sexually abusive priests as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood when he was the archbishop of Milwaukee” and that " a document unearthed during bankruptcy proceedings for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and made public by victims’ advocates reveals that the archdiocese did make such payments to multiple accused priests to encourage them to seek dismissal, thereby allowing the church to remove them from the payroll.”</p>
<p>mini—Father Benedict is a fairly prominent figure–has a weekly TV show. There are a few more quotes from his interview in this article:</p>
<p>[Father</a> Benedict Groeschel, American Friar, Claims Teens Seduce Priests In Some Sex Abuse Cases](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>Father Benedict Groeschel, American Friar, Claims Teens Seduce Priests In Some Sex Abuse Cases | HuffPost Religion)</p>
<p>He doesn’t believe first-time offenders should be prosecuted.</p>
<p>I’ll resist temptation, and pray to be delivered from doing evil.</p>
<p>I disagree with Father Benedict. Adults are adults and should act that way. Years ago I worked at a residential treatment facility for adolescent girls. One of the girls, about 16, came on to the elderly driver in exchange for cigarettes, etc. It came out. The Director of the facility was inexperienced and initially felt sympathy for the driver and blamed the 16 year old. I had to remind her, the driver is the adult. We are supposed to be protecting the residents. He acted unprofessionally, to say the least. There is no excuse for adults not acting as adults with minors. It didn’t go very far (the resident and the driver), but he was fired and if I remember correctly his wife divorced him. Unfortunate for everyone involved, but there are consequences to actions.</p>
<p>Sadly, Fr. Groeschel’s opinion is all too commonly held, at least among the priests with whom I’ve discussed child abuse and those who used to post in the old AOL forum (“Ask a Priest or Deacon.”) In my experience, there’s far greater concern about “giving scandal” by discussing abuse openly than there is for the victims of abuse.</p>
<p>I was told the very same thing that Groeschel said by a Monsignor, who was president of the Catholic high school I attended, when I broached the subject with him about a decade ago. He was also quick to accuse anyone who reported such crimes of being interested only in getting a large financial settlement. It didn’t surprise me when I learned a couple of years later than he had participated in the cover up of a case involving a priest who taught at the high school.</p>
<p>One contributing factor to the apparently widespread cover up at Penn State may be the influence of clergy if they expressed similar opinions to anyone who sought their counsel. If someone is already conflicted about reporting and hears from a pastor that there’s no moral imperative to report and it may even be worse to ruin someone’s good name then it becomes even harder for that individual to listen to his own conscience.</p>
<p>Well, they all need to listen to the archbishop of Dublin, Ireland. Don’t have time to look him up. But, he has basically complained to the Vatican regarding the handling of the sexual abuse scandal of the Catholic Church.</p>
<p>silpat - That’s an interesting point about the Penn State admins possibly being influenced by the church. I’ve always assumed Paterno was Catholic; no idea about the others.</p>
<p>But Father Benedict’s perspective and sympathy for the abusers seems to come from the same place as Spanier’s comment about wanting to be “humane” in the treatment of Sandusky.</p>
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<p>I concur with what others have said about Father Groeschel’s statement being a classic “blame the victim” move, but the other thing I find somewhat disturbing is that he seems to see it in terms of homosexuality, not pedophilia. Homosexual acts are a sin, a “moral failure,” but pedophilia is apparently only a legal category in his mind, and he seems to think it was sort of understandable and maybe even OK that these things occurred when those laws weren’t enforced. But why does he need to bring homosexuality into it? Doesn’t he think priests molesting little girls was just as bad as priests molesting little boys? Granted, either would be a sin under Catholic theology and either would be a crime under secular law, but is he saying it’s somehow worse because it was same-sex molestation and not an opposite-sex molestation? Do we really need to make that distinction?</p>
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<p>And we’re supposed to feel some kind of empathy for “this poor guy–Sandusky” because his depravity went on for so long that he forgot that what he was doing was a crime, then all of a sudden they pull a bait-and-switch on him and decide to enforce the laws after all?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, not one shred of empathy for the children who were the victims of Sandusky’s (and the priests’) crimes, sins, scandals, whatever. Notice he identifies three distinct problems with the behavior: it was a sin (a “moral failure”), so that’s bad for the perpetrator. It was a “scandal,” so that’s bad not only for the perpetrator but for the entire institution of which he is a part. And it turns out, much to everyone’s surprise in his world, I guess, that it was also a crime, so that’s really bad for the perpetrator and even more of an embarrassment for his institution. But he seems utterly oblivious to the greatest harm by far, which is the harm to the children who were the victims. They’re not objects of empathy; they’re the “seducers” who led poor innocents like Jerry Sandusky and pedophile priests astray, and then engaged in a cover-up by not “saying anything” and “not breaking the ice.” The kids are doing Satan’s work, apparently.</p>
<p>What a depraved moral universe this guy lives in. It’s just appalling that someone whose moral compass has gone absolutely haywire is responsible for leading the spiritual development of the Archdiocese of New York.</p>