KULPMONT - The bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg said the sex abuse scandal at Penn State University is a reflection on society.
The Most Rev. Joseph McFadden agreed that the alleged sexual abuse of eight young boys at the hands of an ex-football coach mirrored a similar scandal that shook the Vatican to its very foundation.
Describing the abuse of a child as "horrific" and a "terrible sin," he said no words can restore lost innocence taken from a child.
"If we are honest when we look at it, it's a societal issue," McFadden told The News-Item Friday before conducting a special service at St. Pauline Visintainer Center to unveil and bless a canvass painting of St. Maria Goretti.
Goretti, an 11-year-old Ital
ian girl who was stabbed to death by an attempted rapist at the turn of the 20th century, is the patron saint of purity and victims of rape - a coincidence not lost on McFadden.
"It's not a Penn State problem. It's not a Catholic Church problem. It's not a Catholic priest problem. It's a societal problem," he said, noting the instances of sex abuse that occur in many settings nationwide, such as in schools and at home.
Penn State had been enjoying a successful season from a team thought by many to be overachieving. The team was off last weekend ahead of today's matchup with Nebraska when news broke of the scandal.
Jerry Sandusky, the architect of storied defenses and once thought likely to succeed Joe Paterno as head coach at Penn State, was charged with molesting eight boys over 15 years. Questions of an alleged cover-up combined with intense public scrutiny led to Paterno's ouster and that of the university's president, Graham Spanier, earlier this week.
"Unfortunately, I think the administrators of Penn State perhaps didn't learn much from the Church's experience," McFadden said.
Countless allegations of sex abuse said to have occurred throughout at least the last half century have been made against Catholic priests across the globe in a scandal that erupted early last decade.
McFadden was quick to admit the Church's mistakes in its own handling of the crisis. There is no denial nor is there a defense, he said.
What is needed, however, is education and reflection, he expressed, with society as a whole looking inward at the roots of child sex abuse, what can be done to prevent it and how society can move on.
"What Penn State has to learn is what the Church had to learn: We have to make sure this never happens again," he said.
"Nobody has done more than the Catholic Church in the last 20 years to make sure that we have safe environments, protection, background checks, all the things put in place to make sure it doesn't happen again."
Paterno's actions upon learning of the alleged abuse from eyewitness Mike McQueary are of much debate.
McQueary was a graduate assistant in 2002 when he told a grand jury that he witnessed Sandusky performing sodomy on a young boy in a shower inside a campus locker room. He turned to Paterno the next day to tell of the incident. Paterno followed up by alerting the university's athletic director, Tim Curley, who would later meet separately with McQueary and vice president Gary Schultz, according to grand jury documents.
There are some who wonder if McQueary - a wide receivers coach this season who was put on administrative leave Friday - expressed to Paterno the details of the alleged sex abuse in as graphic and in-depth nature as he provided to the grand jury; perhaps not getting across the seriousness of the incident. Others believe the comments McQueary made were more than enough to have spurred Paterno into greater action than simply informing his boss.
Some believe Paterno met his legal responsibility and say his firing unjust. Others argue he fell far short of his moral responsibility.
McFadden found the debate intriguing.
"In a society that so often doesn't want to accept moral absolutes, it's interesting that we're going to hold somebody to a moral responsibility. ... But the important thing is it's right," he said. "At least we haven't lost that consciousness that there are some things that go beyond just doing your duty."
McFadden later added, "Certainly Joe Paterno is a great man. He's done a great amount of things,. Did he do enough here? In hindsight, he didn't do enough."
Moving forward, the bishop said it's important that society understands that we all are obliged to uphold a moral responsibility beyond a legal responsibility.
Also, he said society must learn to forgive.
"We live in a society that wants an ounce of flesh for an ounce of injury, and that's not the gospel our Lord preaches. That doesn't mean that we say there was no wrong done here. That doesn't mean that there's not some punishment to make sure this doesn't happen again. But the other side of it has to be forgiveness. ... And that's a tough thing, but that's the gospel that we preach."