DOUTHAT: JOE PATERNO ENABLED A CHILD RAPIST BECAUSE JOE IS SO DARN VIRTUOUS!
Yeah, Ross Douthat really said that -- and he said it about the pedophile enablers in the Catholic Church as well:
Bad and mediocre people are tempted to sin by their own habitual weaknesses. The earlier lies or thefts or adulteries make the next one that much easier to contemplate. Having already cut so many corners, the thinking goes, what's one more here or there? Why even aspire to virtues that you probably won't achieve, when it's easier to remain the sinner that you already know yourself to be?
But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness -- by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind. It's precisely in the service to these supposed higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away.
I believe that Joe Paterno is a good man....
I also believe that most of the clerics who covered up abuse in my own Catholic Church were in many ways good men....
They believed in their church. They believed in their mission. And out of the temptation that comes only to the virtuous, they somehow persuaded themselves that protecting their institution's various good works mattered more than justice for the children they were supposed to shepherd and protect.
I have to be fair: Douthat doesn't say this to fully exonerate Paterno or the members of the Church establishment who covered up child rape. He acknowledges that they did a bad thing.
But still: he's arguing that these people are so good that they're incapable of weakness. He seems to be arguing that some people are so darn good that they're incapable of any failing, apart from, well, inattentiveness.
Douthat is still a Catholic and I left the Church in my teens, but I still remember what I was taught, and what he's saying is not just absurd, it's contradictory to Church teaching: no one is without sin. And the secular way of putting that is that no one is without weakness (to use Douthat's word). I don't care how wonderful you seem -- you're capable of a profound moral lapse. Everyone is.
I wouldn't have thought Joe Paterno was a living saint even if this scandal had never taken place -- he was a freaking football coach; he's not living in a slum curing lepers. But even the leper-curer surely has moral flaws. We all do, Ross.
6 comments:
"But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness..."
No they aren't. That is a horribly specious argument.
It is not goodness that leads them into temptation. It is power and self aggrandizement.
If they covered up abuse they were by definition not good men.
"They believed in their church. They believed in their mission. And out of the temptation that comes only to the virtuous, they somehow persuaded themselves that protecting their institution's various good works mattered more than justice for the children they were supposed to shepherd and protect. "
Take out the word church/children, and this can be construed as an apologia for any system, from ours, to Lenin/Stalin's, to (Godwin forgive me) Hitler, to Mao, etc.
No, he's saying that protecting their jobs and status was more important to them than protecting children. He's just putting that ol' Catholic spin on it to make it look like virtue.
It seems that the virtuous would do the right thing all the time, and have faith that doing the right thing all the time will make things work out in the end.
When I heard about Paterno, my mind took me back to a TV movie many years ago in which Bing Crosby played the role of an elderly and much beloved small town doctor who had a dark secret -- for years he had been using his medical acumen to quietly bring about the deaths of locals he considered to be bad people. A young man who'd been born and raised in the town, went to medical school and came back to practice with the old man -- and of course, eventually, he found out the truth about him. The old doctor has a bad heart and at the end of the movie he has a heart attack with the young doctor right there. Young fellow could save him, of course, but chooses to do nothing and watch him die.
With his final breath, the Crosby/doctor character looks into the young man's eyes and wheezes:
"Now you see . . . how it begins."
Reminiscent of Newt Gingrich & his (paraphrased) "I was so busy working hard to save the America I love that I committed adultery when I wasn't looking" excuse/rationalization.
As far as Douthat's Catholicism goes, The Wiki sez: As an adolescent Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family,[8] to Catholicism.[9]
WTF?
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