Everyone knows that the key to winning as a big-time coach is keeping your players eligible. Some of that effort is legal, some not. Give the players tutors and gut courses, or even have someone write term papers for them. Get the campus police and the local cops to cooperate. Hey, boys will be boys. Overlook. Blind eye. Forgive them their trespasses as game day approaches. Keep them eligible. Joe Paterno was a football coach all of his long, adult life. Like all coaches, after a while, keeping your players eligible is second nature. When his old assistant was in trouble, that must’ve kicked in. Joe Paterno kept Jerry Sandusky eligible. If he has a legacy, that’s it.

Joe Paterno’s Legacy: Protect Players At All Costs by Frank Deford

A brutal remembrance.

(via npr)

I don’t practice as a Catholic anymore. It’s so hard to reconcile what the men at the top do with what Jesus preached.

—Marie Collins, a 64-year-old Dubliner who was abused by a hospital chaplain, Rev. Paul McGennis, when she was 13, as quoted in The New York Times Magazine article “The Irish Affliction.”

Two decades later, she confided in another parish priest about what happened. He suggested it was her fault because she may have tempted McGennis, but that he would forgive her. And then ten years later, she wrote to the archbishop of Dublin, now a cardinal in the Vatican, who told her McGennis was a good priest and she should not “ruin his life.”

by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer

Violence pretty much forces a silence on people. When everyone sees a violent act, the first reaction they have to it is, ‘Well, it’s bad and it should stop.’ And then that’s kind of where the brain ends. There’s a lot of moral torture talk…but the ability to turn around and confront, not the torture talk, … but to actually look at the practice, pay attention to it, understand its details, consider what would it take if I took a tool and I did this to such a person, what would its effects be, that’s a pretty horrifying thing. Nobody really wants to go there.

— Darius Rejali, from our show “The Long Shadow of Torture”

With new reports of detainee abuse in Iraq emanating from WikiLeaks, we’re going to broadcast/podcast an encore version of Krista’s interview with Rejali in the coming weeks. Rejali argues that, with the right circumstances in place, torture is a likely outcome and that it’s the “situation, not the disposition, that makes people evil.”

by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer

The silence of the Vatican is contempt. Its failure to fully examine its central place in Rwandan genocide can only mean that it is fully aware that it will not be threatened if it buries its head in the sand. While it knows if it ignores the sexual abuse of European parishioners it will not survive the next few years, it can let those African bodies remain buried, dehumanised and unexamined.

—Martin Kimani, from his scathing critique of the Catholic Church in today’s Cif section of The Guardian titled “For Rwandans, the Pope’s Apology Must Be Unbearable.”

Trent Gilliss, online editor