If anything, sports is more like a cult—closed in on itself, exalting personalities more than a system or institution. Catholicism is actually a very decentralized community, and Catholics can hold their leaders in the same low regard that they have for politicians. That’s why you saw Catholics in Boston protesting to have Cardinal Bernard Law fired in 2002, while thousands of Penn State students rallied to let Paterno keep his job.

Penn State coaching legend Joe Paterno is out in the university’s burgeoning sex abuse scandal, and comparisons to the Roman Catholic Church’s own abuse scandals are in.

“The parallels are too striking to ignore. A suspected predator who exploits his position to take advantage of his young charges. The trusting colleagues who don’t want to believe it—and so don’t,” author Jonathan Mahler wrote in The New York Times.

“This was the dynamic that pervaded the Catholic clerical culture during its sexual abuse scandals, and it seems to have been no less pervasive at Penn State.”

The analogy is popular. But does it hold up to scrutiny? Yes, and no. Here are three ways in which the twin abuse scandals are similar, and three ways they are different.

SIMILARITIES

1. Sports is like a religion, with its rituals and incantations, rules and traditions, collective devotion and uniforms. Indeed, anthropologists say that like religion, athletic competition is one of the oldest communal impulses in human history, and today sports and religion mirror each other almost as much as they did in classical Greece.

To wit: a sign held by one Paterno supporter at a rally for the disgraced coach: “Two of my favorite ‘J’s’ in life: Jesus and Joe Pa.”

2. Whatever their bona fides as religions, Penn State and the Catholic Church are big, self-protective institutions. The cover-up is always as bad (or worse) as the crime, and Penn State leaders feared scandal—and probably harm to their own reputations—so much that they didn’t think about the welfare of the children. Same with so many bishops. And Boy Scout leaders. And teachers unions, and so on.

“The sort of instinct to protect the institution is very similar. And of course, in both cases, it backfires horribly. If your idea was to avoid a scandal, you sure failed,” Phil Lawler, a Catholic journalist in Boston, told The Associated Press.

Read More