A Catholic theologian friend e-mails to say how much Jerry Sandusky’s situation reminds him of the late Father Bruce Ritter, founder of Covenant House, the home for runaways. (I paraphrase his letter with his permission.) Fr. Ritter, who died of cancer some years ago, was found to have had sexual relations with a number of the youth he sheltered. My friend was close to the Covenant House community, and says it was impossible to separate out the good Fr. Ritter from the bad Fr. Ritter. The evil he did did not obviate the good that he did, and — here’s the key point my friend wished to make — somehow Fr. Ritter’s genuine desire to help kids got mixed up in his twisted personality into using the kids for his sexual gratification.

My friend points out the part of grand jury testimony in which Sandusky is reported to have said to the mother of one of his victims, “I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won’t get it from you. I wish I were dead.” Let’s assume that this was the honest statement of a man in torment — a man who may have genuinely wanted to help children, but whose desire was sexualized, and who could not indulge in one without indulging in the other. None of this, of course, is to justify in any way the abuse of children. But it’s true, as my friend said, that the narcissism of pedophiles often causes them to imagine that their sexual abuse of the young is desired by their victims, and is in fact a form of helping them. Writes my theologian friend, of Ritter, “He did real good, and seems to have genuinely desired the good of others — even as he sank further into sin and evil. What did St. Paul say? ‘The good that I would do…’.”

Fr. Ritter, like Jerry Sandusky (and like Joe Paterno) was an icon to many. People made themselves vulnerable to both because they trusted them. To follow on something my friend suggested, perhaps the reason we scapegoat them so fiercely is because it frightens us that we took such monstrous people so close into our affection and trust. And perhaps it’s also because we fear that if what might well have started within them as good impulses turned to such rancid evil, then we are, at some level, afraid it could happen to us too.