Edit: Football coaches are notorious for being out of touch with the day's popular culture trends and the hip new sensitivities of the students. It's often the grist for wacky comedies, but John Gagliardi, football's most winning coach for Mondernist Abby's "University", has maintained silence in the face of years of betrayal, and that isn't so funny. Some of the most winning coaches have been notorious for getting "out of hand" with the physical discipline of their players. Bobby Knight comes to mind. Our society tends to punish men acting the way men have acted in ages past. Nothing Bobby Knight ever did comes close to the crimes committed by other educators.
Then there are coaches who allegedly commit sins of omission and participate in the crimes of their employers and silence implies consent. John Gagliardi, head coach of St. John's University Football Team, doesn't have a problem with the denial, the stonewalling and cynical demeanor of the Abbey and its "monks". This is what happens when, being aware of something sinister going on, nothing is done by the knower.
It is perfectly understandable that John Gagliardi, one of the most winning coaches in the history of the sport of football, wants to put the accusations of sexual abuse at the Monastery of St. John's Abbey behind him, and disavow any connection, as he laments Joe Paterno's death, but he can't, because the truth is that he consents to the crimes committed , there, but football, if not confession, covers a multitude of sins.
Despite being well aware of the predations of homosexual monks at Collegeville, Gagliardi has remained silent and downplayed the obvious problem at the heart of his school by his silence and his recent public statements It doesn't matter as long as you're winning games. Actually, Gagliardi's relationship with Collegeville goes a long way to explain why the monks who reside there, and continue to undermine the Church's teachings, are allowed to get away with what they do.
Too many people who are aware, remain silent and even accuse those who've made accusations of being "liars", as Pat Marker describes the response from an interview with a Gagliardi family member's idea of the numerous and credible accusations against homosexual predators. When Marker asked this individual about Father Allen Tarleton's self-admitted molestation of his minor students, he/she said, "ohhh yessss".
Pat Marker at Pine Curtain recently took umbrage against Gagliardi's soft-peddling and indifference to what is really a cancerous and deplorable situation, in an interview with the Philly Inquirer. Marker's asking, so you're a great coach, but where's the moral backbone, where's the integrity?
Gagliardi has the gall to claim he had no connections with the events happening at Collegeville, but didn't do anything when it happened. When you're the winningest coach in football, why not resign and coach somewhere else? Why continue to support an institution which has persistently violated its obligations to represent the Catholic Faith and protect the purity of its students?
Gagliardi was well aware of the situation when he allegedly warned Abbot Jerome Theisen in the eighties to "keep his monks away from my players" in an unconfirmed story. If he were aware, this is plainly what they call a, "sin of omission". According to Catholic Encyclopedia:
"Omission" is here taken to be the failure to do something one can and ought to do. If this happens advertently and freely a sin is committed. Moralists took pains formerly to show that the inaction implied in an omission was quite compatible with a breach of the moral law, for it is not merely because a person here and now does nothing that he offends, but because he neglects to act under circumstances in which he can and ought to act. The degree of guilt incurred by an omission is measured like that attaching to sins of commission, by the dignity of the virtue and the magnitude of the precept to which the omission is opposed as well as the amount of deliberation.
We're convinced Gagliardi is well informed of the situation. Despite the evidence and the credible accusations, he remains silent.
He was silent when the still missing Josh Guimond disappeared in 2002.
So much for a great resume. If you have no integrity, what good is it?
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