Or, just another reason I detest "Ted Lasso."
IT'S NOT ONLY CATHOLIC elite prep-Ivy League equivalent schools that are engaged in some of the clearest and most obvious hypocrisy when it comes to school sports, the private preps and public schools are, too. But when it's an alleged religious institution, especially when it is an institution in a religion that would probably fire an employee for being in a loving, committed, faithful marriage to a member of the same sex or some theologian over some minor issue of doctrine, that hypocrisy is multiplied. And that's only one of such multipliers in this story.
Like so many sports related school scandals, it is that most absurdly and hypocritically worshiped sport in the United States, football. Read this opening of this article from the National Catholic Reporter:
Pride. Poise. Courage. Red block letters in the varsity locker room spell out the motto of Mater Dei High School football. A California powerhouse, the program boasts three Heisman Trophy winners among its graduates and in 2021 was ranked No. 1 in the country by USA Today.
But a recent spate of allegations linked to the Catholic school in Santa Ana appear to highlight behaviors antithetical to the motto. Late last summer, several football players sexually assaulted a teammate, according to claims in a Santa Ana Police Department document obtained by the Los Angeles Times. Seven months prior, a football player allegedly suffered a broken nose and a traumatic brain injury during a team ritual, leading the injured player's parents to file a lawsuit against Mater Dei and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange.
Other claims suggest the violence extends beyond football and the walls of the locker room. In 2019, two football players reportedly punched a basketball player in the head and face, breaking his jaw. This spring, Santa Ana police investigated allegations of assault and hazing in the Mater Dei boys water polo program.
Critics of the high school say these incidents are not isolated but are part of a toxic culture stretching back decades — to past allegations of sexual abuse that involved administrators, teachers, coaches and priests. And they say it reflects an ongoing lack of accountability from the school and diocese.
"Mater Dei has continually escaped accountability when it comes to abuse and violence; it has a cultlike mystique that makes it untouchable," said Joelle Casteix, who was sexually abused by a Mater Dei choir director in the late 1980s. She's now an author and advocate for survivors of child sexual assault and institutional cover-up.
NCR reached out to administrators at the school and diocese with questions about the recent alleged incidents but received no response. Bradley Zint, a diocese spokesperson, said no employees of either entity can comment on pending litigation or affairs regarding minors.
"As a general principle, however, our entire clergy, teachers and staff take the safety of students very seriously," Zint said in an emailed statement. "Toward that end, Mater Dei and the diocese remain committed [to] finalizing our previously announced campuswide assessment, which is ongoing and being conducted by an independent agency."
Bradly Zint's claim that the elite Catholic prep and the diocese that owns and operates it "take the safety of students very seriously" is entirely obliterated by the fact that football is entirely dedicated to risking the safety of students WHEN THE GAME IS PLAYED ENTIRELY BY THE FRIGGIN' RULES! It is only one of the current American equivalents to the decadence of gladiatorial games in pagan Rome but they haven't, at least so far as I know, taken up "mixed martial arts" or car racing at most elite prep schools.
No institution that sponsors a football team, whether private prep, allegedly religious or public can claim that they "take the safety of students very seriously" when they sponsor games and practices in which students are routinely injured, maimed for life and even killed. The violence that is inherent in the game, which is intrinsic to it, is covered with the most transparent of denials on every level. And with that violence come the worship of size, strength, willingness to inflict damage on other students - those on the other teams and, unsurprisingly as a result of that, on the members of the same team.
The school and diocese are being sued by parents and students on the basis of such violence off the field but which the "culture" of the sport has always encouraged, bullying of the most extreme kind is regularly practiced and exposed and, I will accuse, encouraged by the coaches and staffs and promoters of football AND CERTAINLY AMONG THE PLAYERS, THEMSELVES.
On Aug. 31, 2021, Mater Dei football players forced a teammate to the ground, exposed their genitals and "began humping him" through their pants, according to the Santa Ana police document cited in the Los Angeles Times. The document said the student was not physically injured but suffered anxiety following the incident. It did not indicate if the assault claim would be investigated.
Brian Williams is a lawyer with Greenberg Gross, one of the firms representing the football player who received a head injury in February 2021. "I would have hoped that months after my client's injuries the school would have implemented some steps to avoid this kind of thing from happening again," he told NCR.
The football player's lawsuit, filed in November, alleges negligence, negligent failure to warn, train or educate, negligence per se hazing in violation of the California penal code, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Anyone who thinks for a minute that any of that description really troubles those who run that joint, the coaches, the clergy and bishop would be forgiven to think the thing that would really bother them was the simulation of male on male sex, ignoring that in the context it was intended as part of the humiliation and mental violence that has nothing to do with the homosexuality that is the great big denial that American football is based. The psychological feast of dishonest depravity and unadmitted, unmentionable same-sex sexual fixation that is American football and, really, most sports is one of the greatest taboos of our depraved culture. That's not the exclusive extent of that mental dishonesty in American popular culture. Not to mention the Catholic hierarchy and its functionaries.
Football, sponsored by schools, organized among minors instead of consenting adults (brain damaged as so many of them already are when they reach the age of majority) is one of the most organized and financed forms of ritual child abuse.
It is ritualized brutality inflicted on children which is fully known of by the coaches and other alleged adults involved. Encouraged and, when they have it brought up to them, they deny their responsibility as the adults fully in on it.
Signed by Williams, the suit recounts a game on the football team known as "Bodies." It involves two players punching each other between the shoulders and hips.
"The persistence of this hazing ritual is longstanding, well known by Mater Dei leaders and apparently condoned by its head coach," reads the lawsuit.
A newer member of the squad, the plaintiff was "trying to fit in and gain acceptance" and was "coerced" into playing the game, says the complaint. The newer player and one much larger exchanged blows, with the larger teammate eventually punching the smaller one in the face multiple times, it says.
Amanda Waters is a former athletic director at Mater Dei who resigned about two months after the locker room fight and nine months after she was hired. In a sworn deposition filed in Orange County Superior Court in April, Waters said she left the school in part because of how it handled safety issues and the hazing case.
"Everything from … when [the injured player] walked out of the locker room to the silence after was handled wrong, in my opinion," said Waters in the deposition.
She said later in the deposition that when she confronted head football coach Bruce Rollinson about the locker room incident, he told her: "If I had a dollar for every time these kids played Bodies, I'd be a millionaire."
The lawsuit, first reported by the Orange County Register, alleges the school tried to cover up the student's injuries by not calling the paramedics and not contacting his parents for 90 minutes. Initially Mater Dei officials also declined to cooperate with Santa Ana Police Department investigators, according to police reports.
I'll remind you, it is at an allegedly Christian, a Catholic institution that this has been known to be going on for years and decades.
None of the adults involved in this can claim they don't and haven't known about this, it isn't something that could go on without their knowledge, it certainly couldn't be for any of the graduates of the school who participated in it. If they have supposedly kept knowledge of it from the bishops and other clergy who have ultimate control of the place, I doubt it.
Go back to that school slogan, "Pride, Poise, Courage" and ask yourself what in the Gospel of Jesus is it a reflection of? Certainly the courage of Jesus was not the kind of "courage" encouraged by such Catholic prep schools that are so heavily focused on athletics. The courage of Jesus was in deliberately preaching a counter-establishment, egalitarian Gospel that he certainly knew was going to get him killed by those who are far more like the products of such Catholic elite prep and Ivy Equivalent education. I can't recall a single example of pride or the kind of poise implied in that slogan coming from Jesus or, indeed of anyone in the followers of Jesus until Paul and Paul's pride and poise were of an entirely different kind and certainly for an end which, probably and by tradition, led to his own death.
Certainly the products of such "Christian" schools who really follow the Gospel of Jesus are very rare, if leading a real Christian life is the goal, the expense and effort involved makes it one of the worst investments the Catholic Church has ever made. Though it's certain that such a thing is far, far from the thinking of even the priests and bishops who run such places. And that's as true for some of the more prestigious blue-collar Catholic schools with prominent sports teams as it is for the most elite of the Catholic colleges and universities with famous football teams and other sports teams.
The poster boy for such places is likely the sexual assaulter on the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, though never forget such was the origin of Clarence Thomas, as well - I will never forget that old teaching-order nun they had saying what a nice boy he was during the confirmation hearings, I often wondered what she thought of some of his rulings. I would almost guarantee you that Kavanaugh's prep school has done absolutely nothing in the aftermath of the exposure its football team and other practices got during the hearings into his nomination - no more than the Supreme Court has improved since that likely criminal joined its fascist majority. Most of them, I will point out as a Catholic, Catholics, at least at the start.
The Supreme Court is earning the infamy that its entire history has certain earned it, now that it is in Republican-fascist hands for the foreseeable future, now that the huge cover-up of its identity as the most corrupt arm of the government is being torn away by their actions. The Catholic hierarchy and its enormous institutional edifice, its physical holdings, has certainly earned infamy due to things such as are listed in the story of only one of its elite prep schools. But they certainly won't change, whether due to a desire not to change or, the often given excuse, that the support of rich, former students would dry up if they did what they did in late imperial Rome as the Church gained influence, they abolished the game. If the support of their products is so reliant on them maintaining a program of moral atrocities like that, then their entire identity as a Christian entity is a sham. They produce Pride and Poise but it's certain that those in control lack even the most basic level of courage as it should be practiced by someone attempting to follow Jesus.
The American Catholic establishment is morally corrupt in so many ways it's hard to maintain any level of faith in it. It's no wonder that, As Good Pope Francis noted recently, that it is the epicenter of anti-Vatican II activity based on the financial support of multi-millionaires and billionaires who despise the Gospel but want the power and probably the property. I would bet that most of them are a product of American Catholic elite preps.