While parents lined up outside a courtroom, indignant that the church would deny their children the sacrament of football, the priest who annulled the season stood before a panel of astonished reporters and demonstrated how a man can do the right thing the wrong way.
The Rev. Kris Stubna, secretary for education in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, pulled Central Catholic High School's football team from the playoffs after deciding that team members had kept unseemly quiet about the hazing of a fellow player. The boy, who left the team and then Central, said two players held him down and head-slapped him with their penises.
In the hallways of the City-County Building, members of the Viking Football Parents Association asked Common Pleas Judge Max Baer to order Central to resume its football season.
"Why is it fair to treat everybody as if they're accused without giving them due process?" one parent, John Pelusi, asked me.
That anyone expects the niceties of American jurisprudence from a hierarchical church grounded in ecclesiastical rites predating the Middle Ages is a quirk of the American psyche.
To grasp the quirks of diocesan reasoning, Stubna was the man to hear yesterday.
"We're talking about very important moral issues that far outweigh participation in the playoffs," Stubna explained. Players, he said, knew what had happened, did not come forward despite repeated instructions to do so and consequently sullied the reputation of the team to a degree that makes it problematic for them to represent a religious school.
What vexed everyone in the room was Stubna's own inability to answer without equivocation why Central's administrators didn't call police in the first place. The attack -- if there was one -- happened at football camp in August. The players were arrested last week. In the intervening weeks the school conducted its own inquiry, apparently blind to the fact that, notwithstanding the lascivious details, they were dealing with a sexual assault.
"The allegations that were made alleged a hazing incident with some physical abuse," Stubna said.
Stubna insisted, repeatedly, that Central officials never had an inkling they were dealing with sexual abuse and so didn't call police.
Given that the boy's parents are on record saying that they described -- graphically -- the nature of the attack on their son, Stubna's meeting with the press became an exercise in word parsing worthy of a Clinton deposition.
How did someone not notice that this could constitute sexual abuse?
"Central Catholic received an allegation of some physical abuse," he replied. Stubna gave that answer repeatedly. He gave it to the question about why police weren't called. He gave it to the question about what school officials knew from the start. By the time the Rev. Ron Lengwin, resident sane person, finally called a halt to the spectacle, Stubna might have given that answer to a question about the largest mineral export of Bolivia. (Tin.)
After 20 minutes of backing a man of the cloth into a rhetorical corner, we finally extracted this analysis from Rev. Stubna: particulars notwithstanding, school and diocesan officials did not interpret the incident as a sexual assault until police used those words.
In the reasoning of Kris Stubna, a student can be beheaded on campus and it will be treated as a hat theft until police step in to declare it murder.
The correct answer to yesterday's major question was that Central administrators tried to take care of something that wouldn't have been a matter for the police a generation ago. They miscalculated -- first their own ability to investigate and then the seriousness of what they were investigating. Their failure has ruined the season of a winning football team and the credibility of a brave priest who did the right thing and proved himself incapable of explaining why.
Dennis Roddy can be reached at 412-263-1965, or by e-mail at droddy@post-gazette.com.
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