New Paterno revelations won't change any minds (column)

Not long ago, I related the story of St. Olga of Kiev and how she could have been the patron saint of Penn State football as the team prepared to exact revenge on the University of Pittsburgh because of her very special talent for vengeance – a talent that involved burying people alive and setting other people's houses ablaze and getting other people drunk and then having her soldiers slaughter them.  

At a funeral. 

The woman was, well, nasty, a bloodthirsty tyrant who committed, essentially, genocide. And she wound up being a saint. 

Now, it appears that Penn State has a new patron saint – St. Vladimir, who happened to be St. Olga's grandson. (He is something of a legacy saint. What, you thought it was merit selection?) 

Like his grandma, St. Vlad has relevance to Penn State. 

He was a sinner – and man, was he a sinner – who became a saint. 

More:What does biology and St. Olga have to do with PSU-Pitt? (column)

More:The Ravens and Kaepernick: A study in hypocrisy (column)

More:Matt Sandusky: Adopted, abused, and now sharing his painful story

Just as the late Joe Paterno was a sinner – a pretty serious one – who is considered a saint among a sizeable segment of the population of the Penn State universe. 

Last week, CNN's Sara Ganim, still mining that very rich vein that is the Jerry Sandusky scandal, reported that former Paterno assistant coach Mike McQueary told state police that the sainted coach knew about Sandusky's predilections and predatory nature before McQueary came to him after witnessing Sandusky doing something very heinous in the coach's locker room. 

According to the police report, Paterno told McQueary that his eyewitness account "was the second complaint of this nature he had received." 

Of course it was. 

The report contained some other damning evidence provided by McQueary. McQueary told police that Paterno said that his wife, Sue, said Sandusky's wife, Dottie, "told her Jerry doesn't like girls." 

This sparked the usual denials from Paterno's family, and from the legions of St. Joe's acolytes, that it was all malicious mendacity and that Paterno had done no wrong and that the whole thing was an attempt to tarnish the great man's legacy, which, for the most part, included being able to win a bunch of football games. 

It was believed to be the final nail in the coffin, the last shovel-full of dirt thrown on his grave – whatever death-related metaphor you can come up with here – that proved that Paterno knew that Sandusky was a monster and that he did nothing to stop him. 

It was billed with a headline that included "CNN EXCLUSIVE" – as if it had something to do with the president-for-the-time-being doing something nefarious with the Rooskies. It was BREAKING NEWS, the kind of thing that is supposed to change the world, or the perception or the world, or at least make somebody think that something important had happened. 

It kind of landed with a thud. 

And that's because, as it is with most of the news that should cause people to sit up and realize that their preconceived notions were wrong, it wasn't going to change anybody's mind. 

The Paterno loyalists aren't going to have a sudden Road to Damascus moment and realize that everything they thought about their beloved saint was wrong. And those who believed that the Paterno who was a holier-than-thou hypocrite for covering up the horrific crimes perpetrated by an assistant just to preserve the image of his football empire accepted the new revelations as just more evidence that they were right all along. 

Ganim wrote, "The police report casts fresh doubt on the mountain of denials by Paterno, his family and his loyalists that the coach knew anything of Sandusky's serial molestation before the 2001 incident. 

"It contradicts the head coach's testimony before a grand jury and his published statement a week before he died in 2012 that he 'had "no inkling" that Sandusky might be a sexual deviant' until he heard the shocking allegation from McQueary. Other documents unveiled since Paterno's death suggest the head coach was told of other similar claims as early as the 1970s." 

All of those claims, Paterno worshippers contend, are flawed, and wrong, and motivated by a variety of ulterior motives. The notion that football had become such a powerful religion among the Penn State faithful is lost upon them. They believe what they believe and no evidence to the contrary is going to give them pause. They believe because they believe. That is what faith is all about. 

Which brings us back to St. Vladimir, St. Olga's grandkid. 

He was kind of a … well, the words that best describe him can't be used in this forum.  

Where to begin. Let's see. He became prince of Kiev by killing his brother. He raped his sister-in-law. He sacrificed a man and his son to consecrate a new temple to the gods. Asked to help quell rebellion by the emperor of Constantinople, he resorted to extortion, demanding that the emperor hand over his sister as payment for his assistance. (The woman eventually became Vlad's eighth wife. Eight wives. Some guys just never learn.) 

Vlad, as part of the deal struck for the emperor's sister, agreed to convert to Christianity, and that led him to an epiphany and a changing of his ways. He became a much more mellow dictator and committed himself to convert his constituency to the church. 

And for that he was canonized as a saint.  

What's that have to do with Paterno? you ask. 

Well, Paterno did a lot of good things. He was revered for running a clean program, one in which his football players actually went to class and graduated. He was outspoken about the sins of other coaches of big-time college programs who exploited players and didn't care about anything but winning. 

But his sins were plentiful. He created the monster that is Penn State football, an institution that overshadows the university, the tail that wags the dog, so to speak. And to protect that creation, he may have enabled a person who committed acts that are perhaps the worst things a human being can do, short of murder. He turned a blind eye to a predator who destroyed the lives of God knows how many children.  

Like Vlad, he was a sinner and a saint.  

The two things aren't mutually exclusive. 

As Ambrose Bierce wrote in his seminal work, "The Devil's Dictionary," a saint is "a dead sinner revised and edited." 

Reach Mike Argento at 717-771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.