How Paterno and Pétain died too old

Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856–1951) and Coach Joe Paterno (1926–2012) have something in common: They died too old. Far better for their legacies if they had taken leave of this world a dozen years sooner.

Pétain was France’s World War I military hero against Germany in the famous 1916 Battle of Verdun. Paterno was the winningest coach in NCAA Division I college football history during his tenure at Penn State from 1966 to 2011. But both departed under a cloud of dishonor. The motto “quit while you’re ahead” is not exactly apropos, but one is tempted to say it.

Pétain outlived his glory years by living to see World War II. As marshal of France he signed an armistice with Germany in June 1940, which established a Nazi occupation zone in northern France, collaborated with the Germans on rounding up Jews, and effectively set France up to become a puppet state of its rapacious neighbor to the east. After the war, Pétain was tried by the provisional government of France and convicted of treason. In deference to his age and former accomplishments, he was spared execution and banished to a small island off the French coast.

Paterno outlived his glory years by choosing to look the other way in the sexual abuse of children by his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, a scandal that broke in 2011 and for which Sandusky was charged for activities occurring between 1994 and 2009. Paterno was not charged but fired as head coach, and the NCAA stripped him of all his wins from 1998 through 2011 as punishment, not dissimilarly from Petain being stripped of all his military ranks and honors except the distinction of marshal of France.

But here is the interesting part to me: the vacillation of human justice and judgment. French President Charles de Gaulle was ambivalent about how to treat l’affaire Petain, and so are Paterno’s judges today. Second-guessing regarding the latter did not take long to surface after the initial predictable outrage. Little by little, and finally in a crescendo, Penn State alumni and fans began clamoring for a restoration of Paterno’s wins. Last month the NCAA complied and announced it would posthumously give Paterno his 111 victories back. Still undecided is the question of whether to restore the bronze statue of Paterno that long graced Beaver Stadium in State College.

How fickle is human justice when unmoored from God’s? All that remains in that case is mood, and mood is famously … moody. The second-century Roman noble Gracchus quipped that “Rome is the mob.” The 10th century B.C. King Agag counted on the half-life dissipation of human moods of justice to get him off death row (1 Samuel 15:32). He would have been right to hope so, too, had the prophet Samuel been a lesser man, who based justice on shifting moods and not the fixed decrees of God.