Abstract

Earl1 was a sweet, slightly chubby, teenager when I first met him at the shelter for runaway and homeless youth where I worked. He was also a street-smart hustler who traded sex for money or room and board whenever necessary. He came from a deeply troubled family and had limited formal edu-cation, but Earl was astute. It was Earl who first introduced me to the seamier side of institutional cultures that permit secrets to be buried and abuses to flourish. I have been wiser ever since. As the Penn State story unfolded, I recognized it: different setting, same story. I now eye uneasily a report just released by my uni-versity documenting institutional failures in handling a child pornography matter. It is too similar for comfort. Here I take a look at these cases side-by-side. A Runaway Shelter: The Case of a Priest I met Earl when I worked at Covenant House, a runaway and homeless youth shelter in New York City. We housed hundreds of kids a night. They came from troubled families and had failed in a variety of systems, so we attempted to plug gaps. I oversaw a small legal department but worked under one roof with other professionals including social workers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and priests. The fit was not always easy, given different professional orientations, but the goal was to help kids. Covenant House was founded by a charismatic Franciscan priest named Bruce Ritter. In the 1960s, he moved to a dis-advantaged neighborhood to, “live and work among the poor ” (Ritter, 1987, p. 4). One evening, in 1968, six home-less teenagers knocked on his door looking for a place to stay. They spent the night, but Ritter sought other place-ments for them the next morning. Faced with advice to have