For reasons both practical and spiritual, I’ve mostly resisted the consuming pull of the sexual abuse saga at Penn State.

But with ubiquitous news feeds and family or friends always there to fill you in, not to mention my own curiosity, one tends to be better informed than one’s better intentions would have it.

On hearing of the case, of young boys victimized first by a predatory coach and then by a bureaucratic cover-up, I was struck by its common ground with the same saga that has wracked the Catholic Church: patriarchal institutions deeply rooted in tradition and committed to preserving their reputations at all costs—even if that cost is children unimaginably traumatized for the rest of their lives.

To emphasize this common ground in a revealing if coincidental light, consider the surname of the legendary Coach Paterno with its root in “father”—the aged “Papa Joe” being a similarly beloved, paternal figure much like “il Papa,” the Pope.

This coincidence aside, though, the case at Penn State brought back to mind the question that for me became only more pronounced with every new report in the past ten years of clerical abuse: was this phenomenon just a matter of natural human depravity on a case-by-case basis, or did the incomprehensible scale of abuse suggest an added agency of supernatural dimensions behind it?

In other words, was an actual devil in the details?

So systemic did the problem seem, global in its sweep and relentless in its reach, that I just couldn’t see any way around the question of the devil.

Of course, speaking of the devil begs the ever-vexing question: does one even exist? Which presents a tall order for the purposes of the remaining space here, with roughly 650 words to go on the humanist-minded platform of the Good Letters blog.

But as much as you or I might pussyfoot with the question, and in some ways for good reason given the ultimate mysteries that enshroud it, one thing is certain: the Scriptures, in particular the New Testament, allow for no such pussyfooting.

The Second Letter of Peter is disturbingly clear:

“Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”

But in this case a lion that poses as a lamb (in this case hoping to lie down with true lambs), as Paul claims in his Second Letter to the Corinthians:

“And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, “The Molester Next Door,” Frank Bruni makes the equivalent point in human terms: “the predator to watch out for is less likely to don a trench coat and lurk behind a bush than to wear a clerical collar and stand near the altar or to hold a stopwatch and walk the sidelines.”

Or, in my own case—a comparatively milder one by far—he was more likely to don a backpack and hold a trail map as he led a group of us into the Colorado mountains.

To be clear, I wasn’t abused on any level comparable to the victims in the news. In fact, I never considered myself traumatized in the slightest, at least not beyond the moment it happened.

But I was violated.

His name was Alan (thankfully I don’t recall his last name), and he was a middle-aged, overweight chef from Texas whose gourmet meals on the trail made him one of the favorite counselors at the wilderness camp in southwestern Colorado.

As leader of a three-day “survival” course in the mountains, he took me and a handful of other nine year-old boys to learn such rudimentary skills as how to make a lean-to, tie a tourniquet, and start a fire without a match.

How to resist a pedophile was not on the list.

But one night in the tent, he quietly turned what at first seemed like a harmless massage for a tired camper into the opportunity to stick his hand inside my underpants.

“How does that feel?” he whispered.

Not so good, you fat fucking pervert, I thought but did not have the balls to say, seeing that he had them in the palm of his clammy hand.

So I said nothing and turned over to sleep with my back to him.

And that was that.

It was a troubling experience, no doubt, but in a fairly passing manner—at least consciously speaking.

And I laughed when I told my parents some twenty years later, though they were aghast to be hearing it for the first time. “Look at it this way,” I said, “I survived the ‘survival’ course.” The irony was never lost on me.

But what if it wasn’t as passing an incident as I’d like to think? What if the jaws of something truly evil opened before me even briefly in that tent, with an effect perhaps that I never fully processed in my sexual development?

Maybe, maybe not. Luckily for me, I have the comparative luxury of not knowing. Untold others haven’t been so lucky.

And as I come to the end of this post, with no more resolution in sight pertaining to the question of the devil than when I began, I would be downright loath anyway to answer it for anyone but myself—especially for those victims who might consider the question itself only more traumatizing.

Speaking for myself, then, I cannot help but note that my own confusion and conflicting claims on the matter only tend to lend greater credence to the epithet that Jesus himself used for the devil: “father of lies.”

Notwithstanding the total culpability of the Alan Whatevers of the world.