Hits and Misses
There’s been little to cheer about in 2020, but Steeler Nation can feel very, very good about the performance of the Pittsburgh Steelers this fall. The team is undefeated so far, the only team that can make that claim across professional football. The Kansas City Chiefs, the team that won the Super Bowl in February, have already notched one loss. Steelers fans can also revel in schadenfreude witnessing the plight of the Tom Brady-less New England Patriots. Without their longtime quarterback, they have won only three games and lost five. Will the Steelers make a return trip to the Super Bowl in February? Hard to say, of course – even a season full of wins doesn’t guarantee anything when the best teams face off in any sport. And the coronavirus inevitably makes the next couple of months unpredictable. But watching the Steelers attempt to win another Vince Lombardi Trophy will indeed be exciting.
The news when it comes to COVID-19 has been unrelentingly grim over the last couple of weeks. There have been rising rates of infections, hospitalizations and deaths in this region and in many parts of the world. But we were all given a glimmer of hope Monday with the announcement by the drug maker Pfizer that a vaccine it is developing has so far proven to be 90% effective – a much higher rate, it should be noted, than the annual flu vaccine. It is still going through clinical trials – Washington County Commissioner Larry Maggi has been participating in them – and a final determination of its safety and efficacy is still a ways off. Then, it will take a considerable amount of time for a vaccine to be widely distributed. That being the case, we shouldn’t relax – wearing a mask, washing your hands, avoiding crowds and keeping your distance should remain the order of the day.
The word most often used to describe Eleanor Schano is “trailblazer,” and for good reason. She rose through the ranks of Pittsburgh television media when it was decidedly a boys club. But through no small amount of determination, Schano was able to break through on WDTV-TV (which later became KDKA-TV), moved on to WTAE-TV, and grabbed onto hard-hitting stories when it was expected that female reporters should interview the governor’s wife and not the governor himself. Unfortunately, Schano was felled by the coronavirus this week, dying at age 88. One person who posted on Schano’s Facebook page shortly after her death was announced said it well: “If you are a woman who enjoys a professional career today, you can thank Eleanor Schano for helping to pave the way for you.”
Since 2018’s devastating grand jury report on child sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Pennsylvania, there’s been a reckoning worldwide on abuse within the Catholic Church that was swept under the rug for decades. On Tuesday, the Vatican released a report revealing how abuse allegations against Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., were not taken seriously by his superiors, most notably Pope John Paul II. The Vatican should be commended for allowing this probe to happen, and it shouldn’t shy away from being this transparent in the future. Wilton Gregory, the current archbishop of Washington, D.C., explained that the disclosures had to be made in order for healing to begin. For the victims of abuse and the Catholic Church, that healing will take a long time.