Ohio State University president apologizes for comments against Catholics

At a gathering of OSU’s athletic council over the winter, Gee was discussing the prospect of Notre Dame joining the Big Ten Conference, and the AP was the first to print his off-the-cuff comment:

“The fathers are holy on Sunday, and they’re holy hell on the rest of the week. You just can’t trust those damn Catholics on a Thursday or a Friday, and so, literally, I can say that.”

Literally, you can’t say that.

So, Gee issued this apology in a statement:

“The comments I made were just plain wrong, and in no way do they reflect what the university stands for. They were a poor attempt at humor and entirely inappropriate. There is no excuse for this, and I am deeply sorry.”

This isn’t Gee’s first apology rodeo. From The Cleveland Plain Dealer:

“In January, 2012, as Gee was discussing the difficulty of coordinating multiple university divisions at a speech in Columbus and said, “When we had these 18 colleges all kind of floating around, they were kind of like PT boats, they were shooting each other. It was kind of like the Polish army or something.