UNITED KINGDOM
Catholic Herald
By Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith on Friday, 12 October 2012
After a time you notice that a pattern emerges. Jimmy Savile’s case reminds me very strongly of other cases that have come to light. A man who was universally respected, who enjoyed the company of the famous, who was praised for his charitable work, suddenly unmasked after his death. And questions are asked: who knew? If they knew, why didn’t they say? Why, above all, did they go ahead with celebrating the man’s memory when, it seems, all the time they had known?
Similar questions were put shortly after the death of Fr Kit Cunningham. Now it is the BBC that faces these questions. But there is, if one can consider things calmly, a human angle to this.
We often say things like the following, after the event: “I noticed such and such, and I felt uncomfortable, but I didn’t like to say…” People did notice things about Jimmy Savile, and they must have been disturbed, but they did not want to say anything. It takes courage to speak out, especially against the overwhelming consensus of opinion – and as a result the person who does not speak out becomes complicit, becomes part of the conspiracy of silence, and the guilt they feel at not speaking out makes their silence, the longer it is maintained, all the more compelling. …
Savile is not the only one to have offended in this way. Many of the abusive clergy were know to be abusers for years – I mentioned the Fr Kit Cunningham case earlier, but the most clear example of this was Fr Marcial Maciel whose evil deeds first began to come to light almost 60 years before he was brought to justice by Benedict XVI in 2005. Again, so many knew about Maciel, and yet he was able to get away with it for so long: but the more people who knew, the greater the number with a reason to keep it quiet. In the end thousands of people had a stake in the reputation of a man in whom they had invested so much.
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