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…