UNITED KINGDOM
Cstholic Herald
By Francis Phillips on Friday, 26 October 2012
I have just been watching a replay of the BBC Panorama programme about Jimmy Savile. There were many clips of his very successful TV programmes dominated by Savile himself, with his trademark cigar, platinum hair and wearing his tracksuit. With the advantage of hindsight we all now know that he was far from the public-spirited eccentric that he presented in the media. Watching his antics during the Panorama programme, the question in my mind was: how did he get away with not just fooling some of the people some of the time, but seemingly all the people all the time – for decades?
Some of the answer to this lies in the institutional blindness of the BBC to the reality behind Savile’s smiling, zany mask. Mary Riddell, in an article about Savile in the Telegraph, rehearsed the well-known quote of Edmund Burke that evil flourishes when good men do nothing. But in this case it seems that the BBC did nothing because they saw nothing; they lived in a complacent cocoon in which high ratings and celebrity status were all-important.
This inability to see what is obvious can be true of any institution – including the Church. I am not talking here about cover-ups in the case of child abuse (though that has parallels with the Savile case) but more generally: when the self-belief of an institution takes over and becomes an end in itself, so that no one says “Wait a minute. What’s going on here?” Self-preservation has become more important than truth.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.