Pressure mounts on Vatican to rescind Jimmy Savile’s papal knighthood

• then Last year, British TV icon Jimmy Savile died at the age of 84. Savile, who had for years been heavily involved in philanthropy and charity, was in 1990 awarded dual knighthoods – one from his country, and one from the Vatican. Following his death, however, a crushing surge of allegations hit law enforcement that Savile had, in fact, been a child sexual perdator. British police now believe he could’ve been the nation’s most prolific predator in that regard – some 300 people have now come forward.
• now The Vatican, under pressure to strip Savile of his papal knighthood, has responded in a way that may not assuage critics. The honor, as claimed by Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi, can’t be taken away because it isn’t recorded in an official capacity to begin with. The title dies with the man, so to say. He did say the title wouldn’t have been given if the church had known of his alleged crimes, but considering the Catholic Church’s woeful history on child sex predation, would saying “he isn’t a papal knight anymore” be so hard? source

»Chris@SFB says: We received a comment on this post we wanted to be sure to address, regarding our use of the phrase “the Catholic Church’s woeful history” as relates to child sex predation. The commenter argues that the phrase is an unfair generalization — that it’s the clergy that suffers with these “issues,” not the Church, and that it’s improper to call it a “woeful history” because this wasn’t a problem that existed before Vatican II. On the first point, this seems both a distinction without a difference, as well as factually incomplete. In truth, child sex abuse committed by members of the Catholic clergy was reliably facilitated by Church officials and higher-ups, who aided in moving violators to different parishes and concealing their heinous crimes. As to the post-conciliar point, I’d only say that I’m unaware of any provable assertion that molestation and sex abuse only became issues for the Church after Vatican II, but even were that true, the past fifty years on their own rise to the level of a “woeful history,” temporally and semantically.