And admirable man, but not to be admired for the wrong reason.

William Oddie writes about the passing of a British disk jockey, who apparently epitomized charity:

Until I read it in the Catholic Herald, I have to admit that I didn’t realise that Jimmy Savile was a practising Catholic, who attended Mass several times a week. Neither, or so it seemed, did most of those who wrote his obituaries. Some 0f them mentioned that he had a papal knighthood, possibly a clue (though since Rupert Murdoch also has one, it doesn’t necessarily signify). But they must have known it. I’ve written obituaries for the Times and the Telegraph: you can’t do it without quite a bit of research into a man’s life: his attending daily Mass must at some point have come on to the obituarists’ radar.


They all mentioned his generosity with both money (he gave 90 per cent of his earnings away) and his persistent and energetic doing of good. (It was interesting that no-one ever described him as a do-gooder; his sheer effectiveness made that impossible, somehow.)

And:

As I say, the English quality papers say nothing about Jimmy Savile’s faith either. But they must have known about it. Is it too much to call this a “conspiracy of silence”? It must, at the very least, be a sign of the underlying almost instinctive hostility in England to the notion that anything good could come from a life whose foundation is the Catholic religion. I fear we still have a long way to go. Ah well; A Luta Continua.

Sounds like a person who should be honored and imitated.