All month Britain has been convulsed by the allegations of sexual assault made against the late disc jockey Sir Jimmy Savile. This has followed hard on the downfall of the Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, whose denials of drug use were shown to be at the heart of a huge cover-up.
There was also Joe Paterno, the legendary Penn State football coach, who died in January, weeks after being fired when he was revealed as a key figure in a decades-long conspiracy to conceal abuse of boys by his assistant Jerry Sandusky. Last November, meanwhile, the cricket commentator Peter Roebuck – a celebrity in his field – apparently jumped out of a Cape Town hotel window as police tried to question him about allegations of sexual assault made against him by a young black man. Later came reports of multiple beatings and “sexual oppression” in the house Roebuck maintained in South Africa to help young Zimbabweans through college.
Sex, drugs, a hint of rock and roll. But what really links these cases is charity: all these four men were philanthropists, which helped deflect suspicion. One can see a similar pattern on a far grander scale: the institutional corruption of the Catholic church as it sought to protect priests it knew to be paedophiles. The work of the church was too important to be hampered by what it saw as minor aberrations.