The only problem was that Savile was a monster. His spectacular public career ran from the late 1950s through his death in 2011. Few doubted that he was a kind of secular saint. Beyond just fund-raising, he involved himself directly in helping the sick, serving as a volunteer nurse in hospital and a helper in orphanages. Everybody loved Savile, including politicians, the BBC, and the royal family. (Please note, this case is totally familiar in the UK, but is scarcely known in the US, and hence my explanation).

This was disc jockey Jimmy Savile, who for decades was a ubiquitous celebrity, prominent in multiple works of charity and fund-raising.

The other part of the story requires some explanation, and involves another entertainer who in his time was as beloved in Britain as Lydon was loathed. Lydon has at least one other very notable achievement to his credit. With enormous respect to Brennan’s fine column, he doesn’t know the half of it. It might be presumptuous on my part, but I would hazard a guess Johnny is not coming to his devotion from a religious perspective. … And if a guy who became rich and famous screaming about everything under the sun can embody Christian sacrificial love, we need to look in the mirror and ask, what’s our excuse?Įmbodying Christian sacrificial love … and this about a man who in his day was about as popular in the media as, say, al-Qaeda is in our own time. The crude and profane Johnny Rotten puts me to shame. Reporting his own family’s experience with Alzheimer’s, Brennan offers a powerful and moving tribute: He has said that he would not have it any other way. Lydon refuses to consider any kind of institutionalization, and he stolidly accepts his burden. He has been married to the same woman for 42 years, and for some time, the main focus of his life has been serving as sole care-giver of his wife, who is gravely afflicted with Alzheimer’s. But as he has discovered, Lydon is himself in many ways a shining exemplar of old-fashioned virtues. Rotten (John Lydon) or the group he once fronted, the Sex Pistols, whose very name he cannot even bring himself to utter in the pages of Angelus. As Brennan makes clear, he never had time musically for Mr.

John lydon rotten