DID we really need
another documentary exposing the Roman Catholic sex-abuse scandal?
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the house of God (BBC4,
Monday of last week) is a feature-length film made in the United
States last year (Arts, 15 February), but
not, as far as I can see, previously broadcast here. It focuses on
the attempts of former pupils at an RC school for the deaf to bring
to justice the priest who abused perhaps 200 of them over several
decades.
Because these men cannot
speak (and therefore were unable easily at the time to tell people
what was being done to them), they communicate by signing, and on
TV this is a surprisingly powerful means of sharing their
long-suppressed anger and hurt.
The familiar points are
well made: the esteem in which RC clergy were held, which meant
that when the victims did manage to complain, they were punished
for their wickedness; the refusal of those in authority to punish
even convicted priests in any way other than moving them on to
another parish, where they could continue the abuse; and the
paramount culture of protecting the reputation of the RC Church at
all costs.
We saw the chain of
failure and obfuscation: each tier of responsibility hiding behind
the tier above. This went right to the top, where the Curia
apparently blocked bishops' attempts to have priests removed. One
former bishop set out the key problem as the concept of the
Church's perfection: if only it could acknowledge how far it fell
short of God's good purpose, then there was hope for radical
change. But this was last year's news: surely the crucial thing is
whether Pope Francis is able to reverse this culture.
In Precision: The
measure of all things (BBC4, Mondays), Marcus du Sautoy
explained how humankind imposes order by quantifying everything.
Last week's opening programme looked at time and distance. He took
delight in exposing the medieval extravagance of conflicting and
evolving units of measurement, supposedly based on the length of
the current monarch's outstretched arm, and hailed the French
Enlightenment's crowning achievement, the metre.
But there is a conceptual
flaw at the heart of his celebration: compared with 12, ten is a
rotten base number, divisible by practically nothing; and
centimetres, metres, and kilometres are either too small or too big
for everyday purposes. Inches, feet, yards, and miles are superior,
because they are human, and relate both to us and to the things we
want to measure. For me, the metric system is an atheistic
encyclopaedists' means of world domination. This should be Lord
Carey's real target.
But surely the metre, one ten-millionth of the distance from
equator to North Pole at sea level, is based on something eternal?
BBC2's magnificent Rise of the Continents (Sundays) tells
the story of how each continent has shifted around the globe, and
has been conjoined, separated, and reformed. Professor Iain Stewart
shows us how geology demonstrates how our planet has changed
utterly, and that such changes are taking place now, and are still
to come. I just wish that they showed the graphics long enough for
us to grasp their meaning.