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Confiteor Deo

21 June 2013

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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.

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