FOR once, nobody could claim that his words were taken out of context. And his protestations about being forced into a corner by his interviewer were groundless. The truth is that Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, the RC Archbishop of Durban, when he appeared on the Stephen Nolan show on Radio 5 Live last Friday, turned up with his own mechanical hole-digger, leapt into the pit he made for himself, and then buried himself in it.

Set up as an insider's view of the papal election, the conversation drifted to the challenges facing the new pontiff, and, inevitably, on to sexual misconduct. And it was only gradually that it became apparent what the Cardinal was saying - that paedophilia should be treated as a psychiatric disorder, not as a criminal act; and that paedophiles were not capable of making moral choices in the same way as most criminals. You could identify the moment when Nolan realised he had a story.

But he did not need to tie up the Cardinal with tricksy questions: as the interview unfolded, it became clear that here was somebody high in the RC hierarchy who maintained a view of the RC Church's authority with regard to sexual crimes which prioritised the well-being of the institution and its ministers over that of its lay members.

The point was most damningly made by the caller who directly followed on from the Cardinal - a victim of clerical abuse, who noted that the Cardinal had never once in the interview mentioned caring for those on the rough end of this sexual "disorder". If anyone wondered whether the RC Church was being unjustly vilified for its complacency over child abuse, this interview provided stark evidence.

On a lighter note: David Starkey and Eamon Duffy. The mere thought of them in the same room, or, in the case of Broadcasting House (Radio 4, Sunday), on the same conference call, is enough to raise a smile. It was when Starkey declared that the RC Church faced the same problems of sexual corruption and moral turpitude as when Luther nailed up his 95 theses that things became really promising. Sadly for us, the presenter put a stop to all that historical nonsense; but not before Starkey had declared Thomas Becket, in his capacity as spokesman for ecclesiastical self-government, to be the patron saint of child-abusers. Duffy was not amused.

While millions of eyes were turned towards Rome, an even larger religious event was almost overshadowed. At the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the largest religious gathering in the world was coming to an end. Every 12 years, millions of Hindus come to make ritual ablution, and Mark Tully was there to report, in The Maha Kumbh Mela (Radio 4, Monday of last week).

In a country that is modernising fast, the festival continues to grow, and provides an opportunity to survey the varied forms of belief which gather under the Hindu umbrella, from the liberal to the highly political and intolerant. But the Kumbh Mela's success is also its biggest problem: crowd-management issues are a real concern - that intersection of traditional customs and modern expectations is a kind of exemplum of modern India.