A BROKEN ORDER, on Drama on 4 (Radio 4, Saturday), was a lightly fictionalised true story of some Poor Clares, in Bruges, in the late 1980s. Their declining community, with a convent in a fabulous location, was introduced by the bishop to a new caretaker — a likely lad whom, he hoped, would charm the elderly nuns into accepting a move to a larger community where they could be better cared for. Instead, the handyman assisted them to sell their property behind the bishop’s back, and buy a château in the south of France.
A true story, but rich in allegory. The bishop character is an interesting placeholder for the Church, across denominations, in the post-1960s West. He dismisses the nuns as “backward”, identifies resistance to change as the source of their problems, and demands that their lives be stripped of much of their richness and beauty, supposedly for their own good.
Yet the reforming bishop doesn’t grasp that the whole is more than the sum of the parts — parts that cannot easily be detached or rearranged without irreparable damage.
The nuns also fail to grasp this, falling apart morally under the influence of the handyman, whose secular assumption is that they need some colour after sometimes harsh lives, and so encourages them to squander the proceeds of the convent’s sale on luxury cars, racehorses, and trips to casinos.
Decades later, it transpires that the prelatical moderniser was sexually abusing his own nephews. Sometimes, the Church can be bad for one’s faith.
Yet there are moments like the interview on Life Changing (Radio 4, Wednesday) with Rozhan, a 19-year-old Iranian whose family left Tehran three years ago after the underground house church that her mother had been attending since 2020 was discovered.
Fleeing with nothing but a weekend bag, without even having the chance to say goodbye to her grandparents, she arrived in this country after a Channel crossing organised by people smugglers — a terrifying experience that clearly still causes her distress.
Rozhan was inspiring in her determination to better herself, her gratitude to Britain for giving her a new future, and her lack of bitterness. She was baptised about a year after arriving here — an “unreal” experience.
In a depressing week in the affairs of the world, Artemis II generated much hope (Comment, 10 April). BBC Inside Science (Radio 4, Thursday) explored whether this was merely the first step towards establishing a permanent human presence on the moon, and then on Mars. Prohibitive problems include deadly solar flares, poisonous dust, and the absence of the chemical building blocks of life; and yet it was hard not to be swept up by the cheerfully infectious faith of the astronautics community, that these were merely appealingly challenging problems for human ingenuity to get stuck into.