A Stranger in Several Worlds

I wanted to bring you Handel, that’s what I wanted to do—but could I? In our technical world, shouldn’t it have been possible to run over to YouTube, knock on Joyce DiDonato ’s door, and ask her to sing Piangero la sorte mia, from Giulio Cesare?

So I tried that, and got the following message:

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

 A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

If you see them, show them this information:

AB38WEMsl82BNwFlnjAjN_pSfOuzgzsjh-uXy0c70ARLtmFIagYeFkcKKttC

ALP2h396ZpWP8XoSMkcQ9JGv70FtwSE5jLFTu0SCmDkn4NxfaBz_ZAk0SOmQ

CbZxXa1qKY3oqivKmBYPBY1-BHQ3uEBkBD_PQbMDVw2igi8a_D445LlPl5FS

NBV_hUh6mxXpv8CUIgKG2PaQ9-W8CeGWQB6jUQ6Af6hf6jl144HmIxOfUIay

7sKJxVlvoRMPDsXcqqzFTn1s6nk082qRs1PSbLhWd0IEUogPlHQ5lsUPQfku

jBQgskIc4PhRrS5ojflfavNV4FfT_NFQSUFO0fI5u0ykmWYomVrb_7PkefQD

In fact, that was only the beginning of the message, which went on with twenty lines or so of gibberish that only a team of highly trained monkeys could understand. And speaking of the team of HTM’s—aren’t we being just a bit facetious, over there are Google / YouTube? Granted, a “500 Internal Server Error” is nothing more than a passing cloud in my day, but what if it hadn’t been? What if I had needed, seriously needed, Piangero? There are times you do, you know…..

And it’s no use telling you that Piangero is a knockout of an aria, since what are words, next to the wrenching sadness of the aria? Suffice it to say that Cleopatra—yup, that’s our girl—has lost both a major battle against Tolomeo and has also lost her man, Cesare, as well. And the music is something only a manic-depressive—and a rapid cycler as well—could write. The middle section is as wild as the two outer sections are vein-cuttingly tragic. And DiDonato, who is singing over the top of her game, just nails it.

But it wasn’t to be, Dear Reader, or was it? Because in looking up the lyrics for Piangero via Google, I saw a link for a YouTube clip of DiDonato singing the aria. Would it work if I clicked it?

Cautionary note—following a long tradition, this is undoubtedly bootlegged video from a New York performance, and thank God for it. Yes, the camera bobs up and down and about—at times decapitating DiDonato, at times losing her altogether. But if you can’t stand it, close your eyes and bask. Oh, and if you’d like to know what she’s singing, well—here are the words:

Why then, in one day,
I am deprived of magnificence and glory?

Oh, cruel fate!
Caesar, my beloved idol is probably dead, Cornelia and Sextus are defenceless
and cannot give me assistance. O God! There is no hope left in my life.

I will bemoan my fate
so cruel and brutal
As long as there is breath left in my body. And when I am dead
and become a ghost, I will haunt
the tyrant night and day.

)

And so the Gods who rule over bloggers relented, and let me bring you the clip above. Or who knows—the highly trained monkeys may have come through at last.

Because, for much of the morning, DiDonato declined to sing—sending error messages instead. In fact, everybody at YouTube was spending the morning on the golf course, since I was getting error messages all over the place.

I wasn’t supposed, you see, to bring you Handel, since there was another composer who needed a boost up. And though I’ll listen to the fabulous countertenor Philippe Jaroussky any day, why did I have to listen to him sing works by a guy named Reynaldo Hahn?

Or rather, who was Reynaldo Hahn? Really, if Jaroussky is singing him, shouldn’t I have heard of him? But there he was, the only clickable thing on YouTube this morning. So it was time to check him out, as can you by clicking the clip below.

)

Wow, what a find! And what’s the dope on Hahn?

Well, we can start with what Proust said: “everything I have ever done has always been thanks to Reynaldo.”

True, they were lovers for two years between 1894 and 1896 and then lifelong friends, but it’s still a tribute.

And, in addition to being a fine composer, Hahn—a Venezuelan who later became a French citizen and served in World War I—was a conductor of, especially, Mozart. Oh, and according to Wikipedia, Hahn had “a special gift of attracting important people to his side.”

Nice!

And he must have had the gift from an early age, because he was able to enter the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten, even though the Conservatoire frowned on child prodigies, and had refused as a child the great Franz Liszt. In the course of his 72 years, Hahn became, in the words of Wikipedia, a “composer, conductor, music critic, diarist, theatre director, and salon singer.”

Lastly, and tantalizingly, here’s what Wikipedia had to say about Hahn:

By the age of nineteen in 1894, Hahn had written many songs about love; however, his worldly sophistication masked shyness about his own personal feelings. He had close intimate friendships with women, and they were clearly fond of the gallant and charming young composer. Cléopatre-Diane de Mérode, a famous beauty of le beau monde and three years older than Hahn, inspired him to write: "I worship her as a great and perfect work of art". Despite this tribute to her, he reportedly loved her only at a distance his whole life. The famed courtesan Liane de Pougy referred to Hahn in her diary as the "sweetness in her life." Though close friends, their relationship ended when de Pougy married. Hahn famously told her: "Goodbye Lianon. I hate married people." Hahn was a closeted homosexual, even though in his personal letters he was frequently critical of homosexuals and homosexuality.

Is it that last sentence, with the information that he was a “closeted” homosexual (even in Paris, at that date could there have been anything else?), which makes me hear such sadness, such wistfulness in the song? Consider—he was Venezuelan, but living in another country. He was a gay man living in—well, another country. He drops his close friends when they marry. And he seems to have lived a life hidden even until the present day. I’ve heard of all the people Wikipedia lists as having been friends with Hahn, but Hahn?

A dark horse, indeed….

Watch Out!

“Can I ask you a question, Marc?” said Naïa, the 12-year old daughter of the owner of the café, who was being homeschooled in Language Arts, at the time. I thought I knew what it was about, since I had been overhearing the lesson.

Language arts, you see, is what used to be called grammar, which at least was straightforward and no-nonsense. But language arts? Mealy mouthed if I ever heard it….

“Do you know how to diagram a sentence?” asked Naïa.

“Of course I do,” I said. “I personally start every day by diagramming at least three sentences, randomly chosen from The New York Times. Should the sentences prove insufficiently challenging, I create them myself. Today, for example, I decided to diagram the sentence:

Europe—roiled by war, torn by turmoil, worn and weary by woe—lurched uncertainly, in the aftermath of the bloodiest conflict of the 20^th century, towards an unsteady and tenuous peace, which, despite the watery goodwill of all concerned, seemed increasingly unlikely to be achieved.”

“You diagrammed that sentence?”

“Of course I did, nor did it take me more than 33 seconds,” I swore. It’s important to maintain the illusion that these things are important. “My mother was an ardent diagrammer of sentences. She once became so engrossed in diagramming a sentence that she unwittingly missed a trip to Paris. Indeed, the anecdotal evidence is rife with people who have neglected to eat or sleep—so immersed are they in diagramming sentences. I only permit myself three sentences a day, so as not to fall into the trap.”

Naïa was completely unconvinced. Lady, Naïa’s mother, joined us. I urged her to join me in diagramming a few sentences.

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to do it,” said Lady, in what I thought was an unnecessarily truthful—and deflating—remark. Surely Lady understands the necessity of hypocrisy in child / adult relationships?

“It’s totally stupid,” said Naïa, and I prepared to fight the statement to one of our deaths. It did occur to me, however, that it had been years since I had diagrammed a sentence. So what was it all about? And could I still do it?

Well, that was a week ago, during which I went to New York on the flimsy excuse that I needed to hear the world’s greatest singer.

“It’s the voice I want to hear at the moment of my death,” I told Lady, who asked me what the German baritone Matthias Goerne sounded like. And Lady, who may have sniffed something fishy in my ardor for diagramming sentences, called for proof. Fortunately, YouTube came through, and I played her Schubert’s “Nacht und Träume”. She got the point.

And so I flew 1600 miles northwest, and arrived in a city that was, according to The New York Times, colder than Montana. It was not, however, colder than Wisconsin at its worst—by which I mean that it was bearable. Just….

And Goerne? To tell you how good he was, and how completely he transfixed the audience, he stood dead still in his singing poise after he had finished the 20^th and last song of the song cycle Die shöne Müllerin. And the audience? Well, we all went into what my brother John called “negative silence,” meaning that no one even breathed, and for a space of thirty seconds. And I mean that “thirty,”—as in “one, one thousand, two, one thousand…”

At last, Goerne relaxed, and then the applause was thunderous.

“It was the best ‘shöne Müllerin’ ever,” said a lady next to me on the subway—and it was hard not to disagree. I might hear it as good, but never better….

Well, it was something I had to do once in my life—spend an inordinate amount of money on going thousands of miles away to hear a concert. And was it my guilty conscience that brought on attack of Montezuma’s revenge that utterly felled me the two days following the concert? On the third day I resurrected myself, had a nice weekend, and came home.

John and Jeanne live in the quietest building in New York. From their apartment, I could hear vague traffic sounds six floors below me. But anything else? Utter silence.

Alas, what was going on this morning when I woke in San Juan? Jackhammers, since now that the street has been re-bricked, it’s obviously time to re-brick the intersections, which hadn’t been done. And why not? Why not do the whole thing at once?

What, and limit the amount of disruption and noise? Are you crazy? Besides, if it’s two projects, then think of the exponential number of cost overruns and overtime and fraudulent-or-at-least-questionable design changes available to the contractor, the subcontractors, the suppliers, and who knows else? And so I did the trot, and turned to the café. Naïa was busy at work, still diagramming sentences. It was time to find out—what was that all about? And here, Dear Reader, is what a diagrammed sentence looks like:

Ummm? It was nothing like what I remembered, so I went to YouTube, to hear a presentation on diagramming sentences. And guess what? I understand it now—because I learned grammar on my own, and from having learned Greek and Latin. But if I were coming at it from a 12-year old’s perspective? Which is to say, Naïa?

I’d be sunk….

Look—sometimes making things too easy is simply to make things infinitely more difficult. Notice in the sentence diagrammed above that there are absolutely no grammatical terms—no transitive versus intransitive verbs, no direct versus indirect objects, no present participles versus gerunds, no prepositional versus adjectival versus participial phrases. But to diagram the sentence above? You have to grasp the concepts of all the terminology above. So why not come out, explain to kids what all this stuff is, and then figure out a scheme to diagram the sentence?

How about this?

It’s rudimentary, of course. “Forecasting” in the sentence above is actually a present participle doing time as an adjective, and “and” and “but” are conjunctions—but are they coordinating or subordinating? (Answer, they’re both coordinating….) Oh, and what to do with that “today’s forecasters?” Technically, it’s an example of the Saxon genitive, (Marc’s hat, or Naïa’s computer, or even Sam’s Club—all that “apostrophe s” stuff.) Of course, if it were “forecasters of today,” then “of” would be the preposition and “today” would be the object of the preposition. But as it is, doesn’t “today’s forecasters” sound like a compound noun, like “toilet paper” or “bowling alley?”

Of course, Franny would have wanted me to identify the predicate, which I dimly remembered from half a century ago. So I asked Mr. Fernández, who assured me: it’s utterly vital. So what is it?

Anything that’s not the nominative—which would be the subject and whatever modifiers and / or conjunctions and / or preposition phrases and / or clauses…

In short, anything including and after the verb.

Why bother?

“How was the concert,” asked Lady, coming into the café.

“Fucking amazing,” I said, forgetting that there was a 12-year kid sitting by—now populating her imaginary zoo with real-if-virtual animals.

“So glad you didn’t miss it,” says Naïa, “so busy you might have been, diagramming those sentences…”

World?

Watch out!

Needed: A Few Improvements in Paradise

It was one of those things I read in the middle of the night, and it didn’t tell me much that I didn’t know. And though the article in The New York Times was expansive, it could be more simply put: the island is a mess and people are getting out.

There’s the crime. Yes, we only had 883 murders last year, but the year before? Over 1100—a record for us.  And New York, with at least twice the population, had about half a many murders as we did.

Per capita income: $15,200, which is half that of the poorest state, Mississippi.

Infrastructure: you could swim in some of the potholes in the roads.

Electricity: sky high.

Public schools: can’t even assure the physical safety of the pupils, who are sent out to the streets if their teacher is absent (no one ever hearing of a substitute teacher…).

It goes on and on, the litany of ills affecting us, and so our professional classes are doing the obvious. Unlike the 1950’s, when poor people moved to the states to work in factories, our educated classes are leaving the island. Here’s what the Times had to say:

Puerto Rico’s drop in population has far outpaced that of American states. In 2011 and 2012, the population fell by nearly 1 percent, according to census figures. From July 2012 to July 2013, it declined again by 1 percent, or about 36,000 people. That is more than seven times the drop in West Virginia, the state with the steepest population losses.

All this—however depressing—I get. What don’t I get? Well, check this out:

Un proyecto de ley senatorial que propone otorgar incentivos contributivos a puertorriqueños que han emigrado para que regresen y residan e inviertan en el país, recibió ayer el endoso del Departamento de Desarrollo Económico y Comercio (DDEC) y de varias entidades privadas.

(“A senate law project that proposes to award tax incentives to Puerto Ricans who have emigrated in order for them to return, live and invest in the island received the endorsement yesterday of the Department of Economic and Business Development and various private entities.”)

Guys?

In the first place, we’re broke and the governor has just had to raise taxes. In the second place, has anyone thought of why all those doctors, lawyers, nurses and teachers left the island in the first place? A sudden desire for 20-below zero weather? The joys of shoveling snow? Struggling daily with a language that is not your own, a feeling every day that you’re an outsider?

Listen, guys, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and one of the three things that neurologists say completely remap your brain (the other two being having children and getting married…). Do you think any of these people, having made such a sacrifice, are going to be lured back by a tax incentive? And by the way, how big a tax incentive will it have to be to compensate for the loss of income with which they’ll be hit by moving back to the island?

More to the point, why did all these people leave in the first place? The crime, the infrastructure, the lousy pay and horrible government—has any of that changed? Everything that prompted people to leave in the first place is not the same—it’s worse.

So what should be done? Well, as I write in the café that is my office, I’m seeing the owner busy rearranging her shop. So I asked her: “what’s the hardest part of running your business?”

She’s stunned, can’t speak, and makes circular gestures with her hands. In short, it’s everything. I give her prompts: the cost of electricity, the regulations, the permits, the…

“The taxes,” she says. “Yeah, that’s the hardest….”

I read recently that Georgia had improved their economy by improving their ease of doing business from a ranking of x to eight. Right—so what was Puerto Rico?

Well, we’re number 40. And our neighbors? Dominican Republic is 112; Haiti is 177. Both Cuba and the Virgin Islands are unranked. Singapore is number 1, the United States is number 4.

The ranking is done by the World Bank; here, drawn from their website, is their description of the ranking:

Economies are ranked on their ease of doing business, from 1 – 189. A high ranking on the ease of doing business index means the regulatory environment is more conducive to the starting and operation of a local firm. This index averages the country's percentile rankings on 10 topics, made up of a variety of indicators, giving equal weight to each topic. The rankings for all economies are benchmarked to June 2013.  

And what are the ten topics?

·      Starting a business

·      Dealing with construction permits

·      Getting electricity

·      Registering property

·      Getting credit

·      Protecting investors

·      Paying taxes

·      Trading across borders

·      Enforcing contracts

·      Resolving insolvency

OK—so how does Puerto Rico do? Here’s the list with Puerto Rico’s rankings

·      Starting a business---------------------------18

·      Dealing with construction permits--------172

·      Getting electricity----------------------------38

·      Registering property-------------------------132

·      Getting credit---------------------------------13

·      Protecting investors--------------------------16

·      Paying taxes-----------------------------------110

·      Trading across borders-----------------------87

·      Enforcing contracts---------------------------101

·      Resolving insolvency-------------------------21

What’s interesting is how skewed these numbers are. Getting credit is 13, our lowest score; dealing with construction permits is a whopping 172. Shouldn’t that suggest something to our lawmakers?

Look, I’m a blogger, I’m a musician. What am I not? An economist. But shouldn’t we be putting our efforts to streamlining the permission permits, clearing up the monumental backload in the Registry of Property, revising the tax structure, and making it easier to enforce contracts?

Maybe, in fact, we could send some guys over to Singapore to figure out how they do it?

Might be money better spent than trying to lure professionals back to the island….

Down and Out in Milwaukee

Damn, I feel bad about it. I mean, I know how it is to be broke, having lost my job a couple years ago. Sure, I get by with a few teaching gigs, selling some (very few) books, and the occasional odd job—but job security? Insurance? Paid vacations? 401K plans? Ah, happy days….

So I sympathize, I really do, with the Archdiocese of Milwaukee because guess what? They’re broke, too! And not only that, but they’ve had to pay a cartload of money in attorney fees—the Miami Herald says the tab adds up to 12 million bucks just to declare themselves broke. Think that’s bad? WISN.com puts the figure at 19 million.

So they’re scrounging—just getting by, those good guys in the Roman collars up there in cold Milwaukee. Had to take out a mortgage in 2006 on the Lake Michigan headquarters. Tried to find you a picture of it, but all I could find was Google Map. Take a look!

Well, they got the mortgage to pay off ten pesky victims of sexual abuse in 2006—settlement was almost 16.7 million. And now the headquarters is underwater—no, not the lake, but the debt is higher than the value of the property.

So of course the then archbishop of Milwaukee, Timothy A. Dolan—now Cardinal of New York, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and everybody’s favorite—had to do a smooth move, which he did. He wrote off to Rome in 2007 asking permission to transfer almost 57 million dollars to a cemetery fund. And—as revealed last summer…well, here’s The New York Times:

“I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.” The Vatican approved the request in five weeks, the files show.

OK—let’s take the tongue out of the cheek. Five weeks? FIVE FRIGGING WEEKS! When I, following the several cases of misconduct, have routinely seen correspondence about abusive priests between bishops and the Vatican that extends for DECADES! One of the worst abusers in the Catholic church, Marcial Maciel—a guy who actually had six children by two women, suffered from morphine addiction, and abused at least nine boys—never got thrown out of the church at all. Nor, by the way, did he ever apologize. So five weeks to approve a money transfer in 2007? That’s fucking outrageous.

Well, they may have acted so swiftly because of words that Dolan had written to Ratzinger in 2003; were the words still ringing through the chambers of the Vatican?

“As victims organize and become more public, the potential for true scandal is very real,” he wrote in such a request in 2003 to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican office charged with handling abuse cases until he became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.

So almost 57 million bucks were transferred to a fund for cemeteries. And then what happened? Predictably, in 2011, the archdiocese declared bankruptcy, joining ten other dioceses around the country to have done so in the last ten years.

But that settlement for the 16.7 million-buck settlement back in 2006? It was just for paying off the victims of two priests. The real scope of the problem was much bigger:

At least 45 Milwaukee priests face sex abuse accusations. One priest in particular was accused of personally molesting close to 200 deaf boys.  

So all of those victims—well, some of them—got together and filed a civil suit. And then what happened. Here’s The New York Times again:

Since then, negotiations between the two sides in Milwaukee have broken down: the church has argued that about 400 of the 575 cases are invalid, while lawyers for the victims have accused the church of hiding assets.

Hiding assets would mean that transfer to the cemetery fund: very logically, the victims of abuse went to court, alleging that the transfer was—in legal terms—a fraudulent conveyance. At first, they got a bankruptcy judge to agree that it was, then a U.S. District judge—Rudolph T. Randa—came out in July of 2013 and said the deal was kosher, citing the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Obviously, liberal minds were appalled: here’s thinkprogress.com:

Randa concludes that the church has a constitutional right to shield its funds. By raising his opinion to constitutional status, Randa effectively strips Congress of its ability to correct his sweeping interpretation of the law.  

(Oh, by the way, Randa’s parents and many relatives are buried in Milwaukee Catholic cemeteries—but that wasn’t, he felt, a cause for recusing himself…)

OK—so we’ve gotten up to last summer. Today? Well, the archdiocese came up two days ago with a plan to pay 4 million bucks to the 125 victims that it admits were abused. Right—so where is this relatively trivial sum coming from? Here’s Yahoo News:

The archdiocese will raise $2 million in a loan from a cemetery trust fund created under New York Cardinal and former Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan.

Yup, Dear Reader, the archdiocese is proposing to pay two million dollars out of the same fund into which they had transferred 57 million dollars seven years earlier.

It is a brazen as it is depraved. And both the depravity and the brazenness have been taken to astronomical, never-before-heard-of, proportions.

Throw the Bishop in the Slammer

OK, let’s copy and paste from the website childwelfare.gov:

Puerto Rico
P.R. Laws Ann. Tit. 8, § 446(b) (LexisNexis through Dec. 2009)
Any person who has knowledge of or suspects that a minor is a victim of abuse, institutional abuse, neglect, and/or institutional neglect shall report that fact through the hotline of the department, to the Puerto Rico police, or to the local office of the department.

I bring you the above because the bishop of Arecibo, Puerto Rico went to court yesterday, and explained why he has been unable to provide nothing except five pages in response to a subpoena issued last week. And the reason? Well, he has an obligation to protect the confidentiality of the 20 victims, all of whom had chosen to go to the church, not to the civil authorities. Oh, and also, every one of those minors from the years spanning 2011 to the present is now magically an adult. So there was no obligation to report.

And the bishop goes farther, alleging that the state is intruding on the traditional and constitutional separation of church and state. So he’s asking for a preliminary and permanent injunction against the state.

Well, I can tell you all this because The New Day’s headline is shouting Colisión entre la Iglesia y el Estado—and yes, that means exactly what you think. So I plunked down the 54 cents to buy the print version of the paper, which would cover the affair more thoroughly than the electronic version. (For the electronic version, click here.)

What’s interesting about this situation is what people aren’t seeing. Yes, journalistic ethics demand that the church be given the chance to present their case. But why aren’t we asking the following questions?

1.     Why didn’t the bishop of Arecibo follow the Vatican’s protocol on reporting sexual abuse of minors to civil authorities? That protocol was contained in a letter of January of 2011. Here’s a direct quote:

Sexual abuse of minors is not just a canonical delict but also a crime prosecuted by civil law. Although relations with civil authority will differ in various countries, nevertheless it is important to cooperate with such authority within their responsibilities. Specifically, without prejudice to the sacramental internal forum, the prescriptions of civil law regarding the reporting of such crimes to the designated authority should always be followed. This collaboration, moreover, not only concerns cases of abuse committed by clerics, but also those cases which involve religious or lay persons who function in ecclesiastical structures.

2.     Why didn’t the diocese of Arecibo release the names of the six priests who have been removed before the current scandal erupted?

3.     How much, if anything, has been paid to abuse victims in Puerto Rico?

4.     How many abuse victims are there in Puerto Rico?

5.     How many abusive priests have been removed?

6.     Lastly, what about the case of the papal nuncio, Jozef Wesolowski, who traveled to Puerto Rico during his investigation of archbishop Roberto González Nieves? As I quoted in a previous post, a Dominican news report alleges that the nuncio may have covered up priest abuse in the diocese of Arecibo. Here’s the quote:

Según los testimonios difundidos por Burgos, en su programa Código Calle, del canal 29 de Santiago, Wesolowski es acusado en Puerto Rico de encubrir a los sacerdotes pederastas.

Los fieles católicos se quejaron ante el obispo puertorriqueño monseñor Iñaqui [Sic.] y ante el propio Wesolowski, pero no recibieron el apoyo que esperaban.

Un seminario fue cerrado, pero todo se mantiene en silencio, y el obispo Iñaqui [Sic.] fue promovido, en lugar de ser sancionado. 

(“According to testimony of Burgos, in his program Código Calle, on channel 29 of Santiago, Wesolowski is accused in Puerto Rico of covering up pederast priests.

The Catholic faithful complained to bishop Iñaki and to Wesolowski as well, but never received the support they expected.

A seminary was closed, but everything was kept secret, and bishop Iñaki was promoted, instead of being sanctioned.”)

To my knowledge, Wesolowski is the first and only Vatican official who may have committed illegal acts in the United States. Does the Justice Department plan to subpoena the Vatican to determine what part, if any, Wesolowski played in covering up pederast priests?

It can’t be clearer, guys. The six priests who had committed abuse were criminals; the bishop had an obligation to report them. Instead, they were removed silently, and never faced the criminal sanctions they should have faced. Not only must the diocese of Arecibo hand over all their records to the district attorney, but the Department of Justice should be demanding that—at long last—the Vatican hand over all their internal documents as well.

I agree with one assertion that the diocese of Arecibo is claiming. By instigating their own investigation and sanctions of priests who had committed criminal acts, and by failing to notify civil authorities, the church had indeed…

…violated the separation of church and state.