The Archbishop Sighs Relief

Readers, you can now stop worrying. The archbishop of San Juan, Roberto González Nieves, is off the hook. Subject to a 19-month long apostolic visit—and one imagines the small talk and social chitchat wearies after 19 months—he came up clean.

Or so the Vatican Insider says; the site quotes González Nieves saying this:

Exonerado de toda culpa. El Vaticano confirmó que el arzobispo de San Juan de Puerto Rico, Roberto González Nieves, no es rebelde y que las denuncias en su contra nunca tuvieron fundamento. Lo confirmó él mismo, hace unos días durante una conferencia de prensa en su país. Ahora sus seguidores piden que se limpie su nombre.

Rough translation: Exonerated of all guilt. The Vatican confirmed that the archbishop of San Juan de Puerto Rico, Roberto González Nieves, is no rebel and that the denunciations against him never had a base. He himself confirmed it, some days ago during a press conference in his country. Now, his followers request that his name be cleared.

You may remember the case. The archbishop, born in New Jersey but raised in San Juan, arrived on the island after serving in New York, Boston, and Corpus Christi. He soon ruffled feathers of the statehood flock by more or less openly being an independentista. He spearheaded efforts to get the navy out of Vieques—OK, we were all pretty much on that page—and brokered a deal when the government shut down in 2006.

Then, he got it into his head to create the Altar de la Patria.

“What actually is “patria?” I asked Mr. Fernández, those many years ago before I was sufficiently politicized.

He gave me an explanation that made no sense. So I asked my friend Tony, who gave me the story. Loosely, it runs like this: there was a politician who was ostensibly for the commonwealth, our current status. But he referred constantly to the “patria,” which became a code word to indicate independence. So if you want to talk about independence without talking about independence, you talk about the patria.

See?

Actually, González Nieves threw a bit more salt into the wound by setting up, as well, what he called, “Capilla del Santísimo Cristo de toda la nación puertorriqueña.” This is guaranteed to set statehood mouths frothing, since it translates into “The Chapel of the most holy Christ of all the Puerto Rican nation.”

The opposition pushed back, charging that the archbishop was inserting politics into the church. And certainly the last governor—rumored to have ties to Opus Dei, and very much pro-statehood—was no particular fan of the archbishop.

Hence the apostolic visit, which, according to González Nieves, found nothing. But there were four charges:

1.     Sheltering pederast priests

2.     Supporting a bill that would allow roommates of either sex health benefits

3.     Selling a parish school without authorization

4.     Creating the famous Alta de la Patria

Things got a little hot for the archbishop, but he’s a fighter. On May 8 of this year, he organized 100 religious groups to come and see him celebrate mass, on the anniversary of his entering the priesthood. He passed the word to send letters to the Vatican, and then came out and said, “please, please, don’t send letters to the Vatican. I beg your prayers instead.”

Smart, hunh?

Then a letter got leaked, in which the archbishop expressed his horror at the gravity of the charges against him, and the hurt that the strong suggestion that he should resign caused him. Never, he said, would he resign. The charges against him were lies and defamations.

Unafraid of pushing any more buttons, González Nieves then decided to get a great Puerto Rican patriot, who had died in Spain and had been buried in Cádiz, back home and re-interrate him, presumably, in the Capilla del Santísimo Cristo de toda la nación puertorriqueña. There, his remains would rest in heavenly harmony with those of his great friend, the first Puerto Rican bishop.

“Ridiculous,” said Mr. Fernández, “The guy was buried in a mass grave during an outbreak of yellow fever. Of course they don’t have DNA evidence—how could they? Nah—they scooped up some bones, conjured up a lab result, and shipped it off to Puerto Rico, probably laughing their heads off. You know the Spanish.”

Right—so the remains of somebody arrived on the island, and were greeted with great Caribbean formality and enthusiasm. Now the question—what to do with them?

Well, they lay around in the State Department for a while, and then, González Nieves announced that he had received authorization from the Vatican to place the remains in the capilla. This they did, on 10 June, in an elaborate celebration, marked by the very finest vestments, incense, altar boys, and the 100-strong Mita choir, singing nationalistically or perhaps just patriotically.

González Nieves announced it all several days before; The First Hour, or Primera Hora, published it all in an article titled “I Survived the Storm” or He sobrevivido a la tormenta. He said:

“Le pido a Dios la fuerza de perdonar porque no es fácil”, aseguró en una rueda de prensa en referencia a quienes lo acusaron en Roma.

“La visita apostólica entra ya a su fase final. Yo creo que puedo decir que el visitador apostólico no encontró que yo hubiera protegido a sacerdotes pedófilos y además hay un informe de la Congregación de Doctrina y Fe que indica que he tratado esos casos con los debidos protocolos”, expresó.

“I ask God for the strength to forgive because it’s not easy,” he stated in a press conference referring to those who accused him in Rome.

“The apostolic visit is now entering its final stage. I believe I can now say that the apostolic visitor didn’t find that I had protected pederast priests and that I had as well a report from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith that indicated that I have treated the cases with the correct protocols,” he said.

Note carefully that phrase, “the apostolic visit is entering its final stage.” To me, that means it’s still going on, and the jury’s still out. The Vatican, as far as I can see, has not made an announcement on the matter.

Think the archbishop is bluffing?

On Questions and Intelligence

Well, it’s a story with many levels. But first, let me point out—we’re spending enormous amounts of money for something that gives us nothing.

There’s a theory among economists called the broken window theory. It goes like this: if I throw a brick through the plate glass window of the store below, I’m actually improving—according to some—the economy. Why? Well, a cop will have to come and arrest me (or investigate the incident), and an employee will have to come to secure the store (that’s overtime, which he’ll spend at the mall), a boarding-up service will be called, a new glass window installed. My toss of a brick has caused a lot of money to be spent, and so is wonderful for the economy.

The problem? All that money could have been spent on teaching a kid to read, researching how to eliminate cancer, and do a host of other useful things. We don’t get anything of value from a broken window.

And I’m beginning to think that our obsession with security is nothing more than that old American paranoia that we do so well. That would be fine, but is it worth spending 53 billion dollars, as we did in fiscal 2012?

Maybe it’s time to say it—the rest of the world, or at least much of it, has lived with terrorism for a long time. The British had the IRA, Spain has ETA—every country has its enemies. And it might be worth it to spend some money guarding against terrorism—but shouldn’t we at least do it well? Is there any reason to think that data mining will make us safer?

I think what will make us safer is to stop dropping drones on civilians in places like Yemen. I also think that doing intelligence the old-fashioned way, instead of relying on the bells and whistles of technology, would yield more results.

And it’s curious—how did a 29 year-old dropout get a job paying $200,000 a year?

Well, the New York Times has the answer—security companies are desperate to get people who can run their sophisticated systems. And that means kids, nerds, geeks.

And apparently, also according to the Times, Snowden was a classic geek—he refused to chat with neighbors; he spent endless hours with his computer. That, says one Time’s columnist, is the problem: too many kids are growing up in a world mediated with technology. They’ve lost the ability to interact in person with the world. And they’re increasingly isolating themselves, and falling prey to paranoia and libertarianism.

Might be. But I’m not so sure that that’s all there is to it. As I understand neurology today, the current thinking is that the brain is still growing at age thirty. In that case, Snowden, with his 29 years, is at the very end of what we called adolescence.

Which means that he is thinking abstractly, not concretely (as he did when he was a child) or as adults do.

Remember that time of your life when you branded your mother a hypocrite because she had said, “sure, you don’t have to go to church, if you don’t believe in God,” and then there she was, begging you to go to church just because her mother was visiting and she was too tired to argue with her mother whom she couldn’t stand anyway?

It’s a very principled time of life, young adulthood, which is why it’s also a time a lot of zealots are made. So I’m not sure that technology has created Snowden, though it certainly played a part.

It’s also easy to see why Snowden is concerned, especially when confronted with headlines like this, in the liberal New York Times:

 Debate on Secret Data Looks Unlikely, Partly Due to Secrecy

Guys? Are you seriously telling me that we cannot know what programs and activities our government is engaged in, because that would breach secrecy and thus endanger us?

Look, do you think our enemies don’t know, or operate under the presumption, that we are carrying out domestic espionage? Did any al Qaeda operative wake up this morning and say, “wow, I’ll have to think about using my cell phone, now that the US….?”

It’s screwy, any way you look at it. There’s also the fact that this is a contractor, who has access—according to him—to vast sources of information. Oh, and by the way, it turns out that even giving access has been outsourced to third parties. So Booz Allen has decided who could look at my telephone use.

And inevitably, politics comes into play. The coauthor of the PATRIOT Act, James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is horrified that the act is being used in this way. Well, yesterday I read the letter he wrote in The Guardian, and very virtuous it seemed. However, the Times this morning threw a little ice water on that with a link to an editorial from 2005:

The House's Abuse of Patriotism

So it’s another mess, though an interesting one. One last thought—remember what I said about the young thinking abstractly, ideologically, reading to sacrifice anything for their ideals? Well, here’s the woman Snowden left behind….

Why Bother?

I don’t get it.

Well, nothing new there. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t get. But this has bothered me for most of my life. Why are people into sports?

What’s the point?

OK, Mr. Fernández came home, switched on the telly—for unknown reasons he’s feeling particularly British these days—and there they were. Gymnasts! And none of them lacking in muscular development….

Right, put down the Sudoku. Watched intently. The Chinese, predictably, were amazing. (Did they invent the sport? Feels like it….). A Japanese kid sailed smashingly onto his knees, walked to the sidelines, then started to hop. Interesting how strongly culture reigns behavior.

Amazing what they could do—hop, flip, twist, suspend, rotate, swivel. And clearly, they didn’t take this all up twenty minutes ago. Add all of the hours of all of the athletes spent in practice and you’d have years, if not decades.

What for?

Disclosure time—I spent years of my own life as a sort of athlete. I was a cellist. And I’ll freely admit, it didn’t do anybody much good either.

And it was a musical analogy that I thought of, yesterday. Seeing all of these amazing gymnastics was exactly like hearing a master pianist—Serkin, for example—play…

…scales.

Well, apparently people want to see it. The crowd was going wild. OK, not soccer-fan wild—there were no riots or fistfights. There also weren’t any empty seats. We’re in the grips of Olympic mania.

Now here more than Puerto Rico. After the opening ceremony, all three papers had headlines screaming about orgullo boricua and pro patria.

What for?

For carrying a flag into a stadium? For being—in the eyes of the Olympic Committee—an entity to ourselves? Sure, we were in the club with the big guys—Russia, China, the US. But also the little guys—the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Mauritania….

So why is it, I wondered, that people spend inordinate amounts of time training their bodies, just to do silly things on bar or ropes? They could put easily the same amount of effort and discipline, and do ballet.

And that made me think of the question Alfredo, Raf’s first lover, posed me.

“What’s the one moment in ballet that has most impressed you?”

Finally a question I can answer!

Concerto Barocco, second movement.

He knew immediately.

“The lift,” he said.

I was eighteen, alone in Boston, friendless. And yes, practicing and struggling. I went to see the Boston Ballet in an old movie theater in the city’s red light district. The first movement—lovely. The second movement?

I swear, the moment the male dancer lifted that ballerina—the crowd gasped. The theater breathed.

Something got changed in all of us.

Call me elitist. Say I’m a snob. There’s a difference between a C Sharp minor scale and a late Beethoven Sonata. There’s a difference between art and gymnastics.