wait -- are you being serious? The YouTube Symphony was simply a mechanism to collect auditions; their performance was live, as a group, (certainly) rehearsed as a group, and, although well done, not groundbreaking in any "virtual" way.

On the other hand, this choir "performance" is actually the combination of individual performances, done all at the singers' locations, without group rehearsal, and combined into a "virtual" performance, which we get to hear and see in real-time.

The differences are like night and day -- are you seriously not seeing the originality of the approach here?

Well... what else is out there, where a conductor took hundreds of choral parts, recorded solo, and stitched them together both for sight and sound, creating a single, sync'ed whole choral piece?

Of course, that's your values and sense of right and wrong -- why are you trying to force them on me?

this is an inaccurate account of what happened. In 2001, Ratzinger's "bureau", the CDF, was given authority to prosecute certain types of canonical cases. Among these was sexual misconduct of priests against minors. When the CDF reviewed the document that gave it this authority, they requested that the same court standards that had applied to the previous authority (the Roman Rota, or Vatican court (in ways, similar to the SCOTUS)), should be applied to them. One of these was known as the "Pontifical Secret", which simply means that court proceedings should be sealed, under penalty of excommunication.

Note: this only applied to proceedings -- not to identification of priests accused of misconduct, not of the results of the proceedings, just the proceedings themselves... just like in the U.S., cases may be sealed.

This has nothing to do with blocking secular criminal proceedings, or hiding the names of those accused. Unfortunately, a poor job of translation (along with a healthy imagination and anti-Church bias) has turned this into an urban legend that just won't go away. Real shame that the BBC bought into it, five years ago.

From the Wiki article on "Pontifical Secret":

What about organizations that cover it up by failing to follow it up and quash it, allowing its perpetrators to move elsewhere and have the right to assume a similar role, and pick up where they left off? They your enemy, too?

Good -- make sure you take on the U.S. public school system, where folks (if fired) aren't stripped of their licenses; or, if stripped of their (state) license, aren't put on any kind of national list, and are able to teach in other states.

Yeah, you're right. Folks never cheer when the other team's captain gets knocked out of the game...

Your reference:

from the OP:

Somewhere, your English teachers are rolling over in their graves, unless there's a world where "defiance" == "allows"...! ;^)

Because he's making the assertion against the notion of priestly celibacy, which is held by the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church -- which is the bulk (in numbers) and the face of the Church as perceived by most outside of the Church.

So, to assert some difference in Africa is implicitly asserting a difference in the Latin Rite. If it were the Eastern Rites of the Church, then he'd mention the Copts, the Byzantines, etc, etc, which he did not.

Civil as opposed to canonical law.

Yes, you have, apparently. At least in the U.S., and although done better by some local dioceses than others over the years, then by all at least in the past ten years.

They're completely relevant, since they're the topic of the whole discussion! The issue at hand is procedure within canonical court proceedings. The procedure being discussed -- the sealing of court records -- has nothing to do with civil (criminal) proceedings, nor does it attempt to conceal the names of those accused of canonical crimes.

Agreed. Now... why is there all the yelling, then, about the pope, when all the alleged abuse and coverups were happening at the diocese level? The Pope is not a CEO...!

You'd have to qualify that with a location and a time frame for it to be accurate. In the U.S., over the past ten years, ever since this scandal broke, bishops have been highly cooperative with local authorities.

No, I'm not. I'm also including experience in counseling.

How do psychologists manage to counsel? You're not really trying to tell me that a BA, MA, and potentially a PhD, as well as time spent as a counselor, don't make the psychologist, just the personal life experience s/he's had with the subject matter? that's delusional!

"Tee, or I'll gray out!". Yep, not at all difficult to parse...

Male ob/gyn's never experience the condition they monitor and offer advice on, don't they? And this is a poor example, then again... why?

which is exactly my point: priests are experienced in offering pastoral counseling/services, which is something they are indeed very experienced in. Thanks for proving my point.

Yes, there are successful churches, but that's a different topic -- we're talking about increases in numbers of ordained ministers. Not part-time workers: full-time, degreed professionals for whom their primary career is church ministry, at the parish level. Those numbers are declining.

The problem isn't "moral bankruptcy", it's affluence. In the U.S., and the West, generally, more people live in middle-to-upperclass life situations, and have the expectation of continued affluence in their careers. It's this set of expectations that hinders the willingness to answer a call to ministry.

Not according to recent polls of teenaged students in the U.S.! As they age, they abandon such superficial role models; however, the goals and ideals that these role models espouse tend to continue to be held dear...

Yes, you're correct -- in limited cases, there are exceptions to the rule. However, the OP is claiming that this is the norm in Africa (assumedly, for the Latin Rite), which it is not.

You're losing sight of the argument, which was that Ratzinger (head of the CDF, later named Pope Benedict XVI) set a rule mandating excommunication for those who turned over names to civil authorities, under the name of the "pontifical secret", and that has hidden the accused from civil prosecution. That's clearly wrong:

• Authority in these cases was given to the CDF in 2001.
• The CDF requested the sealing of case records under the pontifical secret for all cases it was to prosecute

Are you saying that there were cases prosecuted by the CDF since 2001 that (a) hadn't yet been visible to civil authorities, and (b) the identities of those accused have been hidden from civil authorities? Now that would be news! Instead, all we have are these impotent claims that pontifical secret means shielding the identities of the accused.

in a civil case, yes. in a canonical case, where the notion of sin is tied up in the determination of guilt or innocence, that's not the case; sealing works both for the victim and the accused.

that's a complete conjecture. do you have anything approaching proof? if it were biased in favor of priests, then there'd be no "convictions" (laicizations), right?

French is the official language of France, German is the official language of Germany, Latin is the official language of the Vatican. Each uses it in its official proceedings. Hence, not a dead language. There's no excuse for shoddy translations of official documents, regardless of language. Are you really telling me that there are no Latin language experts out there, even among academics, who have to use it in their research all the time? No -- it isn't ridiculous, and using a poor translation is always an approach to be ridiculed.

Yes... it's clearly bullshit to allow an institution or government to make up its own rules and then follow them. Puh-leeze!