Bishop Timothy Broglio, the Papal Nuncio to the Dominican Republic, called the false birth certificates facilitated by a Haitian priest in Mao, Valverde, “dishonest and immoral”. At the same time, Bishop Tomas Abreu Herrera, the head of the Mao-Montecristi dioceses, justified the work Vigny Bellerive carried out 18 years ago as being “charitable”. Broglio said that priests should respect the law, and act when there are situations of human rights abuses that need addressing, but without disregard for the rules and regulations that govern the working of Dominican institutions. The Papal Nuncio said that “the Church does not want to say that the end justifies the means.” Monsignor Abreu Herrera told reporters that Bellerive did what he did because in the bateys (workers’s quarters in sugar cane fields) and villages around Mao there was a whole generation of Haitian children that could not attend school because they had no birth certificates. Abreu said that “if Father Bellerive’s charitable work was illegal, the civil registry official would have rejected these birth announcements, and he never did this.” El Caribe reports that Abreu Herera said that everyone “has the right to a nationality” and that he hoped that the accusations against father Bellerive “are not just to distract attention from the passport scandal in Santo Domingo.”