Disgusting: Conservative Catholic priest busted for using Grindr, a “gay hookup app” — but it diverts blame for the clergy sexual abuse scandal
… embarrassment to the American church and its bishops
Some in the Roman Catholic Church try to justify the abuse of young people as not pedophilia or ephebophilia or hebephilia. Instead, they blame homosexuality.
That is ridiculous because homosexuality is not a disease, though they would like to think it is.
As a result, some right-wing Catholics attempted to trap a very conservative monsignor by somehow surveilling his phone records — without a warrant.
And they were successful. They discovered that Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, who was then the secretary of the U.S. bishop’s conference, as conservative and right-wing an organization as exists in America, had been using a gay dating app.
Now, they had no evidence that this clergyman had ever followed through and dated anyone or had sex with anyone.
Only that he had used the app.
And so, the U.S. bishops, the 21st Century reincarnation of Joe McCarthy, cut him loose.
The irony: The fall of the Catholic Church is due to the negligence of two far-right popes who then appointed far-right bishops in the U.S. like Bernard Law and Joseph Adamec who then covered up the greatest scandal in the history of that institution.
How did this happen?
It started with a nefarious website started by other right-wing priests,
The reports hit the Roman Catholic Church in rapid succession: Analyses of cellphone data obtained by a conservative Catholic blog seemed to show priests at multiple levels of the Catholic hierarchy in both the United States and the Vatican using the gay hookup app Grindr.
The first report, published late last month, led to the resignation of Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, the former general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference. The second, posted online days later, made claims about the use of Grindr by unnamed people in unspecified rectories in the Archdiocese of Newark. The third, published days after that, claimed that in 2018 at least 32 mobile devices emitted dating app data signals from within areas of Vatican City that are off-limits to tourists.
Liam Stack, “Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests
Using Grindr,” New York Times, August 20, 2021
“The Pillar”
Those who have started this far-right website are ones who are trying to deny or ignore the roles played by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, who ignored the crisis and covered up for priests who had abused young children.
They would like to demonstrate that there is a problem with homosexual priests that caused the abuse crisis.
They are wrong, but at the same time, priests dating other men or anyone else after taking a vow of celibacy is wrong ethically,
The only app explicitly named in the reports has been Grindr, which is used almost exclusively by gay and bisexual men, although The Pillar has made vague references to other apps it says are used by heterosexuals. Only one of the reports directly links an app to a specific person, Monsignor Burrill.
The reports have been criticized by Catholic liberals for tying the general use of Grindr to studies that show minors sometimes use the app as well. That conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia is part of a longstanding effort by Catholic conservatives to blame the church sex abuse crisis on the presence of gay men in the priesthood.
Liam Stack, New York Times, August 20, 2021
Pillar sleazy, but did they also violate constitutional rights?
What “The Pillar” did was probably sleazy and may have been illegal, though Grindr requires those to use it to sign a vow allowing them to be made public.
Still, their actions are reprehensible because again, they are blaming homosexuality, not the criminal behavior that was criminally covered up by conservative bishops, for the church crisis.
And, targeting one diocese looks like it was designed to hurt a close ally of Pope Francis,
The editors of The Pillar, J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon, have refused to answer any of those questions and did not respond to a request seeking comment for this story. They have also declined interview requests from other news media.
In a podcast, Mr. Flynn and Mr. Condon said their work was motivated by a desire to expose a secretive culture of wrongdoing within the church.
“Immoral and illicit sexual behavior on the part of clerics who are bound to celibacy, but also on the part of other church leaders, could lead to a broad sense of tolerance for any number or kinds of sexual sins,” Mr. Flynn said on the podcast.
They said Newark was the only American diocese they wrote about because it was once led by the former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019 and charged last month with sexually assaulting a child in Massachusetts in 1974.
But their decision to investigate the use of a gay dating app in suburban New Jersey, instead of a city with a large gay population, has raised suspicion that their real goal may have been to undermine Cardinal Tobin, an ally of Pope Francis.
Liam Stack, New York Times, August 20, 2021
U.S. Bishops hypocrisy not a problem for The Pillar
The fact that the one priest whom they identified was tied to the national Catholic bishops, ruled autocratically by conservatives in the church, was interesting.
However, it was a con job. More on that later.
Bottom line: This is a tremendous embarrassment to the American church, not to Pope Francis personally. Priests should not be using dating sites of any kind.
However, the real disgrace is that these two creeps, Flynn and Condon, are attempting to deny the reality of who is to blame for the sexual abuse crisis that has effectively brought down the Catholic Church in America. Only 12 percent now attend mass regularly or take the sacraments, according to recent polling.
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