Catholic Group Spent $4M Tracking Priests Who Use Gay ‘Hookup Apps’
(Link): Catholic Nonprofit Secretly Spent Millions on Gay Priests’ App Data, Report Says
A Catholic nonprofit based in Colorado is spending millions to purchase tracking data that identifies members of the priesthood using dating and hookup apps, according to a new investigation from The Washington Post. The Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal group has used this data to prepare reports for bishops across the country on individual priests’ usage of apps like Grindr—a hookup app for gay men—the outlet reports.
Excerpts:
March 9, 2023
A Denver-based Catholic nonprofit spent millions of dollars to purchase tracking data from gay dating and hookup apps to identify gay priests. They then shared that information with bishops across the country, a new investigation has found.
Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal — a group whose goal is to “empower the church to carry out its mission” by providing church leaders with “evidence-based resources” so they can better train priests after identifying their weaknesses — obtained tracking data from popular dating and hookup apps from 2018 through 2021, according to an investigative report published Thursday by The Washington Post.
(Link): Catholic group spent $4M tracking priests who use gay ‘hookup apps’
March 10, 2023
by Lee Brown
A Colorado Catholic group spent millions tracking clerics who used mostly gay “hookup apps” — then outing them to bishops.
The head of Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal admitted its secretive research in a lengthy response Thursday to an exposé by The Washington Post.
The DC paper detailed how the Denver-based nonprofit spent at least $4 million buying up data mostly from Grindr, but also from Scruff, Growlr, Jack’d and OkCupid.
Some of those involved in the group were directly behind the outing of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned in July 2021 over a report that he’d used Grindr and gone to a gay bar and bathhouse, the paper said.
Renewal’s president, Jayd Henricks, confirmed the work in an op-ed on First Things, saying he felt “blessed” to help and promising that he’d been “meticulous to ensure that we were doing things by the book.”
“The purpose was simple: to love the Church and to help the Church to be holy, with every tool she could be given,” Henricks said — including “the darker side of technology.”
“Trafficking in obscene content, and even criminal content, is a risk to the Church and her children,” he wrote of earlier “heart-wrenching wake-up” calls of grooming and abuse.
“When we learned legal ways to understand risks to the health of the Church beset by technology — including the use of hookup apps by clerics— we studied that.
“We learned some things. And we shared what we learned directly with bishops,” Henricks admitted.
“It’s true, as part of our data analysis work, we learned that some clergy were publicly advertising their interest in actions that contradicted their promises of celibacy.”
Renewel analyzed “publicly available data, bought in the ordinary way” to show how “heterosexual and homosexual hookup apps were used” in ways that “were not isolated moral lapses.”
“It should be noted that these sorts of hookup apps are designed specifically for casual, anonymous sexual encounters,” Henricks wrote.
“It’s not about straight or gay priests and seminarians, it’s about behavior that harms everyone involved, at some level and in some way, and is a witness against the ministry of the Church.”
The data was not made public, the group’s leader stressed, saying it was instead shared with the “proper authority of rectors and bishops to act prudentially.”
Related:
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(Link): Homosexual Couple Charged with Using Their Adopted Children to Make Child Porn
(Link): A Church in Crisis: Pornography and Patriarchy by R. Kotz
(Link): Baptist Pastor Arrested for Child Porn Possession After Authorities Search Parsonage
(Link): Priest Close to Pope Francis Accused of Inviting Two Nuns to Take Part in a ‘Holy Trinity’ Threesome
(Link): Grindr Sold Users’ Location Data for Years, Many Have Outed Catholic Priest: Report
(Link): Priest Daniel McFalls Fathers a Baby – Speaks Out Against Celibacy
(Link): A Dallas Man Used Grindr To Target, Assault, And Rob Gay Men
(Link): Texas Pastor Sentenced to 30 Years After Using Hidden Cameras to Secretly Film Child Porn at Church
(Link): The Oxymoron of Ethical Porn via End Sexual Exploitation
(Link): Married Preacher Hides Porn Addiction By Faking Terminal Cancer
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