It’s been a busy month on the Catholic beat. There’s rarely a dull moment, especially in the Pope Francis era, as debates over the past few weeks focused on the Latin Mass and Grindr-clicking gay clergy in high places.
These are two different issues, of course, but ones where conservative Catholic media outlets have excelled. I’d even go as far as to say that the coverage in various corners of the Catholic press has set the agenda on these two raging issues — for everyone.
I have written about the importance of the growing independent Catholic press before. At a time when mainstream media very often ignores one side on hot-button issues, a healthy alternate media that covers the church and isn’t afraid to give those voices space has helped readers fully understand the broader spectrum of U.S. and global Catholicism.
The health scare that Pope Francis recently went through has seemingly inflamed the culture wars within Roman Catholicism. There is a feeling that this pope’s time may be coming to an end and that reformers need to move quickly before conservative bishops and priests embark on a takeover.
I have lauded The Pillar in this space for their ability to explain complicated issues as well as break stories and embark on investigations. This has been a wonderful month for them, even as they have been catching flak from the Catholic left (and, thus, from key mainstream news outlets).
The story they broke on July 20 is what we in the journalism business call “a bombshell.” The story revealed that Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, former general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference, had resigned after The Pillar “found evidence the priest engaged in serial sexual misconduct, while he held a critical oversight role in the Catholic Church’s response to the recent spate of sexual abuse and misconduct scandals.”
This is what The Pillar’s reporting found (this is long, but essential):
A priest of the Diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin, he began to work at the bishops’ conference as associate general secretary in February 2016. In that capacity, the priest was charged with helping to coordinate the U.S. bishops’ response to the Church’s 2018 sexual abuse and coercion scandals.
But an analysis of app data signals correlated to Burrill’s mobile device shows the priest also visited gay bars and private residences while using a location-based hookup app in numerous cities from 2018 to 2020, even while traveling on assignment for the U.S. bishops’ conference.
According to commercially available records of app signal data obtained by The Pillar, a mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr on a near-daily basis during parts of 2018, 2019, and 2020 — at both his USCCB office and his USCCB-owned residence, as well as during USCCB meetings and events in other cities.
In 2018, the priest was a member of the USCCB’s executive staff and charged with oversight of the conference’s pastoral departments. He and several senior USCCB officials met with Pope Francis Oct. 8, 2018, to discuss how the conference was responding to ecclesiastical scandals related to sexual misconduct, duplicity, and clerical cover-ups.
Burrill, then second-in-command at the conference, is widely reported to have played a central role in coordinating conference and diocesan responses to the scandals, and coordinating between the conference and the Vatican.
Data app signals suggest he was at the same time engaged in serial and illicit sexual activity.
On June 20, 2018, the day the McCarrick revelations became public, the mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted hookup app signals at the USCCB staff residence, and from a street in a residential Washington neighborhood. He traveled to Las Vegas shortly thereafter, data records show.
The McCarrick referenced in the excerpt above is now-disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Washington, D.C. political and theological powerbroker who was a sexual predator. A Vatican probe last year revealed that he had engaged in non-consensual sexual relations with boys and young seminarians over several decades.
More explanation of how the Pillar’s source figured out the Grindr-using phone belonged to Burrill: Not by knowing something about the phone itself, but because the phone went to places Burrill would go or was known to be. pic.twitter.com/K9UQL75BXl
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 21, 2021
Both Catholic progressives and conservatives have been at each other’s throats since the 1960s and in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. It’s those reforms, that affected the Mass, and the change in mores of the broader Western culture that have been front and center this summer. Homosexual behavior and temptations in the priesthood, for example, trended up in during those post-Vatican Council decades. The Pillar’s reporting exposed an uncomfortable truth: many Catholic clergy are either gay, not celibate or both. There was evidence of roaming straight priests, as well.
The Burrill/Grindr story is a case study into these internal church conflicts — in addition to the type of journalism that has emerged in the internet age, who should and should not be written about and the backlash that can come from such a news story. Despite criticism from other news outlets, The Pillar’s reporting forced a resignation and set the tone. They beat everyone else to a story no one seems to want, but one they also can’t stop following.
Overall, it was such a major investigative piece that it forced other news outlets, both Catholic and mainstream, to follow the story.
It is exactly this type of reporting that will give The Pillar, for those previously unaware of it, the attention that will help it grow readers since launching this past January. They followed the Burrill story with another post about how the Archdiocese of Newark launched a probe into “the possibility of clerical sexual misconduct, in response to questions from The Pillar about the use of location-based hookup apps at several parish rectories in the archdiocese.” McCarrick, it should be noted, was once the archbishop of the New Jersey city in the late 1990s. The current leader in Newark is Cardinal Joseph William Tobin, a powerful ally of Pope Francis.
These are the type of revelations that would never be reported on if not for news sites like The Pillar.
Let me explain. In the case of the Latin Mass flap, mainstream news sites largely stayed away from the story. The reason was two-fold. First, it was just too complicated for secular newsrooms to explain. Second, it would have forced them to report experts and activists on both sides, something that GetReligion writers have noted ad nauseam is an ever-shrinking practice in far too many newsrooms. That meant that conservative Catholic news sites led the way on that story.
Unlike the Latin Mass, the Burrill revelations were too big to ignore. This is how Crux’s John Allen followed the story — with the caveat that he would not have run the original revelations:
Easily the most talked-about development in American Catholicism over the past week has been the resignation of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill as the Secretary General of the US Bishops Conference, after the new Catholic media outlet Pillar obtained data from his phone suggesting Burrill had visited gay bars, private residences for single men and even a notorious sauna in Las Vegas while he was serving the conference.
The episode has generated tremendous controversy, not only about Burrill’s behavior but about data privacy and the ethics of paying for supposedly confidential information on someone and then broadcasting it to the world.
Pillar was at it again yesterday, publishing a new report that the Archdiocese of Newark will be investigating information presented by Pillar indicating the use of hookup apps, both gay and straight, in ten different rectories and clerical residences.
Because the data only establishes location and app use, not sexual activity, and because Pillar so far has not disclosed where it’s obtaining this data or how it was confirmed, there’s also a debate about how sure a news outlet needs to be before publishing such a report. (A statement about Burrill’s resignation didn’t address the charges, merely indicating that he stepped down to avoid becoming a distraction.)
For what it’s worth, which probably isn’t much, as an editor I wouldn’t have run the original Burrill story based on the information it contains.
First of all, the secretary general of a bishops’ conference doesn’t exactly have his finger on the button. Yes, he’s a public figure, but at a low level and therefore the bar should be higher to compromise his privacy, especially in a way certain to damage his career and soil his reputation. Second, even though geolocation data is suggestive, it’s not conclusive, and I would have wanted to seek secondary confirmation. While I don’t consider an independent news outlet to be bound by the rules of the Catholic Church, I do consider us bound by the canons of good journalistic tradecraft.
Nobody, however, is paying me to make editorial decisions for anybody else, so what I would have done doesn’t really matter.
We can debate whether Burrill is a big enough figure to matter (in my opinion, he does), but Allen’s mention of the data itself is what became the focus of much mainstream news coverage. In other words, it wasn’t whether the revelations were true or not and whether that mattered, it became a story about the lack of privacy we all have had to endure in the smartphone era.
Progressive Catholic news sites took this tact, as did mainstream secular ones. If you can’t ignore the story or don’t like the narrative or its findings, then attack what The Pillar alleged through its investigation.
This is what the National Catholic Reporter published in an opinion piece that originally ran at Religion News Service:
Even during a period when the bombs dropping on American Catholics fall with escalating and increasingly destructive frequency, the publication of an “investigation” of Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, the now-former general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, blasts a crater worth crawling down into for a forensic examination.
There are reasons to think it heralds a new and even uglier era in American Catholicism.
As Catholics were still reeling from Pope Francis’ abrogation July 16 of his predecessor’s guidance on the traditional Latin Mass, “Summorum Pontificum” (indeed, while this author was struggling to finish an article about that event), The Pillar, a Catholic publication, released what it called “an investigation” in which data identifying Burrill’s phone seemed to indicate he had frequently used Grindr, a popular dating app in the gay community, and that he had left geolocation tracks to and from gay clubs.
That is all we really learned from The Pillar’s “investigation.” And, here is an important place to pause.
I am a sinner. So are you. So is Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill. Not one of us has a personal life that would withstand the sort of scrutiny The Pillar has applied to Burrill. Every single one of us has had a shameful moment we regret, and I suspect most of us must be caught up in cycles of sinfulness that we repeat less because we want to than because we are sinners and cannot help being sinners.
Why toss so much cold water on this story? Could it be that Burrill is someone the doctrinal left sees as a useful ally? It certainly appears so. I didn’t see too much of this indignation during the Donald Trump years when anonymous sources, in some cases hiding partisan research, were the norm whenever the former president was accused of wrongdoing.
Anyway, I digress. The Associated Press followed the story on July 20. This is how it opened:
Citing allegations of “possible improper behavior,” the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Tuesday announced the resignation of its top administrative official, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, ahead of a media report that probed his private romantic life.
Shortly after the announcement, the Roman Catholic news outlet The Pillar published its article based on data it said was “correlated to Burrill’s mobile device” and indicated he had visited gay bars and private residences using a dating app popular with gay people.
The Pillar alleged “serial sexual misconduct” by Burrill — homosexual activity is considered sinful under Catholic doctrine, and priests are expected to remain celibate.
Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, president of the USCCB, said in a statement that conference officials learned of the allegations of possible improper behavior on Monday.
Why report on this if the probe is, as Allen notes, “not conclusive,” anyway? In just four paragraphs, the AP cited other source material, most notably that the USCCB had publicly said that Burrill had resigned. That alone makes it a story. The “why” factor — something important to every news story — focuses on what The Pillar discovered.
NEW: @Grindr has updated and slightly softened its comment on a Catholic newsletter outing a priest allegedly on the site. First said it was “infeasible” for Grindr data to become public. Now says “We do not believe” Grindr is the source https://t.co/9Z0CAYZtak
— Michelle Boorstein (@mboorstein) July 22, 2021
Two days later, the AP also did a data tracking story. This is the story’s thesis:
Privacy advocates have been warning for years that location and personal data collected by advertisers and amassed and sold by brokers can be used to identify individuals, isn’t secured as well as it should be and is not regulated by laws that require the clear consent of the person being tracked. Both legal and technical protections are necessary so that smartphone users can push back, they say.
The Pillar alleged “serial sexual misconduct” by Burrill — homosexual activity is considered sinful under Catholic doctrine, and priests are expected to remain celibate. The online publication’s website describes it as focused on investigative journalism that “can help the Church to better serve its sacred mission, the salvation of souls.”
Its editors didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday about how they obtained the data. The report said only that the data came from one of the data brokers that aggregate and sell app signal data, and that the publication also contracted an independent data consulting firm to authenticate it.
The data privacy angle became the story for those who don’t read Catholic news sources on the doctrinal right. A Google search of “Burrill” and “data privacy” reveals a plethora of headlines about just that.
To conservative Catholic news outlets, the Burrill story is one about homosexuality among high-ranking clergy. To those on the progressive end of the Catholic doctrine and in the mainstream secular press, one about potentially poor journalistic ethics and data privacy issues.
The story can be about all three of these things, but the reality is that the Burrill incident, for traditional Catholics, is one about culture wars within the church. It’s a story about sin. It’s a story about faith. Despite the focus by some on the data breach angle, the reality is that conservative media has led the way on issues within the church over the last month.
FIRST IMAGE: Screen shot of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill photo, via YouTube/USCCB
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