Yes, faithful readers, I saw the New York TImes story that ran under this headline: “Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr.” Why didn’t I write — pronto — about this story?
I guess because it seemed like an echo of an echo of an echo, fitting neatly into the template established by numerous articles in progressive Catholic media. It was an investigation of the methods and motives of a conservative Catholic blog — The Pillar, of course. TheTimes was not (#DUH) all that interested in the phenomenon that concerned The Pilliar, as in evidence that some Catholic priests have been using Grindr, that smartphone ap that a Vanity Fair feature once called “The World’s Biggest, Scariest Gay Bar.”
In a way, this Times story was yet another example of an old truth: Conservatives are wrong — simplistic, at the very least — when they claim that elite mainstream news publications are “anti-religion.”
In this Times piece, it’s clear that there are good Catholics and bad Catholics and that the Gray Lady gets to tell readers who is who. This is not the same as saying that there are Catholics who want to defend church doctrines and those who want key doctrines to evolve and we (the editors) will offer coverage in which readers read accurate, fair-minded discussions about why people on each side believe what they believe.
Yes, this is a Times piece about bad Catholic journalists. But it’s clear that the Times is not an anti-Catholic newspaper; it’s using the same basic doctrinal lens as progressive Catholic newspapers. Click here for a famous Times op-ed explaining the basics on this: “Is the Pope Catholic?”
There are, however, two things I would like to note in this Times feature. First, read the following carefully:
The reports by the blog, The Pillar, have unnerved the leadership of the American Catholic Church and have introduced a potentially powerful new weapon into the culture war between supporters of Pope Francis and his conservative critics: cellphone data, which many users assume to be unavailable to the general public.
“When there is reporting out there that claims to expose activity like this in parishes around the country and also on Vatican grounds, that is a five-alarm fire for church officials, there is no doubt about it,” said John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a progressive advocacy group.
The reports have put church officials in an awkward position: Priests take a vow of celibacy that is in no way flexible, and the downloading or use of dating apps by clergy members is inconsistent with that vow. But officials are also deeply uncomfortable with the use of cellphone data to publicly police priests’ behavior. Vatican officials said they met with representatives from the blog in June but would not publicly respond to its reports.
Stop and think about this for a moment: What is the Times saying? Is the implication that there is a difference between how The Pillar views the use of social-media dating apps by priests — gay and straight — and the point of view of Pope Francis and his supporters? Why is the use of this data a unique threat to the Catholic doctrinal left? What does the Times team think the current pope believes on this topic?
As I have said many times, I have heard — for decades — candid Catholics on left and right stress that the cloud of secrecy that surrounds clergy sexual abuse and related topics is NOT a left vs. right thing. There are defense mechanisms and secret lives in many corners of the church.
The Pillar reports have stressed that they have, before publication of these stories, approached church leaders to privately discuss the contents of this smartphone information. I think it’s valid to press The Pillar for information on what it’s finding about the lives of many straight priests, as well as Grindr priests. Next question: Have doctrinally conservative bishops been more or less willing to discuss these subjects?
The Times story did note:
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.
Now, there is a valid topic for follow-up work. If the Pillar team never “goes there,” then that will certainly be a subject worthy of commentary and reporting.
This brings us, once again, to the most important topic linked to the ongoing (the story broke into the open in the 1980s) clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church (as opposed to public schools, sports organizations, Protestant flocks, etc.). Read the following carefully:
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.
Does this statement about a “broad sense of tolerance for any number or kinds of sexual sins” creating a safe zone for a variety of sins sound familiar? Maybe it sounds familiar to reporters who have covered this scandal for decades or, perhaps, those who have seen the Academy Award-winning movie “Spotlight”?
It certainly sounds familiar to me. Then again, I have been around long enough to have interviewed the late A.W. Richard Sipe, who spent a half century investigating topics linked to sexuality and the Catholic priesthood. Here is a key chunk of a 2018 column that I wrote about Sipe’s work at the time of his death. Note the contents of the direct quote:
As a psychotherapist, his research files included hundreds of thousands of pages of church reports and court testimony. He estimated that he had served as an expert witness or consultant in 250 civil legal actions.
As a former Benedictine monk and priest, his private files included notes from years of work at the Seton Psychiatric Institute in Baltimore, where he counseled legions of troubled priests sent there by bishops.
“Sooner or later it will become broadly obvious that there is a systemic connection between the sexual activity by, among and between clerics in positions of authority and control, and the abuse of children,” he wrote, in a 2016 letter to his local shepherd, San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy.
“When men in authority — cardinals, bishops, rectors, abbots, confessors, professors — are having or have had an unacknowledged secret-active-sex-life under the guise of celibacy an atmosphere of tolerance of behaviors within the system is made operative.”
Doesn’t that sound quite similar to the crisis described by the editors of The Pillar?
As I have always said: When you find experts on the right (think The Pillar) and left (think Sipe) agreeing about something — a theory, an interpretation of key facts linked in a hot story — that is almost always important.
Obviously, Sipe and editors at The Pillar would disagree on many, many things linked to church life. But it appears that they have reached similar conclusions about the acidic impact of clouds of secrecy.
Stay tuned.
FIRST IMAGE: Graphic used with feature story at Out.com
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