Jeffrey Burrill resigned from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops after his usage of the hookup app was exposed

Jul 29, 2024

A Catholic priest who became (in)famous after he was outed for using the gay hookup app Grindr is now suing the company for not doing a better job of maintaining his anonymity.

The situation dates back to 2021, when Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, the general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) resigned from his position. The announcement came as a surprise since Burrill hadn’t been accused of any crimes. There were no allegations of child sex abuse or anything like it. He wasn’t involved in any financial improprieties.

He stepped down because an outside group tracking his phone discovered that he was frequenting gay bars and using Grindr to presumably meet other men.

What made the story especially delicious for critics was that the USCCB is the conservative arm of the U.S. Church, made up of active and retired bishops. They’re known for their bigotry. They’re responsible for all the horror stories you hear about Catholic hospitals refusing care because they put dogma over patients. They’ve argued that pro-choice Catholic politicians like Joe Biden should be denied communion (though they backed off from that particular position after public outcry). And they believe homosexuality is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

If the allegations about Burrill were true, the hypocrisy would be astonishing.

But how did anyone know he was using the app?
How the Grindr data became public

The Catholic News Agency explained in 2018 that they were approached by an individual with a proposal:

This party claimed to have access to technology capable of identifying clergy and others who download popular hook-up apps, such as Grindr and Tinder, and to pinpoint their locations using the internet addresses of their computers or mobile devices.

The person’s hope was that the Church would use the technology to root out priests who were violating their vows by having sex or inviting scandal into the Church. The CNA refused the offer. It wasn’t clear how the individual was tapping the phones but it was undoubtedly plausible, if highly unethical. (I mean, of all the ways to police priests, catching them in the act of a consensual hookup would be fairly low on the list of problems I have with Catholic Church leaders. Yes, they would be violating their vows, but the priests aren’t the problem. The anti-gay, anti-sex vows are the problem.)

Anyway, while the CNA said no to the offer, a Catholic website called The Pillar accepted it, and that outlet broke the news about Burrill.

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.

…

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.

On June 22, the mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted signals from Entourage, which bills itself as Las Vegas gay bathhouse.

…

The data obtained and analyzed by The Pillar conveys mobile app data signals during two 26-week periods, the first in 2018 and the second in 2019 and 2020. The data was obtained from a data vendor and authenticated by an independent data consulting firm contracted by The Pillar.

The Pillar contacted the USCCB about the data, giving them time to respond, but before the website received any answers, the USCCB announced Burrill’s resignation.

The Pillar never explained who this “data vendor” was. But days later, they wrote about how some priests in the Archdiocese of Newark were allegedly using Grindr. They also said that, in 2018, data revealed how “at least 32 mobile devices… from within areas of Vatican City that are off-limit to tourists” were using similar dating apps.

In the two years after that story broke, we didn’t hear any additional stories of priests outed by the data… or where the data came from.

But in 2023, the Washington Post reported that conservative Catholic donors in Colorado poured millions of dollars into spying technology in order to share it with bishops around the country.

Burrill was just the tip of the iceberg.

The secretive effort was the work of a Denver nonprofit called Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, whose trustees are philanthropists Mark Bauman, John Martin and Tim Reichert, according to public records, an audio recording of the nonprofit’s president discussing its mission and other documents. The use of data is emblematic of a new surveillance frontier in which private individuals can potentially track other Americans’ locations and activities using commercially available information. No U.S. data privacy laws prohibit the sale of this data.

The goal was to give the data to bishops—evidence that their priests were violating their oaths—to help them better train those priests in the future. And they had the resources to do it: The group spent over $4,000,000, with a lot of it being used to purchase and analyze the data, pay staff, and hire attorneys.

The group’s president, Jayd Henricks, wouldn’t speak with the Post’s reporters, but he preemptively defended their actions in a separate piece published on the conservative site First Things. He said the group was formed in the wake of allegations involving former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who “had been grooming and sexually abusing young men for decades.” To avoid similar stories, they wanted to “spot dangers that could lead to more scandal and heartache for the Church down the line.”

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. Sadly, in some places, we could scarcely avoid seeing it. And there have been news reports about priests arrested for criminal use of such apps. All of that is a problem—one we as a Church can choose to acknowledge and confront, or not.

Publicly available data, bought in the ordinary way, was given to us at CLCR, and as we analyzed it, it became clear that heterosexual and homosexual hookup apps were used by some seminarians and some priests in some places, and with volumes and patterns suggesting those were not isolated moral lapses by individuals.  

Just to point out the obvious, a priest having a same-sex hookup may be an ethical lapse given the Church’s beliefs but that’s not a danger to anyone. Henricks said he wanted to prevent another McCarrick-like situation, but catching a priest on Grindr wasn’t anywhere in the ballpark of sexually abusing a child. Henricks claimed they wanted to use the technology to decide “what sorts of church activities draw people to a parish” and “when and how liturgies are scheduled,” but that turned out to be a smokescreen. Once they knew they could possibly “out” sexually repressed priests, that soon became its main function.

While The Pillar never said where its data came from, the Post spoke with people connected with CLCR who “were involved” in Burrill’s outing, and Grindr was directly implicated.

According to two separate reports prepared for bishops and reviewed by The Post, the group says it obtained data that spans 2018 through 2021 for multiple dating and hookup apps including Grindr, Scruff, Growlr and Jack’d, all used by gay men, as well as OkCupid, a major site for people of various sexualities. But most of the data appears to be from Grindr, and those familiar with the project said the organizers’ focus was gay priests.

The more interesting revelation had to do with the technology that allowed people to be tracked through their phones:

One report prepared for bishops says the group’s sources are data brokers who got the information from ad exchanges, which are sites where ads are bought and sold in real time, like a stock market. The group cross-referenced location data from the apps and other details with locations of church residences, workplaces and seminaries to find clergy who were allegedly active on the apps, according to one of the reports and also the audiotape of the group’s president.

[Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s public policy school, who focuses on data privacy issues] said police departments have bought data about citizens instead of seeking a warrant, domestic abusers have accessed data about their victims, and antiabortion activists have used data to target people who visit clinics.

To put that another way, if you have enough data, it’s theoretically possible to identify the actions of individuals. If you knew someone visited a diocese, or stayed overnight in a rectory, and also walked over to a gay bar the next day, you don’t need to know the person’s name to narrow down your list of suspects. When you toss in more specific details about the kind of phone and the internet service provider, that short list can be whittled down even further. Most of the dating apps, including Grindr, said they no longer sold hyper-specific tracking data to third parties, according to the Post, but it was clear they were selling some data.
What Burrill’s lawsuit is all about

And now, Burrill is trying to get some semblance of justice.

Last week, in a California superior court, Burrill filed a lawsuit against Grinder, saying that the company didn’t adequate protect his data despite their promises, nor did they inform him that outside groups could possibly access it. He says that lack of transparency cost him his job and made him suffer “significant damage” to his reputation.

The lawsuit openly admits Burrill downloaded Grindr in 2017. It also affirms what the Washington Post found: that the Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal purchased that personal data and sent it along to The Pillar, leading to his outing and subsequent resignation.

But the CLCR and The Pillar are not parties in this lawsuit. Just Grindr. The lawsuit says the company told customers their data would be protected from “unauthorized access, use, or disclosure,” but they didn’t take the necessary steps to do that and purposely didn’t share what they would reveal to third parties.

“Had BURRILL known that GRINDR intended to make his data available for sale, he would not have used GRINDR’s services,” the lawsuit says.

According to the Post, Burrill’s attorney only filed the lawsuit after Grindr rejected a separate request to compensate Burrill $5 million for what he went through.
The troubling ethics of all of this

I have no idea if the lawsuit will accomplish anything other than reminding everyone about what Burrill did. The Streisand effect is fully in play here. And while Burrill may not have used Grindr had he known his information could become public, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t going to find other men to hook up with through other means. Blaming the app for the underlying “sin” ignores the principles he supposedly adopted as a Catholic priest. For the Catholic Church, is the problem really the app or the desire?

But there are a number of issues beyond the lawsuit that critics ought to think about before mocking Burrill. (Because that’s ridiculously easy to do, and there’s good reason for it!)

For example, that original article in The Pillar was disturbing for a number of reasons. The outlet acted like Burrill committed a scandal of the highest order, but that really wasn’t the case. Whatever you think about the USCCB, the Catholic Church, or priestly vows, what exactly did he do that was so problematic? He’s gay. He wanted to act on it. That’s it. Because he was a Catholic priest, he was forced to do it in secret. The hypocrisy was worthy of discussion, yet The Pillar’s story made it sound so much more serious than just that.

Consider how that outlet went out of its way to say there was no evidence Burrill met up with minors—falsely suggesting that there was a strong link between people on Grindr and child sex trafficking. The site also unfairly suggested that Burrill, whose job involved coordinating the U.S. Church’s response to child sex abuse cases, was incapable of handling the position because of his actions.

In fact, a large portion of that article was spent talking about child sex trafficking, priests who have molested children, and the role of hookup apps to facilitate all that—but none of it was relevant to the case at hand! It was all a red herring. For all we knew, Burrill just wanted to have sex with other consenting adult men… which would, at worst, be a violation of a rule that shouldn’t exist. But The Pillar even quoted someone who said that a priest failing to live up to the Church’s sexual rules was “only a step away from sexual predation.” What?! No! Not even close!

We don’t know if Burrill spent years struggling with Church-enforced sexual repression or if he ever fought against those repressive rules internally. I have no reason to think he did, but it wasn’t even considered.

The biggest question, of course, is whether he deserves any sympathy. After all, he’s a gay priest who chose to join a corrupt, bigoted institution that actively works to block LGBTQ rights. But I do think there’s a difference between someone like Burrill who merely works for an anti-gay organization and someone like Ted Haggard who actively campaigned against same-sex relationships while secretly acting on his homosexual desires. It would be a lot easier to condemn and mock Burrill if we could point to anti-gay sermons he’d delivered. (I have not come across any of those.)

Haggard deserved to be outed and ridiculed. Jerry Falwell, Jr. deserved to be outed and ridiculed. I’m not sold on the idea that every gay Catholic priest deserves the same fate. The same could be said of the people who supposedly overwhelmed the app during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee; there’s a difference between random delegates and elected officials who actually vote on these issues. Not a huge difference but a difference nonetheless.

If Burrill was guilty of committing a sin, then what about the whistleblower who used data that Grindr users believed was private? What about Church leaders who celebrated Burrill’s downfall while ignoring or downplaying stories about priests who have secret children or who pay for abortions? There’s a strong case to be made that their ethical lapses are far more concerning than anything Burrill did.

For a group of people who believe we’re all sinners, there were many Catholics happy to expose the “sins” of one of their own only because it involved homosexuality.

Then there was the USCCB’s response to all this, which was a textbook case of what not to say:

What was shared with us did not include allegations of misconduct with minors. However, in order to avoid becoming a distraction to the operations and ongoing work of the Conference, Monsignor Burrill has resigned, effective immediately.

The Conference takes all allegations of misconduct seriously and will pursue all appropriate steps to address them.

Misconduct was a hell of a word to use to describe an act between two consenting adults. On the spectrum of bad behavior by priests, this was a nothingburger. It was hypocrisy, yes, but nothing more, and the USCCB acted like he had committed the most egregious of crimes.

Just imagine if Catholics with money, power, and tech savvy spent this much energy going after actual predators instead of priests who just wanted a consensual release. But much like the Vatican hierarchy, even these lay Catholics didn’t really give a damn about child safety or religious ideals. They wanted to ruin the lives of gay people under the guise of purifying the Church. And because the Vatican’s rules are so strict in that regard—anti-gay, anti-sex—the Church created a giant opening for this kind of spying to be justified.
Was Burrill’s reputation truly damaged?

The lawsuit says Burrill’s reputation “has been destroyed.” And yet, in 2022, he returned to work as the parochial administrator of St. Teresa of Kolkata Parish in West Salem, Wisconsin, a church in his home diocese.

In the announcement of his return, Bishop William Callahan simply said Burrill had “recently come off an extended leave” and was working to “strengthen his priestly vows.” There was no mention of why he was no longer working for the USCCB.

The next paragraph was almost cryptic in avoiding talking about the elephant in the room:

Let me state unequivocally that the Diocese of La Crosse has received no allegations of illegal misconduct of any kind by Monsignor Burrill and that I have every confidence in returning Monsignor Burrill to active ministry and in his ability to accompany the people of God of this great parish as together you journey toward a deeper, more meaningful relationship with the Person of Jesus Christ. 

It’s still unbelievable how they’re making consensual sex sound like a grave crime.

That said, how damaged could Burrill’s reputation truly be if he was able to return to working for the Catholic Church, albeit in a different role, a year after his resignation?

(Portions of this article were published earlier)