A non-profit group in Colorado, Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, “spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country”, according to The Washington Post.
The revelation follows a similar use of cellphone data in 2021 to out Mgr Jeffrey Burrill, who was then the general secretary of the US bishops’ conference.
According to tax records, the Colorado group received $400,000 in funding from the Catholic Foundation of Northern Colorado, an organisation affiliated with the Archdiocese of Denver.
There is no known previous example in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States of a bishop participating in an effort to spy on his clergy.
Jayd Henricks, who formerly served as chief lobbyist for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, has been involved in this project, as he explained in an article at First Things.
Henricks now works at the Augustine Institute in Denver, the president of which, Timothy Grey, is also on the board of directors of the Napa Institute along with Fran Maier, another Denver Catholic who is the long-time amanuensis of former Denver (and then Philadelphia) Archbishop Charles Chaput.
“It should be noted that these sorts of hookup apps are designed specifically for casual, anonymous sexual encounters – it’s not about straight or gay priests and seminarians, it’s about behaviour that harms everyone involved, at some level and in some way, and is a witness against the ministry of the Church,” Henricks wrote.
He claimed his work was “collaborative” but the information purchased was done without the consent of those being spied upon.
Ethicists have raised profound questions about such usages of data. Commenting on the Burrill outing, Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organisation, told the Post that the story “was a character assassination of a private citizen for some kind of political reason based on information [the citizen] didn’t know they were being tracked on”.
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