Catholic group spent millions on app data that tracked gay priests
A group of philanthropists poured money into a Denver nonprofit that obtained dating and hookup app data and shared it with bishops around the country, a Post investigation has found

By Michelle Boorstein and Heather Kelly
March 9, 2023 - Washington Post

A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has 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.

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 project’s aim, according to tax records, is to “empower the church to carry out its mission” by giving bishops “evidence-based resources” with which to identify weaknesses in how they train priests.

In response to requests for comment and a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal initially said the group’s president, Jayd Henricks, would agree to an interview at a certain time, but Henricks did not call or return several messages seeking comment. After The Washington Post reached out again, Henricks on Wednesday posted a first-person piece on the site First Things, saying he was proud to be part of the group, whose purpose was “to love the Church and to help the Church to be holy, with every tool she could be given,” including data. He wrote that the group has done other research, in addition to the analysis of dating and hookup apps.
The Post interviewed two people with firsthand knowledge of the project, heard an audio recording of Henricks discussing it, and reviewed documents that were prepared for bishops as well as public records. One of the two people works for the church and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about it. The second person is active in the church in Colorado, knows some of the project’s organizers, and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the project is not supposed to be public. Both disapprove of the project because they see it as spying and coercive in ways that are damaging to priest-bishop relations and to the reputation of the Catholic Church and thus its ability to evangelize. They also see the project as taking a simplistic approach to morality that they call un-Catholic.
Some of the men who are part of the Renewal project were also involved in the July 2021 outing of a prominent priest, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, according to the two people with firsthand knowledge of the project and comments by the group’s president on the audio recording. Burrill, who declined to comment for this story, resigned from his post as the top administrator at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) after a Catholic news site, the Pillar, said it had mobile app data showing he was a regular on Grindr and had gone to a gay bar and a gay bathhouse and spa. The Pillar did not say where its data came from.

The anonymous tracking of a gay priest through his phone made news around the world, with critics calling it a kind of weaponized, anti-gay surveillance.
Until now, the people behind Burrill’s outing and the extent of the project were not public, nor was the fact that the effort continued — for at least another year after that incident, according to the people familiar with it and documents.
“The power of this story is that you don’t often see where these practices are linked to a specific person or group of people. Here, you can clearly see the link,” said Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s public policy school, who focuses on data privacy issues. The number of data privacy laws in the country, he said, “you can count them on one or two hands.”

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.


Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, seen in 2018, resigned as the general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2021. (Bob Roller/Catholic News Service)

In the First Things piece, Henricks said: “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.”
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.
Sherman 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.

But Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, said the Burrill story was the first time he had heard of a private group buying commercial data and using it against a specific individual.
“It was the first needle-in-a-haystack case, where someone sifts through millions of locations in apps and looks for one person and then tries to use that info to impeach them,” Cyphers said. “It 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.”
Still, some have celebrated Burrill’s outing as a way to purify the church by making other clerics more fearful of breaking their promise of celibacy.
The Rev. Gerald Murray, a New York City canon lawyer who offers church commentary on the Catholic channel EWTN and Fox News, said Burrill being a priest in a prominent role makes any misbehavior “a much greater scandal” and essentially eliminates his right to privacy.

“The promise of celibacy is a public act, it’s not a private commitment. It’s of public interest when those are violated in a scandalous way,” he said.
The Renewal group has spent at least $4 million, according to the recording of Henricks, and approached more than a dozen bishops with the information. It’s not clear what impact the project is having on clergy who the data suggests have actively used a dating or hookup app on their phone. Except for Burrill, it is not known whether the data has led to the resignation or termination of any other priests or seminarians. One of the two people familiar with the project said people may be kept from promotions or wind up in early retirement but not know why.
The project’s existence reflects a newly empowered American Catholic right wing that sees enforcing its interpretation of church teaching on sexuality and gender as an existential issue for the church and that no longer trusts bishops to do so. It is a flip of traditional church power dynamics, with the Colorado laypeople in a position to pressure bishops.

At the most intimate level, it shows a new generation of surveillance technology moving into different realms, now including the religious.
“Revealing information that harms a person’s reputation without an objectively valid reason — even if it’s true — is considered a sin,” said a member of the USCCB who knows Burrill and watched the monsignor experience “intense emotional distress” when his orientation and use of Grindr were made public in 2021. This person spoke on the condition of anonymity because of their working relationship with bishops. This person had heard about the data project before the Burrill news from another person who was approached by the nonprofit who told the USCCB member the effort was mainly focused on exposing gay priests.

A data project

In 2018, a man “concerned with reforming the Catholic clergy” approached a few Catholic organizations, including the Catholic News Agency, according to a cryptic article CNA published the day before the Burrill story broke.

That 2018 pitch, CNA reported, “was to provide this information privately to Church officials in the hopes that they would discipline or remove those found to be using these technologies to violate their clerical vows and possibly bring scandal to the Church.” CNA had declined the man’s offer, the story said, “but there are reports this week that information targeting allegedly active homosexual priests may become public.”
Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal opened for business in June 2019, incorporation records show. The nonprofit was created to “support the commitment of Roman Catholic clergy to living the teachings of the church,” its 2019 tax filing states. Its purpose is “to work systematically with bishops, priests, religious and seminarians to … provide evidence-based resources to bishops that enable them to effectively judge and support quality formation practices, and [to] identify weaknesses in current formation practices and priestly life.”
It’s not clear if or how the Renewal group is connected to the man who approached CNA.

Bauman, Martin and Reichert are listed as trustees on the nonprofit’s tax filings for the two years they are publicly available.
Martin is a co-founder of one of the largest natural gas producers in the western United States, McMurry Oil Co. He supports many charitable efforts through his and his wife’s Martin Family Foundation. Those include his co-founding of the Amazing Parish, a national consulting firm to help improve parishes, and major donations to the causes of campus evangelization, antiabortion, anti-poverty and religious education. He contributed $555,000 to Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal over two years, tax records show.
Bauman is a former entertainment company executive who is now president of the board of Christ in the City, a nonprofit organization that trains missionaries and serves the homeless. He is a benefactor of some of the same Denver-area groups as Martin and Reichert, including Catholic Charities and Focus campus ministry. He did not donate money to the Renewal group in 2019 or 2020, according to tax documents.
Reichert is the founder of Economics Partners, a consulting firm that employs dozens of economists. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year in the central 7th District as a Republican. With his wife, he gives major gifts to Catholic Charities, Mother Teresa’s order Missionaries of Charity and college evangelization. The couple also gave $600,000 to Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal over two years, according to the group’s tax returns.

In a speech last year given to a Catholic Charities men’s breakfast, Reichert said Christians need to oppose false ideas like “post-Christianity” or “pluralism,” which he calls a “fool’s errand.” Instead, he said, they need to boldly proselytize and not worry about being unpopular or canceled. “To be free, one has to be willing to lose one’s reputation. That’s the way they’ve set up the game.”
According to two people with knowledge of the project, the philanthropists hired Henricks, the former head of government relations for the USCCB, the organized body of Catholic leaders in the United States. Henricks by then had moved from D.C. to Denver to work for the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school. Martin and Bauman have donated to the school. Reichert’s wife, Martha, is listed as a staff member there.
Tax documents for Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal show revenue of $1.5 million in 2019 and $1.8 million in 2020, the most recent year information is public. Most of the money each year was spent on “data and computing,” staff salaries and attorneys’ fees.
The law firm representing the group is D.C.-based Schaerr-Jaffe, founded by Gene Schaerr, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has called fighting same-sex marriage “a religious duty.” Schaerr advises evangelical colleges on how to protect their government funding while upholding practices such as barring LGBTQ student clubs.
In an email to The Post, Schaerr confirmed the group is a client. “My charge was and is to help them ensure that their efforts — which are focused on empowering Catholic bishops to more effectively oversee and mentor their priests and seminarians — comply with all relevant privacy and other laws.”
He deferred other questions to the group.
Other donors to the nonprofit include the Catholic Foundation of Northern Colorado, which works in tandem with the Archdiocese of Denver to support its ministries and parishes. The foundation gave the Renewal group $400,000 in the two years for which tax forms are available.
The Catholic Foundation of Northern Colorado did not return messages seeking comment.
Henricks knows many bishops from his previous job with the bishops’ conference. According to the person who works for the church and to the audio recording, Henricks’s role has been to take the data sets to various bishops and use their knowledge of priests’ and seminarians’ locations to match the known device locations with actual people.
Henricks wrote in First Things that he shared this information with “a handful of rectors and bishops” and did not make the information available for public use, so as to be able to “have honest and frank conversations with Church leaders, and protect the privacy of those affected.”
However, one of the people with knowledge of the project said some bishops felt pressure from the group to take action.

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