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Using Technology to Track Priests
Questions: is it a legitimate tool to root out moral corruption? could it encourage blackmail?
by Robert Moynihan and ITV staff
This story sets before us allegations about the sexual activities of a priest, first reported July 20 by a relatively new Catholic news agency, The Pillar, founded earlier this year by two former editors at Catholic News Agency (owned by EWTN), JD Flynn and Ed Condon, from which both resigned at the very end of 2020.
The priest in question abruptly resigned his post with the US bishops’ conference. So with that decision the story took on a certain seriousness.
REMOTE TRACKING
Then emerged something new: the way the evidence in this case had been gathered. The evidence of the alleged sexual activity had been gathered — the news agency itself revealed — by remote tracking of the priest’s phone.
In other words, everywhere the priest went with his phone, reports of his location were being sent in to a central database, and a way to access that database had been made available to the news agency, The Pillar.
The news agency concluded that the priest had been in places where various liaisons of a sexual nature were quite “likely” to have occurred.
No evidence of an actual occurrence has been produced.
So the priest in this case had no privacy. The record of his movements was an open book.
Well, an open book to those who have access to the database… But who has access to such a database?
TECHNOLOGY OFFERED TO OTHERS EARLIER
Then, remarkably, the editors of another Catholic news agency (named Catholic News Agency, CNA) published their own startling report about The Pillar’s report, revealing that they themselves had been offered this very same location-tracking program three years ago, in 2018 — and had refused to use the program to track the movements of priests.
“The issue was first raised in 2018, when a person concerned with reforming the Catholic clergy approached some Church individuals and organizations, including Catholic News Agency,” CNA reported.
“A Catholic tech expert who also spoke to CNA said the technology is so precise that it can provide the names and addresses of the targeted clergy and also tell what other app users he might spend time with and where their meetings take place,” CNA said.
Two American journalists — J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon (photos here), who have founded a news agency called The Pillar — have warned the Vatican that governments (perhaps that of China) might obtain compromising information about Vatican officials which could potentially lead to blackmail. The case exploded when the two journalists revealed their concerns to the world.
WHO ELSE HAS THIS SOFTWARE?
This bit of news sheds a new light on the case.
A tracking software that can be used to track priests had been offered (by someone) to more than one Catholic news agency.
One agency has used the software and exposed the activities of a priest.
Another agency has, evidently, not used the software. But… were there other news agencies that had been offered this software? Was anyone else using this software? (Note: Inside the Vatican has never been offered this software by anybody.)
As a matter of speculation, if this software was available two years ago, might it not be that there are many news agencies, many news organizations, and of course many investigation agencies, that also have this software, and are already using it to track the movements of priests everywhere, and not only of priests, but also of… bishops… and of cardinals… and (why not?) of ministers, rabbis, imams… and of all sorts of other leaders, inside and outside of organized religion?
Chinese bishops at the October 2018 Synod of Bishops (CNS photo / Alessandro Di Meo, EPA)
...AND WHOM ELSE MIGHT IT BE USED TO TRACK?
Then, raising the bar to another level in a final twist, one reader wrote to me, asking this question:
“If we link the idea of surveillance of priests to determine if they are engaging in various types of sexual misconduct to the idea of the other story we have been following in recent days, the story of the suppression of the old liturgy, do we not come spontaneously to this question: Might it not be possible that every priest who celebrates the old Latin Mass could be placed under this type of surveillance, so that all movements of such priests could be tracked, and the locations of all such Masses determined by it?”
in England in 1581 for celebrating Mass in private homes when the Catholic Mass had been made illegal by the authorities of the time...
BLACKMAIL
A new element of the situation was then revealed on July 27, when the editors
at The Pillar published a follow-up story, quickly picked up and reported on by news outlet Breitbart, suggesting that the compromising use of “hookup” apps by people who work in the Vatican could be creating a vulnerability to blackmail.
Further, it raises the question of whether such blackmail could be a possible explanation for the behavior of the Vatican toward Communist China.
The article suggests that the Vatican’s September 2018 agreement with China (the contents of which have never been made public) — an agreement which was recently renewed — may have been entered into, or abided by, in part due to threats from China to expose certain activities in the Vatican to global view
The (possible) blackmail is occurring, perhaps (the article is proposing a hypothesis) because — as The Pillar article reports — a number of people, from “non-public areas” inside Vatican City, in 2018 used their cell phones to connect to “location-based homosexual and heterosexual hookup apps” which facilitate the possibility of sexual encounters between homosexuals and between heterosexuals.
Still, the article does not identify who might have been using such “hook-up apps” — whether Vatican monsignors, or lay workers, or even guests in Vatican City (every October in Rome there are international meetings hosted by the Vatican which are attended by people from all over the world).
So this article is a construction of suppositions based on data that does not seem to conclusively identify a single person yet — unless such identification has not been made public.
APPS’ DATA ACCESSIBLE TO THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT
According to The Pillar, “Use of the Grindr app among Vatican residents and officials and within the non-public areas of Vatican City State could present a particular diplomatic security risk for the Holy See in its dealings with China.”
The Pillar notes that “the company was launched in California, but acquired by the Chinese gaming firm Beijing Kunlun Tech in 2016 for $93 million. While it was under Chinese ownership, the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) deemed the app’s ownership a national security risk, over concerns that data from the app’s some 27 million users could be accessed by the Chinese government and used for blackmail. The app was sold in 2020 to a company based in the United States for a reported $608 million, at the demand of the U.S. government.”
The Pillar adds: “While it was still under Chinese ownership, Grindr allowed third-party engineers access to the personal data of millions of U.S.- based users, including their personal details and HIV status, according to media reports last year.”
