Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

As a Catholic, I thought it might be important to raise one point here (since it seems everyone immediately jumps to "the Church is firing someone for who he wants to have sex with").

A Roman Catholic[1] priest is obligated (takes a vow when ordained) to not have sex with anyone, and it would be scandalous to find a priest—especially one with so much power and connections—to be hooking up with multiple partners in any situation. The app and sexual orientation are immaterial.

The other takeaway is that all the HN preaching about the importance of data privacy and how advertisers are grifting us, and how 'free' services are never free—this is probably the most lucid illustration of those facts yet.

Even those who try to aggregate anonymous data in a safe way are never going to be perfect at making sure nobody could associate the data back to an individual. The best thing is to not use the free (or cheap/ad-heavy) apps and services that do collect location information or other identifiable metrics.

[1] There are other parts of the Catholic church where priests are allowed to marry, and there actually are some Roman Catholic priests who converted from other faiths that allowed marriage, who are still married.

Practicing Catholic here. To add a reference about vows of celibacy: the minor (but notable!) exception are priests in Anglican Ordinariate who were validly married before their Catholic ordination. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu... this is a temporary exception, though, and does not signify any change in the Church's discipline of clerical celibacy.

> the minor (but notable!) exception are priests in Anglican Ordinariate who were validly married before their Catholic ordination.

The major exception is the priesthood of the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches; priestly celibacy is a discipline of the Latin Rite, not a universal discipline or doctrine of the Catholic Church.

> this is a temporary exception, though, and does not signify any change in the Church's discipline of clerical celibacy.

Sure, the most recent change was the reestablishment of the permanent diaconate within the Latin Rite, since before that the diaconate (and, before it was suppressed, also the subdiaconate) were within the scope of clerical celibacy.

> The app and sexual orientation are immaterial.

They aren't treated as immaterial in the attacks made on him by The Pillar based on the data, the attacks that led to the resignation; in them, the app and its use by some child predators (despite the explicit absence of any interactions by the official in question with minors) is specifically used to suggest he had a conflict of interest dealing with sex abuse issues.

And, its worth pointing out that there are Catholics calling foul on The Pillar in strong terms: https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/pillar-investigation-...

> "the Church is firing someone for who he wants to have sex with"

Are they tho? The headline says he quit.

Also: Off-topic; You the same "geerlingguy" that does all the open source stuff? Drupal and Ansible and all that stuff? If that's you, I just wanna throw out my "so very much thanks for all you've done for open source" at you. I've learned a ton of great stuff from you over the years. People like you genuinely contribute to a "more-better" world. ;)

If it were only about celibacy then they wouldn't have bothered to mention his trips to gay bars. Priests can go to a bar. They can drink alcohol. They can exist near and around gay people and straight people go to gay bars, too.

Grindr isn’t a gay bar directory. It’s a hookup app.

He knows that and is alluded to the fact that the article mentions the gay bar to taint his character and create a narrative that he is lurking on the down low.

Many people go to gay bars not to hook up, but to be around other gay people. Gay bars are not a hookup app.

Why are there gay bars but not gay restaurants or gay coffee shops?

There are. Bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and more all offer community to LGBT people , as they do many other minorities (and special interest groups, for that matter).

Straight people tend to get offended when a gay person hits on them, and drunk offended people can sometimes get violent. On the flip side of the coin, heteronormative bars present an added challenge for gay people looking for a hookup as they can't always tell who will be receptive. There was a need and the market filled it.

And for the record, straight people are allowed in too, it's not like they scan you with a gaydar at the door. You just have to be ok with people hitting on you who you're probably not interested in. So it's like being a woman in a normal bar.

one of my favorite places to hang out was a gay coffee shop that was next to a gay bookstore, thank you very much!

I’ve used it simply to make friends. It’s not always about sex

The whole situation is terrible.

A. Using extensive app logs to stalk & doxx someone is shitty. Alas this is the world we have built. Way back in 2003 this country still had some leftovers of a moral backbone and could pass CAN-SPAM act. These days anything goes.

B. This guy was using a hookup app 'almost daily', and following up with visits to hookup bars and private residences. His activities strongly corroborate that he was a sex addict. Which is in direct contradiction with his Catholic priesthood vows of chastity and celibacy.

C. Hookup apps like Grindr do not validate the user's age. They are a de-facto funnel feeding under age kids into the hookup sex scene. 'In an NWU study of of 14 to 17 year old males who identify as gay or bisexual [...] more than a quarter of the study’s adolescent participants said they had had sex with a partner met through an app.' The next stage of the funnel is prostitution and trafficking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/pillar-investigates-usccb-g...

I do not disagree with you one bit, and appreciate the thoughtful response. Though tinder and other dating apps do not have age verification either. We probably need photo id verifications

I met one of my best friends on Grindr. But there’s no denying it’s primarily about hookups.

There is a discrepancy on the Catholic church's teachings regarding this matter.

"Priests not allowed to marry" is contradictory to theology (the very book Catholics are supposed to believe in):

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Timothy%204...

It is unnatural to forcibly suppress desires for life, one way or another it will come out - no wonder there are so many sex scandals of priests abusing children.

With any information (journalism, scientific method, etc.) always check the reliability of sources, refer back to the original, don't just listen to the interpretation of one person (preacher) to avoid bias.

Please provide proof of the contrary

Isn't the defining trait of Catholics as opposed to Protestants that they don't just straight up follow the bible? That the church is the authority and the bible is just a jumping off point. If you're reading the bible yourself and using it to argue with the church then you've already left Catholic territory.

> there are so many sex scandals of priests abusing children.

says who?

If anything priesthood is statistically protective against pedophilia, even without accounting for "professions with access".

If I remember, last time I read the literature on the topic, it was quoted as something like 0.2%? As opposed to, say, teachers, which came at a scary 8%, and against a background population level of about 1-2%.

The scandal was about the "handling" of these cases, not about their presumed overwhelming propensity compared to "normal people". So your theory about repressed urges and the like is effectively Bulverism.

Obviously you'd be forgiven for having that impression though. This kind of stuff os golddust for the media. All they have to do is match pedophilia articles with articles about catholics on the front page, and boom -- fact by association.

> So your theory about repressed urges and the like is effectively Bulverism

On the contrary, the 1st statement was a theological argument, which led to a later hypothesis.

Please provide sources:

38% of clergy accused total, 0.1% actually convicted

“Cartor, Cimbolic & Tallon (2008) found that 6 percent of the cleric offenders in the John Jay Report are pedophiles; 32 percent ephebophiles, 15 percent 11 & 12 year olds only (both male and female)...” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jay_Report

Critic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6026966/

Critic https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6026966/

If you're so quick to uncritically believe that 38% of ordained priests are pedophiles, then you should at least consider the possibility that you have been successfully brainwashed by your choice of media/ideology. That kind of number is verging on conspiracy theory, up there with illuminati and chemtrails.

I'm not quite sure how you hoped the links you placed would help with your rebuttal, since they basically agree with what I said, but, in any case, thank you for the links; since you trust those sources, feel free to treat these as the sources you requested.

For comparable prevalence figures in the general population and in high risk professions (like teachers), just google that phrase, top links seem good enough references.

Correction: total accused is 4.4% of clergy. The percentages above are based on this cohort

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