A Catholic Nonprofit On Grindr: Charity and the Integral Part Doctrine

Wapo is out with a cringeworthy story yesterday that ought to make us wonder what “charity” means, and perhaps whether there is ever a product, service, or endeavor that is non-charitable, per se.  Is it charity if there are below market transfers of the organization’s goods or services, no private inurement or  benefit, and no politics involved?   Not necessarily, that’s why organizations that exist to break the law — even if only by civil disobedience — cannot be tax exempt charities.  When we talk about nonprofit hospitals and schools, for example, we express the sentiment that health care and education are pretty nearly charitable, per se. When we talk about “Fagin’s School for Picking Pockets” we express the sentiment that crime is noncharitable per se.  

It seems that a buncha philanthropists formed an exempt charity.  The charity, Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal describes its mission thusly:

The Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal supports the commitment of Roman Catholic Clergy to living the teachings of the church and of holy scripture. The Renewal of fidelity to church teachings will enhance the church’s credibility among members and non-members, thereby re-empowering the church to carry out its mission to proclaim and witness  to the gospel. The purpose of the Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal is to work systematically with bishops, priests, religious and seminarians to (a) establish a network of support and ongoing formation for Clergy; (b) provide evidence-based resources to bishops that enable them to effectively judge and support quality formation practices; and (c) identify weaknesses in current formation practices and priestly life.

The Wapo articles begins the story like this:  

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.

There is no mention of private inurement or benefit, or political activity, and the organization freely gives the results of its data collection and search to the Catholic Church. But does that make the organization one that has a charitable mission?  To spy on late night hookups?  As though exemption must be granted for any legal activity so long as there are donative characteristics accompanying the activity and no politics.  If so, than what the CLCR is doing qualifies for tax exemption.  CLCR got wind of the story a day before it ran and, according to WAPO quickly prepared its own prebuttal, minimizing and justifying its activities:  

All of us know that limitless connectivity, and boundless access to information and content, can become an instrument of sinfulness, just as easily as it can help build up our society.

Trafficking in obscene content, and even criminal content, is a risk to the Church and her children, as it is to the rest of society—indeed, as repeated scandals have shown, the danger is more acute because of the Church’s privileged position as the guardian of souls and the door of salvation.  

When we learned legal ways to understand risks to the health of the Church beset by technology—including the use of hookup apps by clerics—we studied that. We learned some things. And we shared what we learned directly with bishops—without setting any expectations, we made information available to the leaders of the Church.

As they and similar secular outlets usually do when trying to talk about Catholic issues, the Post has fixated on a small part of what we do—anything that touches on sex. According to them, it seems, you can (even should) have all the sex you like, with whomever and however you wish, but discussing what the effects of this might be for our physical and mental health—to say nothing of spiritual well-being—is somehow weird and obsessive.  

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.  

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 behavior that harms everyone involved, at some level and in some way, and is a witness against the ministry of the Church.

The Grindr Logo

Ha! I gotta say, I like the way the author writes. “People think they can have ALL the sex they want!” I saw him throw his hands up, roll his eyes and lean back hard in his chair when I read that. The group states that it spends money to obtain and use legally obtained data for many purposes, and that its use of data to find out and report to the church which priests are getting their freak on using Grindr is only a small part of its activities.  The relative size of the activity, of course, does not make it charitable, it just means that the activity, even if not charitable, is not enough to deny or revoke tax exemption under Better Business.  But I wonder what the result would be if the Church did the same thing through a wholly owned subsidiary.  If the Catholic Church did the same thing itself or via a wholly owned subsidiary, it seems to me, the integral part doctrine would probably consider the spying part of the Church’s charitable mission.  I said it before and I’ll say it again.  Churches can pretty much do whatever they want with their tax exemptions.  Even so, is this something Jesus would do? 

darryll jones