The first thing one should take away from this story, particularly if you are a Non-Catholic who has no interest in what the good monsignor is doing in his spare time is this: The same tracking data that was used here is being used on you and you have almost certainly agreed to its use via the user agreement.
If that doesn’t scare you it ought to
My decision to stay off of Facebook and to do without a smartphone is looking better and better every day.
Forgetting the sinfulness of the actions of Msgr Burrill it really strikes me how stupid it is.
Even without this tracking business did he really think that this was going to be kept under wraps forever. Did he not think that with all the enemies that the church has that this would not have eventually been used against the church?
The idea that people think that stuff like this is never going to come out never ceases to amaze me, and I’ll bet there are plenty of people in the church who are very afraid right now.
They should be, particularly for their souls.
It is not lost on a lot of people that the Msgr. is from the same diocese where Fr. Altman has his priestly facilities to say the mass removed for daring to call out both the Bishops and Catholic pols for their open flaunting of the teaching of the church.
I suspect that unlike Fr. Altman Msgr Burrill will not face such a punishment or anything near it from his Bishop, unless he suddenly does something really beyond the pale like coming out against Traditionis custodes.
To nobody’s surprise the “Catholics for Mortal Sin” left as I call them is up in arms about the revelations citing privacy. Crisis Magazine and religion news both hit the messenger hard insisting that these sins were nobody’s business, but at least they referred to them as sins as opposed to Fr. James Martin to who the only sin in that the public was informed of something that I suspect an awful lot of people knew about, some I suspect with authority.
I have a question for these folks. If a priest was banging the wives of parishioners or was working at an abortion clinic under an assumed name, both acts completely legal in the US and elsewhere, would it not be proper to expose these acts?
I suspect their answers would vary depending on if the priests politics paralleled their own.
Speaking off souls what I find really interesting, as a person who struggles with sin, is the lack on concern about Msgr. Burrill’s soul. If these catholic actually believe in their vows and the doctrines of the Church they should be very interested in stopping mortal sins that can destroy a person’s soul.
Now in fairness there are some who are more interested in spiking the ball against their foes then the idea of worrying about both the Msgr’s soul and the souls of the men he was hooking up with. That’s the sin of pride.
We should be concerned with the souls of sinners as their are our brothers and the soul of the church because it is the instrument by which Christ redeems such sinners, Souls are all that matter, this should always remain the priority. Such things need to be exposed because the scandal they produce endangers souls, yet it is still our duty to be willing to show mercy once they are, “Blessed are the merciful for they shall be shown mercy” For we must remember as I’ve said many times that heaven will be no less glorious nor hell any more bearable if someone we despise is standing next to us there.
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