LOS ANGELES – The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced the resignation of LaCrosse priest Jeffrey Burrill as the conference’s chief of staff. The announcement, from Los Angeles Archbishop Gomez Velasco, came in the wake of the lead article on the news site Pillar that chronicled Burrill trolling a location-based gay hookup app in numerous cities from 2018 to 2020 while traveling on conference business. Burrill had been appointed associate general secretary of the conference in 2016 and became general secretary in 2020. In those roles he coordinated the work of the conference on policy development on clerical sex scandals.
Celibacy and hypocrisy
Sexual abstinence is a vow of priests in the Catholic church. Celibacy is defined in church literature as “a special gift of God by which sacred ministers can more easily remain close to Christ with an undivided heart, and can dedicate themselves more freely to the service of God and their neighbor.”