Diarmuid Martin, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, has removed three students from the seminary at St. Patrick's College over allegations that they were using Grindr to engage in the school's "gay subculture."

Martin made his decision based off a series of anonymous tips he received from peers of the students at Maynooth seminary.

"One (allegation) is that there is a homosexual, gay culture, that students have been using an app called Grindr, which would be inappropriate for seminarians and not just because they are going to be celibate priests," Martin said in an interview with Irish state broadcaster RTE on Tuesday.

He added, "If this is going on a large scale in the seminary and it hasn't been noticed in the seminary, then there is something wrong."

Hugh Connolly, the president of the seminary, said no investigation had been launched prior to Martin's interference as Maynooth staff had received no official complaints from their students.

"It is very important that anything we do, we do in natural justice, in other words, that we will always act only when we have clarity and when we have grounds to act," Connolly told RTE. "Broadly speaking, I think the atmosphere is a very good one."

Officials at the school have since claimed that they have found no "concrete evidence" of the existence of any alleged "active gay subculture."

In response to the controversy, Father Brendan Hoban, a well-known Irish Catholic priest in the Killala Diocese, remarked that at seminary “you are always going to have a mixture of gay and heterosexual candidates, that has always been the case, and there will be-from time to time, incidents that people would prefer didn’t happen. But they do happen, human nature being what it is."

According to the Irish Times, the students will be transferred from Maynooth to a seminary in Rome where they will finish out their studies.

h/t: Business Insider