Renunciation is defined with reference to your mental attitude towards possessions, not the presence or absence thereof. See, for example the 'Royal Sage' (Raja Rshi).
Not really. Detachment from love of material possessions doesn't imply having no material possessions. It implies a lack of a disordered love for them. The true test of hypocrisy would be to see how one of those monks responds when his phone gets stolen.
That is a Western view of things where spiritual and material realms are different. Dharmic religions consider the spiritual realm to be a superset of the material, not separate from it.
Perhaps, but based on a similar experience I had with a Tibetan monk, I'd say there's actually quite a lot of room for flexibility. Just because someone has a handful of materialistic interests doesn't mean they're incapable of being a good person or teacher. That was probably the main lesson I learned from the monk I knew. As outsiders, we often have a very romanticized, storybook view of monkhood that doesn't line up with reality.
