Conversion Therapy Left Gay Man ‘Broken.’

— Now He Explores How It Changed an Aspiring Nun Who Died by Suicide

“It’s really given me the courage to tell my own story, which has been an incredibly healing process for me,” Simon Kent Fung — host of the ‘Dear Alana,’ podcast

by Brian Brant

As a teenager growing up in Colorado, Alana Chen — known by loved ones for her generosity and kindness to others — dreamed of becoming a nun.

But Alana’s life came to a tragic end on Dec. 8, 2019, when she died by suicide at just 24 years. Now a new podcast, Dear Alana, explores the diaries she wrote as a young woman trying to reconcile her strong Catholic faith with her sexual identity — an exhausting challenge that drove her to conversion therapy.

According to the podcast, Alana attended two church summer camps in Boulder when she was 13 years old: Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic Church and St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center on the University of Colorado Boulder Campus, where she met and soon entrusted a priest at St. Thomas Aquinas, who would eventually become her spiritual director.

With the help of her best friend, Alana began sneaking behind her mother’s back to attend early evening mass at St. Thomas. Then, one day, she told her mom the truth.

“She just said, ‘I’m sneaking out. I lied. I’ve been going to mass every day at 5:30, taking the bus,'” her mother, Joyce Calvo, tells PEOPLE.

“I just remember saying, ‘Why? Why are you doing that?’ She said, ‘I love it,'” adds Calvo, who was shocked by her daughter’s goal of nunhood. Although she hadn’t been a religious person in her youth, Calvo’s sobriety journey sparked the search for a spiritual home for family.

But Alana was hiding another secret: she was struggling with her sexual identity. At 14, Alana came out to the priest, who instructed her not to tell anyone, not even her family, according to the podcast.

Simon Kent Fung, creator of the "Dear Atlanta" Podcast
Simon Kent Fung.

“[He] noticed me. He knew me. He knew I loved God. He knew I did not want to marry a man,” Alana wrote in one of her journal entries. “He forgave my unspeakable sin. He took my defilement and buried it. ‘You ought to pray the rosary everyday.’ Later, he said, ‘I better pray it five times per day to keep temptation away.'”

The priest did not return PEOPLE’s request for comment, but the Archdiocese of Denver — where he is now a diocesan hermit, a monk-missionary, per his blog — says in a statement: “Commenting on specifics regarding Alana Chen is improper, but as the Archdiocese of Denver has previously stated, conversion therapy was never practiced. Trying to explain Alana’s story with a simplistic explanation is unfair to her memory. We reject any practices that are manipulative, coercive, or pseudoscientific. Alana, and every person, is beloved by God and deserves to be treated with mercy, dignity, and reverence. We continue to pray with and for everyone who is affected by Alana’s untimely death.”

St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center says in a separate statement: “Our deepest prayers and condolences continue for the Chen family, who experienced the tragic loss of their daughter, Alana. The St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center does not practice conversion therapy and remains against any form of coercion or manipulation. As Catholics, we reverence the dignity and free will of each and every human person and view every person’s life as a beautiful gift from God. We strive to live and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and embrace the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

Reflecting on the revelations in her daughter’s journals, Calvo tells PEOPLE, “I love the Saints and Mary and Jesus, but [in] a lot of churches, I didn’t like the language and how strict it was. That’s why I was always church-hopping. But I was shocked [by] this, what he was doing, seeing her in private.”

The journals and podcast claim Alana spent years seeking pastoral counsel and receiving conversion therapy treatment, practitioners of which “commonly use an array of psychosocially harmful techniques,” according to the American Psychological Association.

Her nearly two-dozen journals explore the pain she experienced as a result of conversion therapy, which she publicly opened up about in The Denver Post in August 2019.

“I felt a lot of shame and anxiety,” Alana told the Post. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Was I going to hell? But I was still extremely faithful, and I felt like the church and the counseling was the thing that was saving me. The worse I got, the more I clung to it.”

Alana said she eventually broke free from conversion therapy after a suicide attempt that led to her receiving professional mental health treatment.

“I was feeling so much shame that I was comforted by the thought of hurting myself,” she told the newspaper of her heartbreaking mindset. “I’ve now basically completely lost my faith. I don’t know what I believe about God, but I think if there is a God, he doesn’t need me talking to him anymore.”

Four months after the Post interview, she vanished and was found dead by suicide. Nearly four years later, her life is the basis of the eight-episode podcast. In the series, host Simon Kent Fung explores his personal connection to Alana’s story, the origins of conversion therapy and the death of a young woman who, according to Fung, “had it all.”

Alana Chen
Alana Chen

“I learned about Alana’s story in the news, like a lot of people did,” Fung, a gay Catholic man, tells PEOPLE. “I think what stuck out to me was how devout and religious she was and her family’s suspicion of the role that that community played, as well as the role that conversion therapy played in her disappearance and death.”

Fung — who has worked in tech at Patreon and Google and as a designer at Time — says he “recognized very similar experiences in my own life with my faith community and with the subculture of the American Catholic Church that I was a part of.”

Ashamed of his sexual identity, he spent “all of my twenties in various forms of conversion therapy in my attempt to become a priest,” Fung says. During this period, he was taught that his sexuality was “the result of an underdeveloped bonding with my father and male peers and encouraged to deconstruct his attractions in order to connect them to trauma.”

“I remember I was in a coffee shop and I just read [her story], and I was just sobbing in the corner by myself … I couldn’t believe that somebody had an almost identical story, at least from the way it was reported,” Fung says. “I didn’t know all the details.”

Fung was then inspired to reach out to Calvo. “A couple of months later, we had our first phone conversation,” he says.

He soon began traveling back and forth between Colorado and California to speak with Calvo, Alana’s sisters and her friends, ultimately deciding to create the podcast.

“In the two years of making this, I had this incredible privilege of being able to read about Alana’s inner life through the journals that her family provided me,” he says.

As Fung learned about Alana’s life outside of what was reported, the host began to understand who she was and the inner turmoil she went through.

“She had many friends [and] was kind of this all-star child and young person,” the host says. “She was an ultimate frisbee champ. She was a top student, getting all the best grades. She was this extremely active kid in her church, but it was really when she was a teenager, an early teenager, that she became more serious about her faith and met a priest who offered to be her spiritual director.”

Alana “sought out conversion therapy” for the next seven years under the guidance of the priest and other spiritual leaders, hoping to “fix herself” to become a nun, according to Fung.

In addition, Alana pursued two years of individual counseling from the ages of 18 to 20 with a therapist she sought through her spiritual mentors and provided by the Archdiocese of Denver, Fung tells PEOPLE in a statement.

Alana attended meetings with Courage International, a Catholic ministry “whose founder explicitly encouraged conversion therapy and whose writings are based on conversion therapy theorists,” he adds. Throughout her treatment, she was “consistently” directed to conversion therapy resources, blog posts and spiritual programs by spiritual mentors like priests and nuns, he claims.

Alana was even referred to a conversion therapist who was formerly on the board of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, the largest clinical network of conversion therapy practitioners, Fung says. In 2014, the organization rebranded as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity, which did not return PEOPLE’s request for comment.

The American Psychiatrist Association said it has been “opposed” to “any psychiatric treatment, such as ‘reparative’ or conversion therapy, which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or that a patient should change his or her homosexual orientation,” since 1998.<

Colorado is one of the 22 states, in addition to the District of Columbia, to ban conversion therapy for minors, per the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank.

However, Colorado’s 2019 law, which was passed months before Alana died, may not have fully protected her — not only because she was over the age of 18, but also because the law doesn’t touch pastoral counseling and only prohibits state-licensed medical or mental health care providers from the controversial practice, the Post noted.

Alan Chen, 3
Alan Chen, 3.

Fung says “a lot of people are unaware” that conversion therapy is happening and that what’s depicted in Hollywood is often far from the reality of what people experience.

“I think the podcast shows the ways in which conversion therapy doesn’t have to look like a very Hollywood, physically violent form or very dramatized way,” he adds. “It can look like talk therapy. It can look like it happened in a clinical setting.”

“A lot of us go down the rabbit hole of believing these ideas and really struggling with what I call a triple shame,” Fung continues. “First of all, the shame of being gay or feeling different in this way, the shame of feeling like you’ve had something horrible happen to you that makes you damaged in this way. Then the shame of not being able to change.”

“I just felt so damaged and broken,” he shares of his experience with conversion therapy. “I think that’s the impact and the harm that it has on people.”

In order to stop conversion therapy, the host argues, it’s important to foster conversations within churches in a “compassionate and sensitive way rather than an antagonistic, accusatory way.”

Alana’s story has paved the way for a new mission: the Alana Faith Chen Foundation, launched by her family to provide “financial support to LGBTQ+ [people] who are at risk of suicide so that they can receive the mental health treatment and therapy they need on their path to healing,” per their website.

Joyce Calvo
Mother Joyce Calvo.

Though Calvo says a priest and people at church would come up to her to tell her Alana was a “saint,” she never wanted to put that pressure on her daughter.

Still, Alana “always wanted to help people,” she says, and the foundation is a “beautiful tribute to Alana and keeps Alana’s desires going.”

Meanwhile, Fung hopes Alana’s story and the podcast help others as much as they’ve helped him.

“It’s really given me the courage to tell my own story, which has been an incredibly healing process for me,” he adds. “I hope in hearing that, other people will feel similarly and will feel they’re not alone.”

Complete Article HERE!

The Catholic Church should end its policy of celibacy for priests

The Catholic Church is desperately short of priests. If they dropped their celibacy and male-only requirements, it would open up a stimulating new pool.

By Gerry O’Shea

I cannot think of one good reason for the Catholic church to continue its policy of compulsory celibacy for priests. I search my mind in vain for any cogent explanation for maintaining the present damaging discipline.

Up to the Second Lateran Council in 1139, most priests married, sharing that experience with the majority of the families in the pews. It seems that the main reason for the unfortunate policy alteration related to priests’ children claiming inheritance based on parentage. Understandably, this clashed with the church’s commitment to maintain ownership of any accumulated wealth.

The inheritance problem could and should have been dealt with by other means than the extreme prohibition against marriage by priests. Sigmund Freud asserts that after self-preservation, the next most demanding human drive involves procreation, and celibates must find ways to respond to that human sexual imperative as much as married men.

In the last 50 years, the Roman Catholic Church has been battered by a seemingly endless succession of child-abuse scandals. We are talking about priests and brothers demanding a full range of sexual favors from innocent children and using the power of their clerical status to intimidate their victims into silence about their “special relationship.”

If the dire behavior was reported to the church authorities, the bishops and other powerful men in chancery offices sought to protect their institution by moving the culprits around where, in a new setting, they often continued their sexual rampage. Parents trusted these men because of the roman collar they were wearing.

Abused children felt isolated and many suffered long-term negative consequences, including a plethora of suicides. It is hard to imagine the sense of abandonment felt by the church faithful as the depth of the betrayal sank in.

Today, clerical leaders have lost credibility and carry a red question mark on their soutanes.

Predictably, disillusioned Catholics left the church in droves as they realized the early defense metaphor about a few bad apples was fatuous when the reality showed the whole orchard rotting. Trust in the American church among parishioners fell from a credible 70 percent to a measly 20 percent, and weekly Mass attendance folded from 31 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2021.

Revelations are still flowing in as major diocesan and national organizations reveal that the rot was not confined to any geographical area. The stories from missionary countries, staffed mostly by Western priests and brothers, are only seeping out now.

Some of these men making their way into cultures with different sexual traditions and expectations found satisfaction with mature local women. Children from these clandestine relationships present new challenges, especially for the welfare of unclaimed children.

A French investigation last year concluded that at least 216,000 children had been abused there over the last 70 years. The numbers from other inquiries are just as damning. Early indications from an ongoing major Portuguese probe suggest that another bombshell revelation is on the way from that Catholic country.

The dismal numbers have fueled calls for change. Already strict instructions from Rome have ensured that any church official – priest, brother, or layman – credibly accused of misbehavior in the sexual area is immediately suspended and the local police are informed of the alleged transgression – very different from past practices.

Church leaders regularly trot out the spurious argument that by forgoing marriage priests emulate Jesus and can devote themselves more fully to their flock. In fact, Christ chose mostly married men among his apostles, and we read in Matthew’s gospel that he healed Peter’s mother-in-law who was suffering from a fever.

The disastrous handling of the abuse crisis by male celibates has raised the important question of how parents would have dealt with it if they had any clout. Would they have hushed up the allegations and shuffled the pervert priests around to other parishes, hoping, somehow, that they would behave differently in a new place?

Sex abusers seem to be unusually common among the clergy, perhaps because the job offers a plenitude of opportunity to meet with children and, until recently, to enjoy unqualified parental approval for this access. Some professionals estimate that between six to nine percent of priests have strong pedophile tendencies by comparison with one to three percent in the general population.

Irish psychologist Marie Keenan argues that abusive priests are products of a twisted formation system that left them fixated at an adolescent level of sexual development.

The first acknowledged Christian theologian, Tertullian, viewed sexuality as a “bubbling cesspit of desire.” For him, it was the sin that transcended all others and women were seen as man’s downfall, a view that was later seconded by Augustine of Hippo whose misogynistic thinking still influences Rome’s approach to females.

Reflecting on this whole area of caring for the young, women are far less likely to engage in sexually abusive behavior than men.

Many Eastern-rite churches, aligned to Rome, let their priests marry before ordination. Significantly, these churches have low levels of reported sex abuse.

The Catholic Church is desperately short of priests. If they dropped their celibacy and male-only requirements, it would open up a stimulating new pool. Many aspirants are unwilling to give up sex and parenting, and that will continue as a deterrent until the Vatican changes the rules.

Priestly celibacy continues as a topic of contentious debate among the 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. Outside of Africa, a clear majority of the church members want change.

This carries some weight but is not determinative. The prelates, the men with the power, must be convinced of the need for new ecclesial structures, and most will use any phony argument to maintain the status quo and their own continuing authority.

Leave aside for a moment the various power games that many in the hierarchy will continue to play to justify holding on to the status quo, and concentrate instead on the awful damage that mandatory celibacy does to the men who are forced to follow this outdated and dehumanizing rule.

Obligatory virginity for priests may have made sense in the culture of the 12th century, but it certainly does not today.

In a recent speech Desmond Cahill, an Australian professor and expert on world religions, says many priests “are terrorized with their own sexual desire.”

Father Daniel O’Leary from the village of Rathmore in Co. Kerry served as a parish priest and theology professor in England until his death a few years ago. He authored a dozen books, and in his last essay before he faced what he called “the final inspection” he wrote movingly of celibacy as “a kind of sin, an assault against nature and God’s will. This mandatory celibacy does violence to a priest’s humanity and leaves wounds on his ministry.”

Is there any chance that Rome will heed O’Leary’s profound words and move from its antiquated ways?

Complete Article HERE!

Demonisation of LGBT people in state-funded Catholic schools is unlawful hypocrisy

Southwark Diocese recently cancelled a school visit from an author because he is gay

It is hard to know anymore how one should react to yet more pontification from the Catholic church regarding homosexuality.

Contemptuous silence? Outrage? A snort of derisory laughter because, after all, there is something almost comical about a bunch of lace-by-day-and-leather-by-night men, clutching their Grecian 2000 and swishing their surplices indignantly, while denouncing gay people from deep inside their clerical closets. More of which later.

This time, it’s Southwark Diocese, where John Fisher boys school is located. The headteacher and board of governors arranged a visit from author Simon James Green.

Green is gay and, as if that’s not enough to make him burn, has a book for young people with – Les Dawson whisper – an actual gay character in it and some sensitive handling of LGBT issues. The Diocese cancelled the visit, sacked some governors, promised retribution against the disobedient in the coming weeks, then claimed to be taking “a stand against tyranny”, which is a bit like Putin claiming to be on a peacekeeping mission.

The tyranny of what? The existence of gay people? The existence of equality legislation?

But the real dark humour behind all this is Southwark Diocese’s own past. Their seminarians attend St John’s, a troubled joint if ever there was one, according to students who have contacted me over the years.

The problem is hypocrisy, not homosexuality

In the 1990s, St John’s had a moral theologian who became quite renowned. He wrote philosophy books, had a liking for scarves by the luxury Italian designer Ferragamo, and was a fan of the singer Cher. (There’s a clue right there, dear reader.)

In 1998, he was a keynote speaker for the Catholic church at an event on human sexuality but, after that, you don’t find too many references to him. Maybe because he subsequently left and lived as a woman. And we wouldn’t want to talk about that, would we?

Good luck to her. The problem here is not homosexuality or transgender choices. It’s hypocrisy.

Photo of wooden pews
Richard Sipe estimated that 50% of priests were sexually active, and 30% or more were gay

The late Richard Sipe, an American ex-priest who spent years researching priestly celibacy globally, estimated that 50% of priests were sexually active at any one time, 6% were paedophiles, and up to half were gay. “A conservative estimate of gay Catholic clergy is 30%,” he wrote in an article in 2012, “[But] many Vatican insiders speculate that the accurate figure is closer to 50%.”

God loves you, brothers and sisters. You are made in His likeness. Unless you are gay, in which case he thinks you are intrinsically disordered. Hard to know why so many clergy parrot that line, given how many of them are homosexual.

What does banning a gay author achieve?

As a journalist, priests have told me about rent boys, sex in parks, gay saunas in Paris and “insider” gay parties attended by even senior clerics with trusted friends. Love and commitment were off limits, but stranger-danger thrills could be followed by confession and some pompous public pronouncements to cover the tracks.

Having attended a convent school, it’s the teenage boys at John Fisher School that I feel sorry for; those who struggle with shame and guilt and depression because they are told – even from those hiding in clergy closets – that they are sick and shameful.

What did they think Green would do in his book-related visit? Issue a gay sex manual?

As for Simon James Green, he didn’t even rate a mention in the church’s published comments. He was nothing, cancelled out of existence, ostracised like some biblical leper.

What did they think Green would do in his book-related visit? Issue a gay sex manual? And what would they achieve by banning him? The eradication of homosexuality? “Expecto patronum!” As Harry Potter would say. That should do it.

Breaching equality legislation

You might expect a little more Christ-like kindness. You would certainly expect more humility from a church riddled with sex scandals. Cardinal Keith O’Brien. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Countless paedophile scandals in every country where Catholicism exists.

But, no sooner are they knocked off their public soapboxes than they jump right back on again as if nothing has happened, trying to seize the old moral high ground while the trickles fall from their bloodied noses.

Photo of cardinal in church
Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned after multiple allegations of inappropriate and predatory sexual conduct

The church has nurtured a sense of being “other”, both legally and morally. The Vatican is legally an independent state, with its own leader. It has its own – corrupt – banking system, implicated in fraud yet again recently in the Swiss banking scandal. Even its own diplomatic corps.

But John Fisher is a voluntary-aided faith school: the state pays its running costs. If the church wants to ignore equality legislation, perhaps the appropriate reaction is to make clear that the state will no longer pay to allow a scandal-ridden organisation to breach its equality laws on the grounds of “faith”.

Complete Article HERE!

‘Sex abuse victims still facing pushback and resistance from church’, warns priest

Fr Tom Doyle was one of the first people to highlight the sexual abuse of children by priests in the 1980s

Fr Tom Doyle said the church was run by a ‘tiny aristocracy’

By Sarah Mac Donald

A priest who has campaigned on behalf of clerical sexual abuse victims for more than three decades has criticised the Catholic Church’s “toxic and erroneous teaching” on human sexuality.

Canon lawyer Fr Tom Doyle linked the crisis over the church’s mishandling of allegations of abuse to “a misconception of the clergy and bishops as the essence of the church” who are “essential for salvation”.

He warned there is “still plenty of pushback and resistance in the church” toward abuse victims, adding: “The good of the Church really means the good of the ecclesiastical aristocracy.”

Speaking at a webinar ‘Stolen Lives: Abuse & Corruption in the Catholic Church’, which was hosted by the lay reform group, Root & Branch Reform, he said: “It is not a few bad apples in the barrel that is the problem, it is the barrel.”

In his view, “the violation of the most innocent in the church is a scourge that neutralises everything that is Christian about Catholicism”.

Fr Doyle, who served as a pilot in the US air force and was one of the first people to highlight the sexual abuse of children by priests in the 1980s, hit out at the “unrealistic idea that priests and bishops are exalted sacred beings” which he said still exists in the church and paralyses a lot of people from speaking out.

The priest said this belief, which had created “a clerical aristocracy” in the church, had to be changed.

“We all know what clericalism is. It is a disease. It is a virus the Catholic Church has, which means the clergy and the clerical way of life and its values come before anything. It is total nonsense,” he said.

Appealing to lay people to “stop tolerating a clericalised church”, he said they had to challenge the hierarchy when they saw evidence of clericalism which “fuelled the constant, systemic, nightmare of child and adult sexual violation by clerics and non-ordained religious”.

The abuse crisis also stemmed from an emphasis on the protection of the prestige, power, and the economic resources of the hierarchical system of the church, he said.

Fr Doyle said at the top of the hierarchy was “a tiny aristocracy running the whole show while the rest of us are down at the bottom”.

“If you look at the positions of power, the men who actually call the shots, about 3,000 men run the Catholic Church,” he said.

“They are all bishops. None of them have been married, presumably.

“Certainly, none of them have been parents presumably, because if they had been parents, they would have understood clearly the horror of what was happening to children.”

On the issue of mandatory celibacy, he told the webinar: “It seems to me that in some ways you have got to be more Christ-like to be a husband or a wife or a parent than you do to be a priest because you need to learn what it means to be unselfish.

“You have to constantly get up in the middle of the night to take care of sick kids, you put up with your kids when they make mistakes, you bail them out of jail, you do all of these things.”

He warned the majority of abuse victims are still suffering in “cocoons of guilt, shame, fear and silence” because studies showed only 37pc of those who were violated ever came forward.

Complete Article HERE!