Rome set to host not one, but two, Synods of Bishops

— Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church gathers in Eternal City, one month before Pope Francis’ Synod on Synodality.

In a little over a month, hundreds of Catholics from around the world will descend on Rome for a long-planned and much-hyped gathering loosely referred to as the Synod on Synodality. Bishops, priests, lay Catholics and non-Catholic guests will meet with Pope Francis for much of the month of October to discuss the future of the Church.

But a smaller gathering in the Eternal City, also bearing the name Synod, will take place starting this Sunday, September 3. It will culminate a week later with a planned Hierarchical Divine Liturgy in St. Peter’s Basilica, possibly in the presence of Pope Francis.

This gathering is an annual meeting of the Synod of Bishops of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the largest of the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with Rome. His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head and father of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, announced in May that the Synod this year will meet in Rome, with the central theme being “Pastoral Support for Victims of War.”

While it’s tempting to invoke Charles Dickens and quip that Rome will see a “Tale of Two Synods,” there are significant differences between Eastern and Western understandings of synodality. Pope St. Paul VI established the Synod of Bishops in 1965, and it has met every few years to deliberate on specific topics. Its recommendations at the end of that process often usually result in a papal document, setting direction for the Church to follow.

In 2020, Pope Francis called upon the Synod of Bishops to take up the topic “For a synodal Church: communion, participation and mission.” As it looks to the first of two international assemblies – this October and next – it has conducted a broad consultation with the laity. In 2021, the Pope appointed French Xavierian Sr. Nathalie Becquart an under-secretary of the Synod of Bishops, making her the first woman to have the right to vote in the Synod of Bishops. Several lay people also have been invited to participate, with voting rights extended to them.

Francis has often said that the word “synodality” comes from the Greek, meaning “walking together.” The Synod of Bishops website says that the “Synod on Synodality” wants to provide “an opportunity for the entire People of God to discern together how to move forward on the path towards being a more synodal Church in the long-term.”

Self-governing Churches

But the Latin Catholic Church is still governed by the Pope alone. Eastern Catholic Churches, on the other hand, are governed by their synods of bishops.

“The Eastern Churches have a tradition of collegial leadership called the Synod, which is a gathering of all the bishops of the Church,” explains the Ukrainian Church on its website. “The Synod, headed by the Patriarch (or Major Archbishop), is the highest level of Church leadership. Currently, 43 bishops participate in the Synod of Bishops of the UGCC, not including retired bishops. The meeting of the Synod of Bishops of the UGCC takes place annually.”

Fr. Mark Morozowich, a Ukrainian Catholic priest who served until recently as the Dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at The Catholic University of America, is now the Bishop Basil H. Losten Chair of Ukrainian Catholic Studies there. He said in an interview that when the Synod of Bishops meets, they reflect on theological and canonical issues, as well as the future of the Church, “what direction, sort of setting the big vision for the Church.”

They also elect bishops for the Church.

Wartime synod

The fact that they are meeting in Rome this year has to do both with the Synod’s practice as an international body and the current reality in Ukraine.

“The bishops have been seeking to go to different places,” Fr. Morozowich said. “They’ve met before in Rome; they’ve met in Washington, DC; they’ve met even in Brazil. Part of the expression of the Ukrainian Catholic Church is to see itself as a Church that’s taking care of its people in the world no matter where they may have gone.”

Due to emigration over the years, the Church has become established throughout Europe, North and South America, and Oceania. Fr. Morozowich said that because Ukrainian bishops want to “understand more clearly the situation of the churches in these areas,” they sometimes hold their synodal gatherings outside the “canonical territory” of Ukraine.

Disruptions began in 2020, however, when the Synod had to meet online, due to the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. And last year, because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Synod met just over the border, in Poland.

And, of course, the war is much on the minds of His Beatitude Sviatoslav and all the bishops of the Ukrainian Church.

“This is an opportunity for the bishops to express to the pope their concern and the need certainly for his unfailing support,” Fr. Morozowich said. “His words sometimes have been difficult for people in Ukraine to understand where he’s coming from.”

Francis’ remarks in late August, in which he seemed to be speaking positively about Russian imperialism, “have blown up all over Ukraine,” Fr. Morozowich said. “It’s hard for people who are being bombed routinely” to hear.

The Synod of Bishops plans to discuss that issue with Pope Francis. In a statement August 29 asking the faithful for prayers for the Synod of Bishops meeting, His Beatitude Sviatoslav commented, “For some reason, it turned out during the war that the Pope does not understand Ukraine, and Ukraine does not understand the Pope. We can say the same thing about Russia. The Pope does not understand Russia, neither its history nor its current crimes. And we are the ones who have to be the voice of truth for the Ukrainian people, even before the Holy Father in Rome. And the truth is that many people, even religious leaders, sometimes feel more comfortable in Russian propaganda’s sugar-coated lies than facing the cruel but Ukrainian truth.”

It is the task of the Synod of Bishops, he added, “not only to fight for our freedom on the battlefield against the Russian aggressor but also to defend the truth on the information front.”

Eastern model?

His Beatitude Sviatoslav also will be participating in the October assembly of the Synod on Synodality. While he will come to it with a very different idea of what synodality means, the Ukrainian Catholic Church, as well as other Eastern Churches, are not unfamiliar with the kind of broad consultation process the Latin Church has recently been undertaking.

“There is a process that the Ukrainian Catholic Church has called a ‘sobor,’ which is this gathering of different lay people of different professions, different priests, and in different places to talk about issues facing the Church and to look at these bigger issues,” said Fr. Morozowich. “So I think certainly as we strive together as a community of believers that the experience of the Eastern Churches and specifically the Eastern Catholic Churches can help to see both the strengths and the weaknesses, because these are all in a sense human endeavors.”

Said Fr. Morozowich, “One of things that Francis has been very clear about is that he wants the Church to be seen as a field hospital, as a place where people can come and feel the mercy of God and be healed, and I believe part of this synodal process is to allow those words to come forward so the pastors can hear more clearly the concerns of the faithful and can respond and find new ways of being alive, new ways of allowing this field hospital to function.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

September 4, 2023September 4, 2023

No women priests in his lifetime, says retired Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin

— Clerical sexual abuse scandals have badly damaged the Catholic Church, in particular ‘the faith of young people, says retired archbishop

Retired Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said he did not see ‘in any way that women priests will be something that we will see in my lifetime’.

By Patsy McGarry

Retired Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said there is “a huge amount of resistance among the Catholic education establishment” to pluralism in schools’ patronage. He does not believe there will be women priests in the Catholic Church in his lifetime and described as “bad theology” the banning of condoms in the fight against Aids. The clerical child sexual abuse scandals had “badly damaged the church,” he said and, in particular, “the faith of young people”.

Now living in Dublin’s Stoneybatter, Archbishop Martin (78) has also admitted finding retirement in 2020 “very difficult at the beginning because I retired right in the middle of Covid.” He remembered “one day in the Phoenix Park, I was out in an open-necked shirt and there was a man sitting on a bench. He looked up and said: ‘Are you enjoying your retirement?’ And I said: ‘Yeah.’ And he said: ‘Did they take the collar off you? Did you have to give it back?’ They recognise the face. Somebody stopped me and said: ‘I know your face. Were you ever in Fair City?’ Dubliners are great for that.”

When he was born, the family “lived in a tenement, there was nothing else available, then we went out to Ballyfermot”. Once when he was archbishop a delegation of Christian Brothers complained about criticisms he made of Artane industrial school. They “were sent to me to tell me that I didn’t know what I was talking about and one of them came up with this punchline. He said: ‘You know, many of these children came from appalling backgrounds, from places like Ballyfermot.’ He hadn’t done his homework.”

In discussing child abuse he became emotional. On arrival in Dublin as Coadjutor Archbishop in 2003, he “wasn’t prepared for it. Do you know who understood the harm paedophilia did? Ordinary, working-class Dublin women. They saw the mess that their child got into, they saw in some cases how their child took their own life, and they went to bishops and they weren’t listened to.”

On education, he said: “We do need to have pluralism of patronage in schools to respect individuals, to respect teachers also. We should also be fighting to ensure that we can maintain schools which are strongly Catholic.”

He added: “There’s a huge amount of resistance among the Catholic education establishment to this. I think I was probably out of tune with the other bishops on this and still would be, mainly because I’ve lived in countries where they have a different system.”

He did not see “in any way that women priests will be something that we will see in my lifetime. I’d be very worried about consultations which lead to frustrated expectations which don’t take place. People’s faith is damaged by a church which doesn’t respect women’s dignity.”

Asked whether Pope John Paul II’s ban on condoms during the Aids crisis was bad judgment, he said: “I think that it was bad theology. It’s this idea of an extraordinary narrow dogmatic understanding of bringing principles and not looking at the broad circumstances in which the situation is taking place and the struggles that people have to face. It was one of the problems with the church in Ireland, we learned the rules before we learned who Jesus Christ was.”

As to what, on arrival at the pearly gates, he would say to God, he said: “The only phrase I have is, when you’ve got that weighing scales there, take the 80,000 files I gave and that might bring me the right way.” It was a reference to the number of documents he handed the Murphy commission when it was investigating how the archdiocese had dealt with allegations of clerical child sexual abuse.

Archbishop Martin was speaking to broadcaster Joe Duffy in the 100th episode of The Meaning of Life programme, which will be broadcast on RTÉ One television at 10.30pm on Sunday night.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

September 3, 2023September 2, 2023

Pope’s Remarks on ‘Reactionary’ U.S. Catholics Rankle, and Resonate

— Where Francis sees rigid ideology replacing faith in the conservative American Catholic hierarchy, his critics see a struggle to preserve traditions and teachings they saw as settled.

Pope Francis at the weekly general at the Vatican on Wednesday.

By Ruth Graham

When Pope Francis spoke of “a very strong, organized, reactionary attitude” that opposes him within the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and, in comments that became public this week, warned against letting “ideologies replace faith,” some American Catholics recognized their church immediately.

“He is 100 percent right,” said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and commentator who is considered an ally of Francis. The opposition to Francis within the American church now, he said, “far outstrips the fierceness of the opposition to Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict,” the two previous popes.

When Father Martin visits Rome these days, he said, the first question many people there ask him is, “What is going on in the U.S.?”

It’s essentially the same question that prompted the pope’s sharply critical remarks, which were made impromptu last month and published this week by the Vatican-approved Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica.

In a private meeting with Portuguese Catholics in Lisbon, a priest told Francis that on a recent sabbatical to the United States, he had observed that many Catholics, and even bishops, were openly hostile to the pope’s leadership.

“You have seen that in the United States, the situation is not easy: There is a very strong reactionary attitude,” the pope replied. “It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally.”

A man in a priest’s collar stands at a lectern which bears the sign “Catholics For Catholics.” Next to him, on an easel, is a framed portrait of Jesus Christ. — Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, spoke at a rally in Los Angeles to protest inclusion of a satirical drag group, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, in a Pride Night event at Dodger Stadium in June.

There are conservative Catholics all over the world who emphasize the church’s teaching on sexual morality and obedience, and who prefer traditional forms of worship. But they are especially prominent and influential in the United States, where Francis faces a church hierarchy that is uniquely hostile to his papacy, led by several outspoken bishops and fueled by a well-funded ecosystem of right-wing Catholic websites, radio shows, podcasts and conferences that have shaped the landscape of American Catholicism and politics more broadly.

“The pope has only spent six days in the U.S. in the last 10 years, so it’s difficult to understand how he really understands Catholics in the U.S.,” said C. Preston Noell III, public liaison for the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, a right-wing Catholic organization that describes itself as “on the front lines of the Culture War.”

“All we’re trying to do is defend the traditional teachings of the church,” Mr. Noell added, singling out opposition to same-sex marriage and artificial contraception.

Francis’ latest, unusually sharp comments about the American church landed at a delicate moment, about a month before a major gathering in Rome that has drawn escalating anxiety and outrage among some American clergy members and commentators. The gathering, an assembly of the Synod of Bishops, will be the first at which women and lay people will be allowed to vote, and it is expected to prompt wide-ranging debate on the church’s teachings and its future.

The Vatican recently announced that on the opening day of the synod, Francis will release a second part of his encyclical Laudato Si, a forceful call to reframe care for the environment as a moral and spiritual imperative. Some conservatives see the encyclical as an attack on capitalism.

After three decades of leadership by popes who generally affirmed American conservative priorities, “Francis has been a complete shock to the system,” said John McGreevy, a historian at the University of Notre Dame. “It just has been tough for a big chunk of the American church, who thought these questions were settled and now seem unsettled.”

Cardinal Raymond Burke, in black vestments and a red skull cap, applauds during a news conference in Rome in 2018. — Cardinal Raymond Burke is a leading voice among conservative American Catholics and an opponent of Francis’ agenda.

The first pope from the global south, Francis has emphasized making the church he leads a more expansive and inclusive one, in contrast to the smaller and more ideologically homogeneous church that some conservatives would prefer. Devotees of the Tridentine Mass, a traditional form of worship said in Latin, fiercely resent that Francis has narrowed their latitude to celebrate the rite, which was largely phased out in the 1960s.

Francis has shown a penchant for seemingly off-the-cuff remarks that poke at conservative priorities. His reply to a question in 2013 about gay priests — “Who am I to judge?” — is perhaps the most memorable single moment so far in his papacy, widely quoted by his supporters and critics alike.

He has worked to cement his legacy by replenishing the College of Cardinals, who will choose the next pope, with men of voting age who share his priorities. By now, he has appointed a strong majority of the group.

Among conservatives in the United States, the pope’s latest comments felt personal. A headline on the conservative website First Things asked, “Why Does the Pope Dislike Me?”

Part of what makes the American opposition to Francis’s agenda unique is that a drumbeat of direct defiance is coming not just from commentators, but also from high-ranking clergy members.

A coterie of outspoken clerics have recently fanned speculation that the synod might undermine core Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist, salvation and sexual ethics. In a public letter in August, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, warned that many “basic truths” of Catholic teaching would be challenged at the synod, and that the church could split irrevocably in its wake.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American former archbishop and leading voice among conservative Catholics, wrote in the foreword of a book published last month that the synod’s collaborative process was inflicting “evident and grave harm” on the church.

An English translation of the book, “The Synodal Process Is a Pandora’s Box,” was published by Mr. Noell’s organization, which recently mailed copies to all the cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons and religious brothers in the United States — about 41,000 in all.

Like other conservative Christians, some Catholics in the United States see themselves as embattled, surrounded by a culture that is hostile to Catholic doctrine and practices.

Catholics make up about 20 percent of adults in the United States, but Mass attendance has been declining for decades, and dropped sharply during the pandemic.

As a whole, Catholics in the United States are a politically diverse group, but those who still attend Mass more frequently also tend to be more conservative. And young men entering the priesthood in the United States are increasingly conservative, surveys have consistently found.

Father Martin said that in many places, Catholics who support the pope’s vision “don’t feel comfortable in their parishes, because the way that Francis’s vision of the church is ignored or downplayed discourages them,” and added, “The opposition to Francis is so loud that it dominates the conversation.”

Kevin Ahern, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, said that many of his students, both Catholic and not, arrive in his classroom totally unfamiliar with Catholic social justice teachings, a historically robust strain of Catholicism that has played a role in labor movements and debates over immigration and the death penalty.

Students who have been exposed to the Church only through its most prominent voices in the wider culture, he said, “are surprised to learn that the Catholic Church doesn’t map onto Republican talking points.”

Francis himself appeared undisturbed by the reaction to his latest comments by his critics in the United States. “Yes, they got mad,” he told reporters on Thursday as he flew to Mongolia for a formal visit. “But move on, move on.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

September 2, 2023September 1, 2023

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.”

“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.

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.

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↩!

September 1, 2023August 31, 2023

Most Church of England priests back gay marriage, survey finds

— Major shift in attitudes in England since 2014 survey, when only 39% approved of same-sex weddings

The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, faced sharp criticism last year for affirming a 1998 declaration that gay sex is a sin.

By Alexandra Topping

Most Church of England priests want the C of E to allow same-sex weddings and to drop its opposition to premarital and gay sex, according to a survey.

In a major shift in attitudes over the past decade, a survey of priests in England conducted by the Times found that more than half supported a change in law to allow clergy to conduct the marriage of gay couples, with 53.4% in favour compared with 36.5% against.

The last time Anglican priests in England were asked, in 2014, shortly after the legalisation of same-sex civil marriage, 51% said same-sex marriage was “wrong”, compared with 39% who approved.

Last year a row erupted at the first Lambeth conference (a meeting of Anglican bishops from around the world) in 14 years, with the archbishop of Canterbury faced sharp criticism for affirming a 1998 declaration that gay sex was a sin.

But the new poll found that 64.5% of priests in England backed an end to the teaching that “homosexual practice is incompatible with scripture”. It also found that 27.3% of priests supported an end to any celibacy requirement for gay people, while 37.2% said they were willing to accept sex between gay people in “committed” relationships such as civil partnerships or marriages, and around a third (29.7%) said the teaching should not change.

Andrew Foreshew-Cain, founder of the Campaign for Equal Marriage in the Church of England, said the survey showed there was “no excuse for further delay and equivocation” in welcoming gay people into the church.

“The clergy of the Church of England are kinder, more generous, and more welcoming towards LGBTI people than the current official position allows,” he said. “The C of E, and in particular our bishops, needs to stop wringing its hands over gay people and move forward towards blessings and, in time, to celebrating same-sex marriages in our parishes.”

The survey results were encouraging, said Robbie de Santos, director of communications at Stonewall. “We hope that church leaders reflect on these findings,” he said. “Too often, LGBTQ+ people of faith face discrimination and prejudice simply for being themselves.”

The survey also found that three-quarters of respondents thought Britain could no longer be described as a Christian country. Almost two-thirds (64.2%) said Britain could be called Christian “but only historically, not currently”.

In the 2021 census of England and Wales for the first time fewer than half of the population described themselves as Christian.

The Times poll found that two-thirds of priests in England thought attempts to stop the drop in church attendance would fail, with only 10.1% thinking it would be halted, and 10.5% believing that congregations would grow again. Average attendance for Church of England Sunday services in 2021 was 509,000, down from 1.2m in 1986.

The survey also found that 80% of respondents would back the appointment of a woman as the archbishop of Canterbury, while two-thirds wanted an end to the system that allowed parishes to reject female leaders.

The survey also asked priests how slave trader memorials and statues should be dealt with: 15% backed the removal of such memorials, 14.1% said they should be left alone, while two-thirds said information should be added alongside them to highlight their links to slavery.

The survey analysed 1,200 responses sent out to 5,000 randomly chosen serving priests.

Responding to the survey on behalf of the church, the bishop of Leeds, the Right Rev Nick Baines, said: “The church is the church, and, as such, not a club. It has a distinct vocation that does not include seeking popularity. Repentance means being open to changing our mind in order that society should encounter both love and justice. And this means sometimes going against the flow of popular culture, however uncomfortable that might be.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!