At the age of 20, Rosario Lonegro enrolled in a Catholic seminary in Sicily with the intention of becoming a priest and studying for ordination. However, during his time there, he fell in love with another guy, and his superiors required that if he wanted to pursue the priesthood, he undergo conversion therapy, which was meant to obliterate his sexual preferences.
Recalling his time in seminary in 2017, he told the news, “It was the darkest period of my life.”
Rosario, overcome with feelings of guilt and fear of betraying the Catholic Church, put himself in the position of being “trapped with no choice but to suppress my true self.”
“It was an overwhelming psychological strain to be someone I wasn’t. I was unable to alter.
He was forced to attend spiritual meetings outside the seminary for almost a year, often over multiple days, where he was exposed to a number of upsetting practices meant to deprive him of his sexual urges.
These included having to perform his own funeral, stripping in front of other participants, and being imprisoned in a pitch-black closet.
He was required to write down any perceived shortcomings, including “homosexuality,” “abomination,” “falsehood,” and even more explicit phrases, during these rites. He was then required to bury these written declarations beneath a gravestone that served as a symbol.
