VIDEO: Dr. Janet Smith at the Coalition For Canceled Priests conference

6 Comments

1. Sid Cundiff in NC says:

   21 July 2023 at 6:11 PM

   Thanks from a canceled seminarian.
2. JonPatrick says:

   22 July 2023 at 7:42 AM

   I have always admired Dr. Janet Smith, ever since the early days of my returning to the Church, when a paper by her made me understand why contraception was against Church teaching and started me on the road from cafeteria Catholicism toward orthodoxy. In a way the talk is depressing when you realize the extent of the problem and how little we can actually do about it. Sometimes all we can do is pray and fast and put it in God’s hands, hope for another St. Peter Damian to appear.
3. Midwest St. Michael says:

   22 July 2023 at 9:05 AM

   What an excellent talk. I passed it on to some friends.

   Thank you, Fr. Z! ?
4. BeatifyStickler says:

   22 July 2023 at 6:19 PM

   I met her a few times. She studied with some of the Toronto Oratorians. She has much good to say.

   Fr. Z would fit in well at the Oratory. Would make a fine teacher at the seminary there.
5. Liz says:

   24 July 2023 at 8:17 AM

   She seems like a fun person. I was laughing so hard at parts of this talk. I would love to sit and have coffee or tea with her.

   She makes excellent points and really got me thinking.

   God have mercy on us and the church!
6. TonyO says:

   25 July 2023 at 7:06 PM

   She confirms for me a long-standing surmise I have made: that many of the bishops in the U.S. are, themselves, the wolves out to get us, and not befuddled and naive clerics who are just ignorant of how bad some priests (and some seminaries) are. They partake of the evils and intend the evils, they are heretics and (for practical purposes) apostates, who know they don’t believe what the Church teaches, and have no intention to be good bishops. Moreover – and this is very important – nearly all of the REST of the bishops, while not the wolves themselves, are fully cognizant of the evils of the wolves, but they don’t speak out because they are “compromised” by something in their past, which the pink mafia uses to extort silence (and worse) from them. They are spineless cowards, AND they know they are not doing what they ought. They might “mean well” in a fruitlessly simplistic way, but (a) they DON’T mean well where that would require doing anything difficult with the pink mafia, and (b) they are (in large part) fully damaged goods theologically and spiritually, and permit vastly many disorders and defects that they could fix if they actually meant well, in every facet of Church governance from the Mass to the sacraments to the seminaries to the priesthood to the charities to the money mismanagement…, without end.

   I had long suspected all this, and Janet confirms it. Now for the question: she indicates that from her perspective there are a tiny handful who are in neither group, who are actually good bishops, doing everything they can to improve the Church. I question this: I think the evidence indicates that there are NONE (in the U.S.) I could name 3 or 4 that, a few years ago, I thought well deserved to be listed in this 3rd group, the good guys doing everything they can. Why the change? Because even the ones that we all thought were the good guys are STILL keeping silence about stuff that they should be shouting from the rooftops. It is functionally impossible to believe that these guys did not have confident knowledge and sufficient circumstantial evidence of the evils of McCarrick AND his cronies: when McCarrick’s star fell from the heavens, they should have ratted out on all the crony bishops, priests, seminary rectors, etc that were McCarrick’s enablers and beneficiaries, but they did not. It was time to clean house, but they gave us Silence: only McCarrick took the hit, nobody else. When McElroy was elevated to the red hat, they SHOULD have screamed to the heavens that this was wrong (and why); instead, one of the “good guys” gave him a big public dinner to celebrate. The list goes on. If anyone can explain how it is that the tiny handful of “the good guys” can remain silent in the face of they evils of which they must have clear evidence, I beg you to explain it. For my part, I cannot.

   Yes, there are 3 or 4 bishops who, more often than not do some pretty good stuff. But “more often than not” and “pretty good” is a terrible standard to measure a bishop. Keeping your head down and “managing your own diocese”, when the Church as a whole is on fire and the custodial staff is setting more fires, is a losing strategy. Your own diocese will go down in flames just 3 years after you retire, because the pope will pick a new bishop from the ranks of the terrible bishops that came from the terrible seminaries that YOU KNEW were terrible seminaries, and yet you said nothing. “The good guys” are following a losing strategy that is both imprudent AND fails to satisfy their obligations to speak out.

   I don’t know what will fix it. But silence won’t.

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