The John-Henry Westen Show - Prof. Janet Smith speaks on the sex abuse crisis and Pope Francis

00:00:00.560 Welcome to this episode of the John Henry Weston Show. May God bless you. We are absolutely thrilled to bring to you today Dr. Janet Smith.

00:00:09.700 Many of you will remember her as the famous Dr. Janet Smith from Contraception, Why Not?

00:00:15.760 That incredible tape, which my own life made a difference, and for countless Catholics around the world,

00:00:21.780 gave them not only the hope and the reason why to be faithful to the Church's teaching,

00:00:26.260 but also enabled them to speak intelligibly to others on the subject.

00:00:31.700 Stay tuned for this interview with Janet Smith, where we will be discussing the sexual abuse crisis in the Church,

00:00:37.220 Pope Francis, and all the rest. Stay tuned.

00:00:45.540 Welcome, Dr. Smith, to the John Henry Weston Show.

00:00:50.620 Thank you. It's great to be here.

00:00:52.340 Well, let's start, as we always do, with the sign of the cross.

00:00:55.060 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

00:01:02.060 Dr. Janet Smith, if you may, I'll just call you Janet.

00:01:05.660 It has been, it's a great honor for me to speak to you, given your history in the Church.

00:01:11.480 And it's really an exciting one for me, because it was very inspirational for me, too.

00:01:15.620 You were called, as we've been called at LifeSite often,

00:01:19.000 to handle the hard issues in the Church, as it were, starting off there with contraception.

00:01:25.060 It seems so.

00:01:29.660 But I have an appetite for these things.

00:01:31.800 Sometimes people think I must be phenomenally courageous or something like that.

00:01:35.360 And honestly, it's just that I have a phenomenal taste for controversy.

00:01:39.620 And I really don't like to do things that aren't controversial.

00:01:43.640 So I don't know why God made me that way, but I'm glad he did.

00:01:47.600 Excellent.

00:01:49.060 You've been, for those of you who might not know,

00:01:51.540 Dr. Smith has been a professor at the seminary in Detroit.

00:01:56.280 How long has that been going on?

00:01:59.500 I think it's been 18, 19 years.

00:02:02.800 18 years.

00:02:03.500 I just retired July 1st.

00:02:05.820 And since your retirement or before that, when have you taken on this new interest,

00:02:12.080 this new role in really getting deep into the learning about studying the sexual abuse crisis in the Church?

00:02:18.920 Well, I actually have been aware of the sexual abuse situation for a very long time.

00:02:26.660 In the 70s and 80s, I really was an avid reader of The Wanderer and even of The National Capital Reporter,

00:02:32.860 who both reported the situation in great and disgusting detail.

00:02:37.840 I had to stop reading it because it was so salacious.

00:02:40.580 And then in the early 2000s, all the books that came out, Pottles and Michael Rose, a number of books.

00:02:49.620 And I, Jason Berry, I read these books.

00:02:53.420 And I thought, well, surely if I know this, the bishops do.

00:02:57.480 And surely if I'm concerned, the bishops are.

00:02:59.920 And I was so confident there were little committees of bishops all over the United States trying to figure out what to do about this situation.

00:03:08.240 And then the crisis in 2005, Dallas Charter, people were saying the bishops just don't get it.

00:03:15.960 They still don't get it. 0.80

00:03:17.160 And I said, oh, that's ridiculous. 0.95

00:03:18.920 These are mature and good men. 0.95

00:03:21.000 Surely they'll get it.

00:03:22.600 And then came out the McCarrie case.

00:03:25.240 And the veil fell from my eyes.

00:03:29.540 The scales fell from my eyes.

00:03:31.160 I just had a sense that this church is corrupt.

00:03:34.840 And over a series of months, I guess like a lot of people, I was just increasingly devastated, increasingly disappointed in our bishops.

00:03:47.860 And more and more realizing that they're the problem.

00:03:51.400 They're not the solution.

00:03:53.040 And I had taken a sabbatical for the fall to work on some projects.

00:03:57.240 But then I found myself very rapidly becoming very involved in just talking to people, talking to victims, talking to whistleblowers, talking to people who were trying to figure out what to do.

00:04:09.820 And I was getting nothing done on my scholarly projects.

00:04:12.500 And I really felt that I talked to my spiritual director.

00:04:16.100 And we both agreed that this is what God had called me to do.

00:04:19.800 So I turned that into a leave of absence.

00:04:21.840 And so I've spent the last year really quite thoroughly involved with this, hours and hours every day, reading everything I can, talking to people.

00:04:31.880 And I was really surprised that I was tired of teaching and not doing such a good job because my interests were now elsewhere.

00:04:41.620 So I asked the seminary.

00:04:42.920 I plan to retire next year.

00:04:45.000 But I asked them if I could bump it up a year.

00:04:47.540 And they were willing to let me do that.

00:04:49.060 So now I'm basically, I still do a lot of my travel and speaking that I intend to continue about.

00:04:55.540 I have other projects I want to finish off, books I've got in the process.

00:05:00.000 But this really is my priority.

00:05:04.160 And what would you say, after having looked at this for so long right now, is your, what's your take on the situation right now?

00:05:14.380 The bishops are the problem.

00:05:15.860 And there's very little effective things that the lady can do directly. 1.00

00:05:25.480 The bishops are not doing anything or so little that it makes a difference, whatever it is.

00:05:32.900 Any sentence that begins with the bishops ought to do X, Y, and Z is almost an empty sentence.

00:05:38.680 I don't know what they will or can do, even can do.

00:05:43.200 If we were to get rid of all the bad bishops, and there are lots, we have no confidence that they wouldn't be replaced by men equally as bad.

00:05:52.480 And so that's not a solution.

00:05:54.240 So the solution on that, what we do, what I've learned is that the bishops are the problem.

00:06:02.720 We have to just pray and pray and pray and try to listen to the Holy Spirit and ask what the Holy Spirit wants of us.

00:06:10.460 I don't think there's one single scoop any group or anybody can do.

00:06:16.720 I think with the media, I think what you're doing is of enormous importance, which is really trying to educate the Catholic public about this.

00:06:24.980 Again, I was prepared in a sense to believe it because I knew I'd read the books, I'd read the articles.

00:06:31.560 I still didn't believe it was the extent it was.

00:06:34.200 I mean, I thought, I believe Richard Syke, who said 30% of the bishops are, you know, possibly sexually active as homosexuals.

00:06:44.220 Now I don't want the limit, the sky is the limit on that number right now. 0.86

00:06:51.060 I don't want to smear good bishops.

00:06:53.080 I don't want to smear men who are doing the best that they can and trying to do what they can.

00:06:57.700 I'm afraid I think there's precious few of them.

00:07:00.180 And I'm not even certain that even those who are trying to do the best that they can are doing very well.

00:07:07.460 Wow.

00:07:09.160 With that kind of an assessment and seeing this and being steeped in it regularly and all the horror that that brings,

00:07:18.980 you still find yourself a Catholic.

00:07:21.140 You still believe in the faith and you still love the church.

00:07:24.220 What is that?

00:07:25.260 Where does that come from?

00:07:30.180 I'm a lifelong Catholic.

00:07:31.860 I'm a cradle Catholic.

00:07:32.980 I had a, let's say, a reversion in my, left the church for a short period of time, had a reversion in my early 20s,

00:07:42.120 the most unlikely of times, the early 70s.

00:07:44.800 And luckily I had a phenomenal group of friends who had also discovered our faith.

00:07:50.520 And we became really learned in our faith.

00:07:54.820 We kind of had almost a self-designed novitiate where we read and read and read and talked and prayed.

00:07:59.920 And I'm going nowhere.

00:08:02.420 This is Jesus's church.

00:08:04.200 I don't think I can find anything like it that the church offers.

00:08:07.640 It offers the sacraments.

00:08:09.800 It's Jesus's church.

00:08:11.220 Jesus is not surprised that this happened.

00:08:13.200 He knows the perfidy of the human soul.

00:08:15.360 So, in a sense, it's a test for all of us.

00:08:19.080 Do we believe because we like our priest or like our bishop or the liturgies are at a convenient time or this is just something that's become familiar to us and we like spending an hour on Sunday morning, you know, going with a group of people to worship?

00:08:34.780 Or do we really, really believe that this is Jesus's church?

00:08:38.620 And there's nowhere else to go in my mind.

00:08:41.220 I love this church.

00:08:42.900 And I will go nowhere else.

00:08:44.600 I've never even been tempted to do that.

00:08:48.100 I feel, I understand other people who are.

00:08:50.440 I don't disdain them. 0.97

00:08:51.700 I don't think they're stupid. 1.00

00:08:53.320 But I think they really need to consider what they would lose. 0.99

00:08:57.620 It doesn't matter how bad the priest is.

00:09:00.540 It doesn't matter how bad a bishop is.

00:09:02.780 It doesn't even matter how bad the pope is.

00:09:05.700 The sacraments are valid.

00:09:07.880 That's what I need.

00:09:09.160 I need that to live and I need that to deal with this crisis.

00:09:12.120 It's going elsewhere where it will just sever me from the thing that gives meaning to my life, that makes it possible for me to do any of the good things that I do in this world.

00:09:22.540 Mm-hmm.

00:09:23.760 Amazing.

00:09:24.620 And this is very interesting because I think there's so many people who have now even attacked you.

00:09:30.940 You who have spent your life defending even the hardest teachings of the church.

00:09:35.180 And funny enough, there's a lot of people who wouldn't defend that, who were actually fighting the church at the time.

00:09:41.100 But they've come out now to attack you because you've dared to open your mouth on some of the crisis that's going on.

00:09:51.460 One of the questions that I had for you with regard to this kind of hardship is, what's your take now with regard to Pope Francis?

00:10:03.120 Pope Francis, you've studied, you know, the situation revolving around him as well.

00:10:08.240 And what's your take there?

00:10:11.820 Well, at a certain point, to a certain extent, I'm not totally prepared to go there yet.

00:10:18.700 It's a level of disappointment and maybe even betrayal.

00:10:26.500 And I'm not certain I don't know how to process yet.

00:10:29.440 I've been disappointed from the start.

00:10:31.080 I was very disappointed in his initial statements that it was unfortunate there were so many people who are obsessed with pro-life issues, obsessed with abortion and contraception.

00:10:41.800 I was terribly offended by that at the beginning.

00:10:45.080 I loved his homilies.

00:10:47.040 I loved some of the images that he used.

00:10:50.040 I loved his calling people really to a very radical commitment.

00:10:55.040 I mean, to some extent, I think I have, at points in my life, become comfortable, both materially in every way and don't think I need to challenge myself a lot more.

00:11:05.020 And I felt that Pope Francis had challenged me.

00:11:08.980 I loved some of his prose in some of his documents.

00:11:12.500 I thought it was just extraordinarily eloquent and beautiful.

00:11:17.820 But he has said so many things that are really, really troublesome and very ambiguous, and he won't respond to challenges for clarity.

00:11:31.260 He says one thing in the morning and another thing in the afternoon.

00:11:35.320 And more and more is coming out.

00:11:37.040 I mean, I certainly don't think he's done the job that anybody expected him to do to help clean up the Korea. 1.00

00:11:42.940 In fact, I think he's added to the problem.

00:11:46.500 The things that I read about his possible neglect of dealing with sexual abuse cases in Argentina before he came, I don't, you know, it doesn't look good.

00:11:59.080 And as I said, that's a letter I'm not ready to, I'm not able yet to fully accept.

00:12:08.460 But, and so I'm just letting other people fight that battle.

00:12:13.060 Again, thank you for what we do.

00:12:15.600 And thank you to many of my scholarly colleagues who have, these are people, many of my colleagues at the seminary, many of my colleagues across the United States and the world,

00:12:26.740 who have, who have spent their whole life taking big bullets for the, for the faith, being ridiculed, as being blindly obedient to the magisterium, as being unable to think for themselves,

00:12:42.480 and have really taken a beating professionally, personally, in defending the Pope and defending the church.

00:12:50.640 And they have bent over backwards, trying to see how what Pope Francis has said can be understood as being in continuity with the tradition.

00:13:04.860 And one by one, they seem to be saying, I can't do that anymore.

00:13:11.100 The evidence is overwhelming that there are serious, serious problems here.

00:13:15.420 His latest, the latest attack on the John Paul II Institute in Rome is totally unpredictable and just devastating.

00:13:27.500 It's one of those bulwarks of fidelity in the church today that has done, that has done a massive amount of good in educating people who are now placed all over the world,

00:13:41.280 but very able to advance, defend and advance the church's teaching on marriage and sexuality and other issues.

00:13:49.360 And to see that that is being really quite violently destroyed, again, is extremely distressing.

00:13:58.200 So I, my gratitude for those who are willing to take on that battle.

00:14:02.320 I'm taking on another battle, but I'm sort of behind them as a cheerleader saying, you go, you go, girl, you go, guy.

00:14:09.240 They're doing what they need to do.

00:14:11.280 Yeah, one of the things, as a professor at a Catholic college, at a seminary even, your appreciation for that situation in Rome,

00:14:21.060 which you were referring to about the John Paul II Institute, you know, it's really quite something.

00:14:26.120 All the professors suspended, and then two of the ones most closely related to John Paul's own thought,

00:14:31.700 to St. John Paul II's own thought, particularly Professor Molina, who has now come out with a public interview.

00:14:38.000 You know, Monsignor Molina being so intimately involved with John Paul II in terms of his thought and study

00:14:45.360 and giving that great teaching to successive generations of Catholic young people who have been formed in that teaching,

00:14:54.340 now summarily dismissed and fired.

00:14:57.020 And he just, in a recent interview he gave to Il Foglio, explained how basically, even the, you know, in previous ages,

00:15:06.300 if you will, under previous pontificates, when they were totally heretical kind of theologians or professors,

00:15:12.960 even they were given the right to contest their, you know, being taken up for things before being dismissed.

00:15:18.620 But these guys who are trying to interpret Francis, as you said, in line with previous magisterial thought,

00:15:26.000 are being just summarily dismissed.

00:15:28.140 No opportunity for appeal, no nothing.

00:15:31.940 It really is scandalous.

00:15:33.480 And I wish they, you know, a lot of us are writing letters.

00:15:37.260 A lot of us are writing letters to those who are now in charge and trying to express our concern.

00:15:43.420 And I hate to say I don't think they care.

00:15:47.680 I think they dismiss anybody who criticizes them or even raises criticisms as being pranks and just dismisses us.

00:15:56.940 But I'm, personally, I'm concerned that this makes the church a bit of a laughingstock in the face of the,

00:16:05.400 in the academic community as large.

00:16:08.420 Academics are not accustomed to being treated this way.

00:16:11.300 We're not just employees of a university.

00:16:15.540 We're a community of scholars who have invested an enormous amount in, personally, in career.

00:16:22.960 Many of those people there have families.

00:16:25.780 They, you know, they're not living at the top dollar of anything.

00:16:30.100 Made enormous sacrifices to defend the church and the truth.

00:16:33.660 And you would think that in an institution like that, they'd be consulting the faculty about what is it that you,

00:16:41.260 in teaching here for all these years, do you find any lack in the kind of education?

00:16:47.820 They would survey the students who have been educated there and who are in the field now and ask them,

00:16:53.360 were you not trained fully in the way that you should have been?

00:16:56.800 Are there things that you wish you had been taught that you weren't?

00:17:00.220 If you're going to reform an institution, you talk to the people inside the institution to find out what it is that might be lacking in that institution.

00:17:09.980 That clearly didn't happen.

00:17:11.600 They're just being treated as disposable parts.

00:17:15.440 You can just fire them all and hire new people.

00:17:19.020 And you say, that's not the way academic institutions work.

00:17:21.920 I don't know what the accrediting requirements are in Italy, but surely in the United States,

00:17:29.620 this would be a lethal blow to an institution that you could just, you know,

00:17:36.260 dismiss all these professors without any justification for these dismissals.

00:17:41.740 Men who performed, men and women who performed extremely well in the institution.

00:17:46.260 So it's, it's extremely, again, just discouraging.

00:17:51.560 I'm praying and hoping that there will be some donors who step forward and say, I mean,

00:17:59.500 maybe these are people who found reason not to support their local diocese anymore and say,

00:18:05.980 I know a really good use for my money.

00:18:07.860 A really good use for my money now would be set up an organization that would reinstitute,

00:18:12.200 call it the St. John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family and set up in Rome and

00:18:18.580 hire the same people and just keep going.

00:18:22.500 If that could happen, I would, I'd probably, I can't levitate, but I hope God would give me

00:18:28.160 that power.

00:18:29.440 I do, I would try to do somersaults anyway.

00:18:33.260 Wow.

00:18:34.160 To get back to the issue of your expertise, it's a very difficult area of study.

00:18:39.840 This, this whole, the, the sexual abuse crisis in the church, because there's so much lying.

00:18:46.100 There's, there's hiding, there's, you know, there's a obfuscation of what's really going

00:18:52.020 on.

00:18:52.480 We saw with the original John Jay report that, you know, it was 80% homosexual abuse.

00:18:57.780 And yet now it's, it seems if you, if you listen to some people in the church in very high

00:19:03.780 positions has nothing at all to do with homosexual abuse.

00:19:07.200 It has to do, you know, with priests taking on too much authority and power, clericalism,

00:19:14.100 as they call it.

00:19:15.820 What's your take on that?

00:19:17.100 And, and sort of related question, how do you discern in all of this?

00:19:21.880 How do you know what to hold on to as the truth?

00:19:25.120 And, and how do you make those determinations?

00:19:31.040 About the sex abuse crisis.

00:19:33.800 Yes.

00:19:34.020 What, what you hear?

00:19:35.120 Yeah.

00:19:36.620 The pattern, the patterns are very, very clear.

00:19:39.180 I mean, it, there's, the, the way the priests groom young men, children or young men or adults,

00:19:47.160 the way that they groom them is pretty much the same across the board.

00:19:50.900 Across the board, the same things that happens when, when victims are, contact dioceses.

00:19:57.800 They're given the most incredible runaround.

00:19:59.560 The bishop doesn't want to meet with them.

00:20:00.860 Um, they are made to feel that they are causing trouble, um, for the priest and the church.

00:20:06.920 Um, the, the bishop puts out some incredibly imprecise and misleading statement about what

00:20:13.640 really happened.

00:20:14.360 And, uh, uh, usually the, the perpetrator, I mean, there are some that because I've committed crimes are removed.

00:20:21.820 But those who don't commit crimes are just, who commit, um, revolting sins and haven't been leading a life that's faithful anyway to Jesus.

00:20:31.040 They aren't in his gospel.

00:20:33.400 They aren't, um, ministering to people on the way that they should minister to people.

00:20:37.600 They are just living a comfortable life.

00:20:39.940 And usually with, with sexual misconduct comes, um, financial misappropriations and lax liturgies and certainly lax teaching, lax teaching, lax teaching, lax teaching.

00:20:52.380 So you have all these souls out there that aren't being fed in the way that in which they deserve to be fed by their church.

00:20:59.640 I actually read, I'm trying to read everything I haven't read and basically reread things I read years ago.

00:21:06.360 So just read a book recently that talked about some victims in California that successfully at one time screwed on the basis of fraud, uh, saying that the church teaches one thing and practices another.

00:21:19.700 And that those of us who are donating to this church are not getting what we are giving to.

00:21:27.120 We're not getting the teaching that we're in a sense paying for, or that's a crude way of saying it, but we're supporting a church and want that church to help us.

00:21:36.360 Let's get to heaven.

00:21:37.360 And it's not, so I don't, but there's not a lot of people say, well, how do you believe things?

00:21:44.200 And I say, well, it's really hard to start because you don't, you can't believe that men who offered themselves to the Lord and have been to the seminary and stand at the altar.

00:21:53.820 Um, you can't believe that they have done the things that they're purported to have done.

00:21:58.800 And then you read about these over and over again.

00:22:02.020 And as I said, the patterns are the same.

00:22:04.220 And before long, you start to get a nose for it.

00:22:07.320 Uh, we have one here in Detroit now that seems to be fairly manifestly a false accusation as the, is the one with, it seems to me, Cardinal Pell.

00:22:15.520 Um, there's just something there that rings so wrong with the accusations that are being made and the person that we know.

00:22:23.700 I know it's not unusual for, um, predators, uh, to put on a very different face and to appear very differently from how they are.

00:22:32.120 And I know there's men who appear to be faithful and appear to be supportive of the church who are just using that as a front in order to be able to engage in the predation that they engage.

00:22:42.940 I know that's true.

00:22:44.540 Um, but there's some men that you just, you just hear it and you say, oh, that's true. 0.95

00:22:50.220 I can hardly trust myself anymore.

00:22:52.840 If, if it's true about them, what's true about anything?

00:22:56.140 Yeah. And it does make it so difficult because, you know, here you have good men being accused falsely and, and, and then evil men, uh, being believed when they're doing these evil things.

00:23:11.440 I mean, it was incredible to realize and watch, you can go and watch the old videos where the, in, in 2002, who's responding, uh, for the bishops to the sexual abuse crisis.

00:23:24.040 It's then Cardinal McCarrick himself.

00:23:29.120 Oh, it's devastating.

00:23:30.520 I thought, you know, with the, um, the sex abuse crisis meeting in Rome that one of the reporters set up and said, you know, I was here 15 years ago and, uh, it was McCarrick who was sitting there assuring me that, um, the church was going to take care of it.

00:23:46.700 And it was a problem of the past.

00:23:48.460 And, you know, she said, how can you assure me that you are not another McCarrick?

00:23:54.040 And I want to say, there are a lot of McCarricks out there. 0.76

00:23:57.560 There are a lot of McCarricks out there who are assuring this, that, that it's all over.

00:24:01.220 It's all done.

00:24:01.860 It's in the past.

00:24:03.140 And, uh, yeah, that's what we're living with.

00:24:05.900 And when, again, when I started to see that, uh, I had to change the whole course in a sense of, of my life and say, there's not anything I have to do.

00:24:14.520 That's more important than coming to grips with this and doing, and if it, it, it turns out that I just started, I am, and everybody knows it started praying more.

00:24:23.280 We're praying more.

00:24:24.280 We're going to mass more.

00:24:25.500 We're staying up and getting there earlier, staying longer, saying our rosaries, doing our adoration and just praying more.

00:24:31.680 I mean, most of us have thought we were, you know, somewhere between 80 and a hundred percent, um, all in, uh, with the church.

00:24:38.660 And now we're beginning to realize we were closer to maybe 50 and that we've really had to, uh, start praying and sacrificing and considering more and more.

00:24:47.240 What, what does God want me to do in this respect?

00:24:49.200 I don't think we should put those things on ourselves.

00:24:51.300 We have to just keep asking.

00:24:53.320 I mean, I think the most important thing in life is people to learn how to hear God's voice, how to hear God's voice.

00:24:58.840 I've, I've started thinking a whole lot less and praying a whole lot more and not trying to figure things out.

00:25:04.160 I'm trying to just let God guide me in what I read and what I, um, how I respond and who I associate with and what I do.

00:25:12.960 I'm trying to listen very closely to his voice.

00:25:15.520 And if he wants me to mortify myself more, I hope I will respond. 0.98

00:25:19.680 I don't want to lay it on myself because I think we do a lot of stupid things, even in that respect. 0.97

00:25:24.880 And so I'm going to do this. 0.99

00:25:26.240 I'm going to do this.

00:25:27.700 Okay.

00:25:28.560 It's only, it's only really fruitful if God wants you to do that, but that's what we all have to be doing.

00:25:33.820 I know so many friends who are doing that.

00:25:35.800 And honestly, I have some friends who say five months ago, well, kind of looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

00:25:42.540 This was just so hard to process and they really did the Catholic thing, the Catholic thing of becoming more sacramental and more prayerful.

00:25:50.360 They look at it, they actually look now to be more peaceful than I've ever seen them.

00:25:55.280 It's an astonishing thing.

00:25:57.200 It's beautiful.

00:25:58.080 Yeah.

00:25:58.200 Here we're being rocked to our very core and perhaps that is about coming to that place of greater purity in our own lives, a greater focus on Christ in our own lives.

00:26:14.320 It's almost like Cardinal Ratzinger or Father Ratzinger at the time when he made those predictions, which are so famous about a smaller and purer church, was also talking about the individual soul becoming itself smaller and purer as well.

00:26:32.560 It has to happen.

00:26:33.680 I mean, I have an unbelievably wonderful spiritual director.

00:26:38.060 You know, I was talking to him about how we're really getting an incredible glimpse of the epic cosmic struggle that's going on between good and evil.

00:26:48.940 That you have St. Michael, the Archangel, and Lucifer are just battling it out big time.

00:26:55.600 And we're getting a glimpse of that.

00:26:57.060 And he said, Janet, it's happening all the time.

00:27:02.380 And it is true that every once in a while, God pulls back the veil and let us see what's happening.

00:27:07.420 As I said, I think many of us, myself included, have become very comfortable.

00:27:11.300 I had actually thought the church was making enormous strides in reforming itself, that we had many, many more good universities, that we were turning out more faithful Catholics.

00:27:24.180 There were many more families who were embracing the church's teaching, still proportionately small, but more, more and more.

00:27:31.720 And I thought, wow, we've turned a corner.

00:27:33.360 We had the catechism.

00:27:34.540 We had John Paul II.

00:27:35.800 We had Benedict, as far as doctrine is concerned.

00:27:39.360 And I thought, oh, my gosh, look what's happening here.

00:27:42.060 And then I see the lot that's right at the heart of the church.

00:27:45.160 And I said, I was getting comfortable.

00:27:46.440 I was saying, you know, I could probably go to the Gulf of Mexico and put my feet in there and just read what I want to read.

00:27:52.120 And the church will just, they can get along without me.

00:27:56.160 I'm quite sure the church can get along without me.

00:27:58.220 But I really think that it made all of us think, again, what's more important than, again, all in 100% with Jesus?

00:28:07.360 And what does he want of me?

00:28:09.540 I'm sure he doesn't want me watching hours of TV or surfing the Internet or sitting with my feet, except occasionally in the Gulf of New Mexico.

00:28:19.700 But, you know, and I do think so many of the people I know that are the most devastated by this have dug deep.

00:28:29.040 And families, I know, lots of families around here who are just reassessing everything.

00:28:35.420 I have one friend who is moving away from his home right now, taking his family to a place, scoured around for the place that he can find that he thinks he can do the best by, he was best by his family.

00:28:46.900 He had made a decision to put his kids in public schools, hoping that his family could have an impact on the school.

00:28:53.100 And we're saying, again, how the school is having an impact on the family.

00:28:56.740 But he's making a very sacrificial move to go somewhere else so he can do what he needs to do for his family.

00:29:03.660 Yeah, truly heroic decisions.

00:29:05.300 You know, what you said there about, I'm sure it could get along without me.

00:29:10.980 You know what?

00:29:12.040 I really believe it's true.

00:29:14.800 Our Lord chooses not to get along without you.

00:29:17.740 And so he calls each and every single one of us to, as you said, be all in, to devote ourselves wholly and completely to his love and his service of his body, the church.

00:29:30.440 And you're doing that and you've encouraged many, many by your words right now to do that.

00:29:35.820 So thank you for that.

00:29:36.940 Right in the beginning of our Lord's ministry, he himself chose Judas.

00:29:45.700 And I can't help but think that that is sort of now a kind of a grace.

00:29:51.120 Yes, we all know it's a grace because it led to his crucifixion, which led, of course, to our salvation.

00:29:55.280 But in a way, it gave us a very early example of the corruption of the shepherds, which in a way is comforting now because we knew right back then that, you know, you don't throw out Jesus because of Judas.

00:30:13.400 And therefore, you don't throw out the church because of the corruption of many of its shepherds.

00:30:20.400 Well, that's exactly right.

00:30:22.080 I mean, I mean, it's it is consoling.

00:30:24.280 There was Judas and there was Peter and there are all the apostles who left at the moment of the crucifixion, except for John, who stuck close to Mary.

00:30:32.380 And there's a lesson there, isn't there?

00:30:34.940 And, you know, I I've just written a column.

00:30:37.320 I don't know what published probably in the next two or two weeks or so that is about basically good bishops and how it's who are those who, you know, they they they teach what the magisterium teaches.

00:30:49.700 They live more lives.

00:30:50.720 They live less of service.

00:30:52.280 But that's not enough now.

00:30:54.120 That's definitely not enough.

00:30:56.040 And they need to go through some.

00:30:57.920 Whoever many there are, I'm afraid there might not be many.

00:31:01.580 They go through those men who are basically good bishops, the ones that we sort of do cartwheels for.

00:31:06.240 Oh, there's bishops.

00:31:07.240 Oh, and so on.

00:31:07.620 So on.

00:31:07.860 So on.

00:31:08.080 So on.

00:31:08.280 So say they're not doing what needs to be done.

00:31:11.260 I know it's hard, but they're not.

00:31:13.380 And they need to have a new pentecost.

00:31:16.900 They need really need to become absolutely on fire with love for the Lord and love for the church and just not worry about where the chips fall.

00:31:27.480 Not worry if they're approved by by the world or by their by the bishops or their priests or their congregation.

00:31:35.680 They need to spend a lot of time with the Lord, again, trying to hear his voice and find out what he wants.

00:31:41.420 So I'm pretty sure he wants them to really clean up their own diocese first.

00:31:46.620 I mean, my suggestion from the start has been, you know, I mean, you say, if I were a bishop, if I were a bishop, I hope that I would.

00:31:57.240 What I do is I would talk to my priest and I would say any of you who are living lives that are not worthy of the Lord in some.

00:32:04.240 I mean, none of us are.

00:32:05.420 But I mean, in some seriously wrong way, you're leading a double life. 0.98

00:32:08.740 If you're males who are having sex with males or males who are having sex with women or you're embezzling or you're just drinking your life away and you don't intend to stop, come to me and I will put you a nice package together to exit from the priesthood. 0.98

00:32:24.940 We're not going to be high and dry. 0.98

00:32:26.340 We're going to try to find you skills that help to get jobs.

00:32:29.240 But goodbye.

00:32:30.520 Right.

00:32:30.900 And those of you who, after prayer and reflection, realize that you love the priesthood and you failed the priesthood and you don't want to be this way.

00:32:37.900 And you want to live a life worthy of a calling that you've been called to, come to me and we will try to find out a program and not just send you off to some spa somewhere where you'll get babied for months on end at very high expense.

00:32:52.280 But we'll do some hard, tough stuff that's going to help you find virtue, to build virtue and live a life full of grace.

00:33:02.500 And those are, and I'm going, I've already been, I want to be able to say I've already been through my files and I've seen the accusations that have been made against you.

00:33:10.040 And if you're not here in my office with one of the other responses, I'm sending out private investigators and I'm finding out whether these accusations are true or not.

00:33:18.620 And I hope all of you get cleared, but anybody who doesn't get cleared, you're leaving, right?

00:33:26.140 Voluntarily or involuntarily, you're leaving.

00:33:28.840 Now, the bishops don't want to do this.

00:33:31.360 To my mind, I mean, maybe I'm just so totally arrogant, but it seems to me this is a pretty clear thing to do, right?

00:33:37.780 You just work on your own diocese and you clean up and say, well, I won't have enough priest to do this and I won't have enough priest to do that.

00:33:44.380 You say, just do your job.

00:33:47.060 And then, you know, I want to say, if it turns out that all we have left is the bishop who says a mass in the local football stadium every Sunday, okay, let's start there.

00:33:57.940 Let's start there.

00:33:59.360 I guess you'll have the most beautiful, strong vocations coming forward like an army within months, right?

00:34:09.560 It will take a while for us to educate those men and inform them, but I'm willing to wait.

00:34:15.760 I'm willing, I don't want to leave my local parish.

00:34:17.800 I don't want to worship in a stadium.

00:34:20.600 But if that's what it comes to, doggone it.

00:34:23.500 Let's do it.

00:34:24.200 Let's just start from scratch and build the whole thing all over again.

00:34:28.260 How much of that, just so our viewers know, how much of what you just said is real hyperbole in that, how realistic do you think it could be that a particular diocese might have almost no priests left if a bishop really took serious his responsibility this way?

00:34:49.040 Well, again, most of these bishops have inherited that.

00:34:53.460 I mean, they didn't create those situations.

00:34:55.340 We have to be clear about that.

00:34:57.040 Not that a lot of them aren't a part of it.

00:34:59.560 I mean, you know, I'm not taking people off the hook, but I think it's very different from diocese to diocese.

00:35:06.880 All right.

00:35:08.120 Richard Seip and other studies show that at any given time, 50% of priests are not being faithful to their vows of chastity.

00:35:16.280 And believe me, if they're not being faithful to their vows of chastity, they're not being faithful in other, even more important ways.

00:35:23.660 All right.

00:35:24.400 And that's horrible.

00:35:28.120 But I also think it's remarkable in this day and age that 50% are being faithful.

00:35:33.080 It shows it's possible.

00:35:34.680 It shows it's possible that they're doing almost no support from their church, from their culture.

00:35:38.460 All right.

00:35:39.480 And still they're digging down deep and staying close to the Lord and managing that, in this culture, a kind of heroic virtue of chastity.

00:35:48.780 So I'm told that in some dioceses there might be as many, it sounds preposterous, but what can I say?

00:35:54.500 That these are people on the inside who tell me this stuff, but some studies seem to support it.

00:35:58.840 That up to 90%, all right, of priests are living immoral, very manifestly immoral lives.

00:36:06.660 In other dioceses, it might be as low as 5%.

00:36:09.720 So it's going to be different from dioceses to dioceses.

00:36:14.460 And so it might be true in some dioceses and not others.

00:36:17.440 But I, I mean, I've, secondhand, you know, secondhand, I've heard people who have heard from bishops themselves who said,

00:36:24.260 if I got rid of all the sexually active priests in my diocese, I would, I'd lose half of my presbyterity.

00:36:34.720 They've said it, right? 0.95

00:36:36.760 So if it comes from a bishop's mouth, I think, I'm supposing he's been through the files.

00:36:41.420 He knows it's not just some speculative thing.

00:36:44.820 I hope I'm entirely wrong.

00:36:48.300 I hope that I am entirely wrong, but I'm afraid the evidence points in the most pessimistic direction.

00:36:55.720 And I think that, you know, despite that, despite that knowledge, despite that persecution, or not persecution,

00:37:05.620 an internal kind of suffering of the church where the body is being sort of eaten by a cancer just unbelievably,

00:37:13.940 devouring, you know, the health of the church, what's your outlook?

00:37:21.800 Do you still have hope?

00:37:23.840 And what's your message for, for, for faithful Catholics as we close out this interview?

00:37:30.980 Oh, I don't know what's going to happen.

00:37:35.840 As I talk with my friends and all of us have tried to figure out scenarios, and we can't, we can't even think of a scenario.

00:37:42.840 We can't even think of a scenario that would say, okay, this is the direction.

00:37:46.360 This is what should happen.

00:37:47.380 This, this might happen.

00:37:48.960 We can't think of one, as I said, because if the bishops got rid of the bad bishops,

00:37:54.140 there'd probably be just as bad bishops put in.

00:37:57.400 So what are you going to do?

00:37:58.260 I mean, I hope that if there's a handful of good bishops, I hope they do what they can do.

00:38:03.060 And then when, if it should happen that a good bishop is appointed, he will have a model of how it can be done.

00:38:10.580 All right.

00:38:11.080 And just slowly, you will get the, and I think that, I think the lady has to really push for good seminaries. 1.00

00:38:18.120 I think the lay boards of seminaries have to demand a very thorough auditing and accounting of what goes on in the seminary.

00:38:25.580 I mean, interviewing everybody who's been in that seminary that's alive for the last 50 years and ask what their experience was, blah, blah, blah.

00:38:34.000 What is it now?

00:38:34.840 Just try to get the real truth of the matter.

00:38:37.560 If there's any problems in the seminaries, clean them up because that's where the next generation of priests are coming from.

00:38:45.340 I think all of us, as I said, just have to pray.

00:38:49.220 We have to, I think it is an odd moment for the new, God does strange things. 0.98

00:38:55.820 Most Catholics are miserable evangelists. 1.00

00:38:58.220 We don't even know how to introduce Jesus or the church into a conversation. 0.99

00:39:02.300 But it comes into the conversation now.

00:39:04.200 And Catholics, when it comes into the conversation, you know, people say, how are you feeling?

00:39:08.320 They say, I'm really kind of loaded there.

00:39:09.620 I read about another parish, another priest, another diocese, another scandal.

00:39:14.100 And then they're going to ask, why do you stay in the church?

00:39:16.540 And then you tell them.

00:39:18.120 And you have an opportunity to be a powerful witness.

00:39:21.340 And I've actually heard in some places there's more people than ever that are coming into the church.

00:39:25.620 And I suspect that some of it has to do with the fact that there are those of us who stay and we really know what the church is.

00:39:33.700 Again, it's not the local priest.

00:39:35.380 It's not the bishop.

00:39:36.360 It's not the pope.

00:39:37.760 Right?

00:39:38.100 It's Jesus' bride.

00:39:40.120 And that feeds us, nourishes us.

00:39:42.140 And we're not going anywhere.

00:39:43.240 So I think it's a bizarre, odd opportunity.

00:39:47.800 Yeah, a bizarre opportunity to be really powerful new engagers in the new evangelization.

00:39:54.900 That our enthusiasm for remaining in the church and our willingness to make a public witness to our staying in this church, which we believe right now is pretty darn corrupt.

00:40:07.520 It's because we believe in Jesus.

00:40:09.340 We can't live without the sacraments.

00:40:10.840 And we want to convince others that their lives will improve greatly if they accept the invitation that the church, Church Triumphant, offers.

00:40:23.380 Great.

00:40:25.160 So let me, last thought here.

00:40:29.640 One of the things that has been coming up in a lot of the interviews that I've had about people who deal with such things, with these difficult things in the church,

00:40:39.640 has been the role of Our Lady in all of this.

00:40:44.020 And how has Our Lady affected you in your life and in dealing with this situation specifically?

00:40:51.080 Well, I certainly love Our Lady and trying to be more and more dedicated to saying the rosary and asking for her help and her guidance in whatever needs to be done.

00:41:05.920 And again, loving her priests, loving the ones that we believe are good and trying to support them and realize that they're not under a cloud of suspicion.

00:41:15.900 And we love what they're doing.

00:41:18.520 Our Lady is at the heart of everything.

00:41:20.480 I mean, you know, do what he tells you.

00:41:23.220 Go to Mary first and do what he tells you. 0.88

00:41:25.660 I think that's the formula for things.

00:41:27.700 I've always found that when I pray to Mary, she kind of answers my novenas before I'm done.

00:41:34.560 If I pray to God the Father, who is all about God the Father, he practices point of friendship.

00:41:40.360 He takes me right up to the moment of complete desperation and then answers something in some spectacularly wonderful way.

00:41:47.700 So it depends on what sort of thrill I'm wanting, who I go to.

00:41:53.480 But yeah, I think that one thing that is, again, as we become more prayerful, we start to see how the supernatural works.

00:42:02.660 Again, you see media like yours and others who have been vilified and ignored and dismissed.

00:42:09.240 And they're looking for any little misstep you might take to just brush you aside and say everything you say is false.

00:42:19.340 You make some misstep and say there's not any media on the face of the earth I trust more than some of the Catholic media.

00:42:27.900 You know that someone's ready to put a knife in your back the minute they get.

00:42:33.300 So you're trying, you're being hypervigilant.

00:42:35.300 But in this kind of work, as you know, you're dealing a lot with rumors and innuendos.

00:42:41.160 And Richard Seip said that's all you're going to get.

00:42:43.520 He said that this is not the kind of crime or sexual abuse that's going to have the kind of evidence that you want for other crimes.

00:42:52.500 He said the most important evidence, honestly, is a person's willingness to come forward about it.

00:42:56.960 Because it's tremendously painful and embarrassing and self-incriminating, though there's no self-incrimination.

00:43:05.060 That's how you feel.

00:43:06.140 And the fact that people are willing to come forward about this is in itself powerful evidence of misconduct.

00:43:17.140 And so you're dealing with the messiest kind of stuff that's very hard to prove.

00:43:21.900 I'm not certain where he's going with all of this.

00:43:23.400 But it has something to do with, what does it have to do with, Henry?

00:43:28.080 Yeah, no, just coming back to Our Lady, just for me personally, it's been, it's sort of an abandonment of, as you were saying earlier on in the show,

00:43:42.660 you were saying that, you know, you're relying more on prayer than on intellect now and more on sort of contemplation.

00:43:51.720 I think the answer with regard to these toughest of questions, probably the worst crisis ever in the history of the church.

00:44:00.340 We have the words of Our Lady of Fatima and of the, you know, the encouragement that we got in 1917.

00:44:09.480 In the end, my immaculate heart will triumph.

00:44:13.040 I think, you know, I always come at it as a little child with my mother.

00:44:18.800 And for me, that's the easiest way of dealing with all these things.

00:44:23.820 As a little child, you don't get often what's going on in the situation.

00:44:27.920 You don't know how to deal with it.

00:44:29.940 But you can run to your mother and know that she can deal with it.

00:44:34.260 And sometimes, you know, if the situation is really, really bad, she hides you in her mantle or in her skirt, you know.

00:44:42.200 And so you don't even have to look at it.

00:44:44.540 You just sort of run to her.

00:44:46.440 It's where I've taken a lot of solace.

00:44:48.820 And, yeah, it's been for me a great grace.

00:44:53.220 You have to be under enormous attack for the good that you're doing.

00:44:57.900 And you see the darkest places.

00:45:00.240 And you know how hard it is to bring that forward.

00:45:03.720 And I think, yes, running to our mother and cuddling in her mantle is extremely important.

00:45:08.760 And I want to say that anybody – I talked to a very good Catholic friend this weekend.

00:45:12.440 And she didn't know a lot.

00:45:13.580 She didn't know much about this at all.

00:45:14.920 She's not – she's a mother of many.

00:45:16.840 She's a teacher.

00:45:18.260 She didn't know much.

00:45:19.240 And she said – and I said, so no, if you want to know about it, you should do X.

00:45:23.240 And she said, I don't want to know about it.

00:45:24.480 And I said, fine.

00:45:25.700 I said, that really is fine.

00:45:27.420 What you're doing is fine.

00:45:29.320 And I want to say anybody who's torn up by this or is finding themselves becoming depressed or finding themselves, again, thinking of leaving the church, stop.

00:45:38.780 Stop reading about this stuff.

00:45:40.420 Stop informing yourself.

00:45:42.120 Just let the others who have been given some special assignment by the Lord to do this.

00:45:48.100 And do your daily duties.

00:45:49.480 Do them faithfully.

00:45:50.540 Pray for the church.

00:45:52.000 And don't let it, you know, get you down.

00:45:55.420 As you said, go to your mother and let your mother raise your hopes.

00:45:58.900 I have, again, friends who have recommitted themselves to saying the rosary every day.

00:46:02.480 And they are finding a peace and a joy in their system that they haven't felt possibly ever.

00:46:09.340 Mary is right here ready to control us. 1.00

00:46:11.460 She knows her son is in charge.

00:46:13.520 She knows the Holy Spirit is doing what the Holy Spirit is supposed to do.

00:46:16.920 She knows that God the Father is right in the middle of all of this, knows just what's going on, knows the conclusion of all this, and simply wants us as always to have our faith deep.

00:46:30.220 And so I think you're right.

00:46:32.280 If nothing else, just go to Mary.

00:46:35.080 In fact, go there first.

00:46:38.820 Professor Dr. Janet Smith, thank you so very much for being with us here on LifeSite News.

00:46:43.760 This is John Henry Weston's show.

00:46:45.740 And might I see, I see in you, in your fierce heart fighting for the church and for her children, the heart of Mary that also fights for her children.

00:46:55.120 May God bless you.

00:46:57.460 That's great time.

00:46:58.300 Thank you.

00:47:00.220 Thank you.

The John-Henry Westen Show - August 13, 2019

Prof. Janet Smith speaks on the sex abuse crisis and Pope Francis

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