Hello and welcome to Pines with Aquinas. Today I am going to be joined by Dr Janet Smith.

Dr Janet Smith is an American classicist and philosopher and former professor of moral theology at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan.

She has created this new open letter called We Are an Eastern People, which urges bishops to make the sacraments as accessible as possible during this time of the coronavirus.

Yeah, good day. Dr Janet Smith, how are you? Good day to you. You look fantastic. Did I say it the right way? Good day. Yeah, that's pretty good.

Yeah, that's pretty good. Okay. I'm always afraid people think it's a stick or something. It really isn't. We just speak like that.

Oh, yeah, you're just insufferably cute. When I was in Australia many years ago, and I was very, very nervous and the, for my talk, and the organizer said,

oh, just open your mouth and talk. We are so enchanted by the American accent. And I thought, oh, I'm just going to think about that for the rest of my life. People are just enchanted. And we are enchanted by your accent.

So just keep being spontaneously authentic. It's all about where you're from. People say, I love your accent. And I'm like, I love yours. So that's good.

Well, tell us maybe a bit about yourself for those of you who aren't familiar with you and then tell us about this open letter that you've put together.

All right. Well, I've been sort of a Catholic activist for now pushing 40 some years, maybe longer.

Most known for my work, defending the church is teaching on contraception and being against God's will for sexuality.

I've written a lot of other stuff on bioethics and life issues ethics in general.

Don an enormous amount of public speaking at certain phases of my life, almost every other week and two, sometimes two or three parts of the country, even in that same weekend.

I'm retired now. I've slowed down in some respects, meaning I most of my activity is wouldn't it need four walls as most of us are these days, but still very active on Facebook and social media.

Have a lot of projects. I want to want to finish up taught at the University of Notre Dame for nine years, University of Dallas for 12 and that sacred heart seminary for I think 18, 19 years.

And you run regular live streams right from that desk there. Is that right?

Well, I have started a little bit of a webcast with a friend of mine, Tom current and we have a YouTube channel called the Janet Smith and Tom current.

Rob, I think it's review review. We've put about 10 episodes up. We're just learning our way on on this, but we'd certainly love to get a few more people.

Go need something to fall asleep by just watching watching our show you and Tom Karen reviewing things.

That's right. It really is just meant to be a review. We started it as a review of so many things of the crisis in the church and trying to be a kind of a mediator between those who some people think have too strident a tone.

Most of which they they do I agree with. I actually find their tone sometimes hilarious in it for me it works for a lot of people it doesn't work.

So we're trying to deliver it in somewhat more of a softball way where we we discuss it and show how people that have been following matters in the church for a very long time.

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