“I said I would do it!”
–Damian Smullen, during conversations at the Mount in Peterborough where the Sister of St Joseph were providing RCIA in 2017. This was said in an angry voice, with a look of disgust on his face, as though baptizing me would be the most unappealing thing he had ever been asked to do.
“We don’t want to get in your way!”
-Damian Smullen, during my brief time in the RCIA classes for St Peter-in-Chains. I have no idea why he said this to me but I suspect my sponsor John O’Brien was saying things to Smullen and other priests that, to quote Dierdre Thomas, “come from his own prayer life.” Part of annoyance, which became real anger after A FEW YEAR OF THIS, was that the priests were listening to a man thirty years older than me who inserted himself in my life and my coming into the Church process and not listening at all to me! It was a level of insane rudeness and disrespect I had never experienced before in my life. And when I tried using stronger language and being assertive that Jennifer spoke for Jennifer and not this man who believed he was “adopting me” to “bring me to Jesus” (those are words he said, at different times) … the priests started to judge “my behavior”, as though I was the poor, helpless, unemployed whore I believe John made me out to be. John often said it meant something that I was drawn to Adoration, and he thought I would be a nun, and “people like you will reform the Church”. I suspect John shared some of these thoughts with priests, including Smullen, who assumed John spoke for me, which he most certainly did not. My experience with John O’Brien and the priests who refused to help me find a proper sponsor is the major reason I now believe local churches (where it makes sense) should consider ordaining (not Holy Orders) women to the diaconate in order to better accompany females of all ages into the Church, and along their faith journey. Part of making local churches open to the possibility of renewing the line of female deacons is more education. Let people discern with the light of deeper and broader understanding…
“Some people think I’m an ogre.”
–Damian Smullen, to the assembly at St Peter-in-Chains one Saturday afternoon when he announced that that Mass had been his last at the Cathedral. I had told the Pastoral Centre what he did to me at lunchtime Mass with the Eucharist just after Tenebrae. I believe he may have been re-assigned because what he did with communion was wrong. A priest in Sudbury later told me that a priest shouldn’t do that, and that it would spiritually affect everyone at the Mass that day, not just me.
“Hindsight is 20-20”
–Damian Smullen again, at a Saturday Day of Grace at St Peter-in-Chains, when I asked him why he had offered me three different baptism scenarios about a year earlier. All he would say is, “Hindsight is 20-20”