Hello, Bella…Conspiracy Anyone?

By MIKE MANNO

In May of 1972 a French Protestant nurse, who later became a Catholic nun, Marie Carré, published a “memoir” entitled ES-1025; Élève Séminariste. The book was later translated into English and published in the United States as AA-1025; The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle.
The story was about a nurse who treated an unknown man after a traffic accident. The man, who carried no identification, never regained consciousness and later died. In trying to find the man’s identity, the nurse, presumably Carré, found his briefcase and in it found a 100-page memoir on which the man had been working. The memoir was the story of how he had become a priest at the behest of the Soviet Communist Party to infiltrate the Church.
The number 1025 indicated that he was the 1,025th Communist anti-apostle groomed to enter the priesthood to wreak havoc in the Church.
It is supposed to be a true story that began with his studies in the 1930s. If so, it took a lot of literary license. It arguably could, however, be based on a factual event with the “memoir” simply a literary device to tell a presumably true story. What is interesting about the book is that it appears to be a traditionalist’s argument against the changes in Church practices during the postconciliar period.
For example, the “priest” in the story tries to tarnish the Church by pushing it to becoming more Protestant. He promotes remarriage after divorce, polygamy, contraception, and euthanasia, to help Protestantize the Roman Catholic Church. He also was a proponent of Communion in the hand to weaken Catholic belief in the Real Presence, predicting, “Very soon, the Host will be laid in the hand in order that all notions of the Sacred be erased.”
I heard about the book years ago, was curious about it, and purchased a copy and read it. To me the book was fantasy; Communist infiltration of the Church, red bishops, and all the rest was simply creative storytelling.
However, I thought of the book again as the story of ex-cardinal Theodore (Uncle Ted) McCarrick became public. What got my attention was the depth of the McCarrick cover-up by Church officials: chancery functionaries, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and (“say it ain’t so”) even the Holy Father himself.
That struck up another memory of real Communist infiltration of the Church and a woman named Bella Dodd.
Bella Dodd was born in 1904 in Italy but soon was brought to the United States where she grew up in New York City and became a lawyer fighting for the rights of workers and the poor. Using her base as a teacher at her alma mater, Hunter College, she began to organize teachers (mainly to indoctrinate the young) and eventually became an organizer for the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) and ultimately sat on its national council
She was expelled from the CPUSA in 1949 as part a purge of its ranks. After her expulsion she went public, testified before several congressional committees, and in 1954 wrote a book about her life in the Communist Party, School of Darkness. (The book can be found on the Internet and makes for interesting reading.)
Dodd recounted her efforts to infiltrate the teachers’ unions — she became the head of the New York state teachers’ organization. But most remarkably she claimed to have put over one thousand men into Catholic seminaries à la AA-1025. She wrote in an affidavit: “In the late 1920s and 1930s, directives were sent from Moscow to all Communist Party organizations. In order to destroy the Catholic Church from within, party members were to be planted in seminaries and within diocesan organizations.”
The idea, of course, was to place men into seminaries who would become priests and ultimately leaders in the Church and would corrupt it from within. “The idea was for these men to be ordained, and then climb the ladder of influence and authority as monsignors and bishops,” she said.
In her book Dodd wrote that Communists “sought to destroy the Church by attacking its priests. . . . When the Communists organized Catholic workers, Irish and Polish and Italian, in labor unions they always drove a wedge between lay Catholics and the priests, by flattering the laity and attacking the priests.”
Confirmation of this came from another former CPUSA leader, Manning Johnson, who, according to a 2011 post in the website A Catholic Life, told this to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953:
“Once the tactic of infiltration of religious organizations was set by the Kremlin…the Communists discovered the destruction of religion could proceed much faster through the infiltration of the Church by Communists operating within the Church itself. . . .
“In the earliest stages it was determined that with only small forces available to them, it would be necessary to concentrate Communist agents in the seminaries. The practical conclusion drawn by the Red leaders was that these institutions would make it possible for a small Communist minority to influence the ideology of future clergymen in the paths conductive to Communist purposes…the policy of infiltrating seminaries was successful beyond even our Communist expectations.”
Noted Catholic philosopher, theologian, and author Dr. Alice von Hildebrand, widow of Dietrich von Hildebrand, the renowned theologian and professor of philosophy at Fordham University, who knew Dodd, told Michael Voris of Church Militant: “Stalin, soon after he came to power ordered his cronies to invade Catholic seminaries with young men that had neither faith nor morals. Now, the ideal cases: homosexual. . . . But if you’re a homosexual, then it was a tragic mission.”
Voris argues that seminarians planted in the Church in the 1920s and 1930s “would explain a lot” since they would have been ordained in the 1930s and 1940s. “Eleven hundred Communist plants who were homosexual over the space of roughly 20 years could create massive chaos in the Church by the time they would ‘mature’ in their priesthoods…surely a good number would have advanced to bishops, archbishops, and even cardinals. And their primary role would have been to recruit the next generation of men for the seminaries….”
Is this a conspiracy theory by grown men sitting in their mothers’ basements wearing tinfoil hats? Or might it explain some of the problems we are now seeing? Remember the warnings of Our Lady of Fatima.
By the way, Bella Dodd, after leaving the CPUSA returned to the Church where she became a daily communicant. The priest who brought her back was a young monsignor named Fulton Sheen.
(Mike can be reached at DeaconMike@q.com.)