The John-Henry Westen Show - 1,000+ Communist Priests Infiltrated the Catholic Church in America

00:00:00.000 On the front page of the New York Times, ladies and gentlemen, April 27, 1952, ran an article,

00:00:07.280 page one, Sheen in Rome says red agents tried to infiltrate the priesthood. There was no

00:00:13.800 institution on the planet that had so opposed communism like the Catholic Church, describing

00:00:19.520 it as literally satanic. As Pius XI said in Divinity Redemptorist 1937, that communism was

00:00:25.520 a satanic scourge orchestrated by the sons of darkness. The church taught that it was

00:00:31.500 literally out of the pit of hell. And Bella came to believe that and tried to pull away. 1.00

00:00:38.900 The church is in a total uproar. And one of the things that might help to explain that

00:00:44.140 is infiltration, infiltration of the church by communists who were actually sent in to be

00:00:52.940 priests, as communists, sent in to be priests to infiltrate the church on purpose. Sound

00:00:58.180 incredible? Well, it's not. Because you know what? It was testified to by an ex-communist.

00:01:04.840 Her name was Bella Dodd. She was known to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and lots of other witnesses.

00:01:11.560 We're going to talk to now the author of a new book on Bella Dodd and what this all means

00:01:18.260 for the church today. You're going to want to stay tuned for this one.

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00:03:40.880 the world. Also, don't forget to pray with your financial gift. Every little bit helps. So thank

00:03:46.480 you and may God bless you. Paul Kengor, welcome to the program. It is so good to be with you. I'm a

00:03:53.880 fan. I've followed you and LifeSite News for years, and this is actually the first time we've ever met,

00:03:59.440 strangely enough. But thank you so much, John Henry. Good to meet you, Paul. Let's begin as we

00:04:04.300 always do it with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy

00:04:09.080 Ghost. Amen. This is incredibly interesting, and I know there's been a lot of folklore around it.

00:04:15.560 Is it really true? Is it a myth? You've got the details and the evidence, which is just incredible.

00:04:20.600 But tell us first a little bit about yourself, just so people know where you're coming from.

00:04:25.080 I was born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I had kind of a major

00:04:31.120 career switch when I left medicine. I actually worked for the organ transplant team at the

00:04:36.440 University of Pittsburgh in the late 1980s and went into, it was the end of the Cold War. And so I

00:04:42.520 became fascinated by that, the causes of it, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev, that whole

00:04:49.660 cast of characters, communism. And then eventually in the 1990s, I decided to go to graduate school,

00:04:57.940 and that became my focus. I should add here, too, from a faith perspective, I was not a Christian.

00:05:04.160 I became a Christian really early in the mid-1990s through evangelicals. So even though I was baptized

00:05:13.160 Catholic and I consider myself a convert to the Catholic faith, I guess I'm really technically a

00:05:19.440 revert. But I came into the Catholic Church, I converted to the Catholic Church in April 2005,

00:05:25.300 right when Pope John Paul II died. And he was a major player, major factor in my conversion.

00:05:34.120 I've written probably about 20 books and on subjects like communism, Karl Marx. I did a book called A

00:05:41.360 Pope and a President, Ronald Reagan and John Paul II. So this has really been my career subject and

00:05:48.180 following. And when I heard about Bella Dodd's claims quite a few years ago, I was absolutely fascinated.

00:05:54.880 And to kind of jump right in how the dovetails into this book, John Henry, what really frustrated

00:06:01.380 me is I would read things on the internet about what Bella Dodd allegedly said. And you can find memes

00:06:09.460 and all kinds of things and even audio where she seems to be talking and maybe she is talking and

00:06:15.920 she's speaking to the Senate or at some place wherever in the 1950s and 1960s. And then the voiceover just

00:06:23.800 freezes. And on the screen comes this language about what she allegedly said. And it would like source 0.86

00:06:31.360 it to her memoirs. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not in her memoirs. She did not talk about

00:06:37.180 it in her memoirs. Or it would make up some Senate testimony. And I'd say, no, no, no, no, it's not in

00:06:43.000 her Senate testimony. It became really an intense project of one even documenting that she in fact

00:06:50.880 said what she said beyond the whole question of whether or not she did what she said, all of which

00:06:56.840 I know we're going to get into. So that's a little bit of background on me. Amazing. Just so that people

00:07:01.580 know, the name of the book is The Devil and Bella Dodd, One Woman's Struggle Against Communism and Her

00:07:07.560 Redemption. It's available through TAN Books and its co-author is Mary Nichols. So Dr. Paul Kangor,

00:07:13.940 first of all, let's get into what exactly she said. What was her message regarding infiltration of the

00:07:21.140 church? So she said that she helped place, quote, over a thousand communist men, unquote, in Catholic

00:07:28.900 seminaries. And the number, sometimes you hear eleven hundred, sometimes you hear twelve hundred,

00:07:34.760 but it's around a thousand altogether. And she, one of the first episodes where we know that she

00:07:41.280 said that, she was talking to Alice von Hildebrand and Dietrich von Hildebrand. Now, these are two

00:07:46.700 very, very credible sources. In fact, Alice died just last year. I think it was January 2022.

00:07:55.100 She was maybe 98 years old, I believe. She was up there. Dietrich died many years ago. It's been

00:08:01.120 quite a while. But we interviewed Alice for the book. My co-author did, Mary Nichols. And Alice is

00:08:07.620 on record saying this in her memoirs, in a piece for Crisis Magazine, in several other different

00:08:16.580 written, a number of different times she wrote it down. She's on YouTube saying it in an interview

00:08:23.140 with Michael Voris, of Church Militant. Let's take a break right now and take a look at that testimony.

00:08:31.220 Bella Dodd gave a talk in Orange, California, in which she declared publicly, I repeat publicly,

00:08:41.640 that in the course of the 20 years of activities for the communists, she recruited some eleven hundred

00:08:50.720 young men, neither faith, nor moral, that entered seminaries. And they were so superbly trained

00:09:01.480 that it was not that easy to detect them because in many ways they seem to be orthodox. But then

00:09:10.600 it's a big poison here and a big poison there. And Al-Saint said, spread doubt.

00:09:17.740 It was Alice and Dietrich who met with Bella Dodd in the 1960s. And she's given the date. John

00:09:28.500 Henry, she is so consistent in this. I mean, she is, you can tell she's a scholar. She's a thinker.

00:09:34.280 She's an intellectual. Her words in describing what Bella says every time are almost verbatim.

00:09:40.060 I mean, there's just a complete consistency. And Dietrich had said to Bella Dodd, you know,

00:09:47.700 I just have this feeling that the church has been infiltrated. And Bella Dodd said in her kind of

00:09:52.540 New York Italian accent, you feel it? I know it. And he said, you know it? Tell me. What do you mean?

00:10:00.180 And then she explained what she did. Now, she said this usually only privately.

00:10:06.500 We found an occasion where she said it in a speech in Orange County, California in the 1960s. And

00:10:14.080 apparently that speech was attended by about 600 to 800 people. Two witnesses to that speech

00:10:20.500 were Janine Leininger and her husband. And in fact, my friend Kevin Simmons actually knew the

00:10:27.200 Leiningers and got a hold of them and took them and got them to sign a smart affidavit saying that

00:10:34.200 they heard Bella say this publicly. Janine just died, I think it was last June, when we were just

00:10:41.580 in the process of finishing this book. So that was one occasion where she said publicly that she did it.

00:10:48.960 She also, another witness that heard her say it is a woman named Sherry Finn, who was about 82 years

00:10:56.540 old. She lives in Redondo Beach, California. She heard Bella say it at a dinner party. It was Sherry

00:11:03.120 and her husband and another couple in Plano, Texas, near Plano, Texas, where Bella had gone to teach

00:11:10.200 in the 1960s. And we interviewed Sherry for the book. And Sherry's still alive. And Sherry said,

00:11:16.560 yeah, I will never forget this. Sherry even said, I've heard the numbers, 1,000, 1,100, 1,200.

00:11:24.580 She said, that's what Bella said to us as well. So these were private occasions. And the reason why

00:11:30.940 she didn't say it publicly, except maybe on that one occasion, apparently the one occasion where she

00:11:35.920 let her guard down and said something in Orange County, California, was that according to Alice

00:11:40.940 von Hildebrand, Fulton Sheen forbade Bella Dodd to talk about it publicly. He thought that this would

00:11:48.320 cause scandal in the church. And she even said to him, she said, Bishop Sheen, I feel like I should go

00:11:54.140 into the most severe penitential order on the planet. We know this too, from Alice von Hildebrand,

00:11:59.960 to make reparation for my sins and what I did. And Fulton Sheen, John Henry said to her, actually said

00:12:06.340 kind of the same thing that Pope Pius XI said to Fulton Sheen. He said, no, I don't want you to do

00:12:12.380 that. I want you instead to go out and warn the world about the evils of communism. I want you to go

00:12:19.240 out there and tell everybody about what has happened and the dangers that are out there.

00:12:24.260 But he didn't want her to name names. And honestly, we go through this very, very carefully in the book.

00:12:28.220 It's the longest chapter in the book. I don't know if by the 1950s or 1960s, she could have named names.

00:12:34.780 She would have been doing this in the middle 1930s. The party was notorious for destroying all of their 1.00

00:12:41.060 records. Bella, who was an attorney for the party, destroyed records. She admitted later that she did

00:12:48.780 this in the Rapp-Coderre hearings in New York. She set the stuff on fire. She shredded it.

00:12:55.200 And she knew that it was illegal. To this day, I say this as a lifelong communist researcher,

00:13:00.060 you cannot find a document anywhere that lists all Communist Party USA members.

00:13:06.040 They got rid of that stuff. They didn't keep that stuff. So she could have helped recruit

00:13:11.540 or been a middleman, middle lady in the whole endeavor without being able to remember or name names.

00:13:18.640 By the 1960s. And let me back up a little more. Why would the party have gone to her for this?

00:13:24.320 Because she was a master organizer for the party. She organized the teachers front. She organized the 0.74

00:13:31.380 New York State Teachers Union. Out of 10,000 members, Bella testified to this in her Congress.

00:13:37.900 The FBI had these numbers. The Senate had these numbers. Out of 10,000 members of the New York State

00:13:43.320 Teachers Union in the 1930s. She helped plant 1,000 to 1,500 Communist Party members. So for her to

00:13:52.780 think, if the party would have went to her and said, okay, you put 1,000 to 1,500 Communist

00:13:59.520 teachers out of 10,000 in the Teachers Union, you think you could do this with a priesthood? Well,

00:14:04.320 we give data on this in the book. By the 1960s, by Vatican II, there were 60,000 priests

00:14:09.820 in the United States. So she would have said, yeah, yeah, 1,000 teachers out of 10,000 in the

00:14:15.380 Teachers Union. You don't think I could put 1,000 men out of 60,000 in seminaries? That's

00:14:20.140 a cinch. This is what she did. She was a master organizer. So she would have saluted the red flag. 1.00

00:14:27.780 She had, in the 1936 May Day Parade in New York City, she had 500 Communist teachers marching.

00:14:36.320 I mean, this is what they did. They were organizers. They were infiltrators. So this would have been

00:14:44.480 something that she felt confident that she could have at least attempted to do.

00:14:48.960 Do we have any details? I mean, because it seems sometimes far-fetched that someone would sort of

00:14:54.580 give up his life and embrace, does he embrace celibacy? Well, it just would go into a priesthood

00:15:01.520 and live their lives for this cause. But how did that work out?

00:15:05.260 We quote in the book, Blessed Solanus Casey. In fact, it's the main biography of Solanus Casey,

00:15:12.000 and his biographer almost mentions this in passing. In fact, he kind of takes a snide shot at Solanus

00:15:18.480 Casey for being kind of giving in here to the whole red scare mentality of the day, right?

00:15:24.060 But Solanus Casey said, oh, yeah, we knew about the red infiltrators. He said they were easy to spot 1.00

00:15:30.460 because they were very disciplined and very smart, but not very devout. And so he even talked about

00:15:37.820 seeing these people, encountering these people. Now, and I would add this, too. This is, I think,

00:15:42.460 quite significant. The party did this up and down with the Protestant denominations,

00:15:47.480 the mainline denominations. I mean, this was testified before Congress by Manning Johnson,

00:15:52.240 Ben Gitlow, Louis Boudin, William Z. Foster, Earl Browder, right? Former communists, current communists,

00:16:00.320 they did this all the time. In fact, Earl Browder told an audience at Union Theological Seminary in

00:16:06.800 New York in February 1935, he said, you might be surprised to know that we have party members,

00:16:12.920 party members, preachers active in the churches who are actual party members, party members. Now,

00:16:19.280 you're supposed to be an atheist to be a party member. So how could you have a party member who's 0.99

00:16:25.020 an atheist being an active preacher in churches? Well, they're infiltrators. But that was easier to 1.00

00:16:31.320 do in Protestant churches than in Catholic churches, where the seminary process for priests was so much

00:16:38.000 more exhaustive, right? So much longer, where the rector had to recommend you, right? You had to go

00:16:44.940 through a long, long, long, long, long, long process to make it through. So I would bet that

00:16:50.560 if Bella tried to help place a thousand communists in seminaries, that they probably didn't put very

00:16:57.440 many through. But those that did stay in, maybe they stayed in and became lukewarm Catholics or not

00:17:06.640 really true Catholics, but they were left of center theologically. But Manning Johnson said that it was a

00:17:13.400 truism in Communist Party organizing, that if you could place just 60 to 70 people in an organization

00:17:20.380 out of 10,000, just 1%, or even less than 1%, you could control the organization. So the goal might

00:17:29.140 be 1,000. But if you can get in less than 100, a well-placed 100, that's significant. My friend Herb

00:17:37.480 Romerstein used to call these agents of influence that could be even more influential than somebody

00:17:43.940 who was an outright spy working for the Kremlin, like Whitaker Chambers, for example. But Bella

00:17:49.880 Dodd was kind of like a female Whitaker Chambers. 1.00

00:17:52.800 Bella Dodd then converts. Take us through that, if you will.

00:17:55.780 She really went through the ringer. She started getting involved with the party in the 1930s,

00:18:00.380 1932. In 1943, she consented to being an open, card-carrying communist. Now, that was a big deal

00:18:08.680 because most of them were underground. But she was so high up in the National Committee

00:18:13.520 and doing so much, probably the highest-ranking woman in the party at that point, that at that

00:18:19.640 point, she might as well go public with it. So she became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party

00:18:24.320 in 1943, same year that Barack Obama's mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, joined the Communist Party.

00:18:30.560 In fact, we have Davis's card number. It was 47544. Bella Dodd was, like Davis, a member of the FBI.

00:18:39.380 She was on the FBI's Security Index. FBI was watching her all the time. That meant that if a war broke out

00:18:46.160 between the United States and the Soviet Union, she could be placed under immediate arrest.

00:18:50.740 Because when you joined the party, and we quote the loyalty oath in the 1935 loyalty oath in the

00:18:57.960 book, they raised their hand and they said, I swear at all times to remain a firm defender of the

00:19:03.560 Leninist line of the party, the only line that ensures the triumph of Soviet power in the United States.

00:19:11.420 So they were what Herb Romerstein called loyal Soviet patriots. Their country was the Soviet Union.

00:19:18.300 Like Langston Hughes said, we will turn it into the U-S-S-A when we take over. So she was hardcore.

00:19:27.220 She was a Stalinist. She wasn't a small-C communist who said, no, I like them ideologically, but I don't want 0.97

00:19:33.460 to join the party because I don't want to have to follow Moscow. No, she followed Moscow.

00:19:38.760 And from 1943 to 48, so this is a long story, but she became disillusioned. She had different

00:19:48.000 problems with the party. Among other things, the party didn't want her to have a family,

00:19:54.600 didn't want her to have children. And I mean, you'll appreciate this at LifeSite News. They were

00:20:00.480 hell-bent on abortion. I mean, the Bolsheviks had been pushing abortion since Lenin wrote a piece 0.66

00:20:08.280 in January 1913 for Pravda, calling for the unconditional annulment of all laws prohibiting

00:20:13.820 abortion. And then they fully legalized it in Russia, Bolshevik Russia in 1920. And it was just

00:20:19.500 a worldwide thing for the party, right? I mean, you aborted your children, period. The Communist

00:20:25.220 Manifesto says, abolition of the family, exclamation mark. Even the most radical flare

00:20:30.420 up of this infamous proposal of the communists. So she wanted to have children. The party told her

00:20:36.700 no. Bunch of other different reasons, other things that happened. And she came to kind of just frankly

00:20:42.140 realize how evil the party was. She came to agree with her church. As Pius XI said in Divinity 0.93

00:20:49.960 Redemptorist, 1937, that communism was a satanic scourge orchestrated by the sons of darkness.

00:20:57.860 The church taught that it was literally out of the pit of hell. And Bella came to believe that

00:21:02.880 and tried to pull away, tried to pull away, tried to pull away. Finally, in June 1948, they expelled her.

00:21:10.480 And the press release that they put forth that the AP and everybody else reported,

00:21:15.580 and John Henry, you'll appreciate this. You've been smeared. You've had character assassination

00:21:21.200 like I have. The AP reporter calls her up and says, Dr. Dodd, we have a statement from the Communist 0.65

00:21:27.480 Party. It says here that you are anti-Negro, anti-Puerto Rican, anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, pro-fascist. 0.94

00:21:36.960 Do you have any comment? And she said, no, I have no comment. And she realized, she said, look, 0.93

00:21:47.260 this is the same thing that I did when I was in the party. This is what I did to Congressman Hamilton

00:21:52.300 Fish. This is what I did to RAP. This is what I did to Kodair. This is what I did to everybody else. 0.63

00:21:58.520 I'm just getting a taste of my own medicine. And now it was her turn. So that began for a period of

00:22:06.040 1948 to 51, 52, where she's kind of on her knees and wondering, where do I go from here?

00:22:14.520 And that's when she started coming back to the faith of her youth.

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00:22:39.820 at give.lifesitenews.com. And now back to the video.

00:22:48.340 She had an interaction with Fulton J. Sheen. Is he the one actually that led her back to the faith or?

00:22:53.040 He was. It was him more than anybody else. So 1951, she goes to Washington. She meets with her

00:23:00.760 congressman, Congressman McGrath from the Brooklyn area. And she's just completely wiped out. She's

00:23:08.100 trying to find a way to make some money. Congressman McGrath says to her, he says,

00:23:13.740 Bella, isn't there anything I could do for you? And she says, no, I've got not just the KGB following

00:23:19.540 me. I have the FBI following me, right? I don't know what I'm going to do. I fear for my life.

00:23:25.400 You know, she knew as Whitaker Chambers did. Her friend, Juliet Points, had been killed by the

00:23:30.900 communists when she defected. When she left the party, she said, yeah, I'm at the end of my rope.

00:23:36.000 I don't know what to do. And McGrath said to her, would you like to see a priest? And she said,

00:23:41.780 just kind of out from the pit of her gut, she said, yes, yes, I'd like to see a priest.

00:23:49.380 So Congressman McGrath turns to his secretary, Rose, and says, Rose, why don't you see if you

00:23:54.380 can get a hold of Monsignor Sheen from Catholic University? So they called him up, got a hold of

00:24:00.680 him. And he said, tell Dr. Dodd to come to my apartment tonight in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

00:24:06.040 So Dodd goes there, knocks on the door, opens the door. She said, he stood there just like on TV.

00:24:12.940 He's got the big, giant pectoral cross. And instead of saying to me, you know, in the language of how

00:24:20.260 she would have been treated by the Bolsheviks, by her comrades, she said, instead of saying to me, 0.98

00:24:25.700 you old Bolshevik bag, you hag, how dare you, you know, get out of here. She said, Dr. Dodd, 1.00

00:24:33.080 I'm so happy that you came. I'm so glad that you came. Come on inside. And they went inside and he

00:24:39.380 put his arm around her on her shoulder and she just started to weep. She just fell apart. She just

00:24:45.280 started crying. And he said, there, there, it's okay. It's okay. Let it all out. And she said,

00:24:50.620 she doesn't, didn't even know how it happened. But minutes later, she's in his private chapel with him

00:24:57.020 in front of a statue of the blessed mother. And they're just praying and talking. And he handed

00:25:03.740 her a rosary. And he said, look, I'm going to be going back to New York in the spring. Why don't

00:25:09.040 you come visit me at the offices for the propagation of the faith? And I could give you instruction to

00:25:13.920 come back into the Catholic church. And she said, I'll do that. I'll do that. So that was the spring 0.83

00:25:19.860 of 1952. He gave her instruction and she was baptized at St. Patrick's Cathedral on,

00:25:27.660 heard her confession, baptized on April 7th, 1952.

00:25:32.560 There's something puzzling about this. Maybe we should go first to this. She knew some of the

00:25:39.340 infiltrators and even worked with them as communist sort of spies, if you will. She even knew four in

00:25:45.720 the Vatican. Is that not right? That's what she claims. And I should follow up with this.

00:25:50.540 So this is quite fascinating. Sheen heard her confession on April 7th, 1952. On the front page

00:25:59.420 of the New York Times, ladies and gentlemen, all right, the front page of the New York Times,

00:26:05.340 April 27th, 1952. So this is three weeks after he hears the confession of Belladot.

00:26:12.660 Fulton Sheen gets on a plane or a boat, I don't know how, to cross the Atlantic to go to Rome,

00:26:18.620 okay? And the New York Times that day ran an article, all right? Page one, it says, quote,

00:26:26.700 this is the headline, Sheen in Rome says red agents tried to infiltrate the priesthood.

00:26:33.520 American communists were under secret orders in 1936 to infiltrate the Roman Catholic priesthood,

00:26:40.340 Bishop Fulton Sheen said today. By the way, so for anybody listening to us who thinks

00:26:45.140 they still don't believe Belladot, do you believe Fulton Sheen? Okay. The 57-year-old auxiliary bishop

00:26:52.180 of New York, speaking before an overflowing congregation in the American Catholic Church

00:26:57.680 of Santa Susana, said, quote, in 1936, the communist wolves went into the forces which control

00:27:06.400 public opinion. There was hardly a prominent newspaper commentator who did not have a communist

00:27:11.400 secretary, although he or she did not necessarily know it. And here you go. This was the beginning

00:27:17.340 of the planning of forces of evil communism within the religious communities to destroy them from

00:27:23.900 within. A call for volunteers to enter religious orders and make the great sacrifices of the life of

00:27:32.460 a seminarian was made at a secret red meeting in a large American city, unquote. Now, that's April 27th.

00:27:42.020 That's three weeks after he heard Belladot's confession. John Henry, where is he getting that

00:27:47.220 but from Belladot? 1936, a call goes out, red meeting, large American city. I mean, clearly, that's where he

00:27:55.740 got that. That's where that came from. Now, does that mean he got it from her in the confessional?

00:28:01.300 He probably got it from her during the months of instruction prior to that, frankly. And it was the

00:28:06.580 only time that I could ever find where Sheen publicly said that. After that, Sheen must have

00:28:12.600 kind of come to his senses and thought, you know, this is going to cause major scandal in the church.

00:28:18.240 And just like I told Belladot, I need to be careful. I know this is sensational. I know this is a big

00:28:23.920 deal. I got to zip it up and I can't talk about it. Let's just fight it. Let's just find a way to go

00:28:31.540 fight it. But that is a public acknowledgement from Fulton Sheen speaking in a church in Rome

00:28:37.140 reported on the front page of the New York Times, April 27th, 1952, completely consistent with what

00:28:44.360 Belladot said in the year in which she would have done it, 1936. The only question is, again, to what

00:28:53.300 extent did it succeed? And did those people that went in become priests and infiltrators and go out

00:29:00.460 and sow discord and cause the problems that they did? I mean, there's all sorts of things around

00:29:05.440 communism. We had the P2 list that named some of the people as well in the Vatican. You've had,

00:29:11.420 there was a book, AA 1024, that caused all sorts of controversy. Do you address that in your book and

00:29:16.800 the source of it? Yeah, I do. And that's one of those books that frustrates me because I feel like the

00:29:22.500 documentation isn't good and it's too speculative, right? So you hear about this person whose car

00:29:28.440 wrecked and then they've, somebody at the hospital found this in the back. And I mean, I love that

00:29:33.920 stuff, right? But as a historian, I need to pin that down more. And what's great about the

00:29:41.880 Belladot stuff and what we've tried to do in this book is we pinned it down, or at least to the best

00:29:47.080 that we can. Now, I will say here on the air, and I say it in the book, and I walk through it in the

00:29:52.640 book, it is frustrating to not have know any of these priests who did that, right? To not have

00:30:00.480 the name of anybody who's ever come forward and said, I was one of the guys who infiltrated. But

00:30:05.140 then again, they would probably be ashamed of what they did. Or if they were genuine infiltrators

00:30:12.320 who continue the infiltration and the sabotaging from within, they're not going to go out and talk

00:30:17.240 about that, right? They're not going to come out and publicly admit that. So the fact that we don't

00:30:22.960 know who those people were, it's frustrating. I wish I knew, but we do know we've documented that

00:30:30.640 the intention was there. And let me say too, while I'm on this show, if there's anybody out there

00:30:36.320 watching us right now, like Sherry Finn, who's still alive in Redondo Beach, who heard this

00:30:42.540 directly from Belladot, or like the Leiningers who heard her say it publicly, and the only time that

00:30:48.240 I know that she said it publicly, please reach out to me, please reach out to us, because Belladot died

00:30:54.420 in 1869. And I bet there are still people alive who heard her say this. And, you know, I think it'll

00:31:02.460 be a tall order to get anybody to contact us who was an infiltrator, right? But at least if there's

00:31:09.360 witnesses to her saying it, I'd like to continue to document that.

00:31:13.960 On the question of the infiltrators themselves coming forward, I think at some point, people

00:31:20.940 realize what they're doing, and then they feel ashamed, yes. But it's a lot better to come forward

00:31:26.960 and confess publicly where you can help the church right now, than to go and face your maker with

00:31:32.420 that on your soul. It does a lot for you to come forward. So please, God, some do come forward.

00:31:37.540 And if they if they do come forward from seeing in this show, you better call me so that we can do

00:31:42.080 that together. But that would just be great, because it'd be for their own benefit as well,

00:31:46.140 as well as for the church right now.

00:31:47.760 And others might have gone forward and did. I mean, look at ideas like liberation theology,

00:31:53.220 right? I mean, that, you know, that's a Marxist based influence idea within the church.

00:31:59.280 So you could see infiltrators going and leading something like that. We talk about the refusal

00:32:05.780 of the Vatican and Vatican II to issue what was really needed, a very strong public statement

00:32:12.480 condemning communism. In fact, one of your writers at LifeSide News a few years ago published the

00:32:18.940 unpublished schemas from Vatican II condemning communism, which were relegated to a footnote,

00:32:24.140 a footnote. Just so that everybody understands. So before the councils, it was they had

00:32:31.080 documents prepared. The best researchers in the church would go through and prepare documents on

00:32:37.800 the issues of the day that are most contentious or problematic or whatever, because the councils

00:32:41.960 were meant to sort things out and make them very clear. So they had this on life, on family and all

00:32:48.660 sorts of things, including on communism, which, as you said earlier in the program, had been vehemently

00:32:54.540 condemned by the church. But they actually threw out all the schemas. There was even more than that

00:33:01.460 with regard to communism in the Second Vatican Council. Please explain, if you would.

00:33:04.940 It's even worse than that, because, I mean, the church had been so beautifully consistent.

00:33:09.820 This is, a lot of Catholics don't know this today, this history, but, so the Communist 0.88

00:33:14.500 Manifesto was published in 1848. In 1846, two years before the Manifesto was published,

00:33:22.520 Pope Pius IX, in one of his first encyclicals—so he was pope from 1846 to 1878, a 32-year-long

00:33:30.440 pontificate—published qui pluribus, which condemned communism and predicted how awful it would be,

00:33:38.400 how damaging and how destructive it would be. So Pius IX issued these statements. Leo XIII

00:33:43.840 issued a bunch of statements. Pius XI did. Divinity Redemptorists, right, describing communism as a

00:33:51.780 satanic scourge in 1837. The Pius XII statements. Pius XII in 1949 issued the papal decree against

00:33:59.880 communism, which would excommunicate people who supported communists or voted for communists or

00:34:06.760 who published pro-communist stuff in publications. So the church was so totally, totally against—

00:34:13.820 by the way, which is why what people think today—well, why would Fulton Sheen have told her not to talk

00:34:19.200 about it? Was it really that scandalous? Oh, yeah. There was no institution on the planet that had so

00:34:25.140 opposed communism like the Catholic Church, describing it as literally satanic. So to find out publicly that

00:34:32.240 over a thousand communists may have been implanted in Catholic seminaries, whoa! I mean, that would have

00:34:38.140 been a major eruption in the church. So leading up to Vatican II, with all of that history, gosh,

00:34:45.520 you're going to expect Vatican II to have a really intense condemnation of communism, especially at the

00:34:51.420 height of the Cold War. But apparently, I think through probably John XXIII and some other cardinals and

00:34:59.280 other individuals around him, right, they were able to maneuver and manipulate this in a way that

00:35:07.020 stopped many frustrated cardinals in the church from issuing a clear condemnation of communism.

00:35:14.480 And could that have been caused by infiltrators in the church who at that point had made their way

00:35:20.100 that high up into the hierarchy? It's possible. It's entirely—that's speculation, but that's possible.

00:35:25.820 What do you think are the biggest takeaways for us today?

00:35:29.480 A lot of people in the church today do not understand this history. They don't understand

00:35:33.640 just how dangerous communism was. I mean, the Jesuits, America Magazine, which is the leading

00:35:40.220 Jesuit publication in America, in July 2019 published an article called The Catholic Case for Communism.

00:35:47.560 The Catholic Case for Communism, written by a member of the Canadian Communist Party.

00:35:53.080 And it included an accompanying article by the editor of America Magazine explaining why we published an

00:36:01.140 article called The Catholic Case for Communism. I mean, what are they going to publish next? The

00:36:04.500 Catholic Case for Atheism, right? The Catholic Case for Satanism? The Catholic Case for—there is no 0.90

00:36:11.120 Catholic Case for Communism. That would have gotten America Magazine excommunicated under the papal decree

00:36:16.460 of 1949. But people today don't know any of this stuff. They don't get it. They haven't been educated.

00:36:24.740 And a lot of it is because of how poor and terrible and how much of a failure our Catholic institutions 1.00

00:36:30.540 have become, especially as some of our Catholic schools, our Catholic colleges and universities.

00:36:35.360 So they don't know any of this. And Bella Dodd, she said that above all, the worst forms of infiltration

00:36:43.100 that she was part of, not just the churches and seminaries, but education, education, education.

00:36:51.820 And she realized that that was the place, that was the one medium, the one institution where the

00:36:58.300 communists wanted to take control and foment their destructive ideas. And I think that's where today,

00:37:05.340 we're seeing the fruits of this, you know, the poison fruit of this rotten tree.

00:37:14.400 Today, the church is most confusing because as bad as that America Magazine article was

00:37:19.560 back in 2019, you today have an official agreement, unseen by anybody, but an official agreement

00:37:27.300 signed by Pope Francis with the Communist Chinese Party to allow the Communist Party to select

00:37:34.980 bishops in China, basically exposing the underground church because they were encouraged by Pope Francis

00:37:40.720 to come out. God willing, many of them didn't. But anyway, you have that going on. And at the same

00:37:46.960 time, and this is to me, one of the worst things in the world, Cardinal Joseph Zen comes begging the

00:37:53.900 Holy Father to see him out of his grave concern about Catholics in China being persecuted.

00:37:58.920 The Pope refuses to see him. While he sees people like James Martin, all sorts of homosexual groups

00:38:08.080 trying to infiltrate the church. What do you make of that?

00:38:11.320 It's utterly scandalous. And in fact, that America Magazine piece, if you look it up right now,

00:38:17.240 the photo with the article is Bolivian dictator Ivo Morales handing a communist crucifix to a grinning

00:38:28.840 Pope Francis. And I collect this stuff, these quotes from Pope Francis. The only thing I've ever found

00:38:35.040 from Pope Francis on Marxism, he said in a 2013 interview, he said, quote, the Marxist ideology is

00:38:41.740 wrong. But I have many good friends who are Marxists, right? So that is the only thing that

00:38:48.940 he's ever said on it. One time. I mean, you need somebody out taking the lead on this stuff and

00:38:56.580 repeatedly condemning it. But that's it. That's the total extent of what he said about it. And when

00:39:02.100 you look at his actions in China, and his close bishop, Sarando, said, I wish I could get the quote

00:39:08.600 right off the top of my head, something to the effect of no one represents the social of the

00:39:13.720 gospel, the social gospel of the church better than the Chinese, or something like that. You can 0.99

00:39:18.700 get that exact quote. You hear that and you think, did he actually say that? That is, I think that's

00:39:26.360 the worst thing maybe I've ever heard. That is one of the craziest, inexplicable, fatuous, 0.99

00:39:37.180 nonsensical things I've ever heard in my life on anything. And then shortly after that, we see all

00:39:45.400 that's happened with the Pope in China. And by the way, he's been very bad too on Nicaragua and Daniel

00:39:51.320 Ortega and, you know, the Marxist persecution of the church there as well. So this Pope who I like to

00:39:59.240 say, I can't call him a Marxist or even pro-communist, but he's soft on communism. He's not good on

00:40:06.480 communism. He's bad on communism. It doesn't make him a Marxist, but it makes him bad on the subject

00:40:15.440 and really kind of oblivious to it. And it's really caused significant damage. This has all

00:40:23.060 been a grave disappointment. I actually defend Pope Francis a lot, all the time. He's been great on

00:40:29.860 life issues and he's been good on traditional marriage, but on so many other things, including

00:40:36.740 this, it's just really disappointing. Any final thoughts for us, Pope?

00:40:40.820 In the case of Bella Dodd, a takeaway lesson from this for people, be not afraid to quote Pope John

00:40:48.580 Paul II's famous admonition from the scriptures. This was a woman who was a courageous witness.

00:40:54.500 She fought against what she described as the devil of communism. She took a lot of heat for it. 0.69

00:41:01.700 John Paul II took a bullet from communists on the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima, May 13th, 1981,

00:41:08.980 two bullets. Bella Dodd could have taken a bullet as well. And at the very least, her character, 0.99

00:41:14.820 she faced character assassination from the communists. But here was a brave, courageous woman

00:41:20.160 woman who fought the good fight, didn't care what people said about her, didn't care about the 1.00

00:41:26.240 cancel culture of her day. And I think that's a lesson for guys like me and you, John Henry.

00:41:33.000 LifeSite News, you guys are fearless. And other Catholics out there, just be not afraid, stand for

00:41:38.780 the truth, fight evil. Dr. Paul Kangar, thank you so much for being with us. It's great to be with you.

00:41:43.140 Thank you. God bless you and God bless all of you. And we'll see you next time.

00:41:47.480 Every single day, there are new developments in the culture war. You need to stay on top of the

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The John-Henry Westen Show - December 21, 2022

1,000+ Communist Priests Infiltrated the Catholic Church in America

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