1,000+ Communist Priests Infiltrated the Catholic Church in America
Summary
On the front page of the New York Times on April 27th, 1952, a newspaper article ran an article saying that Communists had infiltrated the priesthood of the Catholic Church. Is it a myth? Or is it true? In this episode of the John Henry Weston Show, we talk to author Paul Kengor about the communist infiltrations of the priesthood, and what it means for the church today.
Transcript
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On the front page of the New York Times, ladies and gentlemen, April 27, 1952, ran an article,
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page one, Sheen in Rome says red agents tried to infiltrate the priesthood. There was no
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institution on the planet that had so opposed communism like the Catholic Church, describing
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it as literally satanic. As Pius XI said in Divinity Redemptorist 1937, that communism was
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a satanic scourge orchestrated by the sons of darkness. The church taught that it was
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literally out of the pit of hell. And Bella came to believe that and tried to pull away.
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The church is in a total uproar. And one of the things that might help to explain that
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is infiltration, infiltration of the church by communists who were actually sent in to be
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priests, as communists, sent in to be priests to infiltrate the church on purpose. Sound
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incredible? Well, it's not. Because you know what? It was testified to by an ex-communist.
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Her name was Bella Dodd. She was known to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and lots of other witnesses.
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We're going to talk to now the author of a new book on Bella Dodd and what this all means
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for the church today. You're going to want to stay tuned for this one.
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the world. Also, don't forget to pray with your financial gift. Every little bit helps. So thank
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you and may God bless you. Paul Kengor, welcome to the program. It is so good to be with you. I'm a
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fan. I've followed you and LifeSite News for years, and this is actually the first time we've ever met,
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strangely enough. But thank you so much, John Henry. Good to meet you, Paul. Let's begin as we
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always do it with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
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Ghost. Amen. This is incredibly interesting, and I know there's been a lot of folklore around it.
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Is it really true? Is it a myth? You've got the details and the evidence, which is just incredible.
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But tell us first a little bit about yourself, just so people know where you're coming from.
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I was born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I had kind of a major
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career switch when I left medicine. I actually worked for the organ transplant team at the
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University of Pittsburgh in the late 1980s and went into, it was the end of the Cold War. And so I
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became fascinated by that, the causes of it, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev, that whole
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cast of characters, communism. And then eventually in the 1990s, I decided to go to graduate school,
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and that became my focus. I should add here, too, from a faith perspective, I was not a Christian.
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I became a Christian really early in the mid-1990s through evangelicals. So even though I was baptized
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Catholic and I consider myself a convert to the Catholic faith, I guess I'm really technically a
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revert. But I came into the Catholic Church, I converted to the Catholic Church in April 2005,
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right when Pope John Paul II died. And he was a major player, major factor in my conversion.
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I've written probably about 20 books and on subjects like communism, Karl Marx. I did a book called A
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Pope and a President, Ronald Reagan and John Paul II. So this has really been my career subject and
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following. And when I heard about Bella Dodd's claims quite a few years ago, I was absolutely fascinated.
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And to kind of jump right in how the dovetails into this book, John Henry, what really frustrated
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me is I would read things on the internet about what Bella Dodd allegedly said. And you can find memes
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and all kinds of things and even audio where she seems to be talking and maybe she is talking and
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she's speaking to the Senate or at some place wherever in the 1950s and 1960s. And then the voiceover just
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freezes. And on the screen comes this language about what she allegedly said. And it would like source
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it to her memoirs. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not in her memoirs. She did not talk about
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it in her memoirs. Or it would make up some Senate testimony. And I'd say, no, no, no, no, it's not in
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her Senate testimony. It became really an intense project of one even documenting that she in fact
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said what she said beyond the whole question of whether or not she did what she said, all of which
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I know we're going to get into. So that's a little bit of background on me. Amazing. Just so that people
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know, the name of the book is The Devil and Bella Dodd, One Woman's Struggle Against Communism and Her
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Redemption. It's available through TAN Books and its co-author is Mary Nichols. So Dr. Paul Kangor,
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first of all, let's get into what exactly she said. What was her message regarding infiltration of the
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church? So she said that she helped place, quote, over a thousand communist men, unquote, in Catholic
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seminaries. And the number, sometimes you hear eleven hundred, sometimes you hear twelve hundred,
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but it's around a thousand altogether. And she, one of the first episodes where we know that she
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said that, she was talking to Alice von Hildebrand and Dietrich von Hildebrand. Now, these are two
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very, very credible sources. In fact, Alice died just last year. I think it was January 2022.
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She was maybe 98 years old, I believe. She was up there. Dietrich died many years ago. It's been
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quite a while. But we interviewed Alice for the book. My co-author did, Mary Nichols. And Alice is
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on record saying this in her memoirs, in a piece for Crisis Magazine, in several other different
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written, a number of different times she wrote it down. She's on YouTube saying it in an interview
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with Michael Voris, of Church Militant. Let's take a break right now and take a look at that testimony.
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Bella Dodd gave a talk in Orange, California, in which she declared publicly, I repeat publicly,
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that in the course of the 20 years of activities for the communists, she recruited some eleven hundred
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young men, neither faith, nor moral, that entered seminaries. And they were so superbly trained
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that it was not that easy to detect them because in many ways they seem to be orthodox. But then
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it's a big poison here and a big poison there. And Al-Saint said, spread doubt.
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It was Alice and Dietrich who met with Bella Dodd in the 1960s. And she's given the date. John
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Henry, she is so consistent in this. I mean, she is, you can tell she's a scholar. She's a thinker.
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She's an intellectual. Her words in describing what Bella says every time are almost verbatim.
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I mean, there's just a complete consistency. And Dietrich had said to Bella Dodd, you know,
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I just have this feeling that the church has been infiltrated. And Bella Dodd said in her kind of
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New York Italian accent, you feel it? I know it. And he said, you know it? Tell me. What do you mean?
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And then she explained what she did. Now, she said this usually only privately.
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We found an occasion where she said it in a speech in Orange County, California in the 1960s. And
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apparently that speech was attended by about 600 to 800 people. Two witnesses to that speech
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were Janine Leininger and her husband. And in fact, my friend Kevin Simmons actually knew the
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Leiningers and got a hold of them and took them and got them to sign a smart affidavit saying that
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they heard Bella say this publicly. Janine just died, I think it was last June, when we were just
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in the process of finishing this book. So that was one occasion where she said publicly that she did it.
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She also, another witness that heard her say it is a woman named Sherry Finn, who was about 82 years
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old. She lives in Redondo Beach, California. She heard Bella say it at a dinner party. It was Sherry
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and her husband and another couple in Plano, Texas, near Plano, Texas, where Bella had gone to teach
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in the 1960s. And we interviewed Sherry for the book. And Sherry's still alive. And Sherry said,
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yeah, I will never forget this. Sherry even said, I've heard the numbers, 1,000, 1,100, 1,200.
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She said, that's what Bella said to us as well. So these were private occasions. And the reason why
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she didn't say it publicly, except maybe on that one occasion, apparently the one occasion where she
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let her guard down and said something in Orange County, California, was that according to Alice
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von Hildebrand, Fulton Sheen forbade Bella Dodd to talk about it publicly. He thought that this would
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cause scandal in the church. And she even said to him, she said, Bishop Sheen, I feel like I should go
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into the most severe penitential order on the planet. We know this too, from Alice von Hildebrand,
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to make reparation for my sins and what I did. And Fulton Sheen, John Henry said to her, actually said
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kind of the same thing that Pope Pius XI said to Fulton Sheen. He said, no, I don't want you to do
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that. I want you instead to go out and warn the world about the evils of communism. I want you to go
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out there and tell everybody about what has happened and the dangers that are out there.
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But he didn't want her to name names. And honestly, we go through this very, very carefully in the book.
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It's the longest chapter in the book. I don't know if by the 1950s or 1960s, she could have named names.
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She would have been doing this in the middle 1930s. The party was notorious for destroying all of their
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records. Bella, who was an attorney for the party, destroyed records. She admitted later that she did
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this in the Rapp-Coderre hearings in New York. She set the stuff on fire. She shredded it.
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And she knew that it was illegal. To this day, I say this as a lifelong communist researcher,
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you cannot find a document anywhere that lists all Communist Party USA members.
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They got rid of that stuff. They didn't keep that stuff. So she could have helped recruit
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or been a middleman, middle lady in the whole endeavor without being able to remember or name names.
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By the 1960s. And let me back up a little more. Why would the party have gone to her for this?
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Because she was a master organizer for the party. She organized the teachers front. She organized the
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New York State Teachers Union. Out of 10,000 members, Bella testified to this in her Congress.
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The FBI had these numbers. The Senate had these numbers. Out of 10,000 members of the New York State
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Teachers Union in the 1930s. She helped plant 1,000 to 1,500 Communist Party members. So for her to
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think, if the party would have went to her and said, okay, you put 1,000 to 1,500 Communist
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teachers out of 10,000 in the Teachers Union, you think you could do this with a priesthood? Well,
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we give data on this in the book. By the 1960s, by Vatican II, there were 60,000 priests
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in the United States. So she would have said, yeah, yeah, 1,000 teachers out of 10,000 in the
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Teachers Union. You don't think I could put 1,000 men out of 60,000 in seminaries? That's
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a cinch. This is what she did. She was a master organizer. So she would have saluted the red flag.
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She had, in the 1936 May Day Parade in New York City, she had 500 Communist teachers marching.
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I mean, this is what they did. They were organizers. They were infiltrators. So this would have been
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something that she felt confident that she could have at least attempted to do.
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Do we have any details? I mean, because it seems sometimes far-fetched that someone would sort of
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give up his life and embrace, does he embrace celibacy? Well, it just would go into a priesthood
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and live their lives for this cause. But how did that work out?
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We quote in the book, Blessed Solanus Casey. In fact, it's the main biography of Solanus Casey,
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and his biographer almost mentions this in passing. In fact, he kind of takes a snide shot at Solanus
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Casey for being kind of giving in here to the whole red scare mentality of the day, right?
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But Solanus Casey said, oh, yeah, we knew about the red infiltrators. He said they were easy to spot
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because they were very disciplined and very smart, but not very devout. And so he even talked about
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seeing these people, encountering these people. Now, and I would add this, too. This is, I think,
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quite significant. The party did this up and down with the Protestant denominations,
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the mainline denominations. I mean, this was testified before Congress by Manning Johnson,
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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,
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you're supposed to be an atheist to be a party member. So how could you have a party member who's
00:16:25.020
an atheist being an active preacher in churches? Well, they're infiltrators. But that was easier to
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do in Protestant churches than in Catholic churches, where the seminary process for priests was so much
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more exhaustive, right? So much longer, where the rector had to recommend you, right? You had to go
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through a long, long, long, long, long, long process to make it through. So I would bet that
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if Bella tried to help place a thousand communists in seminaries, that they probably didn't put very
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many through. But those that did stay in, maybe they stayed in and became lukewarm Catholics or not
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really true Catholics, but they were left of center theologically. But Manning Johnson said that it was a
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truism in Communist Party organizing, that if you could place just 60 to 70 people in an organization
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out of 10,000, just 1%, or even less than 1%, you could control the organization. So the goal might
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be 1,000. But if you can get in less than 100, a well-placed 100, that's significant. My friend Herb
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Romerstein used to call these agents of influence that could be even more influential than somebody
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who was an outright spy working for the Kremlin, like Whitaker Chambers, for example. But Bella
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Dodd was kind of like a female Whitaker Chambers.
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Bella Dodd then converts. Take us through that, if you will.
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She really went through the ringer. She started getting involved with the party in the 1930s,
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1932. In 1943, she consented to being an open, card-carrying communist. Now, that was a big deal
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because most of them were underground. But she was so high up in the National Committee
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and doing so much, probably the highest-ranking woman in the party at that point, that at that
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point, she might as well go public with it. So she became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party
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in 1943, same year that Barack Obama's mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, joined the Communist Party.
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In fact, we have Davis's card number. It was 47544. Bella Dodd was, like Davis, a member of the FBI.
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She was on the FBI's Security Index. FBI was watching her all the time. That meant that if a war broke out
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between the United States and the Soviet Union, she could be placed under immediate arrest.
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Because when you joined the party, and we quote the loyalty oath in the 1935 loyalty oath in the
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book, they raised their hand and they said, I swear at all times to remain a firm defender of the
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Leninist line of the party, the only line that ensures the triumph of Soviet power in the United States.
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So they were what Herb Romerstein called loyal Soviet patriots. Their country was the Soviet Union.
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Like Langston Hughes said, we will turn it into the U-S-S-A when we take over. So she was hardcore.
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She was a Stalinist. She wasn't a small-C communist who said, no, I like them ideologically, but I don't want
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to join the party because I don't want to have to follow Moscow. No, she followed Moscow.
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And from 1943 to 48, so this is a long story, but she became disillusioned. She had different
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problems with the party. Among other things, the party didn't want her to have a family,
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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
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in January 1913 for Pravda, calling for the unconditional annulment of all laws prohibiting
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abortion. And then they fully legalized it in Russia, Bolshevik Russia in 1920. And it was just
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a worldwide thing for the party, right? I mean, you aborted your children, period. The Communist
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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
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no. Bunch of other different reasons, other things that happened. And she came to kind of just frankly
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realize how evil the party was. She came to agree with her church. As Pius XI said in Divinity
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Redemptorist, 1937, that communism was a satanic scourge orchestrated by the sons of darkness.
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The church taught that it was literally out of the pit of hell. And Bella came to believe that
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and tried to pull away, tried to pull away, tried to pull away. Finally, in June 1948, they expelled her.
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And the press release that they put forth that the AP and everybody else reported,
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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
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Party. It says here that you are anti-Negro, anti-Puerto Rican, anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, pro-fascist.
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Do you have any comment? And she said, no, I have no comment. And she realized, she said, look,
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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.
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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.
00:22:20.280
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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,
00:24:25.700
you old Bolshevik bag, you hag, how dare you, you know, get out of here. She said, Dr. Dodd,
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
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,
00:31:47.760
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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,
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
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
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