FEATURE
Communist infiltration? Kevin J. Symonds looks at the curious history of Dr Bella Dodd and the Catholic Church
D
r Bella Dodd, the famous Communist lawyer who reverted to the Catholic Faith of her youth, is said to have planted some 1,200 men into Catholic seminaries. These men are said to be either Communists or Communist sympathisers who would “co-opt” the Church into serving Communism. This story was a cornerstone of arguments set out in 2002 and 2018 in various publications, in discussions of clerical sex abuse to explain the scandal. A talk given by Dodd, however, has recently surfaced that challenges this understanding of Bella Dodd and the infiltration of the Catholic Church. 1961 Detroit Lecture In a talk Dodd gave in Detroit on 1 September, 1961, she was asked the following question: “Have you ever met Communists among the Catholic clergy and if so, were these people ever exposed?” Dodd responded: “I never met a Ca-, uh, Communist, uh, who was, uh, a member of the Catholic clergy. Now I say that, not because I’m a Catholic. Because I was familiar with a number of the young ministers in the Protestant, uh, among the Protestant clergy. God bless some of them. They wanted so much to do good. “The Communist Party used to raise money to send them to seminaries, which would last maybe for one year, two years. And, uh, then they’d come back and preach the social doctrine. Now, I never had met anyone in the Ca-, uh, among the Catholic clergy. That doesn’t mean that they may not be [Communist]! My feeling is that, uh, the long years of [slight pause] preparation required for the Catholic clergy may deter, uh, the Communist Party line as to putting people in.” Dodd’s statement appears to run contrary to what many believed about her for many years. Let us see, however, whether there is a contradiction by looking at how some of the more important publications that discussed Bella Dodd discussed the story.
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Bella Dodd: ‘no control over admitting someone to a seminary’
Historical background The November 2000 issue of Christian Order published an article entitled “The Greatest Conspiracy” and listed “The Editor” (Rod Pead) as the author. The overall picture painted by Pead is the following. There was a worldwide directive in the 1930s from Communist leadership ordering the infiltration of the Catholic Church. Remarks are attributed to Bella Dodd about 1,100 men being put into the priesthood to destroy “the Church from within.” After some editorializing, Dodd is again attributed as having said that these infiltrators were “right now [working] in the highest places in the Church” and that the Catholic Church would be unrecognizable. Not everyone was a cardcarrying Communist as some were just “young radicals,” according to Pead. Regretfully, the article does not provide citations and the statements attributed to Dodd and others cannot be verified. Several months later, the publication The Latin Mass Magazine published an interview with the famous Catholic philosopher Dr Alice von Hildebrand.
The interview was entitled “Present at the Demolition” and published in the magazine’s Summer, 2001 issue. During the interview, Dr von Hildebrand made a statement about Bella Dodd and the Church being infiltrated: “It is a matter of public record, for instance, that Bella Dodd, the ex-Communist who reconverted to the Church, openly spoke of the Communist Party’s deliberate infiltration of agents into the seminaries. She told my husband and me that when she was an active party member, she had dealt with no fewer than four cardinals within the Vatican ‘who were working for us’.” Dr von Hildebrand presents two claims: 1) Bella Dodd “openly spoke of the Communist Party’s deliberate infiltration of agents into the seminaries,” and 2) Dodd privately told the von Hildebrands that she “dealt with no fewer than four cardinals” who were working for Communism within the Vatican. Whether they were actual Communists or just friendly to it was not specified. Von Hildebrand maintained her two claims in the public forum in later years. In December, 2002, after the clerical sex abuse scandal arose within the United States, Sandra Miesel wrote an article entitled “Swinging at Windmills: A Close Look at Catholic Conspiracy Theories” for Crisis Magazine. In it, Miesel referenced Bella Dodd: “Dodd implausibly claimed to have sent a thousand young men into American seminaries….” Dr Alice von Hildebrand responded in April, 2003 in a letter to the editor of Crisis entitled “A Final Swing.” Dr von Hildebrand affirmed her two claims from her 2001 interview and added new details. For example, she claimed that Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Dodd’s director, had forbidden her to reveal the names of the four cardinals. Dr von Hildebrand also claimed that Dodd gave a talk in Orange, California in which she admitted she had been told to infiltrate the Catholic seminaries with “Young men who had neither faith nor morals”.
SUMMER 2021
