The Bella Dodd Accusation

[Pitcairn17]

Another thread raised the Bella Dodd “infiltration “ issue. I know Ven. Sheen supported this. Of course, the era in which this took place was rife with, for lack of a better term, paranoia about Communism - some if it justified, some of it perhaps not. A number of sources I’ve read seem to indicate the “infiltration “ charge was false. My question: did any hard proof for her charge ever emerge? Was a single such priest ever identified? If 1,000 infiltrators in fact existed and, having been ordained , served as priests for decades, I would have thought that there might have been a few “deathbed statements” of recantation or public confessions. Anything at all?

 

[Tis_Bearself]

I’d like to know myself. Bella Dodd is brought up all the time by Catholic conspiracy theorists, but I have not yet seen one name named. One would think that someone would have spoken up and named names by now, especially since most if not all the people she accused are all dead at this point. I have not been able to find anywhere any credible identification of any of the 1000 priests or 4 cardinals she claimed were working for the Communists.

 

[MarysLurker]

“Who” the Communist sympathizers were within the Church isn’t nearly important as “what” happened. The mistake of McCarthy, and that of many people today, is to focus on people and not ideas. Marxism is like a virus, spread unwittingly by well-meaning people who fail to recognize the doublespeak that’s used to conceal the actual Marxist ideas being spread. For example, many doctoral students are taught conflict theory, which is just Marxism by another name. Because the origin of the theory is not given, people assume it was created by such and such group of people and not by Marx. Conflict theory is now ubiquitous in our society, and hence, so is Marxism.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

I don’t approve of Marxism, but it’s reasonable to want to know some names. Senator Joe McCarthy was notorious for just claiming large numbers of people in government were Communist with no basis. Moreover, the conspiracy theorists often claim that these Communist infiltrators are somehow still wreaking havoc in the Church up to today.

I’m not quite to the point of “Names or it didn’t happen” but Bella just doesn’t seem credible to me, especially since she had a lot of reasons to be disgruntled with the Communist Party.

 

[niceatheist]

Marxism may be wrong, but it’s more about the conclusions that Marx and Engels drew. The notion of “class conflict” was pretty revolutionary, and gave another window on historical events. You couldn’t fully understand the Roman Social Wars or the early modern Peasant Uprisings in Europe without at least acknowledging that social class is a significant component of how societies function. As well, it wasn’t really until Marxist theory that we begin to see economics as critical to understanding social forces. Prior to Marx, history tended to be a long list of various kings, emperors, princes, noblemen and aristocrats bashing at each other, without really caring to understand what it was about those conflicts that made them happen. It’s why a student of history will understand that supposed “religious wars” like the Thirty Years War had far greater dimensions than simply trying to impose some brand of religion on each other, but that there were actual underlying political, social and economic forces underpinning the conflict.

I’m a firm believer that history really is about economics. It’s from Marx onward that that notion came forward. Not that Marxism is right. It certainly isn’t. Frankly, it’s biggest problem apart from anything else is that it is fundamentally Utopian in nature, and thus utterly unimplementable in reality. The Marxists will talk about how they’re going to overthrow the Bourgeoisie and then a workers democracy will just ensue, but it was pretty obvious from 1917 onward that all Marxism ever did was replace one group of autocrats with another, and that the post-revolutionary autocrats, no matter how much they invoked Marx and workers’ freedoms, were often worse tyrants than the ones they replaced (I suppose that’s debatable in Russia, where the Czarist regime was pretty darned awful, but at the very least we can say the Bolsheviks were about as bad).

 

[MarysLurker]

all Marxism ever did was replace one group of autocrats with another,

That’s all it ever does. That, and kill 98 million people and counting. There’s no way you can “rescue” Marxism and try to turn it into something good.

Let me put it to you this way. If we were to outlaw Marxism today, we’d easily solve the student debt problem because 99% of universities would close. That’s how pervasive it is. Pervasive with people wanting to keep trying to salvage good out of it. The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again expecting a different result.

Winners don’t do Marx.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

Marxism may be wrong, but it’s more about the conclusions that Marx and Engels drew. The notion of “class conflict” was pretty revolutionary, and gave another window on historical events. You couldn’t fully understand the Roman Social Wars or the early modern Peasant Uprisings in Europe without at least acknowledging that social class is a significant component of how societies function.

I’m not going to flag this, but your whole defense of Marxism is a bit off topic for the thread, which is specifically about whether Bella Dodd’s accusations were supported.

We could go back and forth on the politics of Marxism, Communism etc all day and given that you are an atheist you obviously don’t care about the most important thing to us, which is the suppression of God’s one Holy and Apostolic Church. Furthermore, those of us interested in the Bella Dodd topic don’t necessarily want to read a long series of back-and-forth posts having a political argument, unless this somehow relates to whether Bella Dodd was credible or had support.

Could you please not derail the Bella Dodd thread? If you want to have a discussion of Marxism generally, please go start one, preferably in Social Justice where it belongs and not in the Traditional Catholicism thread. Thanks.

 

[niceatheist]

I still think there’s some justice in saying that Marx’s theory did at least make economics a serious avenue for studying history. His conclusions were wrong, but the initial observations weren’t. The fact was that there had never been a systematic attempt to explain the economic and social underpinnings of history.

Outlawing Marxism would be a peculiar thing, to my mind. First of all, there aren’t even a lot of Marxists out there in the wild any more. Some in universities, but my impression is that even socialist economists view Marxist theory much like modern psychologists view Freud. Heck, even China isn’t really Marxist any more, it’s more lip service than a serious economic theory.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

Same comment I made to niceatheist.

General discussion of Marxism is off topic here; could you please not derail the thread? Please start a new thread if you and niceatheist want to discuss this topic further in Social Justice subforum.

 

[MarysLurker]

That’s a good idea. Thanks.

 

[MarysLurker]

whether Bella Dodd was credible or had support.

I do think that Bella Dodd was credible. What has happened to the Church in the past 60 years is evidence enough. Only the Soviet Union had the motive, intent and opportunity to inject Marxism into the Church, which they were also doing in other organizations. It looks like their initial intent was to hijack the Church and use it to spread their ideology, but when the Church proved far more resistant than they expected, they settled on their “anti-apostle” strategy. I don’t think it will ever be possible to directly link the abuse scandal to the Soviet Union anymore than to link the rise of the drug culture, but circumstantial evidence is just as probative as direct evidence.

 

[Mi_Rose]

I have a hard time believing any of this. I know the abuse crisis has shown us a terrible side of some priests but without names and dates my inner skeptic reigns.

 

[Bushum]

I personally believe her but for discussion sake what was her motive for making it up? I certainly would never confess to some great scandal and then testify to the United States Congress something I never did. What did she gain from it? Her name is now known but it is in infamy.

 

[Pitcairn17]

Tis_Bearself:

whether Bella Dodd was credible or had support.

I do think that Bella Dodd was credible. What has happened to the Church in the past 60 years is evidence enough. Only the Soviet Union had the motive, intent and opportunity to inject Marxism into the Church, which they were also doing in other organizations. It looks like their initial intent was to hijack the Church and use it to spread their ideology, but when the Church proved far more resistant than they expected, they settled on their “anti-apostle” strategy. I don’t think it will ever be possible to directly link the abuse scandal to the Soviet Union anymore than to link the rise of the drug culture, but circumstantial evidence is just as probative as direct evidence.

Of course, correlation does not equal causation. Organizations from the Boy Scouts to the Southern Baptist Convention have had major abuse scandals, but nobody’s pointing to Russia for those. As the OP I’m not going to derail my own thread chasing Marxism. My whole issue is the apparent lack of a single, provable individual traceable to the “Dodd infiltration” - especially since, as the names of credibly accused priests and bishops have been publicized, their backgrounds and timelines have been pretty thoroughly investigated.

 

[MarysLurker]

Organizations from the Boy Scouts to the Southern Baptist Convention have had major abuse scandals, but nobody’s pointing to Russia for those.

But I think there is substantial cause to tie the sexual revolution to the USSR. The sexual revolution in turn infected all those organizations. In the case of the Catholic Church, there is further evidence of specific intent by the USSR to compromise the Church. “Liberation theology” didn’t just come out of left field. The Industrial Areas Foundation (Saul Alinsky) had direct communist influence. And so on.

Marie Carre also provides independent corroboration of Dodd’s testimony.

When the Romans threw Christians to the lions, nobody asked for direct evidence tying the intentions of the lions themselves to Caesar before concluding that Caesar ordered the show. Nobody cared what the names of the individual lions were. It was enough to prove that Caesar’s men bought the lions and some praetor affiliated with him arranged the encounter. Likewise here.

 

[phil19034]

The issue is that apparently Ven. Archbishop Sheen instructed Bella Dodd NOT to release the names she had to the public. Apparently, the Venerable Archbishop felt that releasing this information to the public would cause more harm than good.

If this is all true, I’m not sure what Archbishop Sheen did with the information that he was given, but he apparently instructed Bella not to tell the public.

 

[ontheway1]

spread unwittingly by well-meaning people who fail to recognize the doublespeak that’s used to conceal the actual Marxist ideas being spread.

And many of them are right hear complaining about conspiracy theories. Also, quite amusingly, they seem to believe in the Trump-collusion conspiracy theory. Makes one wonder.

 

[commenter]

“Who” the Communist sympathizers were within the Church isn’t nearly important as “what” happened. The mistake of McCarthy, and that of many people today, is to focus on people and not ideas. Marxism is like a virus, spread unwittingly by well-meaning people who fail to recognize the doublespeak that’s used to conceal the actual Marxist ideas being spread. For example, many doctoral students are taught conflict theory, which is just Marxism by another name. Because the origin of the theory is not given, people assume it was created by such and such group of people and not by Marx. Conflict theory is now ubiquitous in our society, and hence, so is Marxism.

Liberation Theology is an example of ideas (not card carrying Communists) penetrating the Catholic and Protestant churches. It taught that the Church is just one more part of the power structure, that “salvation” means political equality, nothing to do with eternity, or God.

 

[niceatheist]

There were allegations of sexual abuse in the Church long before the sexual Revolution. The Sexual Revolution seems to be the be-all for abuse scandals, and I frankly don’t buy it. In fact, I’d say the response of a lot of organizations to sexual abuse scandals is deeply rooted in how such scandals were historically dealt with; bury it, move the offenders away, and make it someone else’s problem. It’s unfair to nail the Catholic Church to the cross and not look at a very sad and long history of sexual abuse, both of minors and adults, in many large organizations, but the institutional response, whether it was a church, a children’s group, schools, police departments, government institutions, etc., is pretty typical of the “circle the wagons” mentality.

What changed for churches was the shift in larger society on transparency. Historically, the police, politicians and prosecutors were willing to help churches and other organizations sweep allegations under the rug. Take Ireland, for example, where the Church was practically a branch of the Irish government. It’s influence, political and social, was enormous, and eventually, as Ireland became more outward-facing, and yes, where Irish society became increasingly secular and less overawed by the Church, there was eventually an accounting.

It’s just too easy to blame outside forces for abuse. The fact was the Church, like many organizations, knew full well there were serious problems, but so long as they could rely upon outside authorities to help them bury allegations and look the other way as alleged offenders were moved out of the area, everyone was happy. Well, we don’t live in that era any more. Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and yes, some priests, could rely upon their influence or the influence of their superiors to escape justice. And the old rule always applies, as bad as a scandal is, burying scandals makes it all the worse.

 

[Pitcairn17]

— And before the Russian Revolution too, come to that. Well written.