THE GREATEST CONSPIRACY (Communist infiltration of the Church)

November 2000

THE GREATEST CONSPIRACY

THE EDITOR

A few months back, during social chit-chat which turned with predictable concern to the modern plague of clerical apostasy, a venerable member of the Society of Jesus recounted various word of mouth histories of Communist infiltration of the Jesuits. These included two men sent to join the Society in Italy and Spain by their respective national Communist Parties - the former having left to return to the Party in the early 1950s after more than a dozen years of study and actual ordination; the latter leaving the Society before ordination a decade ago. More disturbing still was the case of a prominent Jesuit seminary rector in Rome who, after being run over and killed, was allegedly found to be a member of the KGB. We pondered briefly all the imponderables of such infiltration as well as the domino effect it might have set in train, like: how many students were deformed by the seminary professor down the years; how many others, clerical and lay, they in turn, as priests, had corrupted; how many other seminaries and Orders were similarly infiltrated; and, above all, how many of the infiltrators and their warped progeny had risen to the episcopate.

In recent years this latter quandary in particular has emerged from the realms of much derided "conspiracy theory" to become a plausible contributory explanation for the otherwise inexplicable levels of corruption, negligence and indifference within Western episcopates. The fact that we will never precisely quantify the degree of infiltration and only rarely identify "plants" beyond all doubt, is no reason to ignore the reality. Besides, it's not as if we hadn't been warned. Ex-Communist and celebrated convert Douglas Hyde revealed long ago that in the 1930s the Communist leadership issued a worldwide directive about infiltrating the Catholic Church. While in the early 1950s, Mrs Bella Dodd was also providing detailed explanations of the Communist subversion of the Church. Speaking as a former high ranking official of the American Communist Party, Mrs Dodd said: "In the 1930s we put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within." The idea was for these men to be ordained and progress to positions of influence and authority as Monsignors and Bishops. A dozen years before Vatican II she stated that: "Right now they are in the highest places in the Church" - where they were working to bring about change in order to weaken the Church's effectiveness against Communism. She also said that these changes would be so drastic that "you will not recognise the Catholic Church."

Mrs Dodd, who converted to the Faith at the end of her life, was personally acquainted with this diabolic project since, as a Communist agent, part of her brief was to encourage young radicals (not always card-carrying Communists) to enter Catholic seminaries. She alone had encouraged nearly 1,000 such youngsters to infiltrate the seminaries and religious orders! One monk who attended a Bella Dodd lecture in the early 1950s recalled:

"I listened to that woman for four hours and she had my hair standing on end. Everything she said has been fulfilled to the letter. You would think she was the world's greatest prophet, but she was no prophet. She was merely exposing the step-by-step battle plan of Communist subversion of the Catholic Church. She explained that of all the world's religions, the Catholic Church was the only one feared by the Communists, for it was its only effective opponent. The whole idea was to destroy, not the institution of the Church, but rather the Faith of the people, and even use the institution of the Church, if possible, to destroy the Faith through the promotion of a pseudo-religion: something that resembled Catholicism but was not the real thing. Once the Faith was destroyed, she explained that there would be a guilt complex introduced into the Church…. to label the 'Church of the past' as being oppressive, authoritarian, full of prejudices, arrogant in claiming to be the sole possessor of truth, and responsible for the divisions of religious bodies throughout the centuries. This would be necessary in order to shame Church leaders into an 'openness to the world,' and to a more flexible attitude toward all religions and philosophies. The Communists would then exploit this openness in order to undermine the Church."

This conspiracy has been confirmed time and again by Soviet defectors. Ex-KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn, who defected in 1961 and in 1984 forecast with 94% accuracy all the astonishing developments in the Communist Bloc since that time, confirmed several years ago that this "penetration of the Catholic and other churches" is part of the Party's "general line [i.e. unchanged policy] in the struggle against religion." Hundreds of files secreted to the West by former KGB archivist Vassili Mitrokhin and published in 1999 tell a similar tale, about the KGB cultivating the closest possible relationships with 'progressive' Catholics and financing their activities. One of the leftist organs identified was the small Italian Catholic press agency Adista, which for decades has promoted every imaginable postconciliar cause or "reform" and whose Director was named in The Mitrokhin Archive as a paid KGB agent. Interestingly, just prior to the Mitrokhin expose it was little Adista that ultra-Modernist Cardinal Martini utilised to diffuse his dissident rant at the 1999 European Synod, where, among other things, he called for a "new Council".

What is often lost in all of this, however, is that Communism (along with the New Age movement) is simply a chief tool of Freemasonry; it's policy of Church infiltration just an extension of the Masonic plan clearly laid out in the Alta Vendita and other bona fide Masonic documents recognised by the Popes. Even experts like Anatoliy Golitsyn have failed to grasp this point. In The Perestroika Deception (1996), his collection of very accurate analyses and forecasts submitted to the CIA during the period 1985-95, he hints at a controlling force behind Soviet Communism but lacks "the facilities to study how it might be operating" under cover of some "front" organisation. At the same time he complains that despite public plaudits for the accuracy of his forecasts, Western leaders have regularly ignored his warnings. He fails to see that having financed and nurtured Russian Communism from its inception, the elite Freemasons (in symbiotic alliance with transnationalist billionaires who shape world affairs for more prosaic reasons of power and profit) will not always allow a free hand to the likes of Bill Clinton, who himself attributes "a lot of breaks" in his life to his forty year membership of the Masonic Order of De Molay.

There are, of course, logistically implausible and just plain silly conspiracy theories. Yet, as the widespread homosexual infiltration of the postconciliar Church attests, the idea that evil men never seek each other out to work together is sillier still. Moreover, the insistence of liberal propagandists that there is no Masonic conspiracy (aided and abetted by fellow-travellers like themselves) is doubtless the greatest conspiracy of all. As E. Michael Jones explains in his dissection of one such propaganda exercise, by distorting and misrepresenting primary historical sources - like ex-Mason Abbe de Barruel, who wrote in the late eighteenth century that "the object of their [Masonic] conspiracy is to overturn every altar where Christ is adored" - the liberal Establishment seeks to protect and maintain at all costs the nihilistic spirit of the Enlightenment, which Masonic legacy underpins that dissolute and crumbling artifice we call Modernity.

As so many of our Shepherds have themselves bowed to the insidious forces of the Enlightenment and embraced Modernity, it might be said that all these ruminations are now superfluous; that with the secular liberal mindset so entrenched within the Church the whole infiltration/subversion thesis has become purely academic. Nonetheless, Catholics especially should know more about all of this; about how to distinguish Masons-and-Reds-under-the-bed 'conspiracies' from the real thing. And since the bishops are not about to alert them or explain the difference, this edition, though unsettling for some, will fill a gap.

THE PONTIFFS vs. THE LODGE

"The papal condemnations of Freemasonry are so severe and sweeping in their tenor as to be quite unique in the history of Church legislation. During the last two centuries Freemasonry has been expressly anathematized by at least ten different Popes and condemned directly or indirectly by almost every Pontiff that sat on the Chair of St. Peter."

"The Popes charge the Freemasons with occult criminal activities, with 'shameful deeds', with worshipping satan himself (a charge which is hinted at in some Papal documents), with infamy, blasphemy, sacrilege and the most abominable heresies against the State, with anarchical and revolutionary principles and with favouring and promoting what is now called Bolshevism; with corrupting and perverting the minds of youth; with shameful hypocrisy and lying, by means of which Freemasons strive to hide their wickedness under a cloak of probity and respectability, while in reality they are the very 'synagogue of satan', whose direct aim and object is the complete destruction of Christianity."

Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement (1930), Fr E. Cahill, S.J.