Former Marxist devoted life to exposing the subversion of the Church.
As the Soviet Union communists penetrated major institutions in the United States, including the Church, some of their espionage activities started coming to the surface. Many people are already familiar with the notorious case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and their stealing of the atomic bomb secrets for the Soviets.
But that was specific government infiltration to get at military information to neutralize the United States' atomic advantage. What was not as widely known was the deep penetration into other aspects of American life — specifically religion.
In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1953, former communist (turned Catholic revert) Bella Dodd broadly outlined the Soviet plan for working with Catholics:
At different times in the history of the Communist Party, they emphasized the fact that it was possible for you to be religious and, at the same time, communist. But those were the periods in which they were trying to win over larger numbers of, let's say, Catholic trade-unionists, Catholic workers, and so forth and so on. Those were the periods which were called the periods of extending the hand of communism to the people in the religious groups. What you did was to say substantially this: 'These men have a blind spot. They believe in God, but we communists know that there is no God. But in order to get them to work with us, we will work with them on a minimum program.' As a matter of fact, even when you were in the Communist Party, the Communist Party from time to time established committees like the — there was a committee on Catholics for Human Rights, which consisted of communists who had been Catholics, whose purpose it was to work with mass organizations which had a large number of Catholics.
It would be incorrect to think of Soviet communist infiltration into the world of Catholicism as some cloak-and-dagger effort with thousands of secret agents wandering the halls of seminaries with decoder rings and midnight liaisons, for example. The much larger, by far and away, effort was made by simply targeting certain individuals as well as leaders of various groups who could be persuaded that at least in many areas, Catholics and communists have common goals they could work on together (for the betterment of mankind, you know).
In short, they tricked them, finding a "soft spot" or "blind spot" they could capitalize on down the road. And they did. They hunted out what we could term "sympathizers." Dodd and other former communists all came forward in those early years of the 1950s and testified the same thing — that it was not really secret communists planted all over religious and other institutions, but associations made where the commies could convince their targets they could, and should, work together.
The strategy to enlist sympathizers paid off handsomely. Why take the chance of having spies uncovered in colleges and media and churches when "locals" could do your dirty work for you? As we see looking around now, in the Church specifically, it worked like a charm. There may be here or there, in key roles in the Church, truly committed communists, but that's nowhere near as effective as having hundreds if not thousands of brainwashed useful idiots spouting your "social justice" vocabulary for you.
