I hate communism as much as I despise Satan. Communism seems the very handmaiden of Satan, himself. It encourages covetousness, thrives on deceit, and lusts for power through theft and murder.
What’s not to love?
The individuals who call themselves Communists, Socialists, Marxists – I don’t hate them. Why? One reason to not hate but rather to feel compassion for many of them is that the reason they became communists was that they wanted to do good for those they saw as needing their help. Many of these communists, socialists, Marxists believed they were actually doing honest and good work – they did not know and do not know the dark side of what they follow.
Perhaps the best way to further answer that question is to quote from Masters of Deceit in which former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover writes:
“Always we must keep in mind that communists, even hard-core members, potentially can be converted. To the individual who asserts, “Once a communist, always a communist,” I say: “No. Every communist can be made to see the errors of his way. He must not be despised, belittled, or rejected as hopelessly lost. He can redeem himself by actively taking a stand for freedom. Every patriotic American must do what he can to bring these persons to see the truth. The ex-communist is today one of our most potent weapons against communism.” – pg.117, Masters of Deceit.
May I add to the above explanation that former communists reign supreme in my heart as souls of the utmost courage. They left a world that determined to hunt them down out of revenge, and they dared to walk into the sunlight bringing a torch to show us the dark evil they once embraced.
One such beautiful child of God, whom I wish with all my heart to have been able to call friend, was Bella Dodd (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Dodd).
Eternal World Television Network produced the most insightful documentary detailing the inner workings and history of communist infiltration into the Catholic Church. Please get the dvd and watch it – study it – spread it!!!!! (Youtube has it for now – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlbSP8Nrhhg) , but please go to EWTN and buy a copy for yourself!
(http://www.ewtnreligiouscatalogue.com/shop.axd/Search?x=0&y=0&keywords=a+wolf+in+sheep%27s+clothing)
I learned about Bella Dodd in this remarkable documentary. She bravely testified how she personally recruited communists to go into the priesthood. Not a pretty picture and this harmed the good and honorable men who entered the priesthood. But, fear not, you shall know them by their fruits. And the documentary will answer so many questions for those of us who are Catholic – but non Catholics need to see it too because you will see the signs that has happened in your own churches and synagogues!
Bella started life in an intriguing way. It started with a love story. Her father, an
American, happened to visit the Italian village of her mother. Bella’s dad fell in love with a farmer’s widow who was working her farm all on her own while raising her multiple children.
The father wooed her mother and convinced her to leave the farm, marry him, and move to New York. While in the first year in America, her mother received news that she needed to tend business regarding her beloved property in Italy, so off she went on a ship to her homeland.
While on her trip she found out that she was pregnant and had to stay in Italy until baby Bella was born. Not long after the baby was born the mother had to return to America and felt she could not bring the newborn with her. Through a series of problems, the mother had to wait about five years before being able to finally go back to retrieve her little angel. In the mean time, a loving couple took care of her. She grew up in the heart of a land where the Catholic faith was worshiped with great adoration. So when she had to move, her heart broke. And even sadder in
her saga, her parents, though Catholic, drifted away from the faith and did not teach her. So Bella grew up with no grounding in the ways of God.
Along the way in her life’s journey Bella came in and out of seeing people who believed in God and people who despised God. She went to a public school in the days when the public schools said prayers but her instruction was very small. Yet she grew to love America. When a teenager she had an accident that crushed her foot. She suffered months of painful surgery after surgery. But the doctor that cared for her brought her books to help her study in Latin and enabled her to endure the months of being bed ridden. She went on to graduate, get a law license
and become a teacher. In college she slid slowly into socialism which step by step led her to communism until she became a full fledged communist party member. First she went into it with the desire to help those she saw as down trodden. But slowly, as she began to get more deeply involved, she saw the darker side and though it took decades, finally she saw the light and broke free.
Dear Bishop Sheen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_J._Sheen) brought her back to the Catholic faith. He personally instructed her, baptized her, took her first confession, gave her first communion, and confirmed her.
As part of her penance, Bishop Sheen instructed her to write her story and to expose the truth about communism in America. She wrote the book, School of Darkness, which can be bought in used book venues and is available in kindle. A good part of her book can be read at this website: http://genus.cogia.net/.
I want every American citizen to read her book. I would quote so much more, but my article would never end! So below are just a few excerpts from her book – may these quotes entice you to find a way to read all she wrote.
Bella, if you are reading my article from sitting next to the Holy Trinity, just know, I so admire you and hope one day every high school student will get the chance to read your story!
Quote from Bella Dodd’s book School of Darkness, pg. 97 — note this book was published in 1954 — : “Attending conventions took much of my time. No convention of teachers in the United States ever went unnoticed by the Communist Party. The national office would call the leaders of the teacher Communists and discuss with us the nature of the organization and inquire if we had party members in it. If we had, we would decide which resolutions they were to introduce and which they were to oppose. If we had no members, observers would be sent to make contacts.
Particular attention was given to pushing federal aid to public education program and to the issue of separation of church and state at these conventions.” Quote from Bella Dodd’s book, School of Darkness, pg 165: “Nancy came from a good Boston family. I knew her mother, Ferdinanda Reed, who was one of the three old ladies who technically owned the Daily Worker, the other two being Anita Whitney and my former tenant in the Village, Susan Woodruff. Ferdinanda had come to
communism intellectually and remained because, like Susan, she never saw its ruthless side.”
From Bella Dodd’s book, School of Darkness, pp 199-200“I spoke with the practiced intensity of long habit but no longer with the old faith in the cause,
for I no longer had the same deep conviction about the Party’s championship of the poor and dispossessed. I knew now that its activities were conceived in duplicity and ended in betrayal.
The sessions of the December National Committee were notable for their long-winded, long-spun-out, and fantastic justification of the line of “self-determination of the Negro in the black belt.” Only the intelligence and patience of Negro leaders in America have made possible resistance to this mischievous theory which was contrived by Stalin and was now unleashed by Foster. Briefly told, it is the theory that the Negroes in the South form a nation, a subjugated nation with the desire to become a free one, and that the Communists are to give them all assistance. The Party proposed to develop the national aspirations of the Negro
people so they would rise up and establish themselves as a nation with the right to secede from the United States. It was a theory not for the benefit of the Negroes but to spur strife, and to use the American Negro in the world communist propaganda campaign to win over the colored people of the world. Ultimately, the Communists proposed to use them as instruments in the revolution to come in the United States.”
Bella Dodd’s 1954 book, School of Darkness, pp. 180-181 — Just read and let it sink into what is happening today: “Earl Browder at the convention of 1944 had insisted on the elimination of a sense of difference among the foreign born and had moved to have them treated as part of the American labor movement. To this Professors Berti and Donnini offered strenuous objections. They emphasized the importance of separate national organizations, of encouraging the foreign-born to use their languages, and of circulating foreign-language newspapers. They encouraged the organizing of different national groups almost as if these were foreign colonies. It would strengthen the sense of nationalism among them, they asserted, a necessary
thing for the building of world communism.
These two Party functionaries found themselves on the carpet for their unwelcome views. Plans were on foot to expel them. Then, suddenly, came the amazing news that they were members of the Italian Communist Party! Up to this point, like others, I had regarded them as honest but misguided foreigners with a penchant for disputation. Now I realized that nothing they said had been unpremeditated, and that they were not speaking for themselves. They represented the International Communist movement and it was clear that Browder’s approach to the national problem was in disfavor with some sections of world communism.”
From Bella Dodd’s 1954 book School of Darkness. pp228-229 — the pieces of the puzzle, read and ponder — and get her book!:
“I found I was again able to interpret events. In my time with the Party I had accumulated a large store of information about people and events, and often these had not fitted into the picture presented by the Party to its members. It was as if I held a thousand pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and could not fit them together. It irritated me, but when I thought of the testimony of witnesses before the Congressional Committee, some of whom I had known as Communists,
much of the true picture suddenly came into focus. My store of odd pieces was beginning to develop into a recognizable picture.
There had been many things I had not really understood. I had regarded the Communist Party as a poor man’s party, and thought the presence of certain men of wealth within it accidental.
I now saw this was no accident. I regarded the Party as a monolithic organization with the leadership in the National Committee and the National Board. Now I saw this was only a facade placed there by the movement to create the illusion of the poor man’s party; it was in. reality a device to control the “common man” they so raucously championed.
There were many parts of the puzzle which did not fit into the Party structure. Parallel organizations which I had dimly glimpsed now became more clearly visible, and their connections with the apparatus I knew became apparent. As the war in Korea developed, further illumination came to me.
We in the Party had been told in 1945, after the publication of the Duclos letter, that the Party in the United States would have a difficult role to play. Our country, we were told, would be the last to be taken by the Communists; the Party in the United States would often find itself in opposition not only to the interests of our government, but even against the interests of our own workers.
Now I realized that, with the best motives and a desire to serve the working people of my country, I, and thousands like me, had been led to a betrayal of these very people. I now saw that I had been poised on the side of those who sought the destruction of my own country. I thought of an answer Pop Mindel, of the Party’s Education Bureau, had once given me in reply to the question whether the Party would oppose the entry of our boys into the Army. I had asked this question at a time when the Communists were conducting a violent campaign for peace, and it seemed reasonable to me to draw pacifist conclusions. Pop Mindel sucked on
his pipe and with a knowing look in his eyes said:
“Well, if we keep our members from the Army, then where will our boys learn to use weapons with which to seize power?”
What now became clear to me was the collusion of these two forces: the Communists with their timetable for world control, and certain mercenary forces in the free world bent on making profit from blood.”
The last page (250) of Bella Dodd’s book School of Darkness. Tell me that it does not speak of today. Tell me that you could not see the returning soldiers of today being of the same material of which she wrote back in 1954:
“That evening I had stayed so late in answering questions that Father O’Brien asked three young men to drive me to the train in New London. As we rode through the Connecticut hills it began to snow. I asked the young man who was driving what he was going to do after graduation. “Serve Uncle Sam, I guess,” he replied. In his voice was no bitterness, no resentment — and I thought with sudden sadness of his possible future and that of all our young people. Then one of the boys said quietly, “Why don’t we say the rosary for peace?” He started the Credo and there in the darkness of that country road, with the soft snow falling, we said the rosary for peace.
I was aware as I rode home that night that men such as these can change the world for the better, so much were they filled with love, so selfless was their zeal. I know that even if the Communists were sincere in the glittering promises they make, they would be incapable of fulfilling them for they cannot create the kind of men needed for the task. Whatever apparent good the Communists have achieved has come through human beings who despite the harsh materialism taught them still retained a memory of God and who, even without realizing it,
drew on the eternal standards of truth and justice. But their store of such men is dwindling, and in spite of their apparent victories men schooled in darkness are doomed to defeat.
New armies of men are rising, and these are sustained not by the Communist creed but by the credo of Christianity. And I am keenly conscious that only a generation of men so devoted to God that they will heed his command, “Love one another as I have loved you,” can bring peace to our world.”
Independent Examiner 