Bella Dodd claimed that she helped place a thousand communist men in Catholic seminaries. We know that they thoroughly penetrated the mainline Protestant denominations. But her penetration of the Catholic priesthood that's all together a different animal. Pope Pius XI wrote an anticommunist encyclical in 1937 during the Nazi era. Against atheistic communism. Today, the Catholic church has basically zero influence; nobody cares what the local Bishop thinks about anything. The world was very, very different just one human lifetime ago. The world was very different and you had this very, very powerful influential organization all over the world, headed by an absolute resolute anti-communist. So I can understand, you say, well, we got to do something about this. But if you take the church head on, it tends not to work out well for you. I mean the French Revolution tried that, and the church only came back stronger. When Saint Francis Xavier brought Catholicism to Japan, 1549, and later that was brought underground, centuries later, tens of thousands of people, when the restrictions were lifted, had been discovered to have been practicing all those years. So all these efforts I mean like right now a lot of Christians want to fight even more than ever. So you might think that the better solution would be to somehow grab hold of these institutions, which by the way the left is very good at doing-- grabbing hold of Institutions, and somehow persuading Christians that really all along they've always believed this principle or that principle just bring confusion into their minds. I assume this is a general idea.
11:25. Yeah the Long March through the institutions. It was Divinity Redemptorist is in 1937 and cyclical by Pius the XI that called communism a "satanic scourge." You can go to 2 years before the Communist Manifesto was published it was published in 1848 there's the 1846 and cyclical by Pious the IX Qui Pluribus and that excoriated communism. So there is this steady blistering assault by the Catholic Church against communism all the way up through John Paul II, even in the Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis, the only time Francis has mentioned it, and I know this because I collect this stuff, I look for it, Francis has said, "the Marxist ideology is wrong." He said that in 2013, and then the next line, Tom, is "but I know a lot of Marxists who are good people." But with Francis that is all that he has said. He has not said another word about communism. And you look what he's doing in China, you look at what he's doing in Nicaragua, and that and what he's doing with Cardinal Zen, he's been bad on communism. He's been absent on the issue but in the 30s, 40s, 50s and prior to that, the church was solid on it. Here too that when Fulton Sheen . . . I don't know if Bella, we talk about this at great length in the book, I don't know if Bella Dodd could name names of the people that she helped put in seminaries. By the time that she was speaking of this in the 50s and 60s because she never laid out to anybody what exactly her role was. I mean as an organizer, right, including organizing infiltrating teachers' unions; now, this is a group effort. There's a number of different people involved. She could have been pushing papers, moving stuff along, part of the effort, I don't know. And I've had a number of people say too that well, who are these priests that infiltrated? Why haven't any of them come out and said, "You know, I was one of the people that Bella Dodd helped put in the seminary." Well a lot of the men, and we talk about this as well, going through Catholic Seminary is a big deal; I mean this is years in the making. We quote Solanus Casey, who is up for sainthood in the United States, and he talked about this penetration of the seminaries, and he said that a lot of these guys eventually expose themselves, right, they were exposed. It became clear that they weren't devout enough. I mean to get up every morning early and go to mass and do confession and do the Liturgy of the Hours and everything else, a lot of these guys probably just threw in the towel. Now on the other hand, it's quite possible, too, that a number of them hung in there and became very leftist center, left-wing priests, who helped give us things like Liberation Theology. So to the extent that the Church might have went left on some of these issues, like the mainline Protestant denominations did, that could, in fact, be an influence of these priests too were placed in seminaries and helped infiltrate.
14:41. It seems like these priests or seminarians would have to have been unusually precocious because as you say in the book it says here that, "the infiltration began around 1936. It was common for a man to enter the seminary between the ages of 18 and 20," so imagine at that age being so ideologically rigid and having your mind made up that you're willing to devote your entire life to something like this for the sake of the great communist future. I can't imagine there were that many men who met that description.
15:15 And that's the thing with the Communist fanatical devotion to their faith of Marxism/Leninism, right, so, they were willing to try, a lot of them are willing to try, but frankly a lot of them probably gave it up and also, a lot of people listening who aren't Catholics, to make it to the priesthood you need to be forwarded and recommended by the Rector of the seminaries. If they believe that you don't have a vocation, you don't have a calling, and you're not there, they're not going to continue to push you through. And I've had some people email me another books where I said a thousand communists I mean that's a lot actually there were about 60,000 priests per year on average in the time that Bella was doing this probably about 30,000 priests generally 20,000 diocese, some clergy, priests, and religious orders this was a start of an upswing in vocations that would eventually reach a peak number of 59,892 priests by 1967. So almost 60,000 by 1967. So to put 1,000 in among 60,000 . . . remember, Bella Dodd when she did the teacher's union she put a thousand communists in the teacher's union of 10,000 so she would have looked at numbers like this as a cinch and plus communist you know they looked at religious people as slack-jawed superstitious morons. So they would have been very prideful in their ability to penetrate seminaries they're probably in for a surprise and they found out how difficult it actually was
