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(LifeSiteNews) — The Church is in a total uproar. One of the things that might help to explain that is infiltration: infiltration of the Church by Communists who were actually sent to be priests to infiltrate the Church on purpose. Sound incredible?

Well, it’s not. Because you know what? It was testified to by an ex-Communist. Her name was Bella Dodd. She was known to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and lots of other witnesses. We’re going to talk to Dr. Paul Kengor, the author of a new book on Bella Dodd, and discuss what this all means for the Church today. This is The John-Henry Westen Show.

Co-authored with Mary Nicholas, MD, Dr. Kengor’s book is titled The Devil and Bella Dodd: One Woman’s Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption and published by TAN Books.

RELATED: New book explores how a woman who placed Communists in seminaries reverted to her Catholic faith

Dr. Kengor tells me that Dodd, in her own words, helped recruit at least 1,000 Communist men to infiltrate Catholic seminaries in America. Based on his research, he finds this figure to be entirely plausible.

“She was a master organizer for the [Communist Party]. She organized the Teachers Front. She organized the New York State Teachers Union,” Kengor says. “Out of 10,000 members … of the New York State Teachers Union in the 1930s, she helped plant 1,000 to 1,500 Communist Party members.”

“By the 1960s, by Vatican II, there were 60,000 priests in the United States. So she would have said, ‘Yeah, 1,000 teachers out of 10,000 … you don’t think I can put 1,000 men out of 60,000 in seminaries? That’s a cinch.’ This is what she did. She was a master organizer. So she would have saluted the red flag.”

When I followed up asking for more specific details, here’s some of what Dr. Kengor said:

I would bet that if Bella tried to help place 1,000 Communists in seminaries, that they probably didn’t put very many through. But those that did stay in, maybe they stayed in and became lukewarm Catholics, or not really true Catholics, but they were left of center theologically.

[It] was a truism in Communist Party organizing that if you can place just 60 to 70 people in an organization out of 10,000, just 1% or even less than 1%, you could control the organization. So the goal might be 1,000, but if you can get in less than 100, that’s significant. My friend [ex-Communist historian] Herb Romerstein used to call these “agents of influence” that could be even more influential than somebody who was an outright spy working for the Kremlin, like Whittaker Chambers, for example. Well, Bella Dodd was kind of like a female Whittaker Chambers.

I also ask Dr. Kengor to recount Bella Dodd’s conversion story, or rather her reversion to the Catholic faith she was raised in. For that story and more, listen to tonight’s episode below, or watch the interview above.

The John-Henry Westen Show is available by video on the show’s YouTube channel and right here on my LifeSite blog.

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John-Henry is the co-founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of LifeSiteNews.com. He and his wife Dianne have eight children and they live in the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, Canada.

He has spoken at conferences and retreats, and appeared on radio and television throughout the world. John-Henry founded the Rome Life Forum, an annual strategy meeting for life, faith and family leaders worldwide. He is a board member of the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family. He is a consultant to Canada’s largest pro-life organization Campaign Life Coalition, and serves on the executive of the Ontario branch of the organization. He has run three times for political office in the province of Ontario representing the Family Coalition Party.

John-Henry earned an MA from the University of Toronto in School and Child Clinical Psychology and an Honours BA from York University in Psychology.

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