Until I read The Devil and Bella Dodd, I thought the greatest defector from communism was Whittaker Chambers, who fingered Alger Hiss as a communist spy for Soviet Russia and identified a communist network in the highest levels of the U.S. government. But former high-ranking communist Bella Dodd—a teacher, lawyer, and union activist— exposed communist clergymen in the Roman Catholic Church and identified Lucifer, the fallen angel in the Bible (Isaiah 14:12-17), as being the agent of destruction.

The concept of “Lucifer” is considered by Christians to be the devil or Satan.

The implication of Bella Dodd’s statement is that a church representing more than 1.2 billion Catholics has been dangerously compromised by evil.

The complete title—The Devil and Bella Dodd: The Story of One Woman’s Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption—documents the problem and the solution in personal terms. We know individuals can be redeemed. But as we contemplate the impact of this important book, published by TAN Books, we wonder if whole nations – indeed, the world – can be saved.

Bella Dodd, who wrote her own book, School of Darkness, isn’t just an ordinary communist who testified before congressional committees about communism’s influence in American society, especially the educational system, as important as that is. She described communist infiltration of the Roman Catholic Church and identified their ultimate goal as world government.

Her story helps explain, in a dramatic way, why this powerful church based in Rome continues to experience scandals that have enormously damaged its credibility as a religious institution and driven many away from the church.

The capitalists behind communism

There are many revelations in this important book, including how Bella Dodd told a close friend by the name of Frank Savile that as she rose in the ranks of the Communist Party USA, she realized that the communists were agents of a higher power, not only Lucifer, which she identifies by name, but elites with power and money. She names them as the representatives of the Rockefellers, the Lehmans, and the Harrimans – capitalists and politicians who made possible the rise of the Soviet state into a terrible fact of life that still haunts the world to this day. They financed the rise of communism, including the Soviet Union and Communist China.

The communists, she said, were part of a larger conspiracy. The co-authors, Mary Nicholas and Paul Kengor, report that W. Cleon Skousen, a former FBI special agent, attorney, and researcher, interviewed Bella Dodd several times in the 1960s and asked her the question “Who is trying to take over the world?” She replied, “I think the communist conspiracy is merely a branch of a much bigger conspiracy!”

The Bella Dodd cover-up

Bella Dodd’s friend, Frank Savile, gave his explosive interview about the capitalists behind communism to the late conservative commentator Stan Monteith, a radio host who wrote Brotherhood of Darkness.

In another revelation, Savile says that Dodd’s book on the communists, School of Darkness, was apparently edited before publication to withhold some of her most explosive charges. The book instead focused on “pieces” of her testimony, he said, and her reconversion to the Catholic faith.

Although the Nicholas and Kengor book goes into some detail about these additional charges, confirmed in general terms by Bishop Fulton Sheen, there are no names of the communist clergymen she had knowledge of. For certain reasons not yet entirely clear, Sheen advised her not to name names in public. It is possible these names were provided in confidence to top Catholic officials and covered up.

At the same time, the book quotes Sheen, who helped in Bella Dodd’s reconversion to the Catholic faith, as saying at a church in Rome that communists had in fact infiltrated the church and he was apparently aware of one, a Jesuit priest by the name of Father Alighiero Tondi, who had been a communist mole in the Vatican.

The FBI cover-up

What’s also significant is that a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FBI about Bella Dodd produced a massive file that the Bureau seemed reluctant to divulge and waited decades to disclose. It was as if the secrets that Bella Dodd had possessed were too terrible even for the FBI to reveal.

Bella Dodd’s allegation that she recruited more than a thousand communists to infiltrate the seminaries is shocking enough. But could this scandal be related to the admission by a top Catholic official about the homosexual nature of the sex-abuse scandals in the church? And has a combination of both scandals effectively destroyed the church’s credibility, leading to the period some Christians regard as the “End Times” and Christ’s return?

The Bella Dodd book brings the sordid story of corruption in the church up to date by citing a 2019 article titled “The Catholic Case for Communism” in a Jesuit publication, written by a so-called Catholic Communist.

Marxists in the Church

The Jesuit article about Catholic Communism is a starting point for naming the names. The author quotes extensively from the writings of Dorothy Day, a Marxist Catholic being promoted for sainthood by American Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan, considered by some a “conservative” clergyman.

Indeed, it started to dawn on many in and out of the church many years ago that Jesuit Pope Francis had come down on the side of the “progressive,” and even Marxist, forces in the world today.