<i>Where Peter Is</i> on yet another loony conspiracy theory

The deep, intense fear that is the engine driving “faithful conservative Catholics” in the US is one of the most destructive forces in the history of the US Church. It has wrought more lasting damage in 50 years than centuries of Know Nothingism and hostility external to the Church. Combined with the feckless institutionalism that gave us the abuse crisis, it is a perfect storm of toxicity, instinctively protecting all the wrong people while lionizing some of the worst celebrities and fixating on the unborn as the all-exonerating human shields for a host of spiritually immature nonsense and paranoid conspiracy theories. Thank God for people like Mike Lewis escaping it and calling Catholics to grow up in Christ. Here he is doing the great service of tracking down Sandra Miesel’s work taking apart the ludicrous claim that Vatican II was masterminded by a Soviet infiltrator (work flushed down the memory hole by CRISIS as it went insane and turned toward Francis-hating MAGA paranoia):

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Revisiting the manuscript as an adult, I thought it was laughable that I once believed it was true. It’s poorly written and its plot is implausible. It doesn’t in any way resemble a real memoir. If this man really existed, he would be easily identifiable from the details he provided. Only someone with very little understanding of how the Church works (or how to fact check) would be gullible enough to believe it’s true.

In an article on Catholic conspiracy theories, Sandra Miesel offers a critique of the book:

Further evidence of faith in Communist trickiness is the persistent popularity of Anti-Apostle 1025 by Marie Carré, originally published in France in 1972. This purports to be a memoir by the 1025th Red to penetrate Catholic seminaries, but it is manifestly a feeble example of radical traditionalist propaganda that even fails to factor in the Russian purges.

The main character is a Polish orphan — the careful reader will note he’s a Jew — recruited by a Soviet spymaster between the World Wars to penetrate and subvert the Catholic Church. This is supposed to explain post-Vatican II changes, although Communist control never altered dogma or worship behind the Iron Curtain.

The fable may have been inspired by a remark attributed to a Catholic convert from Communism, Bella Dodd, in the 1950s. Dodd implausibly claimed to have sent a thousand young men into American seminaries, but she also insisted that the Communist Party of the U.S.A. secretly took its orders from American capitalists.

Miesel’s article has an interesting history. It was originally published in Crisis Magazine in December 2002 (the 2009 date on the link is inaccurate), and many radical traditionalists were deeply offended by it. At the time it was originally published, Crisis was more of a neoconservative publication than the conspiratorial and reactionary traditionalist outlet it is today. In 2016, Remnant Newspaper editor Michael Matt issued a plea for Crisis to take the article down from their website:

Perhaps now that things are becoming a little clearer we might persuade the good folks at Crisis to remove from their archives an unfortunate piece of yellow “journalism,” recklessly penned a few years back by something called Sandra Miesel.  Uncharitable in the extreme, if not libelous, the thing is entitled “Swinging at Windmills,” and it’s still hailed as a “Crisis magazine classic” on that website. Crisis Editors, please, take down that slanderous, SPLC-accommodating rant.  It’s embarrassing and well beneath the standards of the new and improved Crisis magazine, which The Remnant is only too eager to congratulate for having the courage to do what must be done, even at the risk of being ridiculed as “rad trads” by folks still trying to get the sand out of their eyes.

Shortly thereafter, it seems that Michael Warren Davis, then editor of Crisis, deleted the article, although it can still be tracked down on obscure websites.

Yet the book has found supporters among “mainstream” Catholic figures as prominent as Dr. Alice Von Hildebrand and Catholic apologist (and 2024 National Eucharistic Congress speaker) Patrick Madrid. It is also quite popular. It has a 4.6 (out of 5) average from 611 ratings on Amazon, and a 4.1 rating on Goodreads from 397 readers.

Alice Von Hildebrand exchanged public letters (the exchange has been preserved on the “freerepublic” site) with Miesel following the 2002 article, in which the professor and widow of theologian Dietrich Von Hildebrand insists that AA-1025 has the ring of truth, writing:

AA-1025 may be a literary invention of Marie Carré, but one must admit that she hits the bull’s eye from the first page to the last. Some people have extraordinary talents to foresee the future. Carré certainly had an extraordinary perception of how best to harm the Church. How surprising indeed that all her inventions have become reality in the post-conciliar Church.

Miesel responded:

Dr. von Hildebrand raises three issues: Is AA-1025 the actual memoir of a Communist agent sent into the Catholic priesthood? Did such infiltration happen in America, as convert Bella Dodd claimed? Is infiltration responsible for the Church’s disarray since Vatican II?

In 1994, I wrote an article denouncing AA-1025. Having just reread it to write this rebuttal, I again draw on my training in history and experience writing and editing fiction to brand the book a fabrication, a piece of propaganda. No one ever wrote a memoir the way this book is written. Important events could not have occurred as described. The protagonist couldn’t have crossed the sealed Polish-Russian border in 1931. He couldn’t have been reporting to the same intelligence handler throughout the Russian purges (which are never mentioned) and World War II (during the 1,000-day siege of Leningrad). His account of meeting the spy “chief” contains not a word of hard description, somehow failing to notice that the unnamed Yezhov was a dwarf. Moreover, the protagonist never uses a word of Marxist jargon.

It hardly took much prophetic skill to “predict” the vernacular Mass in 1972 when AA-1025 was written. As for “hitting the bull’s eye from the first page to the last,” do we have ordained fathers and mothers celebrating Mass on the family table before dinner every night? Are the naves of our churches filled with communion tables for groups of twelve? Have we abolished infant baptism, marriage ceremonies, private confession, vestments, altar cloths, candles, the Sign of the Cross, the Sunday Mass obligation, the term “Catholic”? Are believers in union with the pope ever likely to do so? As I said, AA-1025 is a fable seething with hatred of ecumenism. I don’t understand why someone of Dr. von Hildebrand’s sta­ture would give it a second glance.

As for Bella Dodd’s story of sending more than a thousand men into American seminaries, that would have re­quired chatting up approximately one youth per week and corrupting them so permanently that they stuck with the Party after ordination. It’s conve­­nient that she was forbidden to name names—not even private communications to Rome? Were those four cardinals collaborating in religion or politics? Clerics make useful idiots.

The Soviets (like the present Red Chinese) had no interest in altering Christian beliefs—theology was irrelevant. A compliant Church loyal to the regime and its “peace” initiatives was quite enough. AA-1025 notwithstanding, the Verona documents, intercepted Soviet intelligence, speak of military spying and influence on many sectors of American society but not the Catholic Church or any other religion.

I got my Catholic education before Vatican II and am bitter about what happened afterwards. Infiltrators— real or otherwise—are unnecessary to explain our problems of the past 40 years, much less the priest scandals. History is a messy record of myriad choices, not the plan of Secret Masters.

I would be very interested in reading Sandra Miesel’s 1994 article about AA-1025, but I have been unable to track it down online or obtain her contact information. If anyone has the article, I think it would be well worth sharing.