Has the Catholic Church been overtaken by Communists? Was there a Communist plot decades ago to subvert the Church? Find out on today’s Crisis Point.
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Eric Sammons:
Has the Catholic church been overtaken by communists? Was there a communist plot decades ago to subvert the church? Find out on today’s Crisis Point. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host, and the editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine. Be sure to like and subscribe to the channel wherever you might listen to it, wherever you might watch us. Also, if you want to support our work, please go to crisismagazine.com/donate, and you can donate by check, by mailing it in, by online, and also by cryptocurrency. So anyway you want to give us some funds, we’d appreciate. And of course, we always appreciate your prayers.
Okay, so let’s jump right into it. Today, our guest is Paul Kengor. He is the senior director and chief academic fellow for the Institute for Faith and Freedom, and a professor of political science at Grove City College. He’s written over a dozen books, many focused on the presidency of Ronald Reagan. And most recently, he is the author of The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, Infiltration, which was published by TAN Books. Welcome to the program, Paul.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Thanks, Eric. Such a lovely book, isn’t it?
Eric Sammons:
Right, exactly. Talk about death, deception infiltration, I mean, yeah, talk about your uplifting topics.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
I’m Dr. Doom.
Eric Sammons:
That’s right. That is what we’re going to focus on today is communism, but before we really get into that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself. Did you grow up Catholic, or what kind is your background?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Well, yes. I remember Robbie George here at Grove City College, and we were in the building right outside my window, and he asked me that question one time. And I said, well, I’m a convert, yeah, but I’m really a revert. I grew up in the church in the 1970s. And he went, “Oh, the dark ages. The dark ages. You don’t need to say anything else.” That’s exactly right, the 70s were the dark ages for the church. I didn’t learn anything, Eric. I knew absolutely nothing. My ignorance was profound.
I didn’t know what a sacrament even was, I didn’t know what that word meant. I didn’t know how many there were. I didn’t know what the Eucharist was. I had first communion. I took communion every week, but if somebody had asked me transsubstantiation real presence, I would’ve just given them a blank stare. It was just unbelievable how little I knew.
So when I went off to college, it was pretty easy to fall away from the faith. I was science major, biochem, biophysics major, microbiology at the University of Pittsburgh, a pre-med major. In fact, I worked for Dr. Thomas Starzl in his organ transplant team at the University of Pittsburgh, which was fascinating research. I was agnostic, close to being an atheist. And it was bad time, college is a bad time to be agnostic or atheist. That’s where I was.
I think one of the things that maybe kept me going, probably kept me alive, probably kept me from death, was my Italian Catholic grandmother’s rosaries. Philomena was her name, Philomena Grace [Grovance 00:03:29], and Gentili was her maiden name. She’d be up all night doing rosaries for me and all my different cousins. I eventually became a Christian through probably evangelicals. I’d say kind of Christian talk radio, which was evangelical talk radio. Happened mainly when I was in Washington DC in the early 1990s. And became very committed Christian through evangelicals, through the Protestant faith.
Joined a PC(USA) church, Presbyterian Church USA, which as is the case with probably most Protestants, well, definitely with most Protestants nowadays, you really join a church that has good preaching, that has music that you like. Most people aren’t very denomination. In fact, here at Grove City College, I would bet that the majority of our students are nondenominational independent church. But I joined a Presbyterian church, my wife and I, she had been raised Presbyterian. It’s a long story. I could just speak on and on about this and cut me off at any time.
Eric Sammons:
No, no, I’m always fascinated to hear this.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
My wife was ready to convert before I was, I guess revert would’ve been for me. But I consider myself a convert because I never really had the faith. And I know Catholics would say, well, you were baptized Catholic, you were confirmed Catholic, you were Catholic. Well, all right. I could not have ever considered myself truly Catholic. So my wife was ready to convert before I was. Both of us, we read and studied our way into the faith. There was no emotional thing. For us, this was totally faith and reason, Fides et ratio. A reason-based coming into the faith.
I remember one pivotal moment, it was kind of out that way down the road, not even a mile. And we were living at our house on Tidball Avenue in Grove City. We were in the backyard and my wife was opening the mail. And there was a letter from our church, Tower Presbyterian Church in Grove City, and it said that it was time for are our oldest sons communion class, communion classes. And my wife looked at me, Eric, and she held us up and she said, “Okay, what do you want them to teach your son about the Eucharist?” She called it the Eucharist. And I said, well, “All right.” I said, “I’ll give you a deadline.” I gave her a deadline. So give me until April or whatever it was, six, seven, eight months from now, I’ll make a decision. I’ll make a final decision.
At that point, so this was 2004, I had been at Grove City College for seven years. I was asked to start the think tank on campus, the Center for Vision and Values, which is now the Institute for Faith and Freedom. I said, all right, let me make a decision. So I dove in particular into a really deep dive study of the Eucharist, which I had all already been studying and reading about. I taught a Sunday school class at Tower Presbyterian Church to college students. And I just became convinced that the Eucharist was what Jesus said it was. When Augustine said, when Jesus held up the host, held up the bread, he held himself in his hands. I became convinced that it was truly what it was intended to be.
The whole John 6 narrative, John 6:50-52, all the way through John 6:66, the only verse that has the number 666, it says, “Then they left Jesus.” And I became convinced that Jesus wasn’t speaking metaphorically there. And he could have said to the disciples when they walked away, are you going to leave me too? He could have said, wait a second, wait a second, I don’t really mean it’s the literal body and blood. Why are you leaving? I’m speaking metaphorically. When I say I am the gate, like a hinge. I don’t mean it literally. But he doesn’t, he doubles down. This is my body, this is my blood. You had to eat the lamb, the Passover lamb. This was the new lamb, the lamb of the New Testament.
So I became convinced that that was true, and as my wife said, as I went through all the different reasons, kind apologetics making the case for the Eucharist, she said, “Well, you’re forgetting the one that’s convinced you most of all, the authority issue.” I Timothy, is it 3:15?
Eric Sammons:
Yes.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Says the church is the pillar and foundation of the truth. What church could that be if it’s not the one that was founded by Jesus. And I know a lot of our Protestant friends speak of, you’re a former Protestant, right?
Eric Sammons:
Yes.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
So they speak of the church. The church, the church. Which is kind of a general Protestant term for sort of Protestant conservative Christianity. But it really has to be a specific church because if it’s not, because you have all these different churches that have all these different views, and all these different understandings of the truth. So if you have over 30,000 different Protestant denominations, which was the case in the 1990s, and now if you add in all the non-denominational independent churches, which are really denominations in and of themselves, it’s got to be over 100,000. So they all have their different definitions of the truth. So which one is it then that’s the pillar and foundation of the truth?
And if it’s not the Roman Catholic church, then who is it? The Lutherans? Okay, well, which branch of the Lutherans, right? The Presbyterians? Which branch of the Presbyterians? We would call the Presbyterians the split peas because they’re always splitting. Even PC(USA) since I left, it has split at least twice. Which one is it?
Eric Sammons:
It’s kind of hard to think of Jesus meant the church when he is talking about the Missouri Synod or something like that.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Right, right. How did God, how did Jesus, how did the holy spirit let the church go wrong for 1600 years until Luther, or Calvin or Zwingli or John Hawes or somebody came and figured it out. And if they did, then which church of theirs is the true church today? If it’s a particular Orthodox Presbyterian denomination that is only 100,000 members in it, is that it? Why aren’t we all going there? Is it the Mormon church? Which one is it?
And so the one that seemed most consistent over and for me was the Catholic church. And to get back to that Eucharist point, my wife said, you’re forgetting one of the most important proofs of all for the authenticity of the real presence, which is the church says it is, the church teaches it. And if you believe that the church is the pillar and foundation of the truth, then that’s another reason why you ought to believe that it’s the real presence.
So I could go on and on and on about this, but one other thing that I’ll say, when I first started reading Catholic and encyclicals, John Paul II encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, Fides et ratio, Veritatis splendor. When I read the catechism, I was blown away by these documents. And as a cold war researcher, communism, when I read documents like Qui pluribus by Pope Pius IX in December, 1846, two years before the Communist Manifesto was even published, warning about how destruct communism was going to be. And I saw this consistent tradition and statements over and over again, I thought, man, these Catholics say that the holy spirit is speaking through the magistarium of their church. That’s got to be the only explanation for this. This has to be supernatural. There’s no way that mere men, mere humans could have known all this stuff.
And look at the consistency from the first century through Ambrose and Augustine and Benedict and up through, this is February 17th I think we’re recording, Saint Cyril and Methodius from the ninth century who bring the faith into central and Eastern Europe into the Slavic language, Cyrillic. Aquinas, Bonaventure, on and on and on, de Sales. There’s nothing like this in Protestantism. When I would go to a Christian bookstore, which is like a Protestant bookstore, about the only thing I found, if my Protestant friends will forgive this, but often the only things that were really I thought all that great were some books by CS Lewis and a few others. There are other Protestant writers that are really good, I think from earlier times. I don’t want to-
Eric Sammons:
But your typical Protestant book store, the oldest thing in there was a CS Lewis book.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
That’s exactly right.
Eric Sammons:
And there’d be nothing from before that.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
In fact, I was recently at, God bless them because these people were important on my path introducing me to Christianity in the early 1990s, we were at Focus on the Family headquarters in Colorado Springs, me and my family in July. And I went through the book store in there. I think that CS Lewis was about the oldest thing that they had. There might have been Augustine’s confessions or something like that in there. A colleague of mine here at Grove City College, who’s another wonderful guy I teach with, great faculty members here. And he told me about going to a church somewhere in Michigan, and there was a mural in the front of the church of the history of Christianity. And it went from Jesus and the apostles, and then it’s skipped to Luther and The Ninety-five Theses, and then it skipped to Billy Graham.
Eric Sammons:
That was my historical understanding as a Protestant growing up was exactly that, was Jesus and the apostles, Luther, and then Billy Graham. That really was kind of how I looked at Christian history, was essentially that.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s much more complicated than that. And you’re missing some amazing writing, amazing writing.
Eric Sammons:
You’re really missing that line that goes directly from Jesus to today. It’s not like something where there’s skips and there’s jumps. If you really study it, from the apostles, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, it just keeps on going all the way to today. And they’re all the way to Newman in the 19th century, even today. That is the beauty of it that there’s this tradition that’s always been alive.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
By the way, there’s a period from about 1170, 1180 to 1380, about 200 years there that I think doesn’t get its due of St. Francis of Asisi, St. Clair, St. Dominic, Dante would be in there, St. Bonaventure, Aquinas, all the way to Catherine of Siena, and the other St. Catherine as well. Catherine of Siena died in 1380 at the age of 33, she was born in 1347.
But that whole period is absolutely brilliant. And that’s kind of a reformation that happened within the church prior to Luther. The difference between St. Francis and Luther, think about this, so Jesus speaks to St. Francis from the cross in San Domiano, and he says, “Francis repair my house.” Repair my house for it has fallen. And so, Francis repairs his house. He doesn’t splinter off. He doesn’t schism the church. He doesn’t create a new movement.
And so at that time you had guys like Francis and the Franciscans, Dominic and the Dominicans who stayed within the church and completely helped change it for the better. They were really the anti Luther. They didn’t do what Luther did, and they made for a better church during that period. What Luther did was really drastic, really revolutionary, and we’re still suffering that from that today, with all these different denominations, with all their different definitions of truths and truth, including everything from the cultural issues, abortion to marriage to gender, you name it.
Eric Sammons:
Absolutely. Let’s transition now to talk a little bit about your book on communism, and also, it kind of relates to what we’re talking about because the impact on communism on the Catholic church today and how that kind of fits with the history of Catholicism. So first, just tell me a little bit about why you first started getting interested in writing about communism, about working against communism, I guess the best way to put it, and that whole topic.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
So the time that I was an undergraduate at the university of Pittsburgh, I graduated in May of 1990. And as I said, I was a pre-med major, but I started writing for the campus newspaper. It was called the Pit News, we’d publish four days a week. I became the editorial page editor. I became just infatuated with events in the world, which at that time was Gorbachev, Thatcher, John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Solidarity Movement, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. That happened in my senior year in college. And I became intensely interested in all of it.
I wasn’t political at all, I wasn’t ideological, but I remember there were these people on campus who called themselves liberals, who for the entire time that I was there, trashed Ronald Reagan as this moron than this idiot who talked about the evil empire. What an idiot, he’s predicting the Soviet Union is going to end up on the ash heap of history.
And then it all happened. And instead of them giving him credit, they just continued to call him an idiot. I’m a science major, so I’m all about rationality. And I’m thinking, well, how can you say that? You were saying this, and now you’re saying that. You said that he said this would happen and it wouldn’t, and then it did happen. And I would argue with these people and they seem to be arguing just on emotion. And I would try to have these conversations with them.
And then at certain point, the more I would think about it and as I started writing about it, when they would disagree with me, they would call me names. They would just finish an argument by saying, oh, well, you’re a Nazi. You’re a fascist. I’m not making this up. First time I was call it a racist was the first article that I wrote on homelessness, which had nothing to do with race. Didn’t mention anybody’s race.
Second piece that I did was on arming the Contras in Nicaragua. And I got called a Nazi and a fascist for that. I remember my dad asking me, “Hey, how’s that column thing that you’re doing for the student news paper?” I said, “Well, all right, dad, but I got called a Nazi.” He said, “A Nazi?” I said, “Yeah, yeah.” He said, “What are you writing about, Hitler?” And I said, “No, I’m not writing about Hitler. And if I did, it wouldn’t be positive.” And he said, “Well, I don’t get it.” I said, “Dad, there’s these people on campus, they’re called liberals, and when they disagree with you, they call you the most vile names. It’s awful.”
And in my case, Eric, instead of kind of crawling under a rock and saying, I don’t want to be called names, I’d fight back. And so, I would write more and more and more and I’d dig more and more and more. And pretty soon, the night before my genetics exams, I would find myself up reading old copies of the New York Times about the start of the Cold War. So I became intensely interested in that whole period.
And then I went off to graduate school, not in medicine, but at American University in School of International Service in Washington, DC. Took up these subjects there, and started then as well on my a PhD program. So I started writing about Cold War Communism and who was responsible for the end of the Cold War.
And my initial interest was mainly Reagan and Gorbachev, their roles. And John Paul II kept coming in over and over and over again. And I learned more and more about him as well. And my first book project, which ended up being published as The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, that came out in 2006. And that’s the basis for Reagan, the movie, which is coming out later this year, starring Dennis Quaid.
But the first book that came from all of this was called God and Ronald Reagan. That came out in 2004. By the way, came into the church in April, 2005, right when John Paul II died.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, wow.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah. And in God and Ronald Reagan, I had material, a chapter of Reagan and John Paul II. And I continued writing books on these subjects. I ended up doing one that I spent over 10 years on, longer than any other book called a Pope and a President, on Reagan, John Paul II, and the end of the cold war. And for that, I learned about Fatima. When I first learned about Fatima as a Protestant, I was blown away by it. To think that there was this miracle witness by 70,000 people and that these three shepherd children, Francisco, Jacinta, and Lucia were talking about Bolshevism, spreading its errors. And this lady made these predictions, the Third Secret of Fatima and-
Eric Sammons:
And the timing of exactly when this happened. It’s amazing.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Amazing, amazing. And you and I before we started this podcast, we were talking about Scott Hahn a little bit, because Scott Hahn was at Grove City College long before me in the 80s. I remember talking to Scott about Fatima at one point, and Scott who was virulently anti-Catholic, especially when he was here. He would’ve chased Catholics on campus with torches if he could have.
But I remember Scott saying to me that he remembered watching something on television, it might have been I think he said when he was with Kimberly in the hospital when they were having a baby maybe, and there was something on the TV screen. And it was about Fatima. And he said, “Keep in mind, I’m not Catholic, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of this. I was fascinated by it. Because you just hear the story and you think they’re not making this up, they can’t make this up. You can’t make up something like this.”
So that became a compelling part of that whole narrative too. Reagan’s interest in Fatima. Of course, John Paul II being shot on the Feast Day of our lady of Fatima, 1981. So I got drawn into it through that as well. I probably jumped way ahead on your questions.
Eric Sammons:
No, that’s okay. Here’s the thing, today in 2022, I think a lot of people think that communism is a historical thing that’s basically in the past. So you have, obviously in 19th century when Karl Marx comes up, you have its heyday, so to speak, with the Soviet Union. And yes, technically, not technically, but communist China is a thing. But I think a lot of Americans, they almost when you call somebody like AOC or somebody like that a communist, whatever, they’re kind of like, oh, you’re just making things up. How is communism still a thing today? How does it really impact us today because it seems like its heyday was back in the 1960s and 70s?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
But there seemed to be shockingly, and I never thought that this would happen, although in a way I could have predicted it because for 20 years from about early 1990s to early 2010s, I was going around the country giving speeches for groups like Young America’s Foundation and Intercollegiate Studies Institute with titles like Why Communism is Bad, trying to explain to young people what they weren’t learning in schools.
So, I knew that there was growing interest and support for communism because they weren’t being taught any of the negatives about it. They weren’t learning about it at all. And now shockingly, there are studies and they’re done by groups like Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and others, even Gallup asked the question, do you prefer socialism over capitalism? And millennials will say socialism by like 46 to 42%. By the way, according to Marxist Leninist theory, socialism is the final transitionary step to communism. So Marx, Engels, and Lenin said that history would go through a series of stages, from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism, to communism.
The union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And there are even a lot of young people in polls right now saying positive things about communism, with approval numbers in the low 20s. And one poll even recently among millennials where something like 25% supported the abolition of private property or something ridiculous like that. There was a poll by Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation that found that I think it was, these numbers aren’t off the top of my head, but I have them in the Devil and Karl Mark’s book, 31, 32% of millennials believe that George W. Bush killed more people than Joseph Stalin.
Eric Sammons:
Wow.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah, that is just nuts.
Eric Sammons:
Shockingly ignorant and unbelievable.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
And worse, I think the same poll found that 28% of Americans of all ages think that George W. Bush killed more people than Joseph Stalin.
Eric Sammons:
Wow.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
It’s incredible. So they haven’t learned any of this. And where we are now is people that are supporting different forms of Marxism that are no longer about a working class revolution, about economics. Martin Malia, the great Cal Berkeley professor who wrote the intro to the Communist Manifesto, the Penguin Classics Edition that I use in the Marxism course I teach here at Grove City College, what he called the Frankfurt School, Marxism without the proletarian. So they started applying Marxism to culture, to gender, even to race. The Frankfurt school, which gave us critical theory, and critical race theory, which comes out of critical theory. There’s critical gender theory.
A lot of the Marxism today is being applied to cultural issues, even sexual issues, even racial issues. Patrisse Cullors, the founder of Black Lives Matter, she says, we are trained Marxist. “Alicia and I,” that’s her and Alicia Garza, the two founders, “we are super versed in ideological theories.” She is applying her Marxism to race. So that’s the kind of Marxism that we’re dealing with today, which in many ways is much more difficult, much harder to pin down because it’s not communism anchored in Moscow in a Soviet common term that’s marching across Eastern Europe. It’s not Communist Party USA, which at the height of its membership in the 30s probably had 50,000 to maybe 100,000 members. CPUSA today has like 5,000 members.
But the group today that’s exploding that now has, what do they call it, I have it right here, 94,915 comrades, as they call them, is the group the Democratic Socialists of America, and that’s AOC’s group. That’s the group of Ilhan Omar, Corey Bush, Rashida Talib. All of which are elected members of Congress, which calls itself “largest socialist organization of the United States.” So that’s where a lot of today’s sort of far left socialist Marxist movement is.
Eric Sammons:
Just to make sure we’re clear on our terms here, because I think this is confusing, I know I don’t always distinguish them very well in my own head. So we’ve mentioned Marxism, socialism, communism. How would you distinguish each of those, because for example, somebody like AOC does not call herself a communist, but basically does admit she’s a socialist. The Black Lives Matter lady, I can’t remember her name, says she’s Marxist. Bernie says he’s socialist. Nobody really used the term communist, but those three terms, how are they interchangeable and how are they not interchangeable?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
I’m hoping I could pull this up for you real quick. I could usually say this stuff off the top of my head. Oh good, I got it right here. So I can give you guys an exact source.
Eric Sammons:
We got the professor here teaching us.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
That’s right. That’s right. We want to be precise. So this is a Vladimir Lenin in his classic book, The State and Revolution, which was published in September, 1917. And the chapter, which is titled The Transition from Capitalism to Communism, he quotes Marx and Engels, and he says this, Lenin writers, “And this brings us to the question of the scientific distinction between socialism and communism.” Good, we’re all ears. “What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the first or lower phase of communist society. Insofar as the means of production becomes common property,” because socialism calls for the common ownership of the means of production. So does communism.
So Lenin said, “Insofar as the means of production becomes common property, the word communism is also applicable here provided that we do not forget that this is not complete communism.” So socialism leads to communism. So communism is the complete fruition of socialism. So Marion Smith, who was with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation used to say that, “As a Christian aspires to heaven, the socialist aspires to communism.” That’s good imagery because as Ronald Reagan would say, “Yeah, Marxism-Leninism, that religion of theirs.” Raymond Aaron called it, the opium of the intellectuals. They really saw communism, even though they claimed to be atheist, they really saw it in a kind of religious way. According to Marxist-Leninist theory, socialism leads to communism.
Now you have socialists today who will say, well, all right, I’m a different kind of socialist. I’m a democratic socialist that doesn’t want to be a communist. Well, what do you do about that, Eric? People everyday redefine their own gender. According to Marxist-Leninist theory, that’s what it means.
And if right now you google, and this gets worse and worse every year because Google is messing around with the definitions, but if you google socialism, what’ll pop up is something like Merriam-Webster definition, which says socialism is the common ownership of the means of production. So public ownership, government ownership of the means of production in an economy. That’s what communism as well. Communism is complete ownership of the means of production.
I’ll also give you one more definition, Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, put it very simply, they say, what is communism? Here’s the exact quote, “The entire communist theory may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property.” Abolition of private property. So it’s about the abolition of private property.
Eric Sammons:
How does that match though with the Black Lives Matter person saying, I can’t remember her name, sorry, but saying-
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Patrisse Cullors.
Eric Sammons:
Yes, saying that she’s Marxist, you see the Marxist influence on modern feminism, and some other movements. Obviously Black Lives Matter and feminism aren’t about just simply the abolition of private property. Why do they consider themselves Marxist? What do they mean by that?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
In fact, I wrote a piece for American Spectator, which I’m a regular columnist for them, called Mansion Marxist, which talks about all of Patrisse Cullors recent home purchases, which has gotten her kicked out of Black Lives Matter and has gotten Black Lives Matter investigated. They are applying their Marxism to different stuff altogether.
So race-based Marxist who en who engage in some Marxist form of critical race theory, for them, here’s the framework. So Marxism is based on this idea of oppressed versus oppressor. And for all of Marxist, all of history, you’re in either the oppressed class or the oppressor class. And for classic Marxism, this was based on economics and classes. So you are either in the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. Your class defined you. And you were pitted against the other class. So the other class was your enemy. There was this antagonistic oppressed-oppressor relationship among classes.
Now what the different forms of Marxism today do, so race-based Marxism, critical race theory based Marxism puts people in oppressed-oppressor class based on race. So you are either black or white, and whichever color you are defines you. And you might think of yourself as a black person not even a black person or white person as white, you’re just a human being made in the Imago dei. You don’t think of yourself as white or black. But the Marxist would come up and say, oh no, no, no, no, that’s what you are. And that means that you are oppressed. And these other guys here, they are the oppressor. And if the white folks in this group don’t think that they’re the oppressor, you need to raise their consciousness, they don’t understand. They need to admit of their racism and their role as oppressor.
So it’s incredibly divisive. It’s incredibly toxic. For Marx and Engels, the alpha and the omega were economics and class. And for some of these people based on race, the alpha, the omega is based on race. Everything is seen through the prism of race. Ibram Kendi, who wrote the book, How to be an Anti-racist, talks about doing every policy, reevaluating every policy through race, looking at every policy through race. Marxists would look at every policy through class, economics, capital. That’s how they’re applying it today. This oppressed versus oppressor framework is critical.
Eric Sammons:
And it’s so crazy because my dad’s side of the family grew up, he was raised in Eastern part of Kentucky, which is extremely poor. It’s almost all white, but extremely poor. And they’re still the people there are. And the idea that they’ve oppressed anybody is just ludicrous.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
It’s unbelievable.
Eric Sammons:
The idea just because they’re white, they’re oppressors, it’s just crazy because they’ve been oppressed, if anything, as well as others.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
For example, look at somebody like, I was a big Kobe Bryant fan. He came out of a very wealthy area in Eastern Pennsylvania, spoke several languages, spoke Italian. This always hits me, his daughter, her name was Gianna Maria, which is exactly the name of my daughter, my youngest daughter. He didn’t come from a poor area, he grew up wealthy, which is because your race doesn’t define you. You don’t think according to your race.
It is so sinful and stereotypical and racist to say, oh, you’re black, you think that way, you act that way. You’re white, you act and think that, it’s unbelievable. Tell that to black people outside of America. They use the word construct all the time, it’s this construct of what it’s like to be, it’s so binary and simplistic to put people in two different groups. Absolutely amazing.
One of my favorite students here at Grove City College, he points out that he’s very dark skinned, but he’s from India. He’s not African American. Barack Obama, his mother was white. His family had money growing up. And everybody knows this, this is just common sense. But if you go to the website of Black Lives Matter, since thanksgiving, they’ve had this thing up about Black Friday, black Xmas, it’s called, and they have this statement, Capitalism doesn’t love black people. They’re condemning what they call white supremacist capitalism. Really? Tell that to Oprah Winfrey. Tell that to Michael Jackson. What are you talking about? The only color that capitalism recognizes is green.
Eric Sammons:
Capitalism has done more to raise up African Americans in this country than anything else. Yeah.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
And why in the world would you try to make capitalism into a racial thing? Well, that’s what a Marist does. There you go.
Eric Sammons:
Now, you mentioned earlier about also kind of the religious aspects of communism. At least in theory, it’s supposed to be just a political system, so it shouldn’t matter about religion, it should be agnostic about religion. Yet we know from history and what’s actually happened is, is that communism is by far the enemy, they consider religion the great enemy and they are the enemy of religion. Why is that? What is it about communism that has made it so antagonistical to religion?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Well, they have to take out God. Marx said, “Communism begins where atheism begins.” And his opiate of the masses essay, people Eric will say, well, I understand what he means. Religion’s kind of like a drug, a pacifier, it’s kind of like a crutch. And even we Christians, we lean on our religion. I get that. I understand. The whole quote is, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the masses.” And in that essay where they use the word criticize or criticism 29 times, Marx writes, “The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.” The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.
The one word that Marx used probably more than criticize, and by the way, this is why critical theory, which is all about criticizing as well too, Marx was all about criticizing was probably abolition. Abolition of property. The manifesto talks about abolition of money, capital, nationalities, entire societies, religion. Abolition of the family!. Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the communist.
And Marx had a favorite quote, and I focus on this in the Devil and Karl Marx, he was asked, do you have a favorite quote, a favorite quotation? And he said, “Ah, yes, it’s from Goethe, Goethe’s Faust.” And Marx fancied himself a poet. He wanted to be like the Goethe of his age, Faust, Faustian Bargain. And he said, “It is from the Mephistopheles character.” The Mephistopheles character is the demon, devil character. And the quote is, “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” “Everything that exists, deserves to perish.”
So Marx was all about burning down the foundation, raising the foundation, starting completely over. He and Engels writing the Communist Manifesto, communism represents “the most radical rupture in traditional relations and traditional ideas.” They call for the “forcible overthrow of all that exists.” That’s actually in the closing paragraph of manifesto, forcible overthrow of all that exists.
Eric Sammons:
It sounds pretty obvious why you call your book The Devil and Karl Marx.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Right. And he wrote poetry about the devil, which is really quite chilling. One of his poems, 1837, he said, what is it? Hold on one second. I don’t want to get the quote wrong because people will think that, well, he didn’t really say this. “Thus heaven, I forfeited. I know it full well, my soul once true to God is chosen for hell.” Some people write poems not necessarily about themselves or their thinking. I think in many ways that applies to Marx. And I go through that in the book. And his soul was once true to God. I wouldn’t say that it was chosen for hell, but he rejected God.
And another one he wrote in 1841 called The Player, Marx wrote this, “Look now, my blood dark sword shall stab unerringly within my soul. The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain til I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. See the sword, the prince of darkness sold it to me. For he beats the time and gives the signs, evermore boldly I played the dance of death.” You look at an ideology that killed over 100 million people, I think that’s a dance of death of death of some sort.
But he realized that you had to go after God. You had to go after the idea of basic moral absolutes, biblical law, natural law, in order to start all over again. They had to take out God.
Eric Sammons:
Now let’s talk about specifically the communist influence of the Catholic church. I remember hearing about this, I think it was when I first became Catholic, I think it was actually a TAN book or something made this claim that, was it Bella Dodd or something like that, made claim that communist had infiltrated in the seminary or something like that.
And to me, at the time, I was like, that just sounds like some craziness or whatever. I never really took it at face value, but at the same time, there’s clearly been, the Catholic church has had a lot of problems let’s just say that since this time in the past few 50 years. Would you argue that there has been a communist infiltration? Crisis Publications, we published Infiltration by Taylor Marshall, which obviously talks about this. Your book, Devil and Karl Marx talks about this. How would you say the communists have infiltrated or at least influenced the Catholic church?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
And right now through TAN Books, Mary Nicholas and I are co-authoring the first biography of Bella Dodd. And so we go through this, we spend a lot of time on it. And in the Devil and Karl Marx, I have a chapter on it. Bella Dodd reportedly claimed that she tried to place “over a thousand communist men” into Catholic seminaries. So I walk through that very carefully in the book. Where did she say it? Where didn’t she say it? She did not say it in public open congressional testimony as far as we know, but we quote people who heard her say it, including the late Alice von Hildebrand, who knew Bella Dodd, actually taught with Bella Dodd at Hunter College? That’s how old Alice von Hildebrand was. I think she was almost 100 years old, right?
Eric Sammons:
She was in her 90s I know when she passed away recently.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
So she heard her say it. She heard Bella Dodd say it. We quote Janine Leininger who saw Bella Dodd say it at a speech in California, and thought it was so important that she signed a testimony, a sworn affidavit saying that she heard Bella Dodd say it. As we will go through in that book, and also as I go through in this book, it was the kind of thing that Bella Dodd could have done and would’ve done because her role in the party was an organizer, an infiltrator. She was in charge specifically of the teacher’s front and of organizing the teachers unions. She placed over 1000 people in the New York state teachers union of which there were about 10,000 members. So that was about 10% of the New York state teachers union.
So to her, the idea of placing a thousand men in Catholic seminaries, and I go through the numbers in the Devil and Karl Marx, there were at least 100,000 priests in the country at the time, I shouldn’t say this off the top of my head, but the numbers were-
Eric Sammons:
What timeframe is this? Is this the 1940s?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
1930s.
Eric Sammons:
30s, okay.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah, 1930s. So is before Vatican II. And I go through all the numbers of the number of priests in the country at the time, the number of priests in seminary, the number of new priests. And so, for her to look at those numbers and say, oh yeah, you want 1000, that’s a cinch. We could do that. We could do that. I could see her at least trying to do that.
Eric Sammons:
Is this the claim though that the idea is that these are actual kind of card carrying communists at least in their hearts, and then they’re recruited to enter the seminary and become priests simply for the purposes of basically undermining the church? Are they basically agents of infiltration from the beginning?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah. And they would not necessarily be card carrying communist because most communists were small c communists. To actually join the communist party, most American communists didn’t do that because you had to swear in actual allegiance to Stalin Soviet union. So there were probably in the 30s, 50,000 to 100,000 party members, communist party members, but there were a lot more than that who were supportive of communist ideology.
This is really important to know, Eric, they did infiltrate all the other churches. The Russian Orthodox church, all sorts of other denominations. So the idea that they wouldn’t target the Catholic church, of course they would target the Catholic church.
Eric Sammons:
And so this would be worldwide thing, of course, not just America.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah, that’s right. So the only question would be to what extent did they target the churches, to what extent did they infiltrate the churches? That’s the key question. Can I find here too the quote from Earl Browder? I got it, good. Earl Browder, who was the second head, well, one of the first heads of Communist Party USA. So he’s speaking here at Union Theological Seminary. As a former Protestant, you know what that is. It’s a very big seminary, very liberal, very left wing in New York.
Eric Sammons:
It’s kind of the cathedral church of liberal Protestantism in America.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
That’s right. And so here he is speaking openly to students at Union Theological Seminary, February 15th, 1935. And this is an amazing statement. He said to them openly, “You may be interested in knowing that we have preachers, preachers active in churches who are members of the Communist Party.” Now that’s astonishing. Here he’s not talking about people sympathetic to communist ideology. Preachers active in churches who are actual card carrying members of the Communist Party. And to be a card carrying member of the Communist Party, you had to be an atheist. So those are without a doubt infiltrators. And they were hitting hard the main line denominations. What became PC(USA), the United Methodist Church.
Eric Sammons:
That was what I was part of.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah, that’s right. And the Episcopal church. And I spent a lot of time in here on the Methodist church and the Reverend Harry Ward, in particular, who was one of the founding board members, one of the founders, two founders of the ACLU. He and Roger Baldwin. Roger Baldwin, the first executive director of the ACLU, in 1929 wrote a book called Liberty Under the Soviets, Liberty Under the Soviets. But Harry Ward was called the Red Dean among preachers in the Communist Party. And he totally completely infiltrated the Methodist church through a group called the social service foundation, why can’t I think of it right now? Basically the word that they used social service, which was an earlier word for social justice.
So they were doing this to the churches. And Fulton Sheen knew it. And I quote Fulton Sheen speaking Saint Susanna Church, the American Church in Rome from the front page of the New York Times, I should have this off the top of my head, where he talks about the infiltration of churches. So people knew that it was going on. It’s just a question of to what extent it was done successfully and what numbers.
Eric Sammons:
And to think they wouldn’t go after the Catholic church actually as enemy number one.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
That’s exactly right.
Eric Sammons:
They’re going after these other ones, they’re definitely going after the Catholic church. What do you think the influence is, specifically on Vatican II, because I know from the history of Vatican II, when they asked the bishops, when the Vatican asked the bishops before the council, okay, what do you want us to talk about, what should we address? The number one answer given by the bishops, they wanted a condemnation of communism. But of course that became off the table because the Vatican want to have the Russian Orthodox bishops come. And the Soviet Union was like, they’re not coming if you guys are going to condemn communism there. So the Vatican said, okay, we’re not going to condemn communism and they didn’t come.
Now, that might just be some real politic or whatever, but it does seem like there’s some influence there at least of the communists in Russia, is there any evidence of more influence than just that?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah. I go through that in the book. I also talk about, of course, liberation theology, the influence on the Jesuits. And I also spent a lot of time on, again, Earl Browder, the guy that I just quoted, speaking to UTS in 1935. He offered something called the outstretched hand to American Catholics. And throughout the 1920s, Williams Z. Foster, who was the head of CPUSA before Browder, and also one of the founding board members of the ACLU, he blasted religion and said, communists had to be atheists and so forth.
They changed their tune in the early 30s, and they offer what Browder calls the outstretched hand as an olive branch to try to woo Catholics, to try to dupe Catholics. And people listening right now, liberal Catholics, I want you to listen to this, the people from America Magazine, which published the piece by Dean Dettloff, called The Catholic Case for Communism, which opens by quoting Dorothy Day and others. Dorothy Day’s Catholic worker firmly rejected in a long editorial on the front page this idea of the outstretched hand.
They were really good at saying, I’m sorry, we might agree with you on helping the poor, on workers’ rights, but we cannot find common ground with communists because you reject the supernatural divinity of Jesus Christ. You are against religion. You believe we have a strictly material world. You call religion the opiate of the masses. Things that all Catholics, distinctions we ought to be able to make. As Pius XI said in Quadragesimo anno, if you want to help the poor, liberal or left wing, Catholics or whatever, just follow the gospel. Religious socialism, there’s no such thing as a Christian socialist, as a socialist Catholic.
But Dorothy Day’s Catholic workers said this to Earl Browder, we Christians love communists as human beings and as potential fellows in Christ’s mystical body, yet you communists hate capitalists as well as capitalism. We love men, hate their sinners. You hate sinners against the party line. They were careful to make these distinctions as to why Catholics and why Christians can’t be communist.
The 1937 encyclical, Divini Redemptoris, by the Catholic church, referred to communism as a satanic scourge orchestrated by the sons of darkness as they put it. You don’t need to support that. You want to help the poor, just do what Jesus would do. Why do you think you should sign on to an atheistic anti-Christian destructive ideology because they talk about sharing the wealth? Well, that’s stupid. That doesn’t make any sense. Who thinks that’s simplistically? But a lot of people in the religious left have been easily duped by these ideologies, and it’s gone on for a long time.
Eric Sammons:
How do you think then communism is really impacting the Catholic church today? Obviously we saw it in the 60s and 70s. How about today? Pope Francis has done a few things that, I mean, he had the, what was that incident where he held up the cross that was sickle and hammer and stuff like that, and he seemed to be very simple towards the communist. Do you think this is basically just a continuation of the infiltration that we’ve seen over the past 50 years?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah, Francis was given a communist crucifix by the wonderful Evo Morales, the Marxist president of Bolivia. And I’ll say this, Francis said, “The Marxist ideology is wrong.” “The Marxist ideology is wrong.” The remainder of that quote is, “But I have many good friends who are Marxist,” or “I’ve met many good people who are Marxist.” I go through that in the book. So he has condemned Marxism, but I got to tell you, Eric, that is all that he has said. He has not said another word.
And I even quote him talking about certain martyrs and recognizing certain martyrs and saying they were the victim of extreme ideologies or something like that. He doesn’t refer to it as communism or as Marxism. He’s just been terrible on this issue. At a time when you need church leadership to step forward and speak proactively and openly against these things and call them out, he’s done nothing on this issue.
Eric Sammons:
Particularly when a lot young people are starting to embrace it more and more, that’s exactly when our church leaders should be saying, no, don’t go down this path, this is an anti-Catholic path really.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Which is why right now, we could use an encyclical not on ecology, on the environment, but really defining clearly for young people, male, female, marriage. Male, female, gender. Those are the issues where we need leadership right now. Not on global warming.
Eric Sammons:
We’re running out of time here, but one thing I wanted to bring up, this is a little bit unrelated, but you mentioned it and I wanted to ask you about this, tell us about this Ronald Reagan movie. You’ve written a number of books on Ronald Reagan. I didn’t even know there was a movie coming out about Reagan and I definitely didn’t know that it was based upon your books until literally earlier today when I was kind of writing some stuff down for today, I saw that, I’m like, wait a minute, what is this? Tell us about this Reagan movie. This sounds very interesting.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah, it’s gone on for a long time. Mark Joseph is the producer and he called me from the Rock River in Dixon, Illinois, 2004, 2005 when he read my book, God and Ronald Reagan. He’s an evangelical, great guy, and has made a whole bunch of different movies. And this has really been a love of his. He’s wanted to make this movie happen. It’s finally done, it’s filmed. We filmed it in Guthrie, Oklahoma in the summer of 2021. I was down there on set for a while. Dennis Quaid plays Reagan.
Eric Sammons:
This isn’t some small time production. You got Dennis Quaid, obviously he’s a star, that’s a big production there, isn’t it?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
It has a great cast. And Reagan is played by three different people because for different age groups. And Reagan around the age of 20s and 30s is played by David Henry, who was in Wizards of Waverly Place. I think the TV show How I Met Your Mother maybe, but I don’t know that show, but I’ve read that somewhere. He’s a really solid Catholic guy. He’s a really good guy. It’s got a great cast. I think it’s going to be released in fall of 2022. What’s held it up, Eric, is COVID. You have to have movie theaters open before you can release a movie. And even then, you have to have people who are comfortable going into theaters again. That’s been the slowdown, the hangup.
Eric Sammons:
Is it based on one of your books specifically or on a number of your books?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Yeah, so it’s based on one book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. So that came out in 2006 through Harper Collins. I’ve written I think eight books on Ronald Reagan, and I’m actually working on another one now, I’m working on a couple books for TAN Books. I’ve done about 20 books, I’m working on five books right now, which is too much.
Eric Sammons:
That does sound a little bit too much.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
I get asked to do other books and other subjects, I’ve had to turn down some really intriguing topics. But there’s only so much that you can do in life. Fortunately, I like to write. And so, I try to get a piece monthly to you at Crisis.
Eric Sammons:
Yes, we always appreciate it. Even more if you want.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
And you didn’t ask me to say this, but you’re doing a fantastic job at Crisis.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, thank you.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
And I read it every day. The articles are so good.
Eric Sammons:
Thank you. We’ve got some great writers. And the more you can write for us, the happier I am.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Thank you.
Eric Sammons:
I want to encourage everybody then to get The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, Infiltration from TAN Books. That’s where you’re going to really learn about how communism has impacted the church, impacted the world. So I just highly recommend it. And it’s been very popular. I feel like I see it around all the time. It seems like it’s selling well, isn’t it?
Dr. Paul Kengor:
I think it’s TAN Book’s best seller I believe.
Eric Sammons:
Nice.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
So it’s sold at least 50,000 copies I believe, which shows the hunger for information on a topic like this. I had actually set this book aside for several years. And John Moorehouse, God rest his soul, who was the editor at TAN before Patrick, the current editor, who tragically died unexpectedly, I think around the age of 53, 54, but he found out that I had this manuscript that I was working on, and said, you got to give us this book, you got to give us this book. And I said, oh, all right. It meant diving back into it.
I got to tell you in all sincerity, the subject matter, the stuff you have to research, I mean, look at that, it’s dark, it’s chilling, and it’s not, I’d rather, you and I were talking about football before we started. You’re a Cincinnati Bengals fan, I’m a sports fan, I’d rather write books about football or baseball. This stuff, this is painful.
Eric Sammons:
I feel like you have to take a shower after reading about it.
Dr. Paul Kengor:
Shower, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Eric Sammons:
Well, I really appreciate you being on, Paul. This has been great. Again, I want to just encourage everybody to get the book, The Devil and Karl Marx. And until next time everybody, God love you.
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