Note: Jimmy Akin recently did an episode of his “Mysterious World” podcast on a short book that had a significant impact on my life. My understanding of this book changed as I matured, and I learned a significant lesson about the way traditionalist Catholic propaganda and conspiracies work, and the importance of detachment and critical thinking when evaluating factual claims. I highly recommend watching this podcast. I have also provided my own reflections on this book below the video, which you can read before or after watching the video.

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The bookshelves of my childhood home were stacked with a wide variety of offbeat Catholic publications from the 1970s and 1980s, many of which contributed to shaping the worldview of my youth as a battle for the soul of our Church, country, and planet against a spirit of darkness that threatened to consume them. Other Catholic families may have had collections of popular devotionals or books by saints — and certainly we had our share of those — but the books that were most compelling to me had titles like The Unicorn in the Sanctuary, The Star-Spangled Heresy, Behind the Lodge Door, Air Waves From Hell, The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita, and Hostage to the Devil.

Unlike many adult Catholics today who complain that their childhood religious formation was nothing but shallow reminders of God’s love, “happy-clappy” guitar music, and doing coloring books filled with images of Jesus picking flowers, my own view of the spiritual world was intensely focused on apocalyptic battles between good and evil and the coming persecution.

Hell? Definitely feared it.

Purgatory? Just as bad as hell, except there was the promise that it’d end eventually.

Mortal sin? Not only an ever-present possibility, but pretty much everyone we knew was most definitely in a state of it.

Yes, we went to our local, mainstream Catholic school, but we were taught that the stuff they said to us in Religion class was post-Vatican II fluff. The “real” Catholic stuff was on the bookshelves and it was terrifying. For most of my early years, I was acutely aware that at some point the US government was going to start rounding up Catholics and we’d have to go into hiding. The only question was when. If it happened soon, the situation would likely be Orwellian; they’d start by kidnapping the kids first, then brainwash us so that we’d turn in our own parents.

And the scariest thing of all was that not even the Catholic Church was safe from corruption. I was taught that at Vatican II, the Church had been infiltrated by Communists and Freemasons, and they were everywhere — definitely in Chicago and Milwaukee but especially in Rome. I understood that Pope John Paul II was a good but weak pope, but the day would someday come when the corrupted cardinals would finally put an infiltrator on the throne of Peter. I feared that day.

In retrospect, this might not have been the most healthy catechetical situation for an impressionable 10–13 year old boy with an active imagination — one who read every book he could get his hands on. Especially in a household without Nintendo or cable TV. And the internet was still a decade away. Books were the keys to knowledge of the outside world, and when I was a kid, I had to make do with the books at my disposal.

And of all the books I read during those years, the one that most captivated me and seized my attention was a thin pulp paperback entitled AA-1025: The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle by Marie Carré. This French book was first published in English by TAN Books in 1972 and purports to be the secret memoir of (according to the TAN edition’s introduction) “a Communist who purposely entered the Catholic priesthood (along with many, many others) with the intent to subvert and destroy the Church from within.”

The memoirs, we are told, were found by a Catholic nurse, who felt duty-bound to publish them. She wrote, “I am only a nurse, and I saw—in a country that I will not name, in a hospital that must remain anonymous—I saw a man die following an automobile accident, a man without a name, without a nationality, I mean, without identification papers.” She writes that it was only due to the man’s untimely death that he did not destroy the manuscript, because he never intended for it to be read by anyone.

[Editor’s Note: Before rushing over to buy this book (it really isn’t worth the money), note that the entire manuscript is available at the Internet Archive for free.]

I read this book several times in my youth, and — not yet having learned about the importance of things like citing sources, let alone critical thinking — took the story as fact. I was confounded by the mystery of who this infiltrator was, discouraged by the knowledge that his identity would never be revealed (the Prologue said that it was impossible: “this text of about one hundred typewritten pages could bring no clue allowing one to identify this injured man.”) I wondered who he could be, and if his identity would ever be discovered. I wondered why this hair-raising story wasn’t more widely known.

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.

A representative positive review from Amazon says:

If Marie Carré wrote a work of fiction, then she should be considered a literary master. Few, if any are so expertly able to capture a character the way that Carré does with the man she calls Michael.

If Marie Carré merely published the memoirs of a man who succumbed to his injuries following an auto accident, something she claims she’s doing in the book, then this book represents a mercifully brief Rosetta Stone for deciphering the trajectory of the Church from the 1970’s, and its prognostications have relevance today.

This latter-most point is perhaps most striking; the character of Michael can be so clearly seen in the actions, mannerism and utterances of the clergy of 2018. And this necessarily means that AA-102: Memoirs of a Communist’s infiltration into the Church can’t be written-off as a mere fiction: AA-1025 is clearly something greater.

This book represents a difficult puzzle, in that the narrative its self is almost certainly fiction, and if not fiction has almost certainly been fictionalized. The tragic romance which unfolds between AA-1025 and “Raven Hair” is almost entirely too well-crafted, too close to Hollywood to be real. And yet every bit of AA-1025’s philosophical waxing, scheming, plotting, and suggestion have either unfolded in the Catholic Church, or continue to unfold today. Even the character of AA-1025 is absolutely convincing in terms of behavior, mannerism, barely concealed rage, and pride. AA-1025, in his curt dismissals and pragmatic approaches to destroying the Catholic Church from within sounds almost exactly like real-life Communist defector Yuri Bezmenov.

If this is a work of pure fiction, it is fiction of the most believable kind. I must agree with the Great, Alice von Hildebrand; Marie Carré hits the bullseye from the first page, to the last.

One of the handful of negative reviews gives an entirely different impression:

Con Job

This book is one of two things: either the most incredible revelation of infiltration of the Catholic Church, or a fairly boring piece of fiction.

As I began reading it, I was prepared to believe that it was true. The more I read, however, the more I became convinced that it must be a work of fiction.

The things that convinced me were:

(1) The whole story about how the book came to be in the hands of a poor Catholic nurse stretches credibility, particularly when the nurse intrudes her own words into the narrative.

(2) The anonymous author claims to be a Communist, but speaks almost exclusively using Catholic terminology.

(3) His motivations in writing his “memoirs” are very unconvincing. He says that he is only writing them to get them out of his system and that he intends to destroy them before anyone can read them, but the book looks very much as if it is intended for publication; in particular, the “romance” with a young woman is too much like a stereotyped romantic fiction. The letter from the young woman sounds like something out of a melodrama. (And people do not quote others’ letters in full in their memoirs, unless those memoirs are intended for publication.) The whole thing looks nothing like a set of private memoirs.

(4) He claims too much: that is, to have thought up just about every change which has occurred in the Catholic Church in the past 40 years. In other words, everything this man claims to have thought of has either come about or been seriously suggested by people in the Church. If this is true, it would make this anonymous man the most influential Catholic of at least the last 19 centuries.

(5) Despite this enormous influence which he claims, and despite his claim that he is writing the book only for himself, he is awfully vague about how he worked. As a result, the whole thing is extremely unconvincing.

(6) Both the style and content are amazingly similar to what one reads in typical traditionalist attacks on the modern Catholic Church.

(7) As the book goes on, it becomes more and more preoccupied with traditionalist concerns, and almost completely abandons any attempt to tell a story.

In conclusion, this book is a work of fiction. As everything in it denies even the possibility that it could be fiction, it is a con job – one which successfully conned me out of my money, since I bought it. Judging from the other reviews, it seems that many others have also been conned by it.

I am prepared to believe, if given sufficient evidence, that Communists may have deliberately infiltrated the Catholic priesthood; but this book offers no evidence.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming number of positive reviews of AA-1025 demonstrate the gullibility and poor critical thinking of many Catholics, even highly intelligent ones. But it also shows that this is a problem that has been with us for a long time. Solving it will not be easy.