The Vatican’s report on homosexual molester and former cardinal Theodore McCarrick is a “whitewash,” Catholic commentators say. But it does contain one item, buried in a footnote, of more than passing interest.
The old man might have been a Soviet agent.
Writing for Crisis, Elizabeth Yore has offered a report that aligns with last year’s allegation from Church Militant that the Soviets could have recruited young McCarrick when he traveled to Europe after high school.
If true, the leftist tilt of the Church for the last 50 years, and the explosion of the sex scandals involving top prelates such as McCarrick, is not surprising.
For McCarrick became the most powerful Catholic authority in the country.
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Infiltrate the Church
The putative KGB-McCarrick connection is easily explained. The Soviets always considered the Church a principal enemy and obstacle to infiltrating and undermining the West.
In 1960, for instance, the Soviets launched Seat 12, a disinformation operation that targeted the reputation of Pope Pius XII. Pius saved hundreds of thousands of Jews during World War II, but in 1963, leftist Rolf Hochuth wrote The Deputy, which accused the Holy Father of complicity in the Final Solution. The charge was false, but Seat 12 and its result, The Deputy, worked. Pius was smeared.
Not until 2007, when Romanian communist defector Ion Pacepa divulged the details of Seat 12, did the truth emerge.
In 1969, Yore recalled, KGB boss Yuri Andoprov, a future Soviet premier, “ordered a full-scale espionage operation against the Vatican, directing Soviet agents to cultivate moles among Vatican curial officials.”
That plan worked, too, she wrote:
Ultimately, every dicastery and bureaucracy in the Vatican had been infiltrated by the KGB. In Christopher Andrew’s book, The Sword and Shield, secret files from the Soviets reveal that they sought the global expansion of communism and the undermining of its enemies; “the Holy See which ranked as one of the top targets of Soviet intelligence services during the Cold War.”
Yet Soviet infiltration of the Church began long before 1969, CM explained in early 2019 in its report on McCarrick.
“When Stalin gained control of the former Soviet Union in the early 1920s, he set about plans to cripple the influence of the Catholic Church in the West, if not completely destroy the Church — all part of communism’s plan for world domination and warned about by Our Lady in Fatima in 1917,” the website reported:
A key component of the plans involved infiltrating seminaries with young men who would work to undermine the Church’s teaching in the area of morality.
This was testified to on multiple occasions by Bella Dodd, a high-ranking member of the U.S. Communist Party. She herself claims to have orchestrated the placement of 1,100 men into U.S. seminaries.
McCarrick Recruited? Page 34, Footnote 127
Those facts set the table to discuss the sex-crazed homosexual McCarrick and his trip to Switzerland after high school, CM noted:
It is from McCarrick’s longtime sex abuse victim James Grein that we know the exact location in Switzerland was St. Gallen, and it is from Church Militant’s former Communist sources we know that St. Gallen was one of the Communist training centers to recruit young men to go into seminaries and begin eroding the Church.
McCarrick told the New York Times that it was during his year in Europe that he discovered his vocation, pointing to how the history of the Church in Europe to which he had been exposed had been a motivating factor.
McCarrick returned to St. Gallen annually, Grein said. It is the home of the St. Gallen Mafia, a group pro-homosexual clerics believed to have orchestrated the election of fellow leftist Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Benedict XVI’s successor.
All these details fit with footnote 127, page 34, of the Vatican’s report on the disgraced prelate.
[wpmfpdf id=”106969″ embed=”1″ target=””]“McCarrick’s rising profile” in the Church, the footnote says, “drew the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and even the KGB.”
Both agencies contacted McCarrick, then the bishop in Metuchen, New Jersey.
“In the early 1980s, a KGB agent who enjoyed diplomatic cover as the Deputy Chief of Mission to the United Nations for the Soviet Union approached McCarrick, apparently to attempt to befriend him,” the footnote explains.
The FBI asked McCarrick to serve as a double agent, an offer he apparently declined:
McCarrick believed it was best to decline such involvement (particularly because he was immersed in the organization of the new Diocese of Metuchen), the FBI persisted, contacting McCarrick again and encouraging him to allow a relationship with the KGB agent to develop.… It is not clear, however, whether McCarrick ultimately accepted the FBI’s proposal, and no record reflects further contact with the KGB agent.
In an interview, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, while not personally familiar with the incident, stated that McCarrick would have been “a very high value target for any of the [intelligence] services, but particularly the Russians at that time.”
Indeed. But what if the Soviets recruited McCarrick in the 1950s?
Unanswered Question
Yore posed several questions given the KGB contact and McCarrick’s extensive travel to the Soviet Union in 1987, Cuba in 1988, and dozens of trips to Red China.
“McCarrick knew his way around Communist countries and leaders,” Yore wrote:
Was McCarrick meeting with his spymasters and sharing intelligence while visiting these communist countries?
Was the KGB supplying McCarrick with boys and young men as payment for cooperating with the Soviets?
Was the source of McCarrick’s vast wealth from payments by his Communist minders?
Why did the Deputy Head of the UN Soviet Mission contact McCarrick in the first place? Was the Deputy Head in New York instructed by KGB Moscow headquarters to contact McCarrick because he was a known communist sympathizer? It seems highly probable that Bishop McCarrick popped up on the KGB radar as a prime candidate for espionage work.
The whitewash from the Vatican doesn’t come clean.
