Infiltration: Sex, Conspiracies, Apparitions, and Prophecies Sell Ink

A review of Infiltration:  The Plot to Destroy the Church From Within (Sophia Institute Press, 2019)

Taylor R. Marshall is well rewarded for keeping disaffected Catholics on the American reservation. Gaining bestseller status on Amazon is a great honor. It also takes skill to be able to identify and push all the hot button items of a target audience just the right way. But then conspiracy stories involving secret societies and sex always sell and they sell bigger when you mix in apparitions, conversations with Satan, and predictions. It’s the same genre that Dan Brown used in The Davinci Code and associated works, it worked there, it works here. Unfortunately, stories don’t help people realize the problem and usually don’t help to solve the problem, and in the case of the Catholic Church, a big part of the problem is America (which equates to rule by the wealthy) and Americanism.

There is no doubt that the Catholic Church is really messed up these days. To Marshall’s credit, he attributes this ongoing mess to the leadership which means the priests and the prelates.   He claims that we got there over the course of about 175 years because of Communists, Masons, and homosexuals, and he tries to support that claim in 224 pages, with a lot fewer footnotes. It is too much with too little that leaves out a whole lot, and leaves much unexplained.  As a result, the book resembles an anthology of well-known stories.

For instance, the Communists are long gone. The Masons are fading away. All that remains are the homosexuals, or gays. Homosexuals have always existed throughout history but Marshall says that they have somehow been weaponized to destroy the Church.  That should be enough to ask the question, Who benefits now from this state of affairs in the Church? He starts to crack that case open in Chapter 27 when he mentions a wealthy businessman becoming McCarrick’s patron, and that Francis Cardinal Spellman, or “Nellie” as Marshall says he was called, of New York was a powerful leader of the homosexuals in the Church, but that is as far as he goes ignoring Spellman’s connections with the most powerful Americans of the day. Marshall mentions Bella Dodd for the proposition that nearly 1,100 men were put into the priesthood by the Communists. What he doesn’t bother to follow up on is her statements that the Communist Party in New York had to wait for orders from the Kremlin which in turn waited for orders from people who worked in skyscrapers in New York City. (more...)

Infiltration: Sex, Conspiracies, Apparitions, and Prophecies Sell Ink