The Devil and Bella Dodd

“Step by step, I retreated from God and went forth to meet the world, the flesh, and the devil. . . . I’d join the devil himself. . . . There is no doubt that I traveled with him at my side and that he extorted a great price for his company.”

This is how Bella Dodd (1904–69) described her long battle with atheistic communism, an ideology her Church calls a “satanic scourge.” She later described it as a “school of darkness,” a school of “hate,” a school for which she was a master organizer an...