What Can We Learn Today From Bella Dodd?

I have known who Bella Dodd was for a long time.  I read her book, School of Darkness, several years ago and more importantly I had a conversation with Alice von Hildebrand about her.  Alice knew her personally and so did her husband Dietrich.  Alice taught at the same college in New York that Bella had also taught at the beginning of her professional career.  Alice was grounded in philosophy and Bella was absorbed in materialism, communist materialism.  While Bella was indeed, like Alice, a Catholic, her family had never given her any of the benefits of a religious upbringing or the sacraments, nor had they taken her to church.  Bella was baptized as an infant in Italy before her parents came to the USA to work.    That would be the end of her journey as a Catholic until much later in her life. 

The Chain Link Cathedral

My favorite book by Sheen

St. Augustine wrote, ““You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.”  Blessed Fulton J. Sheen wrote of this restlessness in his book Peace of Soul.  He showed us how there is a longing to reconcile ourselves with truth and come to rest in knowing answers to all the things that trouble us throughout our lives.  Until we have found the fullness of truth there is no enduring peace in our hearts.  

As the world grows less and less religious and membership in churches of all denominations around the globe continues to decline,  it becomes ever more obvious each day how true this longing is and how in spite of man’s rejection of God through professed faith, that longing persists.  It is a longing to achieve inner peace in an ever more violent world.  It is the desire to comfort ourselves with something beautiful and pure and innocent.  We walk away from God, but the farther away we get, the more restless we are to be at peace, to have order and dignity and calm in our lives.