Conversion, Communism, and Fulton Sheen

Very cool.  Excerpts:

...Communists in the United States (as elsewhere) were expected to put Party above all, including family. Although the Budenzes were model Communists in other ways, they never quite fit the Communist vision of family life. Neither Louis nor Margaret adopted the loose interpretation of marital fidelity espoused by many of their comrades. Margaret was expected to work for the Party outside the home, but she always put the welfare of her children first. When forced to choose between her obligations to her children and the demands of the Party, she chose her children, risking the ire of the Communist leadership. When Louis and Margaret's love came to fruition in their third child, their Communist friends were incredulous. One of the Party's top operatives urged Louis to abort the baby (which would have been illegal at the time). Another child would put too much financial and emotional strain on the couple, he said, and might result in Margaret's "becoming 'bourgeois.'"

The Budenzes spurned this advice, and Margaret delivered their third daughter, Justine, at a Catholic hospital in New York. She wrote "atheist" in the blank for "religion" on the hospital admission form. Margaret recounted that the sister on duty joked that "she would like to send me home with a religion as well as a new baby." Margaret wasn't amused.

Being a former Catholic, one of Louis's assigned tasks was to infiltrate the Catholic Church in the United States so as to soften its anti-Communist stance. Among his targets was the well-known radio personality and eloquent anti-Communist, Msgr. Fulton Sheen. Budenz got nowhere. At a dinner meeting in 1936, Monsignor Sheen refused to engage Louis on the issue of Communism's merits. Instead, the monsignor invited Louis to "kneel down and let me hear your confession." The two parted on less than amicable terms...

The day of their reception into the Church and the blessing of their marriage was hectic. Because of the potentially violent consequences of severing ties with the Communist Party, the Budenzes could not let on to their comrades what they were in the process of doing. Monsignor Sheen announced it to the press on the day they professed Catholicism and publicly renounced Communism. Their residence in suburban New York would become a dangerous and inhospitable place after their conversion became known, so after the ceremony in St. Patrick's Cathedral, they hid in a hotel until they could catch a train out of the state. Their destination was South Bend, where Monsignor Sheen had arranged a teaching position for Louis at the University of Notre Dame...

Read the whole thing for an awesome ending.