Marie Carré (died 1984) was a French Roman Catholic nun. She is known primarily for having published a purported memoir entitled AA-1025: The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle,[1] which some dismiss as radical Traditionalist Catholic propaganda.[2]
Contents |
Carré grew up a Protestant in France. In 1964, she converted to Catholicism and became a nun.
While working as a nurse in a Paris hospital in the late 1960s, Carré claimed that a severely injured man, who had a Slavic look, was brought in after being in a car accident. Carré tried to communicate with the man to ask him some questions but he didn't or couldn't respond. She even tried to get him to answer her questions by blinking his eyes but he didn't. The man survived for a few hours before he succumbed to his injuries. Having no form of identification Carré was instructed to go through his belongings in order to possibly identify him. She did not succeed in discovering his name, but she did discover in his briefcase a 100-page-typed memoir. She began reading the papers partly to find some information to identify him and partly out of curiosity.
The memoir claimed that he was an undercover agent of the Soviet Union ordered to infiltrate the Catholic Church by becoming a priest and to put forth modernist ideas through a teaching position that would undermine the main teachings of the Church during the Second Vatican Council. The document gave details and even told of a murder of a priest he had committed in order to get his way. No one ever claimed his belongings and Carré eventually decided to publish the memoir which was apparently written by the dead man. It was printed in France in May 1972 and eventually was translated into several other languages.
In a 2002 critique of Catholic conspiracy theories for Crisis magazine, Sandra Miesel wrote:
| “ | Further evidence of faith in Communist trickiness is the persistent popularity of Anti-Apostle 1025 by Marie Carré, originally published in France in 1972. This purports to be a memoir by the 1025th Red to penetrate Catholic seminaries, but it is manifestly a feeble example of radical traditionalist propaganda that even fails to factor in the Russian purges. The main character is a Polish orphan—the careful reader will note he’s a Jew—recruited by a Soviet spymaster between the World Wars to penetrate and subvert the Catholic Church.[2] | ” |
Catholic philosopher and theologian Alice von Hildebrand counters that:
| “ | AA-1025 may be a literary invention of Marie Carre, but one must admit that she hits the bull's eye from the first page to the last. Some people have extraordinary talents to foresee the future. Carre certainly had an extraordinary perception of how best to harm the Church. How surprising indeed that all her inventions have become reality in the post-conciliar Church.[3] | ” |
Carré died in France in 1984.