Marie Carré

Marie Carré (1905-1984) was a French nurse who later in life converted from Protestantism to become Roman Catholic nun. She is known primarily in the English-speaking world for having published a purported memoir entitled AA-1025: The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle, which some consider to be Traditionalist Catholic propaganda.

Life

Carré grew up a Calvinist Protestant in France. In 1964, she converted to Catholicism and became a nun much later in life. A picture of Carré was made available on the Internet by Chiré: Diffusion de la Pensee Francaise.

AA-1025: The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle

Carré claimed that, while working as a nurse in a Paris hospital in the late 1960s, a severely injured man, who had a Slavic look, was brought in after being in a car accident. Carré alleged that she 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 allegedly 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 advance modernist ideas through a teaching position that would undermine the main teachings of the Church during the Second Vatican Council in subtle ways, by turn of phrase methods. 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. It was printed in France in May 1972 and eventually was translated into several other languages.

Criticism

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.

Catholic philosopher and theologian Alice von Hildebrand argues that:

Von Hildebrand received a detailed response by Miesel, who stated that:

Death

Carré died in France in 1984.