The FBI versus Catholics

New documents uncovered this week revealed that FBI director Christopher Wray was completely full of it when he testified to Congress that attempts to investigate traditional Catholics were limited to one rogue FBI field office.

Earlier this year, a former special agent released a memo from the FBI’s Richmond field office warning that so-called “radical traditionalist” Catholics were potential sources of domestic extremism. The memo asserted that there is “growing overlap” between white supremacist groups and traditional Catholics who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). According to the FBI, these individuals are “antisemitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT and white supremacy.”

The memo suggested infiltrating these traditional Catholic groups and developing “sources” within them.

The FBI removed the memo after backlash, saying that it did “not meet the exacting standards of the FBI.” But House Republicans now claim to have uncovered evidence that additional FBI field offices were involved in its creation.

The GOP says that “both FBI Portland and FBI Los Angeles field offices were involved in or contributed to the creation of FBI’s assessment of traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists.”

This doesn’t come as a major shock. It was always difficult to believe that the Richmond field office had singlehandedly dreamed up this unconstitutional mess of investigating people based on activities protected under the First Amendment. It does, of course, help solidify the very legitimate mistrust that Americans have in the intelligence community.

Some FBI agents are apparently so blockheaded that they have managed to conflate a few online LARPers who dig the aesthetic of women wearing veils with actual Catholic traditionalists who regularly attend Mass on Sundays and otherwise participate in their parishes. There are some pretty key Catholic teachings that would necessarily prohibit any devout believer from becoming a racist extremist: the Ten Commandments, obviously, and that pesky belief that all human beings are created in the image of God (although, to be fair, the church’s stance on abortion never stopped Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi).

Sadly, the targeting of Catholics has been commonplace throughout history, including in America. In fact, it was the persecution of Catholics in Maryland — originally established as a safe haven for English Catholics — that in large part inspired the Founding Fathers to protect religious liberty in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Still, many Americans retain a distaste for Catholics (recall the controversy over JFK’s faith!), particularly the minority of believers that actually believe in the less socially popular tenets of the faith, such as transubstantiation, being pro-life without exceptions, or not accepting same-sex marriages.

This phenomenon is not limited to Catholics, certainly, given how the Hasidic Jewish community was treated by government officials and how church services in general were one of the first activities to be banned during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Americans are welcome to find each other’s religious beliefs as wacky as they like, but the deliberate targeting of certain believers by the surveillance state is beyond the pale. Unfortunately for the FBI, the many traditional Catholics I know won’t be intimidated at attempts to lump them in with white supremacists or other domestic extremists. As Father Mark Beard said in his now-viral homily just a few days before he passed away in a car crash, “You and I have got to stop apologizing for being Catholic.”