(ZENIT News / Washington, 06.07.2025).- What once appeared to be a bureaucratic misstep is now surfacing as something far more systemic. Recent disclosures from the Senate Judiciary Committee and files obtained by Senator Chuck Grassley have unraveled a broader and more coordinated FBI effort to monitor traditionalist Catholic communities—raising serious constitutional and ethical concerns.
The controversial 2023 memo from the FBI’s Richmond field office, which targeted so-called “radical traditionalist Catholics,” was long described by then-FBI Director Christopher Wray as a singular lapse. But new evidence points in another direction. Far from being a rogue document, the memo was not only distributed to over 1,000 FBI employees but also involved collaboration with at least four other field offices across the country. Internal communications show participation from FBI branches in Buffalo, Louisville, Milwaukee, and Portland, with coordinated discussions and exchanges of intelligence about liturgical communities offering the Latin Mass and traditionalist online networks.
Even more revealing is the existence of a second, previously unknown draft memo, designed for broader circulation across the FBI. Though this version omitted explicit references to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), it retained the central—and deeply troubling—claim: that traditional Catholic environments might serve as breeding grounds for ethnically or racially motivated violent extremism.
This draft, known as a Strategic Perspective Executive Analytical Report (SPEAR), directly contradicts Wray’s testimony under oath that there had been “only one product” from a “single field office.” Now it appears the Bureau was preparing to institutionalize that narrative across its national network, effectively embedding suspicion toward segments of the Catholic population into its framework for domestic threat assessment.
The implications are stark. Language from the memo compared traditional Catholic beliefs to “Islamist theology” and advised cultivating informants within Latin Mass parishes. Internal emails show that some agents were uneasy. One asked bluntly whether anyone had even requested such a product. Another warned about overreliance on the SPLC’s designations—labels that have sparked controversy for sweeping certain religious or socially conservative groups into categories of hate.
Yet despite these internal concerns, no official objections appear to have been raised at the leadership level. On the contrary, a quiet effort to erase the paper trail followed. Deputy Director Paul Abbate reportedly ordered the permanent deletion of the Richmond memo and associated files. Another official demanded the removal of the access log—effectively concealing who had interacted with the document.
Senator Grassley, now chairing the Judiciary Committee, has not minced words. He has requested that new FBI Director Kash Patel provide a full accounting of the memo’s origins, the suppression of its trail, and any other materials that reflect similar biases against religious groups. Grassley accuses the former leadership under Wray of misleading Congress and impeding oversight by withholding documents for months.
At the heart of this controversy lies an uncomfortable question: What happens when government agencies—tasked with protecting the nation—start treating prayerful communities as potential security threats?
The FBI’s focus on “radical traditionalist Catholics” may have been framed in the language of threat mitigation, but the cultural resonance runs deeper. For many, the surveillance of Latin Mass communities recalls an era of religious suspicion, invoking not just political overreach but moral blindness. The notion that kneeling before the altar or posting theology online might trigger federal scrutiny treads dangerously close to violating the First Amendment’s guarantee of free religious expression.
The use of vague ideological labels—“radical traditionalist,” “extremist,” “comparable to Islamism”—serves not as analysis but as a warning flare. These terms do not simply describe; they classify, isolate, and activate surveillance machinery. When paired with a lack of internal accountability, they carry the real risk of criminalizing religious devotion.
The Richmond memo may now be formally retracted, but the trust it eroded cannot be so easily recovered. The revelation that 13 FBI documents and five attachments across the agency included similar phrasing suggests a deeper cultural bias in federal law enforcement’s approach to certain religious groups.
The debate now moves beyond the memo itself to the broader architecture of federal oversight and respect for religious liberty. Is there space in the current security paradigm for traditionalist worldviews that challenge cultural norms? And can government agencies distinguish between radicalism and orthodoxy without falling into ideological policing?
Grassley insists this is not a partisan fight. “Whether we’re Democrats or Republicans, believers or non-believers, justice must be administered fairly,” he said in a letter to Director Patel. “What’s at stake is nothing less than the integrity of the FBI and the trust of the American people.”
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