Last week’s report by whistleblower Kyle Seraphin that an analyst within the Richmond Field Office of the FBI released an intelligence product profiling “the increasingly observed interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVE) in radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology” was sobering but not particularly shocking.
When late last year The New York Times’ Ruth Graham took an especial interest in the flourishing Traditional Latin Mass and the increasing numbers of faithful Catholics attending these services, despite pushback from the pope, I warned something was up. Graham’s slippery references to “a rising right-wing strain within American Christianity” and the so-called “brand of new hard-right rhetoric” attracting Catholics to the Latin Mass didn’t sit well.
The FBI’s persecution of Catholic fathers for their pro-life advocacy is sickening enough. But the monitoring of a tiny subset of Catholics based on their beliefs and mode of worship is an appalling new low. The FBI memorandum has received widespread condemnation, with Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares and now 19 other state attorneys general demanding that the FBI “order agency personnel not to target Americans based on their religious beliefs and practices” and “reveal to the American public the extent to which they have engaged in such activities.”
Significantly, the FBI hasn’t shed light on whether it was tasked to investigate traditional Catholics or whether some lowly partisan ideologue in the hate-speech division got a little carried away.
Pleasing to the Pope
In any case, one thing seems likely: The memo must have been music to the
