Betrayal. If I could sum it all up in one word, it would have to be “betrayal.”
“This is what being stabbed in the back feels like,” I thought to myself on that winter day when I first laid eyes on the FBI’s anti-Catholic “Richmond memo.”
My reaction was predictable. I am Catholic, and I thought it was appalling, plain and simple.
Of all the groups our top federal law enforcement agency would write an 11-page document targeting, they picked us. With all of the crime going on in the country, especially in the last few years, the FBI decided we Catholics were the problem.
“Radical-traditionalist,” I thought, trying to make sense of the term the FBI used more than 40 times throughout the memo. It was certainly not a term I had ever heard before in the counterterrorism space.
Who is a “radical-traditionalist Catholic?” (Let’s call them “RTC” for short.)
I’m friends with people who love the Latin Mass. I attended a traditional school where I learned Latin from fifth grade through high school.
Are they RTCs? Am I?
As these questions raced through my head, I thought back to another watershed moment in my life — the day I decided as a 27-year-old to put my “professional career” path behind me and enlist in the U.S. Air Force. I also remembered the day I applied to the FBI, several years later, eventually becoming an agent.
The memo was a punch right in the gut. The American
