The Right Way to De-Weaponize the FBI | RealClearPolitics
This February, FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin revealed the existence of a memorandum within the Richmond, Va., field office that labeled Catholics as potential domestic terrorists. Last Monday, almost a full year after Seraphin s disclosure, the House Judiciary Committee released a report, The FBI s Breach of Religious Freedom: The Weaponization of Law Enforcement Against Catholic Americans.
Although the report details how the FBI abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholics, there are some key issues that Capitol Hill and most media missed completely.
The FBI stigmatized a vast number of United States citizens as potential Radical Traditional Catholic (RTC) terrorists based upon the existence of one criminal case involving a man who self-described as an RTC. The FBI s version of the facts, detailed in the Intelligence Note, describes a man who likely suffers from mental illness hardly a cross-section of the Catholic population.
The most shocking aspect of this, one that largely escaped public attention, is that the FBI memo states the subject wasn t even Catholic. He was taking catechism lessons in the hopes of becoming a baptized Catholic, but he was neither baptized nor confirmed.
The FBI never explained what threat the agency sought to mitigate by targeting Catholics. The Note offers no history or example of political violence associated with conservative Catholics who prefer Latin mass. It simply asserts, baselessly, that they pose a threat as potentially violent domestic terrorists.
Moreover, the FBI s denigration of Catholics is not limited to Latin mass worshippers. Rather, the bureau appears to have issues with the Catholic faith in general. The Intelligence Note laments a purported intelligence gap when seeking to identify factors leading to violence, which may include increased religiosity and/or adherence to extreme religious teachings. Hence, the FBI literally claims that increasing one s religiosity makes one a greater domestic terrorist threat.
The FBI never bothered to explain precisely what tenets of Catholicism or extreme religious teachings of the Catholic Church lead to political violence because, of course, there are none. Adherents of the faith who embrace extreme Catholic religiosity tend to become nuns in the streets of Calcutta.
The FBI used to be full of Catholics, Irish and Italian. Long gone, it seems.
Back then, all Masses were in Latin.