Senate Judiciary Committee: Anti-Catholic texts found in 13 more Biden-era FBI documents
The J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters building in Washington, D.C. / Credit: Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 4, 2025 / 17:35 pm (CNA).
A report from the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that the 2023 anti-Catholic Richmond FBI memo involved coordination with field offices around the country and that similar disparaging language about certain Catholics was found in at least 13 separate documents.
In February 2023, the FBI retracted a memo from the Richmond, Virginia, field office that detailed an investigation into so-called “radical traditionalist” Catholics after the internal document was leaked to the public and prompted heavy pushback.
The memo called for the FBI to develop sources within parishes that offer the Latin Mass and online Catholic communities for the purpose of “threat mitigation.” Relying almost entirely on designations from the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the memo expressed concerns about a potential link between “radical-traditionalist” Catholics and racially motivated violent extremism.
Although the FBI removed the document from its systems and asserted the issue was isolated to one product from one field office, the new report found that multiple field offices were involved in producing the memo and that it was distributed to more than 1,000 FBI employees throughout the country.
The report reveals that analysts at the Richmond field office had consulted with the offices in Louisville, Kentucky; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee to gather information about “radical traditionalist” Catholics in preparation for the Richmond office’s report.
Conversations with the Louisville office reportedly helped Richmond analysts conclude that the beliefs of “radical-traditional Catholicism” are “comparable to Islamist theology.” Less is known about what was discussed with the Portland and Milwaukee field offices, but the report found that Richmond’s analysts had phone conversations with them about the subject.
After the Richmond field office produced the memo, the report found that it was sent to other field offices throughout the country.
The report cites an email exchange from the Richmond office to the office in Buffalo, New York, which notes that two “radical traditionalist” Catholic groups are in Buffalo’s area of responsibility.
Some FBI officials in the Milwaukee and Phoenix field offices were concerned about the memo, according to email exchanges. The report notes, however, it’s unclear whether the concerns were shared with the Richmond field office.
One official questioned: “Is anyone really asking for a product like this?” and complained that “apparently we are at the behest of the SPLC” and another responded: “Yeah, our overreliance on the SPLC hate designations is … problematic.”
According to the report, the Richmond FBI had produced a draft of a second memo on the same subject, which was intended to be distributed to the entire FBI. This was shelved following the backlash to the initial leaked memo.
The draft contained similar assertions of a link between “radical traditionalist” Catholics and racially motivated violent extremism and called for source development within parishes that celebrate the Latin Mass and within Catholic online communities. The draft, which was being written in 2023, asserted that the threat of violence will likely increase during the election cycle.
Although the second draft expressed similar concerns, one noticeable difference is that it did not reference the SPLC.
The report also revealed an internal FBI email, which acknowledged that the phrase “radical traditionalist Catholic” appeared in 13 separate FBI documents and five attachments throughout the agency.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley is requesting that the new FBI director under President Donald Trump — Kash Patel — provide the committee with those documents and any other documents that “purport to tie religious groups to violent extremism based on SPLC and other biased sources.”
The report also chastises former FBI Director Christopher Wray, accusing him of “misleading testimony on the scope of the memo’s distribution” when he classified the memo as “a single product by a single field office.”
“I and other members had already expressed concern as to whether the memo’s production was isolated to Richmond or part of a larger problem,” Grassley wrote. “Testimony calling it the work of a single field office was misleading at best and appears to be part of a pattern of intentional deception.”
Grassley further notes that internal emails demonstrate that FBI leadership was aware that the scope of the issue extended beyond the Richmond office and accuses the agency under Wray’s leadership of “[obstructing] my investigation by not providing these answers for many months.”
He told Patel he is “determined to get to the bottom of the Richmond memo, and of the FBI’s contempt for oversight in the last administration.”
“I look forward to continuing to work with you to restore the FBI to excellence and prove once again that justice can and must be fairly and evenly administered, blind to whether we are Democrats or Republicans, believers or nonbelievers,” Grassley added.
