The Richmond Catholic Memo, the machinery of suspicion, and why the Church Christ founded will always be an enemy of the spirit of the age
“If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you.”
— John 15:18, Douay-Rheims
There is a temptation whenever Catholics discover something like the FBI’s Richmond Catholic Memo to treat it as merely another political scandal.
Wrong analyst. Bad methodology. Government overreach. First Amendment concerns. Congressional hearings. Personnel failures. Bureaucratic cleanup.
All of that matters.
But it does not go deep enough.
Because Catholics have seen this pattern before.
Empires change. Flags change. Political parties change. The vocabulary changes. The accusations change.
But the Church remains.
And somehow, century after century, the world repeatedly finds new language with which to explain why fidelity to Christ is dangerous.
Once we were “atheists” because we would not worship Rome’s gods.
Then we were enemies of the state.
Then papists.
Then obscurantists.
Then reactionaries.
Then enemies of progress.
Now, in the sterile vocabulary of the modern security bureaucracy, Catholic religious convictions can find themselves discussed beside phrases like “radicalization,” “violent extremism,” “tripwire,” “source development,” and “mitigation opportunities.”
The vocabulary has become clinical.
The spiritual conflict has not.
And the recently released Department of Justice report on the FBI Richmond Field Office is disturbing precisely because underneath all the bureaucratic language lies something ancient:
the temptation of worldly power to look upon a religion it does not understand, identify beliefs it finds alien or threatening, and begin treating fidelity as suspicious.
The DOJ documents do not establish that every FBI employee involved hated Catholics. In fact, the FBI’s own internal review said it found “no evidence of malicious intent or an improper purpose.”
That distinction matters.
Because the Catholic understanding of spiritual warfare is far more profound than “these people are evil.”
St. Paul tells us:
“For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers…”
— Ephesians 6:12, Douay-Rheims
Our enemy is not some intelligence analyst sitting at a desk in Virginia.
Our enemy is the ancient lie that truth itself becomes dangerous whenever it refuses to kneel before the spirit of the age.
And that is where this story becomes much bigger than the FBI.
Start with the truth: the original target was actually dangerous
Catholics should not manufacture a martyr where there was none.
The man whom the report calls Target 1 was not merely some traditional Catholic guy who owned a rosary and attended the Latin Mass.
The evidence against him was serious.
According to the DOJ report, he had expressed violent racial views, assaulted police, attempted to obtain or manufacture weapons and ammunition, constructed more than half a dozen Molotov cocktails, advocated attacks against minorities and police, encouraged armed resistance against the government, and even promoted a mass shooting at a school for children with special needs. He was eventually sentenced to more than eight years in federal custody for possession of destructive devices.
Investigating him was legitimate.
Period.
White supremacy is not Catholicism.
Antisemitism is not Catholicism.
Terrorism is not Catholicism.
Murderous racial hatred is not “based traditionalism.”
The Catholic Church teaches that every form of unjust discrimination based upon race is incompatible with God’s design for humanity. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1935. The Church explicitly repudiates hatred and persecution of Jews. Nostra Aetate, 4.
So Catholics have no reason whatsoever to defend the man’s ideology.
But here is where the story becomes extraordinary.
When Target 1 began attending a traditional Catholic chapel, the priest told investigators that this man wasn’t actually Catholic.
He wasn’t a member.
He had never been to confession.
He had attended only three or four catechism classes.
And according to the priest, his beliefs needed to be changed before he could even join the Church.
The priest reportedly described Target 1’s racial views as “crazy.”
Read that again.
The extremist arrives carrying an ideology formed before his Catholic association.
The priest says his ideology is unacceptable.
The priest says the man needs to change before becoming Catholic.
And somehow the investigation eventually helps generate an intelligence product about an allegedly dangerous intersection between violent extremists and Catholic traditionalism.
That reversal is the heart of the scandal.
The Church was not shown radicalizing this man.
The available evidence showed the Church resisting what he already was.
Yet the man’s proximity to Catholicism began casting suspicion upon Catholicism itself.
That is how guilt by association works.
And spiritually, that mechanism is very old.
First isolate the monster. Then associate the monster with the faith.
Satan rarely begins by saying:
Jesus Christ is Lord, therefore hate Him.
That would be too obvious.
The more effective strategy is distortion.
Take something genuinely evil.
Attach Catholic symbols to it.
Blur distinctions.
Collapse categories.
Then make ordinary Catholics defend themselves against the evil they already reject.
The devil is called by Christ “a liar, and the father thereof.” John 8:44.
The Catechism is even more explicit that Christian language about Satan is not merely metaphorical:
“Evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan…”
— Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2851
That does not mean every bureaucratic mistake is directly dictated by a demon.
It means Christians understand something deeper about evil: falsehood has an intelligence and trajectory of its own. Sin darkens judgment. Fear distorts perception. Ideology corrupts language. And once a lie becomes embedded inside an institution, perfectly ordinary people can participate in something profoundly unjust without consciously waking up in the morning intending evil.
That is precisely why the Richmond documents are so unsettling.
The FBI’s own later review found no malicious purpose.
Yet the product still happened.
That should frighten us more, not less.
Because persecution does not always require persecutors who twirl their mustaches and consciously announce themselves as enemies of Christ.
Sometimes all it requires is a system in which increasingly fewer people are capable of recognizing Christianity on Christianity’s own terms.
How one violent individual became a theory about Catholics
The Richmond memo did not emerge from a massive collection of Catholic terrorist plots.
It grew out of the Target 1 investigation.
An FBI analyst proposed examining the allegedly “increasing intersection” between “rad-trad” Catholics and domestic violent extremists. But the analyst simultaneously acknowledged that substantiating the idea required “finding sufficient additional evidence beyond” Target 1.
Think about what that means.
The theory existed.
Then analysts went looking for additional cases to support it.
They found two.
Not two hundred.
Not twenty.
Two.
Combined with Target 1, the supposedly “increasingly observed” phenomenon rested on three identified cases in the FBI database search described by the DOJ report.
The FBI’s own Directorate of Intelligence later tore into that reasoning.
Its Analytic Tradecraft Review said the authors had never established the baseline required to demonstrate that anything was actually “increasing.” It said the memo implied that violent-extremist ideology and the so-called “RTC” ideology aligned while failing to provide adequate evidence for the claim.
Even the Counterterrorism Division rejected the premise.
It explicitly said that “radical traditionalist Catholic” was not an FBI domestic-terrorism threat category and that it did not assess a significant linkage between such Catholic ideology and racially motivated violent extremists requiring additional FBI intelligence collection.
So this isn’t Catholics screaming “persecution!” because somebody criticized us.
The FBI’s own people concluded that the analytical connection had not been demonstrated.
And then theology itself entered the threat model
This is where Catholics should pay very close attention.
The Richmond office produced a presentation attempting to explain traditional Catholicism.
Among the characteristics discussed were:
the Traditional Latin Mass;
“conservative family values/roles”;
rejection of modernity;
hardline positions concerning abortion and LGBTQ issues;
debates over Vatican II;
religious pluralism;
the relationship between Church and state.
One slide reportedly compared forms of traditional Catholicism to “Islamist ideology.”
Now stop.
Forget party politics for a moment.
Forget whether you personally attend the Traditional Latin Mass.
Forget whether you are charismatic, Byzantine, Ordinariate, Novus Ordo, Dominican, Franciscan or the guy sitting in the back who shows up three minutes before Mass and leaves immediately after the final blessing.
A line has been crossed when the state begins constructing security categories using ecclesiology, liturgy and moral theology as meaningful markers.
Because the question is no longer simply:
Is this person preparing to commit violence?
It begins drifting toward:
What does this person believe?
What liturgy does he attend?
What does he believe about Vatican II?
What does he believe about abortion?
What does he believe about sexuality?
That distinction is everything.
A government has a legitimate interest in bombs.
It has a legitimate interest in threats.
It has a legitimate interest in murder plots.
It has no legitimate authority to decide that Catholic theological conviction sits somewhere on a psychological highway leading toward terrorism.
And eventually the FBI’s own Inspection Division essentially admitted the problem.
It concluded that the intelligence product “impermissibly considered the religious beliefs of the subjects” without connecting those beliefs to a desire to engage in violent criminal activity.
That sentence should be burned into the historical record.
Then came the “tripwires”
This is where sterile bureaucratic vocabulary starts sounding sinister.
The Richmond memo spoke of developing new “tripwire and source development” opportunities.
It proposed outreach to Catholic institutions.
It proposed involving diocesan leadership in sensitizing parishes to signs of radicalization.
And the underlying memo proposed developing sources with “placement and access” concerning violent extremists attending or showing interest in relevant Catholic places of worship and online communities.
Again, precision matters.
There is nothing inherently sinister about law enforcement warning churches that a dangerous individual may target or exploit them.
Churches regularly cooperate with police when actual threats exist.
But that is different from constructing an analytical category in which traditional Catholic communities themselves become an intelligence environment.
The memo itself admitted that there were no formally recognized SSPX-MC or SSPV houses of worship in the Richmond area, yet still discussed threat mitigation through outreach to traditionalist Catholic parishes generally.
That is exactly how categories expand.
Today the suspect is an actual neo-Nazi carrying Molotov cocktails.
Tomorrow the conversation is about his chapel.
Then the priest.
Then another priest.
Then traditional Catholics.
Then the Traditional Latin Mass.
Then abortion.
Then “conservative family values.”
Then whether Catholics possess beliefs allegedly at risk of intersection with extremism.
This is how language functions as a gatekeeper.
Before power acts against something, power usually first renames it.
The priests
The newly released material becomes even more serious here.
The Richmond Field Office opened a Guardian assessment concerning Priest 1 to determine whether he had been “recruiting and/or radicalizing” Target 1.
Remember who Priest 1 was.
This was the priest who had reportedly said the man’s racial views were crazy.
The priest who said Target 1 needed to change before joining.
The priest who said Target 1 wasn’t Catholic.
Yet the scrutiny widened.
Another Guardian assessment was opened concerning Priest 2.
Records describe examination of sermons, international travel information, flight and credit-card information, airport surveillance, CBP interactions and FBI surveillance after his return from travel.
And how did the assessment concerning Priest 1 end?
The FBI record states:
“No identified threat to national security was found at this time.”
It further said no allegation of federal violation or national-security threat had been identified.
That does not establish that every investigative step was illegal.
It does establish that Catholic clergy became objects of counterterrorism-related scrutiny in a chain of investigation flowing outward from a genuinely dangerous individual whose priest had already rejected his extremist ideas.
That should sober every Catholic.
The world does not hate a harmless Christianity
Here is where we leave the conference room and enter theology.
Why does Christ say:
“If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you.”
— John 15:18
Because Christianity is not merely therapeutic spirituality.
The Church does not exist to provide scented candles for the modern world.
She makes claims.
Terrifying claims.
She says there is objective truth.
She says good and evil are real.
She says governments are not gods.
She says human beings do not invent their own nature.
She says the unborn child possesses dignity before any legislature recognizes it.
She says sex has an objective meaning.
She says marriage has a nature.
She says the rich will be judged.
She says the powerful will be judged.
She says nations will be judged.
She says every intelligence agency, president, king, billionaire, activist, professor, bishop, journalist and ordinary sinner will eventually kneel before Jesus Christ.
“For it is written: As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me.” Romans 14:11.
That is why authentic Christianity can never be completely domesticated.
The state may tolerate religion as private sentiment.
The market may tolerate religion as a consumer identity.
The culture may tolerate religion as heritage.
Academia may tolerate religion as anthropology.
But the Catholic Church claims something far more dangerous:
Jesus Christ is Lord.
Not metaphorically.
Not privately.
Not as one lifestyle among many.
Lord.
And if Christ is Lord, Caesar isn’t.
If Christ defines man, ideology doesn’t.
If Christ defines marriage, government doesn’t invent it.
If Christ is Truth, truth cannot be manufactured by consensus.
That is the explosive core of Christianity.
“Upon this rock I will build my church”
Christ did not leave behind a vague movement of inspirational spirituality.
He said to Peter:
“Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
— Matthew 16:18, Douay-Rheims
Notice the imagery.
Christ does not promise the Church applause.
He promises survival.
Why?
Because there will be gates of hell.
There will be conflict.
There will be opposition.
There will be centuries when kings attempt to dominate her.
Centuries when revolutionaries attempt to destroy her.
Centuries when dictators imprison her priests.
Centuries when intellectuals announce her extinction.
Centuries when governments confiscate her property.
Centuries when mobs burn her churches.
Centuries when bureaucracies categorize her teachings.
And still:
“The gates of hell shall not prevail.”
Not because Catholics are brilliant.
God knows history disproves that.
Not because clergy are always courageous.
History disproves that too.
Not because Catholic institutions cannot become corrupt.
They can.
The Church survives because she belongs to Christ.
Her indefectibility rests ultimately upon Him.
The dragon still hates the Woman
The Apocalypse gives us another image.
After depicting the Woman and the Dragon, St. John writes:
“And the dragon was angry against the woman: and went to make war with the rest of her seed, who keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”
— Apocalypse 12:17, Douay-Rheims
Catholic tradition sees profound Marian and ecclesial dimensions in the Woman of Revelation 12.
And the image tells us something essential:
The devil hates what belongs to Christ.
He hates sanctity.
He hates the Eucharist.
He hates Our Lady.
He hates priesthood.
He hates confession.
He hates marriage.
He hates children.
He hates the human body properly understood.
He hates authority when authority serves truth.
He hates freedom when freedom means the capacity to choose the good.
Above all, he hates the Church because Christ established her as an instrument through which sinners are continually ripped from his grasp by grace.
Every baptism is stolen territory.
Every confession is a jailbreak.
Every worthy Holy Communion is union with the King Satan rebelled against.
Every priest pronouncing absolution is exercising an authority hell cannot reproduce.
Every obscure old woman fingering Rosary beads in the back of a church is participating in a war larger than nations.
That is Catholicism.
No wonder hell hates it.
But be very careful what we mean by “the world”
Christ’s use of “world” cannot be reduced to:
everyone outside the Catholic Church is evil.
That would itself be profoundly un-Catholic.
The Johannine “world” in this sense is creation insofar as it is organized in resistance to God—the fallen order of pride, lust, domination, falsehood and self-deification.
Catholics themselves can become worldly.
Bishops can become worldly.
Priests can become worldly.
Catholic institutions can become worldly.
Government officials can resist worldliness.
Atheists can act justly toward Christians.
And an FBI official who recognizes wrongdoing can be acting more in accordance with justice than a Catholic who lies about what happened for partisan gain.
That is why we must not turn this story into hatred.
We cannot fight the devil by becoming like him.
We cannot defend truth with lies.
We cannot oppose dehumanization by dehumanizing FBI employees.
We cannot condemn guilt by association and then declare every government worker an enemy of God.
Again:
“Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood.”
— Ephesians 6:12
The people involved are human beings made in the image of God.
Some made mistakes.
Some failed professionally.
Some apparently resisted the memo.
Some recognized the constitutional danger.
Some ordered it removed.
Our duty toward persons remains charity and justice.
Our duty toward error is war.
This is why accuracy matters
Catholics should resist the cheap dopamine hit of exaggeration.
The evidence does not prove that the entire FBI was conducting a nationwide war against every Latin Mass Catholic.
It does not prove that every person involved consciously hated the Catholic Church.
It does not prove that the White House personally ordered agents to infiltrate Catholic parishes.
The released DOJ material itself says the 2023 Inspection Division found no malicious intent or improper purpose among those who created the memo.
And yet that same internal review concluded that the document improperly conflated religious belief with violent-extremist activity and created the appearance that FBI investigative activity was being conducted on the basis of religious affiliation.
We don’t need to lie.
The truth is disturbing enough.
And Catholics should be the last people on earth willing to sacrifice truth for a narrative.
Christ did not say:
“I am the Way, and the politically useful talking point.”
He said:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
— John 14:6
Truth is not merely something Catholics defend.
Truth is Someone we worship.
The deepest danger isn’t persecution
Here is the part Catholics need to understand.
The greatest danger is not that the world hates us.
Christ already told us it would.
The greatest danger is that we become so desperate for the world’s approval that we stop being recognizable as the Church.
That temptation is always present.
Maybe if we soften this doctrine.
Maybe if we stop talking about that sin.
Maybe if we make the Cross less offensive.
Maybe if we stop speaking about judgment.
Maybe if we redefine marriage.
Maybe if we treat abortion as merely one political issue among many.
Maybe if we stop talking about demons because intelligent people might laugh.
Maybe if we stop insisting that Christ founded one Church.
Maybe then they’ll stop calling us extremists.
No.
The world does not ultimately make peace with Christianity by Christianity becoming more persuasive.
The world makes peace with a Christianity that has ceased contradicting it.
And that Christianity is no Christianity at all.
Christ Himself warned:
“Woe to you when men shall bless you: for according to these things did their fathers to the false prophets.”
— Luke 6:26, Douay-Rheims
There are things worse than being hated.
One of them is being loved because we betrayed Christ.
The Church’s path has always been the Cross
Vatican II itself teaches this—not some fringe traditionalist manifesto.
Lumen Gentium teaches that just as Christ accomplished redemption through poverty and persecution, the Church is called to follow the same path, proceeding amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God. See Lumen Gentium, 8.
That is the pattern.
Christ is rejected.
The Church follows Christ.
Therefore the Church should not be astonished when fidelity carries a cost.
The Catechism likewise teaches that the Church’s pilgrimage will not culminate in worldly triumph but in a final trial in which the mystery of iniquity will confront believers with religious deception. CCC §§675–677.
That does not mean the Richmond FBI memo is “the final persecution.”
Do not cheapen eschatology like that.
It means the incident belongs to a theological pattern Christians have always known:
the kingdom of God advances through the Cross, not by escaping it.
The irony is almost perfect
The FBI feared that extremist individuals might exploit Catholicism.
Fine.
That is possible.
Any religion, political ideology, hobby, social-media platform or community can be exploited by disturbed people.
But the Catholic answer to violent extremism is not less Catholicism.
It is more actual Catholicism.
Teach the man that every human being possesses dignity.
Teach him that racism is sinful.
Teach him that murder cries to heaven.
Teach him that hatred corrodes the soul.
Teach him that vengeance belongs to God.
Teach him that he cannot baptize his political rage and call it holy.
Take him to confession.
Teach him to fast.
Teach him humility.
Put him before the Blessed Sacrament.
Give him St. Francis instead of fascism.
Give him the Beatitudes instead of racial ideology.
Give him the Crucifix and ask him whether the God bleeding naked for His enemies looks like his racial fantasies.
The priest in this case appears to have been doing something closer to that.
Target 1 needed to change before becoming Catholic.
That is evangelization.
The world says:
Your religion may be radicalizing him.
The Church says:
No. He needs conversion.
Those are not the same thing.
And that may be what the world understands least
Catholicism is radical.
Not in the FBI sense.
In the literal sense.
Radix.
Root.
The faith goes to the root of man.
It tells the racist he must repent.
It tells the pornographer he must repent.
It tells the abortionist he must repent.
It tells the corrupt politician he must repent.
It tells the abusive priest he must repent.
It tells the billionaire he must repent.
It tells the revolutionary he must repent.
It tells you and me we must repent.
No one gets a pass.
That is what makes Catholicism intolerable to every ideology.
The Left cannot own it.
The Right cannot own it.
Nationalism cannot own it.
Capitalism cannot own it.
Socialism cannot own it.
The state cannot own it.
The market cannot own it.
The sexual revolution cannot own it.
Traditionalism as an ideology cannot own it.
The Church belongs to Jesus Christ.
And whenever Catholics hand the faith over to an earthly ideology, Satan has won something without needing to destroy a single church.
So what should Catholics do?
Not panic.
Not hate.
Not fantasize.
Not turn criminals into saints because they use Christian vocabulary.
Not call every federal employee a persecutor.
And absolutely not retreat.
Be Catholic.
Completely Catholic.
Know the faith well enough that some analyst’s PowerPoint slide cannot tell you what Catholicism is.
Know Scripture.
Know the Catechism.
Know the Fathers.
Know the Councils.
Know your parish priest.
Go to confession.
Receive the Eucharist worthily.
Pray the Rosary.
Teach your children.
Defend the unborn.
Love the poor.
Reject racism.
Reject antisemitism.
Reject political violence.
Reject sexual immorality.
Reject hatred.
Reject cowardice.
And refuse to apologize for doctrines Christ entrusted to His Church.
Because there is a strange confidence at the center of Catholic Christianity.
We already know how this story ends.
Not Richmond.
Not Washington.
Not America.
History.
Christ gave Peter a promise long before the FBI existed and long after the FBI is gone:
“Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
— Matthew 16:18
Governments rise.
Governments fall.
Civilizations appear and disappear.
Ideologies burn across history and become paragraphs in textbooks.
Caesar dies.
Herod dies.
Nero dies.
Diocletian dies.
The Soviet Union dies.
Every empire eventually becomes archaeology.
And this morning somewhere in the world, a priest lifted a Host over an altar and whispered words first entrusted to the Apostles two thousand years ago.
Hoc est enim Corpus Meum.
This is My Body.
That is the part the world has never understood.
You cannot finally defeat the Church by surveilling her.
You cannot defeat her by categorizing her.
You cannot defeat her by mocking her.
You cannot defeat her by infiltrating her.
You cannot defeat her by killing her children.
You cannot even defeat her when her own members betray her.
Because the Church’s life does not ultimately come from us.
It comes from Christ.
Satan knows that.
Perhaps better than many Catholics do.
And that is why the war continues.
But the promise remains.
The world hated Him first.
The dragon still rages.
The Cross still stands.
The tomb is still empty.
Christ is still King.
And the gates of hell still do not prevail.
Catholicg33k source note
The factual claims concerning the Richmond Catholic Memo above are drawn from the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2026 Richmond Domain Perspective Report and its reproduced FBI records. The report documents the memo’s proposed “tripwire and source development,” investigative scrutiny involving clergy, subsequent closure of a priest-related assessment without an identified national-security threat, and later FBI findings that the memo improperly conflated religious beliefs with violent-extremist activity.
The spiritual interpretation of those events is Catholic theological analysis, not a claim made by the DOJ report itself. Its principal sources are Matthew 16:18; John 8:44, 14:6, 15:18–20; Ephesians 6:12; Apocalypse 12:17; Catechism of the Catholic Church §§675–677, 1935, 2851; Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, 8; and Nostra Aetate, 4.
The U.S. Department of Justice Report
by the Weaponization Working Group
Pursuant to Executive Order 14147
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1459476/dl?inline
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/4-18-2024-letter.pdf