The United States Department of Justice has this week released the most damning report to date on the FBI’s anti-Catholic memo from Richmond. The document, prepared by the Weaponization Working Group created by the Trump Administration, confirms with more than 1,800 pages of internal records what many Catholics denounced from the very first day and what the Biden Administration tried to downplay: the FBI treated traditional Catholic faith as a suspicious ideology, spied on innocent priests, and, when the scandal came to light, protected, comforted, and even rewarded those responsible.
Priests surveilled as if they were terrorists
The report reveals for the first time the true scope of the operation. Under the direction of Christopher Wray, the FBI opened files on two Catholic priests linked to the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X (FSSPX) and its circle. One of them had his flights and credit card movements tracked in January 2023. The Boston office even conducted physical surveillance at the airport, and Customs and Border Protection agents questioned him twice and searched his phone.
The result of this entire operation? None. Days after the memo was leaked to the press in February 2023, the FBI quietly closed both investigations, finding “no identified threat to national security” and “no allegation of federal violation.” Two priests treated as terrorism suspects for the crime of wearing a cassock and celebrating the traditional Mass.
A theory fabricated from nothing
The origin of it all was a case that had nothing to do with the Church: a violent individual investigated since 2020 for his racist posts, in whose home Molotov cocktails and weapons were found. The man had attended some catechism classes at an FSSPX chapel in Richmond, whose pastor—the same one later investigated—told the FBI that the individual was not Catholic, was not a member of the parish, and had never gone to confession, and that his “outlandish ideas about race” would have to change before he could even consider entering the Church.
With that single case, analysts in Richmond rushed to build a theory about the “growing intersection” between traditional Catholics and violent extremism. They searched FBI databases for more examples and found only two: one of them, a deceased individual whose supposed link to traditionalism came from a dossier by the Anti-Defamation League. The Department of Justice report itself states plainly: the investigation found “nothing linking Catholics, or groups not in full communion with the Catholic Church, to domestic extremism.”
It didn’t matter. An internal presentation titled “Overview of Traditionalist Catholicism” went so far as to flag attachment to the traditional Latin Mass, “conservative family values,” opposition to abortion, mass immigration, and the LGBT agenda as elements of a supposedly dangerous ideology, and compared traditionalist Catholicism to “Islamist ideology.” All of this was uncritically supported by the blacklists of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the progressive organization that labels Catholic and pro-life groups as “hate groups.”
Priests as informants and parishes as targets
The final memo, issued internally on January 23, 2023, contained perhaps the most chilling proposal: to develop “approaches” to traditional Catholic parishes to turn church leaders into “tripwires,” that is, informants who would report suspicious activities by their own faithful. Beneath that passage were listed four specific churches as potential targets. The chief attorney of the Richmond office reviewed the document and saw no problem “as long as the product remained internal.” No one in the entire review chain raised a single constitutional objection.
The cover-up: praise, hugs, and “exemplary” evaluations
If drafting the memo was a scandal, the reaction of the Biden FBI leadership after its leak was even more so. While Wray testified before Congress that he was “horrified” and claimed it was “a single product from a single office”—something later investigations disproved by documenting the involvement of multiple offices—behind closed doors the opposite occurred:
- An analyst continued “tweaking” the memo more than a month after headquarters ordered it deleted from the systems. “I’ve spent the day tinkering with the Domain Perspective,” he wrote on March 17, 2023, attaching a list of “major changes” and “areas where we could tweak further.”
- Although the FBI’s Inspection Division concluded that the authors had violated FBI standards and shown poor professional judgment, and ordered them reprimanded, Richmond leadership openly defended them. In a July 2023 meeting, the deputy chief of the office declared: “There are no underperforming employees in this room.”
- The office chief even apologized… to the authors of the memo. When an analyst wrote that she felt “terribly” about what her colleagues were going through, the supervisor responded: “There’s nothing to apologize for.” In another general meeting, it was said of them that “they didn’t deserve this,” and the office arranged psychological support for those involved and their families due to congressional attention.
- At the close of fiscal year 2023, the employees who drafted, reviewed, and approved the memo received positive performance evaluations, ranging from “Consistent” to “Exemplary.”
This is the portrait of “accountability” under the Biden Administration: the bureaucracy that spied on innocent priests was coddled, protected, and rewarded. It is worth recalling that the Biden Justice Department’s inspector general concluded in 2024 that there was “no evidence” of religious bias in the authors of the memo, a conclusion the new report exposes as false.
Now yes: dismissals and documents brought to light
The contrast with the current Administration is total. In compliance with Executive Order 14147, signed by President Trump on January 20, 2025, to dismantle the political weaponization of federal agencies, those responsible for the memo have been dismissed from the FBI. Attorney General Todd Blanche has also partially lifted privilege over the internal documents so that any citizen can verify for themselves what was done.
“This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills activity protected by the First Amendment. The individuals who produced the Richmond Domain Perspective are no longer with the Department, and the efforts of our Task Force to investigate weaponization under the previous Administration will continue,” Blanche stated.
“Weaponization will never be tolerated in this FBI,” added the agency’s director, Kash Patel. “While those who produced the unacceptable Richmond Catholic memo under the previous administration have been held accountable, making information about what occurred under the previous regime public is an important part of the process.”
Deputy Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward, Jr. summarized the heart of the matter: the Richmond memo was “a clear abuse of power, directed against conservative and religious beliefs that displeased government agents lacking necessary oversight.”
The report itself concludes with a phrase that deserves to go down in history: “History will rightly judge the Richmond Catholic memo as a grave failure of the FBI’s Richmond office in its duty to protect the First Amendment rights of all Americans.” A failure, one might add, that was not an isolated accident, but the symptom of an Administration that viewed Catholics faithful to Tradition as internal enemies to be watched.