Here’s Right Way to Deweaponize FBI

FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin revealed in February the existence of a memorandum within the FBI’s field office in Richmond, Virginia, that labeled Catholics as potential domestic terrorists. Last Monday, almost a full year after Seraphin’s disclosure, the House Judiciary Committee released a report on it.

The House committee’s report, titled “The FBI’s Breach of Religious Freedom: The Weaponization of Law Enforcement Against Catholic Americans,” details how the FBI “abused its counterterrorism tools” to target Catholics. But 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” terrorists based upon the existence of one criminal case involving a man who self-described as such a Catholic. The FBI’s version of the facts, detailed in an “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 intelligence note offers no history or example of political violence associated with conservative Catholics who prefer the 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.

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