See all the latest videos on conservative politics, culture, and faith, plus articles patriots need to read at Discern.tv. (RealClearPolitics)—FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin revealed in February he 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.
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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.”
Mike Lindell Auctioning Off Equipment, Subleasing Manufacturing Space After Attacks From Multiple Angles 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 House Judiciary Committee also fails to address the most fundamental issue posed by the FBI’s abuse of Catholics’ civil liberties. The FBI labeled an amorphous and impossibly ill-defined faith community as potential terrorists without pointing to a single historical or current example of a “radical-traditionalist Catholic” associated with any form of political violence, the preeminent and unnegotiable element required by the domestic terrorism statute (18 U.S.C. § 2331).
No political violence = no domestic terrorism. Contrast this to the Black Lives Matter riots that engulfed the United States in the summer of 2020. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project filed a federal lawsuit to force the FBI to provide evidence that the government conducted any investigation of BLM during that season of political violence and domestic terrorism. To date, the bureau has produced no such evidence.
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