Were they concerned some rad-trad Catholic was going to strangle a modernist with his rosary beads? With leftists likening the rosary to an AR-15 last year, one could wonder. But the “they” here, the FBI, didn’t say. Truly shocking, however, is what it did recently do:
The agency recruited at least one “‘undercover employee’ to ‘develop sources among the clergy and church leadership.’”
So said Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday, related National Review (NR). What’s more, the FBI justified its investigation of “radical traditionalist Catholics” with a report by the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This effort raises a question, too:
If this has happened to Catholics, what other innocent but politically incorrect religious groups could be FBI targets?
NR reported on the story Monday:
Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, issued a subpoena demanding FBI director Christopher Wray testify and provide more information to Congress about the federal agency’s intelligence-gathering initiative targeting Catholic Americans.
…“Americans attend church to worship and congregate for their spiritual and personal betterment,” the [subpoena letter from Jordan stated]…. “They must be free to exercise their fundamental First Amendment rights without worrying that the FBI may have planted so-called ‘tripwire’ sources or other informants in their houses of worship.”
The weaponization committee demanded that the FBI turn over information related to its investigation of Catholics after a former FBI agent leaked a memo entitled, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”
Wray had disavowed the memo during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March. “When I first learned of the piece I was aghast, and we took steps immediately to withdraw it and remove it from FBI systems,” NR quotes him as saying.
“I will note it was a product by one field office, which, of course we have scores and scores of these products,” he later added.
Telling perhaps, however, is that the memo was withdrawn only after being made public.
Just as telling is that the “report relied upon information from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal-advocacy organization that has come under fire for including conservative nonprofits like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American College of Pediatricians on its list of ‘hate groups’ alongside groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Nation of Islam,” NR reported in a February piece.
To gain perspective, consider that the SPLC rose to prominence decades ago by combating white supremacist groups. With their decline, the SPLC should’ve lost its raison d’être. But organizations are much like organisms in displaying a seemingly innate will to continue living. In the SPLC’s case, perpetuating itself required finding ever more boogeymen; this meant lowering the hate group/individual-designation bar. So the SPLC adopted a standard essentially stating:
A “hater” is anyone or anything the SPLC hates.
Consequently, the organization has targeted a multitude of conservative individuals and entities — including yours truly. I was placed on its “HATEWATCH” page in 2009 for, believe it or not, using the term “lynch(ed)” in an article. (Interestingly, my targeting occurred not too long after I exposed the SPLC for using deception to scare sympathizers into donating money. Will coincidences never cease?)
As a result, the organization has been successfully sued for defamation and is currently the defendant in another such case. (Note: A must-read SPLC exposé is Harper’s 2000 essay “The Church of Morris Dees.”)
The point is that it’s hard taking today’s FBI seriously if it fancies the SPLC a reliable source.
Nonetheless, the agency’s trad-Cath investigation must be taken very seriously. What was its legitimate justification, after all? Incidents involving Islamic terrorism (e.g., 9/11) are well known, but how many such acts committed by “radical traditional Catholics” can the FBI cite?
Probably not many, if a comprehensive German study is any guide. It found that while increasing religiosity made Muslim youths more violent, increasing religiosity among Christian youths made them less violent.
Moreover, historical perspective also gives pause. As commentator Monica Showalter wrote Tuesday:
The fact that they had an informant (and who knows if it was really one, let alone confined to the Richmond field office?) puts the FBI squarely in the league of Russia’s KGB, which, after the Soviet empire collapsed, was found to have infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church like termites, spying on people going to church, listening in on confessions, driving clergymen to issue state policy pronouncements. It was an ugly period, and obviously, many Russians abandoned religion altogether as the ugly spectacle became obvious, both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Might that be the real aim of the Bidenites — to separate people from their churches, making them distrustful, and no longer wanting to be associated with them? That certainly would be convenient for the state, whether the Soviet one or the American one.
It wasn’t just the Russian Orthodox Church, either. Ex-communist Bella Dodd claimed years ago that she helped place 1,000 fellow Marxists in Catholic seminaries, and that this infiltration reached the Church’s top levels. And the highest-ranking communist intelligence officer ever to defect to the West, Ion Mihai Pacepa, claimed that he’d been part of an operation, code-named Seat12, designed to portray Pope Pius XII as a Nazi sympathizer.
Sadly, while our government once combated communism, it’s now mirroring its dark behavior. It’s for the same reason, too: Big states despise the Highest Power — because they want to be the highest power.
