The FBI disseminated a document suggesting conservative Catholics are an emerging violent extremist threat far more broadly than previously known, according to materials released by Congress.
The FBI’s concern about “Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology” under the Biden administration was more widespread than it has admitted publicly, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said in a Monday letter to the FBI. Grassley’s newly-released documents show that FBI field offices across the U.S. received a memo suggesting traditionalist Catholics may be budding extremists and that the memo was not created by “a single field office,” as the FBI suggested to Congress in 2023.
Grassley also found that the bureau was drafting a second document about Catholics before it retracted the first one amid backlash from Congress.
The document, originally from the FBI’s Richmond field office, “was widely distributed to over 1,000 FBI employees across the country before it was publicly disclosed by a whistleblower in 2023,” Grassley’s office said in a Tuesday press release.
BREAKING: The Biden FBI’s memo suggesting trad Catholics are an emerging violent extremist threat was sent to more than 1,000 bureau employees across the country, Sen. Grassley’s office says. https://t.co/y3sSTOY5kt
— Hudson Crozier
(@Hudson_Crozier) June 3, 2025
The documents Grassley obtained showed that the FBI Richmond office worked with offices in Portland, Ore., Milwaukee, and Louisville to create its memo. Grassley said this raises questions about former FBI Director Christopher Wray’s 2023 testimony to Congress that the memo was “a single product by a single field office.”
One Richmond FBI analyst investigating Catholicism claimed that some Catholic lifestyles, including “[c]onservative family values/roles,” were “[c]omparable to Islamist ideology,” according to Grassley.
The FBI declined to comment to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The original Richmond memo said “Radical Traditionalist” Catholics were increasingly moving toward “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism.” Rejecting the Second Vatican Council and preferring the traditional Latin Mass could be signs of violent extremism and white supremacy among Catholics, the document claimed.
The memo called for the FBI to develop “sources” within Catholic churches to report on their congregants.
The FBI tried to back up its claims by citing materials from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing activist group widely discredited for portraying mainstream conservatives as part of “hate” groups.
Grassley also released a draft memo, saying the FBI had planned to distribute it to the entire agency before it retracted the Richmond document. The draft memo said that violent extremists’ interest in indoctrinating Catholics “is likely to increase over the next 12 to 24 months in the run-up to the next general election cycle.”
“It is unknown if priests or other parishioners within certain [Radical Traditionalist Catholic] communities are recruiting or radicalizing members or individuals,” the draft memo said.
Grassley’s letter asks FBI Director Kash Patel to “further search FBI records” on the matter and provide them to his office.
“I look forward to continuing to work with you to restore the FBI to excellence and prove once again that justice can and must be fairly and evenly administered, blind to whether we are Democrats or Republicans, believers or nonbelievers,” Grassley wrote to Patel.
The White House established a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” in the federal government in a February executive order, which referenced the Richmond FBI memo as evidence of the Biden administration’s “egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians.”
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