Biden FBI Spied On Catholic Priest Who Refused To Disclose Private Conversations With Parishioner

The House Judiciary Committee this week revealed that under the Biden administration, the FBI spied on a Catholic priest who refused to disclose private conversations with a parishioner who was arrested.

FBI employees at the Richmond field office discussed the priest’s ordination, recruitment efforts, location, and credit card information through email. They also communicated with their London office to monitor him during a trip to the United Kingdom, according to the report.

They launched a “formal investigative assessment” against the priest after he refused to answer whether a parishioner had expressed “desires and plans to commit violence.” The employee wrote in an email to the counterterrorism unit at FBI headquarters that the priest “became very uncomfortable and started incoherently stuttering.”

He said the priest “requested to speak with the church’s leadership and attorneys” and “refused to speak with us any further but has continued to speak with [the parishioner] while in prison, and even attempted to visit him.”

He also incorrectly stated in his email that the priest’s communications were “not considered privileged” since the parishioner “has not completed his catechism or been baptized in the Church.”

Virginia law protects confidential communications between ministers of religion and any “persons they counsel or advise.”

“The priest-penitent privilege rightly protects communications between a clergy member and an individual seeking spiritual guidance,” the House Judiciary Committee report notes. “It is not dependent on the individual achieving certain milestones in his or her spiritual life.”

The report determined that the Richmond office’s investigation was unlawful: “There appeared to be no legitimate law-enforcement purpose for investigating this priest.”

The report, which was compiled by the Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, was issued in response to a 2023 leaked memo from the Richmond FBI field office that revealed the agency attempting to link “Radical-Traditionalist Catholic ideology” to violent racism and the “far-right white nationalist movement.”

It found that the Richmond office was gathering intelligence on “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics “(RTC), a group which, the committee notes, FBI staff couldn’t even define.

A presentation titled “Traditionalist Catholicism Overview” outlined their “core ideology and beliefs.”

“Core concepts” included the Traditional Latin Mass, “conservative family values/roles,” a “rejection of modernity,” and a “tendency toward isolationism.”

It alleged that radical Catholics’ main tenets include the “belief that mainline Catholicism is illegitimate” and were accused of holding “hardline positions on abortion, LGBTQ matters, and interreligious dialogue.”

It also claimed that RTC contains “apocalyptic overtones,” “rigid fundamentalism [and] integralism,” and an “undertone of antisemitism.”

In its information gathering, the FBI used “politically biased and anti-Catholic source material,” the report notes. Many of the articles they cited openly accuse Catholics of being white supremacists. One article titled “The Catholic Church has a Visible White Power Faction” from Sojourner, a progressive Christian publication, was taken down at one point because of misleading statements that editors claimed “called into question the entire substance of the article.”

The FBI also relied heavily on the Southern Poverty Law Center, a “far-left, anti-religion group that focuses on labeling conservative leaning groups as ‘hate’ groups.” The SPLC considers groups like Focus on the Family, a global evangelical ministry widely popular in Christian circles, to be hate groups for opposing LGBTQ and abortion.

“The FBI analysts who developed the Richmond memorandum relied on literature with an inherent prejudice against people of faith and those with widely-held, deeply personal views of the sanctity of life,” the Committee notes.

Though former FBI director Christopher Wray minimized the significance of the 2023 memo, saying that it was a single product of a single office, the committee found that the Richmond office was working with FBI headquarters and that its “religious liberty abuses were more widespread than the FBI initially admitted and led the public to believe.”

Employees worked with FBI headquarters to develop a “Strategic Perspective Executive Analytic Report” for external use. They pitched the project to headquarters in December 2022, a month after the memo was created. It was later abandoned after the memo was leaked to the public.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said in a statement to the Catholic News Agency that lawmakers “knew the Biden-Wray FBI was targeting Catholics, but new documents obtained by the committee — thanks to the leadership of FBI Director [Kash] Patel — shows that it was worse than anyone thought.”

“Contrary to Director Wray’s statements, the targeting of Catholics went beyond the Richmond Field Office and extended not to just offices across the country but around the world.”