We are glad to hear that the FBI has retracted its now-notorious leaked memo on the threat of Catholics who worship at the traditional Latin Mass. The memo should never have been written. It is an embarrassment to law enforcement and reflective of serious problems in the intelligence community.
The Richmond office of the FBI prepared a memo on what it called “Radical Traditionalist Catholics” and the threat they posed, as a potential recruiting ground for ethnically motivated right-wing extremism. These “RTCs” were described in the memo as an extremist subset among those Catholics who reject the Second Vatican Council’s authority and who attend the traditional Latin Mass. Until recently, a group defined this loosely would include scores of thousands of people across the United States, though the memo attempts to differentiate the mere traditionalists from the “radicals.” The memo accuses such Catholics of “adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.” It contains several references to Catholic hostility to “abortion rights.” And it recommended with some optimism that containing the threat posed by such Catholics can be accomplished by cultivating sources and assets within the Catholic Church itself.
The memo is an ugly slander of a small but surprisingly prominent religious minority. The research for the memo was based on clickbait articles from Salon, the Atlantic, and a hysterical report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The FBI is supposed to have deliberately excluded SPLC’s “research” from its own documents, because the buck-raking, scaremongering organization is so unreliable.
The memo is analytically sloppy. The authors show little ability or interest in distinguishing between heated populist rhetoric — which is common in democracies — and conspiratorial intention, which is rare. By identifying traditionalist Catholic opposition to abortion or certain priorities of the LGBT community as evidence of a potential threat, it was doing the opposite of intelligence work. Careful research is supposed to narrow the focus of law enforcement on the tiny numbers of groups and individuals that are a danger. By choosing beliefs that are obliged in a religious communion of 1 billion people worldwide, and shared by billions of other humans worldwide, the report becomes a slander.
And this sloppiness is another demonstration of a persistent alienation that our intel community has from many normal features of American life. Convictions found commonly among Americans are described in this memo with lurid alarm. Millions of Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and nonbelievers who share those traditional beliefs will see themselves as potentially targeted by this memo, their views deemed by their own government as suspect, extreme, and potentially a threat. The memo itself and its leak will amplify conservative distrust of the intel community. Now is a good time for the FBI and other agencies to reverse course altogether.