Kyle Seraphin has a leaked FBI document that purports to show the extremism of “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics.” The document outlines opportunities for agents to recruit assets within the Catholic Church itself.
What’s astonishing about the document is the shoddiness of its analysis and sourcing. The belief that “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” are a potential threat seems to come entirely from an old report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is buttressed in the appendices with a clickbait piece from the Atlantic — about populist and hyper-masculine depictions of rosary beads — and a few more from Salon.
Christian opposition to abortion and to certain political priorities of the LGBT community are held in this report to be a sufficient basis for linking “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” to white supremacists and other racially motivated extremist groups.
The report highlights what I think is a persistent problem in analysis, which is the conflation of passionate or populist political rhetoric with dangerous extremism and active conspiracies. The former is and has always been plentiful in functioning democracies, and it is a sign of their health. The latter is rare.
In some ways, the federal side-eye falling on a minority of Catholics is a predictable outcome of the war-on-terror suspicion combined with the intel community’s and political elite’s alienation from religion as practiced in America. Maybe Pope Francis will be pleased to see the feds taking the subversiveness of Latin Mass Catholics more seriously than the American episcopate.