The U.S. Government Is Targeting Its Heretics

How the FBI investigation of traditional Catholics reveals religious undertones within our government's ethos.

It has been revealed that it wasn’t just one rogue FBI field office that was targeting traditional Catholics, as was previously claimed, but rather was much more widespread. This revelation comes about after a less-redacted document was finally sent to the House Judiciary Committee.

We now know that these FBI investigations were underway from Richmond, VA to Portland, OR, and all the way to California. Those places were mentioned by name in the report. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suspect that this was a nationwide effort.

Since the new report became public, committee chairman Jim Jordan has asked FBI Director Wray to amend his July testimony and explain the complete nature of the FBI investigation into traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists. This document was only finally made available to the Judiciary Committee after a subpoena was issued, showing the FBI’s contempt for the oversight.

The document defined “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as those who attend a Latin Mass, and said that they may adhere to “anti-semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology”. According to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the FBI used leftist news sources to justify continuing their investigations. That makes sense, for those who attend Latin Masses tend to revere tradition, and thus align on the right side of the political spectrum — making them white supremacists in the eyes of the average leftist news analyst.

The unspoken question is really: Are traditional Catholics a threat to the government and to the cultural status quo? To that, one could actually say yes. No, they’re not going to start committing acts of violence and terrorism, but they absolutely reject the depraved system of ‘morality’ of modernity. They don’t believe that people should identify themselves by their vices or perversions, as in the case of the “LGBT community”. They are not okay with mutilations of healthy body parts. They do not condemn white people with some kind of collective guilt, and place upon their shoulders every injustice of society.

Their values are rooted in timeless truths, and ultimately in God. That can make them unyielding, which they consider a virtue and the government considers a threat. They prioritize the family unit, shun sinful actions that undermine it, and encourage a self-denial that means striving beyond one’s primal urges. (Modernity asserts that we should live animalistically, embracing every urge, with no need to resist temptations or reach for a higher good, chasing after sex and food before finally dying without purpose.)

In this way, it would seem that traditional Catholics (and really, all practicing Catholics), represent a potential cultural clash with the modern world and the current system (even when the government is officially headed by a self-identified Catholic). Of course, it’s not intrinsically evil to adopt different cultural views from the dominant regime. But the persecution of Catholic communities (even placing informants therewithin) shows how the government has embraced modernist ideology in a religious way.

These government agencies don’t see their own political views as potentials among many others — but as self-evidently right, with those who deny them as gravely immoral. Therefore, in their view, it’s not that you oppose the identification of oneself with one’s vices, it’s that you’re “anti-LGBT”. It’s not that you oppose the importation of those from foreign cultures because you have a culture that is worth protecting, it’s that you’re a “white supremacist”. And so on.

The irony is that the secular ideologues pulling the government strings are participating in a religious crusade of their own making. Their stance is not simply defensible, preferable, or true—it is self-evidently morally good, superior, and obligatory. Faithful Catholics who disagree are not simply in error or misguided but are purposefully wicked and must be stopped and punished. This state-sponsored secular ideology embraces the religious tropes of creed, sacrament, initiation, and apocalypse, deploying them in a secular jihad against the infidelities and infidels of faithful Catholicism.

“The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C. S. Lewis

As the disparity increases between the government’s moral position and that of Christendom, we can expect more instances of persecution. At the same time, the need for strong, resilient Christian communities will increase, to resist the embrace of the evils that are being promoted as good, and to protect one another from the persecutions.