Biden’s FBI Spied on Priests for Being Too Catholic

The Justice Department just confirmed what many Americans suspected all along. Under the Biden administration, the FBI wasn’t just watching criminals. It was watching Catholics. Not the Sunday-and-Easter crowd, mind you, but the real deal. The ones who attend Latin Mass, oppose abortion, and haven’t quite gotten the memo that traditional family values are supposed to be embarrassing now.

Thursday’s report from the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group laid it all out. More than 1,800 pages of internal documents prove that FBI agents in Richmond compiled an assessment linking conservative Catholic beliefs to violent extremism. They actually put pen to paper and decided that attending the Traditional Latin Mass might be a warning sign. That rejecting modernity could indicate dangerous tendencies. That believing what the Catholic Church has taught for two thousand years might make you a threat.

Two priests got the full treatment. The FBI monitored their travel. Tracked their communications. Investigated them like they were running a terror cell instead of saying rosaries and hearing confessions. And you know what the bureau found after all that surveillance? Nothing. Zero connection to criminal activity or violent extremism. Just priests being priests.

Here’s where it gets worse. The FBI built this entire assessment on garbage sources. They relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that’s made a cottage industry out of labeling mainstream conservative groups as hate organizations. They pulled in foreign intelligence materials without bothering to verify credibility. Basic investigative work got tossed aside because the narrative was too compelling to fact-check.

Internal FBI reviews eventually caught on. Officials admitted the Richmond assessment wrongly mixed Catholic doctrine with violent extremism. They acknowledged it failed to consider First Amendment protections. That’s government speak for “we trampled on religious liberty and we know it.” But did anyone face consequences? Not under the previous administration. The people who produced this document got positive performance reviews. Richmond office officials kept defending their work, even refining it after the document was supposedly removed from FBI systems.

Think about what that means. Federal agents identified American citizens as potential threats based solely on their religious practices, got caught, and then doubled down. This wasn’t an accident or an isolated incident. This was institutional rot.

The First Amendment exists precisely to prevent this kind of overreach. The government doesn’t get to decide which religious expressions are acceptable and which ones look suspicious. It doesn’t get to treat traditional beliefs as warning signs. Yet that’s exactly what happened, and it happened in an agency that’s supposed to protect constitutional rights.

President Trump ordered a full review of federal weaponization after taking office in January 2025. Attorney General Todd Blanche put it plainly: “This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity.” The key FBI employees behind the Richmond document are now gone. FBI Director Kash Patel promised accountability and prevention. Those are nice words, but they come after years of abuse.

The broader question lingers. How many other Americans got flagged for holding unpopular views? How many other religious communities faced scrutiny for refusing to conform? We’re talking about an FBI that looked at citizens praying in Latin and saw potential terrorists. That should terrify everyone, regardless of political affiliation.

This isn’t about protecting Trump or attacking Biden. This is about an administrative state that grew comfortable targeting Americans for thoughtcrime. It’s about bureaucrats who convinced themselves that monitoring priests was somehow keeping the country safe. It’s about a system that failed at every level to protect the very freedoms it exists to defend.

The FBI just learned an expensive lesson. Americans won’t tolerate their government treating faith as a security threat. Not now, not ever.

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