CV NEWS FEED // The President of the Catholic League has sent a letter to Christopher A. Wray, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to immediately stop any existing probe of practicing Catholics and provide accurate information regarding previous targeting.
In the open letter to Wray, William A. Donohue, Ph.D. recalled that
[on] January 31, 2024, the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, Charles Grassley, and Judiciary Committee Ranking Member, Lindsey Graham, and several other senators, wrote to you regarding the FBI’s probe of Catholics as outlined in the Richmond memo.
You were to answer their questions by February 14, but apparently that has not been done.
“This issue has been festering for a year,” Donohue continued:
It was in February 2023 that the public learned of a startling memo produced by the Richmond Field Office: it revealed an investigation of traditional Catholics. On February 9, 2023, I made public the concerns of the Catholic League. “What’s next? Will it be a war on Catholics who are orthodox?”
“My hunch,” wrote Donohue, “was proven right. The FBI subsequently said that ‘mainline Catholic parishes’ and ‘local diocesan leadership’ were selected for investigation.”
For the Catholic League, it is “vitally important” that the FBI answer the questions posed by the senators in their letter of January 31. “They asked many serious questions that are of interest to Catholics nationwide,” Donohue wrote.
In the January 31 letter, the senators asked:
Why the FBI permanently deleted critical records related to the memo;
Why the FBI relied on the far left and anti-Catholic Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for information in its probe against Catholics….
Senators Grassley and Lankford have demanded the FBI to stop using the biased assessments of the SPLC in their investigations.
“This is not a subject we will ever abandon,” wrote Donohue. “Catholics have every right to know what is going on at the FBI and why they have been spied on, without just cause. Not only are First Amendment religious liberty issues at stake, so is the legitimacy of the FBI.”
The FBI in November of last year sent a reply to an April Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit CatholicVote Civic Action filed in partnership with Judicial Watch. The Bureau’s response mostly consisted of useless records.
The lawsuit was filed against the FBI and the Department of Justice after their failure to respond to a CatholicVote March 2023 request for records about a shady “FBI intelligence memo” targeting alleged “radical traditionalist” Catholics.
CatholicVote reported in August 2023 that the FBI’s investigation of Catholics in the US was not limited to one memo from a single field office.
CatholicVote President Brian Burch said then that “the FBI has finally acknowledged what we have long suspected, namely that FBI efforts to spy on Catholic churches went far beyond a single field office and a so-called rogue agent.”
On February 5 this year CatholicVote also reported the FBI and the Department of Justice made a concerted effort to illegally eliminate evidence of their anti-Catholic bias.
“According to a group of 16 Republican senators, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) deleted records pertaining to its infamous anti-Catholic memo after former agent and whistleblower Kyle Seraphin leaked it to the press a year ago,” CatholicVote reported.
In its open letter, the Catholic League encouraged Catholics to contact the FBI at public.affairs@fbi.gov
