First Amendment violations face renewed scrutiny.
The cornerstone of American liberties is the First Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids any state or government agency from prohibiting the free exercise of religion or abridging free speech. Continuing revelations about FBI scrutiny of conservative Catholics demonstrate that the Joe Biden administration’s FBI threatened both and then deceptively concealed from Congress the full extent of its activities.
New FBI Revelations
A letter to FBI Director Kash Patel from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) alleges that the FBI obscured its dubious investigation of traditional Catholics by concealing or deleting documents and misrepresenting how widely its controversial 2023 “Domain Perspective” memo was disseminated. The Daily Caller reported:
“Grassley’s newly-released documents show that FBI field offices across the U.S. received a memo suggesting traditionalist Catholics may be budding extremists and that the memo was not created by ‘a single field office,’ as the FBI suggested to Congress in 2023 …
“The original Richmond [Virginia] memo said ‘Radical Traditionalist’ Catholics were increasingly moving toward ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism.’ Rejecting the Second Vatican Council and preferring the traditional Latin Mass could be signs of violent extremism and white supremacy among Catholics, the document claimed.”
The memo relied on highly partisan sources, including Salon and the Southern Poverty Law Center, for its outlandish slanders. One citation in a Salon article — titled “White nationalists get religion: On the far-right fringe, Catholics and racists forge a movement” — intoned that adherents were guilty of “a rejection of modernity and embrace of patriarchal, anti-LGBTQ values.”
A second Salon piece — emblazoned “‘Traditional’ Catholics and white nationalist ‘groypers’ [alt-right activists] forge a new far-right youth movement” — recounted supposed offenses such as “protest[ing] of a church vaccine drive in Southern California [that] forced the drive to end three hours early,” “demanding a forensic audit of the 2020 election and holding a protest rally on the state capitol steps,” “counterprotests of pro-choice demonstrations,” and wearing a “style of sunglasses popularized by [alleged neo-Nazi Nick] Fuentes.”
Free Speech Under FBI Attack
All of these are perfectly legal forms of free speech in the United States. Indeed, political and religious speech is afforded the highest of protections in the Constitution. Yet the content of speech associated with a minority of Catholics was used by the Biden FBI to justify an effort to recruit informants in Catholic churches around the country to subvert followers’ free exercise of speech and worship.
The Biden FBI also incorporated into the memo a list of supposedly dangerous right-wing hate groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Among these was an obscure Catholic sect from the famously atheist state of New Hampshire called Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The SPLC labeled the group antisemitic, which is particularly ironic in view of the widespread antisemitic protests championed by far-left extremists at liberal colleges supporting Palestinian liberation and the genocidal extinction of Jews “from the river to the sea.”
In a statement to Liberty Nation News, Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Prior Brother Andre Marie, M.I.C.M., countered the claims of the SPLC:
“We have been fraudulently framed as ‘antisemites’ by the SPLC because we hold that the Jewish religion is not sufficient for salvation, that Jews — like everyone else — need faith in Jesus Christ and baptism into the Mystical Body of Christ in order to be saved … We have been instrumental in bringing Jews into the Catholic Church, which a genuine ‘antisemite’ would neither want to do, nor be effective at doing.”
Not all Catholics view non-Catholics as “unsaved.” According to this sect’s historically rooted theology, Protestants cannot find salvation outside the Catholic Church, either. Some Protestants, in turn, believe that Catholics cannot be saved. Buddha claimed that only his path led to Nirvana. Islam holds that only through the Muslim faith can people enter heaven.
Government Control of Catholics
Yet the Biden FBI, leveraging the apparent slurs of the SPLC without independent verification, became a critic of this narrow theological view to broaden its investigation and infiltration of Catholic parishes across the nation. This is government action as a theological arbiter coupled with infringement of speech liberties, a double transgression against the First Amendment’s clear proscriptions.
“We now know that the FBI under President Biden launched a nationally coordinated effort to monitor traditional Catholics as ‘potential domestic terrorists’ because his administration perceived them as political enemies,” CatholicVote Cofounder Joshua Mercer commented in LifeNews.com. “Our own government authorized the use of undercover agents to infiltrate our Catholic churches, parish schools, and even diocesan offices around the country.”
John Adams rightly cautioned, “Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion.” James Madison resolved, “The civil rights of none, shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship … nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext infringed.”
If Americans are to trust that their constitutional rights are not being infringed and the FBI is not burying them under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation for political power, Kash Patel’s FBI must unearth the full details of the Biden FBI’s anti-Catholic activities.
Dig Deeper into the Themes Discussed in this Article!
Liberty Vault: The Constitution of the United States
Liberty Vault: The Federalist Papers
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