FBI Retracts Memo on ‘Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology,’ Says It Failed to Meet Bureau Standards

The FBI said Thursday that an internal memo released by its Richmond field office last month warning against “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology” does not meet the bureau’s standards.

Kyle Seraphin, who was a special agent at the bureau for six years before he was indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, published the document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on UncoverDC.com on Wednesday, after obtaining it from a whistleblower.

“While our standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products, this particular field office product – disseminated only within the FBI – regarding racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI,” the bureau said in a statement to National Review. “Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters quickly began taking action to remove the document from FBI systems and conduct a review of the basis for the document. ”

The statement adds: “The FBI is committed to sound analytic tradecraft and to investigating and preventing acts of violence and other crimes while upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and will never conduct investigative activities or open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity.”

The whistleblower document from January 23 said the FBI’s report “relied on the key assumption that [racially or ethnically motivated extremists] will continue to find [radical-traditionalist Catholic or RTC] ideology attractive and will continue to attempt to connect with RTC adherents, both virtually via social media and in-person at places of worship.”

It adds that “RTCs are typically categorized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) as a valid church council; disdain for most of the popes elected since Vatican II, particularly Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II; and frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.”

Radical-traditionalist Catholics, the document says, “compose a small minority of overall Roman Catholic adherents and are separate and distinct from ‘traditionalist Catholics’ who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings and traditions, without the more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”

The report relied upon information from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal-advocacy organization that has come under fire for including conservative nonprofits like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the American College of Pediatricians on its list of “hate groups” alongside groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Nation of Islam.

The document notes the SPLC has identified nine “RTC hate groups” operating in the U.S. as of 2021.

“We got briefings that SPLC was not legitimate when I was at Quantico,” Seraphin told the Daily Signal. 

Seraphin told the outlet a “a real intelligence product would quote [SPLC] and say, ‘unsubstantiated.’” He added that if a document were to cite Salon, as the leaked document does, it would need to cite a separate “source on the other side.”