US Justice Department calls the FBI’s memo against traditionalist Catholics a “grave failure”

On 28 August 2026, a working group of the United States Department of Justice released a report concluding that the federal police took only “minimal corrective action” after a 2023 internal memo that portrayed “radical traditionalist” Catholics as liable to carry racially or ethnically motivated threats of violence. The report is blunt: “history will rightly judge” the document as “a grave failure” of the Richmond field office to protect the liberties of the faithful. Two years earlier, however, an internal review by the same department had found “no evidence” of religious bias on the part of its authors. The point thus remains contested within the very administration that produced it, and we report it as contested.

The memo distinguished these “radical traditionalists” from “traditionalist Catholics,” described as those who “simply prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teaching.” It named a group not canonically recognized by the Church, located in Richmond, New Hampshire. The federal police later withdrew it as failing to meet its standards, and its director at the time told Congress in 2023 that he was “appalled.” According to the report, the agents responsible have since left the office. The Attorney General stated that the document’s authors “are no longer at the department,” and the current director affirmed that “weaponization will never be tolerated.”

The measure of tradition

The Church has always taught that the civil power and the spiritual power form two distinct societies, each sovereign in its own order. Leo XIII fixed it beyond ambiguity: “The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, things.” The worship rendered to God according to the rite of the Church belongs to divine things. A civil power that treats attachment to that worship as a mark of dangerousness steps outside its order and encroaches upon that of the Church.

The memo is judged by this measure, and its own line condemns it: it ranks the man who “simply prefers the Traditional Latin Mass” at the edges of violent threat, making fidelity to the ancient rite a flag for suspicion. It is not for a state’s security apparatus to weigh faith, nor to hold a manner of prayer under suspicion. That the 2024 internal review found “no evidence” of religious bias does not change the nature of the act: the state made the worship of the baptized its object. Tradition judges the act, not the intentions it cannot read.

None of this is new to the Church. Christ warned His own: “you shall be hated by all nations for my name’s sake.” The faithful attached to the Mass of all time keep their place by praying as the Church has prayed, without letting themselves be defined by the suspicion of a bureau. There is here neither ground for revolt nor pretext for sectarian withdrawal, but the old command: to keep the faith just as the Church has always handed it down.

Sources. Leo XIII, encyclical Immortale Dei (1 November 1885), on the Christian constitution of states and the distinction of the two powers; Gospel according to Saint Matthew 24:9 (Vulgate); Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the First Commandment, on the worship due to God.