House Republicans' Contradictory Investigations
The Catholic Church, Religious Liberty, and Christian Nationalism
Last year, I described how the US House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee, chaired by Republican Jim Jordan from Ohio, had published a report accusing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of targeting conservative Catholics as potential violent extremists, and even of spying on church members. These allegations were based on an FBI memo from the bureau’s Richmond, Virginia office describing the threat of so-called “radical-traditionalist Catholics.” These allegations led to denunciations of the memo or calls for an investigation by Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, and Virginia’s bishops, Michael Burbidge of Arlington and Barry Knestout of Richmond.
As I also noted, however, the US Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General later issued a letter that, although finding fault with the analysis in the memo, showed that the FBI had not acted with “malicious intent” toward Catholics and, for the first time, revealed that the FBI’s efforts had been spurred by actual investigations of violent extremists who were linked to traditionalist Catholic groups and who themselves had linked their extremism to their religious affiliation. The House investigation, it turns out, had played politics with concerns about hostility toward the Catholic Church while ignoring the real danger of violent extremism.
At the time, I considered the Inspector General’s report to be “case closed,” but last month the House Judiciary Committee released a second report based on over 1,300 pages of additional documents released by FBI Director Kash Patel. These documents provide further details into the creation of the FBI memo and, perhaps more interestingly, reveal that the FBI had opened an initial investigation into the pastor of a community of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a traditionalist Catholic group, in Richmond, Virginia attended by one of the violent extremists investigated by the FBI.
Although these new facts are certainly worth considering, the new House Judiciary report continues to interpret these facts through the misleading narrative that “the FBI targeted Americans for simply practicing their religion,” as the report claims in its opening line. In fact, the report never mentions the DOJ Inspector General’s letter, including its conclusion that the FBI was not motivated by religious bias, as well as the evidence used to reach that conclusion. And as Paul Moses at Commonweal notes, the House report also never mentions that the FBI’s investigation was spurred by the arrest of an actual violent extremist, Xavier Lopez, who was charged with the possession of several Molotov cocktails and other weapons and who had bragged on social media about planning a violent attack comparable to that carried out by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right extremist responsible for killing 69 people at a summer camp in 2011. Lopez had joined that same SSPX community in Richmond, and the FBI suspected he may have been attempting to recruit co-conspirators at the church; the FBI’s inquiry into the pastor was based on those facts.
The House report mentions that the FBI contacted the SSPX priest to discuss “a subject under investigation,” but does not name Lopez, nor does it explain that he had, prior to this interview with the pastor, been arrested in relation to his violent extremism, and neither does it mention that in social media posts he had linked his religious faith to his extremism and had identified the church as a place where he had found individuals with similar views. The report does mention that one FBI employee had written to their colleagues:
[U]pon asking [the priest] questions about [the subject’s] desires and plans to commit violence, [the priest] became very uncomfortable and started incoherently stuttering. He requested to speak with the church[’]s leadership and attorneys before continu[ing] to provide any more information.
The FBI interpreted this response as potentially suspicious, and the pastor’s later decision to cut off contact with the FBI while continuing to meet with Lopez when the latter was in prison fueled those suspicions. They eventually initiated an “investigative assessment” of the pastor, the process of following up on leads to determine whether a formal investigation of an individual is justified. FBI agents in Richmond contacted FBI offices in Louisville and London to check if they had any relevant information about the priest, although it appears that the Richmond agents concluded that there was no reason to formally investigate the priest. The House report interprets the FBI’s response as nefarious and concludes that “there appeared to be no legitimate law-enforcement purpose for investigating this priest,” but this ignores the FBI’s concern that Lopez may have established relationships with co-conspirators in carrying out a violent attack prior to his arrest.
As Moses points out, the priest’s cold response to the FBI, and his desire to speak with his superiors, likely reflected a desire to respect the ministerial privilege of confidentiality, which in the Commonwealth of Virginia applies to all spiritual guidance and not just what is shared in a confessional. The FBI agents misinterpreted this policy, believing the priest’s conversations with Lopez weren’t privileged because Lopez was not formally a member of the church (he wasn’t baptized and hadn’t completed his catechetical training). This is surely an important mistake, but it’s also not evidence that the FBI was targeting the priest for his religious beliefs, as alleged in the House report. As with the House’s original investigation into the FBI memo, this more recent report on the FBI’s interactions with an SSPX is a brazen effort to justify a predetermined, misleading conclusion while ignoring key facts.
This blatant disregard for facts in a purportedly investigative effort is nothing new. The same tactic has been used, for example, in the repeated efforts to discredit the investigation of connections between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. The details of Russia’s hacking efforts and of contacts between Trump campaign figures like George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone with individuals tied to Russia’s efforts to interfere in the election are well established, even if these Trump associates’ complicity in any of the crimes committed by Russian intelligence officers was never proven. But those facts have repeatedly been treated as if they don’t exist. Of course, President Trump himself has frequently referred to the investigation as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” and in the past called into question whether Russia had indeed hacked Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and various offices of the Democratic Party. Special Prosecutor John Durham’s inquiry into the opening of the Trump-Russia investigation was premised on the notion that the latter was the result of a conspiracy between the FBI, the US intelligence community, and the Clinton campaign, and more recently Attorney General Pam Bondi has opened a grand jury investigation based on the same false premise and the obvious misreading of documents, what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has called a “seditious conspiracy” on the part of the Obama administration. These and other efforts to re-write history by ignoring inconvenient facts are certainly one of the signs of the times.
But the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the FBI handling of “radical-traditionalist Catholics” must also be placed together with the House Homeland Security Committee’s ongoing investigation of more than 200 nongovernmental organizations, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Catholic Charities USA, for allegedly “facilitating illegal activity” by migrants entering the United States, an investigation launched this June. The USCCB and other religious organizations targeted by the probe have claimed that the investigation is a violation of their religious freedom, but it’s also an ideologically-driven effort to undermine organizations offering humanitarian assistance under the cover of investigating supposed illegal activity.
The flimsiness of the allegations was made clear in a July 16 hearing before the Homeland Security Committee. For example, Julio Rosas, a journalist for Blaze Media called as an expert witness, noted:
The NGOs located along the border were often the first place processed migrants went to after being released by Border Patrol. These organizations helped the Biden-Harris administration avoid the bad optics of released migrants having to be on the street due to the large volume of overcrowding in certain sectors. Even with those efforts, the mass overcrowding still resulted in people sleeping on the streets, sometimes during the winter.
“Ultimately, the goal of these NGOs was to get people to their desired destination within the United States and get them settled in, even though their legal status was far from being secured.
It’s not at all clear why providing food and shelter to migrants as they seek to “settle in” and wait for the proceedings to determine their legal status unfold is suspect. Another witness, Mike Howell, the president of an organization called the Oversight Project, summarized the allegation:
Simply put—under the Biden administration’s open border policies, the government could only do so much to facilitate mass illegal migration, welcome the illegal aliens to the United States, and move them around the country. It needed help and open borders organizations jumped at the opportunity to fill the void.
Apparently the USCCB, Catholic Charities, and other organizations are accomplices in what the Committee staff refer to as a scheme to “work with Democrat officials and open-borders advocates to advance a pro-illegal immigration agenda.” Never mind that the Catholic Church in the United States has been providing similar assistance to immigrants in cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco since at least the nineteenth century. And never mind that, as Rosas obliquely pointed out in his testimony, the majority of these migrants are asylum seekers whose legal status has yet to be determined.
But what I’m most interested in is the fact that, on the one hand, the Republican House majority is decrying the supposed victimization of US Catholics by FBI agents investigating a violent extremist affiliated with a fringe, far right Catholic group, while at the same time engaging in a politicized investigation of the US bishops themselves and the US Catholic Church’s charitable arm for carrying out the corporal works of mercy enjoined by our faith. What is going on here?
Of course, at one level, the answer is rank partisanship. But something deeper is going on, as well. As theologian Bryan Massingale points out in a recent episode of the Commonweal podcast, a certain segment of US Christians, including some Catholics, have re-defined the notion of religious liberty to mean the privileging of a certain form of Christianity—in essence, the liberty of these Christians to see their religious beliefs embodied in society’s laws and norms—rather than a principle protecting the freedoms of all religious believers and nonbelievers alike (one only needs to ask if the House Republicans would be just as incensed if the FBI had looked into an imam after a member of his mosque had been arrested for making and hoarding bombs to see Massingale’s point). Massingale links this understanding of religious liberty to the broader phenomenon of Christian nationalism.
The House Republicans’ seemingly contradictory attitudes toward Catholics can then be understood in this context. The Republicans’ investigations serve to privilege groups like the SSPX and less radical traditionalist Catholics who tend to be more sympathetic to some form of Christian nationalism while undermining religious groups that embody a different vision of public faith. This dynamic puts the US Catholic bishops in a difficult position. The bishops are understandably sympathetic to a view of religious liberty that acknowledges an important public role for religious faith; the presence of Cardinal Dolan and Bishop Robert Barron on President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission is testimony to this fact. But as a global religious institution committed to the notion that every human being is created in the image of God, the Catholic Church transcends the narrowness of Christian nationalism. Massingale warns that American Catholics may soon learn that the Christian nationalist understanding of religious liberty does not have room for the Catholic Church, and the House’s unjustified attack on the USCCB and Catholic Charities is an early sign of that rude awakening.