By Monica Showalter
When news broke a few weeks ago about the FBI targeting the Catholic Church’s Latin mass enthusiasts as part of the great Joe Biden hunt for “extremists,” outrage ensured, and the bureau moved quickly to dismiss the matter as the doing of an errant field office, which put out a bum policy paper. It certainly wasn’t the FBI’s policy to target Americans for their beliefs, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified, adding that the miscreants in the Richmond local field office would be given refresher courses to put them back on the straight and narrow. Never mind that they’d committed a violation of the First Amendment rights of American citizens under the Constitution. The refresher courses would fix everything.
Well, now it turns out there was more to the matter than simply a bad policy paper from the FBI’s local yokels out in the Richmond backwoods who didn’t understand the First Amendment.
According to National Review:
As part of its effort to identify extremists in the Catholic Church, the FBI recruited at least one “undercover employee” to “develop sources among the clergy and church leadership,” Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) revealed Monday.
Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, issued a subpoena demanding FBI director Christopher Wray testify and provide more information to Congress about the federal agency’s intelligence-gathering initiative targeting Catholic Americans.
Meaning, it was more than a policy paper, it was an anti-Catholic operation that was advanced pretty far along, complete with the recruiting of at least one informant.
Who the heck was this informant for this illegal act, how’d they find this character, how did the FBI make the recruitment pitch, and how much taxpayer money was the informant paid?
Meanwhile, the leftists dominating the Catholic Church itself have been attempting to stamp out Latin mass, too — so why was the FBI trying to uselessly duplicate its efforts — or was it a government-private “partnership” here?
Those seem like valid questions for Jordan to ask as his subpoena brings Wray back to testify under oath.
We could leave it to the Catholics to sort out whether he went to confession afterwards for his misdeed, informing on his fellow parishioners for an intrusive government agency in a blatantly illegal act.
The fact that they had an informant (and who knows if it was really one, let alone confined to the Richmond field office?) puts the FBI squarely in the league of Russia’s KGB, which, after the Soviet empire collapsed, was found to have infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church like termites, spying on people going to church, listening in on confessions, driving clergymen to issue state policy pronouncements. It was an ugly period, and obviously, many Russians abandoned religion altogether as the ugly specter became obvious, both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Might that be the real aim of the Bidenites — to separate people from their churches, making them distrustful, and no longer wanting to be associated with them? That certainly would be convenient for the state, whether the Soviet one, or the American one.
Which is just astounding to consider, given the scope of this operation. Jordan has his hands full with this revelation and an urgent mission to get to the bottom of it. The U.S., according to a recent poll, is already showing signs of falling into irreligion and church attendance in many faiths is down. While the press may be blaming COVID, the state intrusion factor shouldn’t be overlooked, either. Church and faith are the social glue for the creation of civil society and the amassing of a culture of trust, the social capital of society. An atomized society dominated only by the state is a Soviet state and we all know what became of that.
This outrageous intrusion into religious freedom has got to be nipped in the bud fast. Jordan is right to be on it.