WASHINGTON (OSV News) — The FBI “took minimal corrective action” after a controversial leaked memo discussed “radical traditionalist” Catholics, the Department of Justice said Aug. 28.
A report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group stated the FBI personnel responsible for the 2023 document, sometimes referred to as the “Richmond Memo,” have been terminated from their roles. Those firings were previously reported in June.
However, a 2024 review by the Department of Justice’s watchdog found “no evidence” of religious bias by those responsible for the memo’s creation.
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation is entrusted with the solemn responsibility of protecting the First Amendment rights of all Americans,” the Aug. 28 report stated. “History will rightly judge the Richmond Catholic Memo as a grave failure of the FBI Richmond Field Office to uphold that responsibility.”
In Aug. 28 statements released by the Department of Justice, Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel pointed to the broader Weaponization Working Group, an effort by the Trump administration to target what it has characterized as the weaponization of government.
“This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity,” Blanche said. “The individuals who developed the Richmond Domain Perspective are no longer with the Department, and our Working Group’s efforts to investigate weaponization under the previous Administration will continue.”
“Weaponization will never be tolerated at this FBI,” Patel said. “Even while those who developed the unacceptable Richmond Catholic memo under the previous administration have been held accountable, releasing information to the public about what occurred under the prior regime is an important part of the process. I want to thank the Weaponization Working Group for their partnership as well as Attorney General Todd Blanche for his leadership addressing these abuses and making sure they never happen again.”
The Richmond memo was a controversial leaked and retracted FBI document that discussed “radical traditionalist” Catholics as those who may pose threats of racially or ethnically motivated violence.
That document drew a distinction between “radical traditionalist” Catholics as “separate and distinct” from “traditionalist Catholics,” who it described as Catholics who “simply prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings.” The same FBI memo noted that “conversely, deep-seated anti-Catholicism remains a characteristic of many far-right white nationalists.” Some of the groups named in the memo are not canonically recognized by the Catholic Church, including the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary located in Richmond, New Hampshire.
However, that memo was sharply criticized as anti-Catholic and promptly retracted by the FBI, which said the memo did not meet its standards. Christopher Wray, the FBI director at the time the Richmond memo was written, was first nominated to that role by Trump in 2017. During congressional testimony in 2023, Wray described himself as “aghast” at the Richmond memo’s contents.
Documents previously released in 2025 during a congressional investigation of the Richmond memo alleged that an FBI investigation that led to the lawful arrest of “career criminal Xavier Louis Lopez” for the possession of unlawful weapons also resulted in “the targeting of his priest and an entire Catholic sect to which Lopez happened to adhere.”
However, those documents from the congressional investigation of the memo suggested that agents were unfamiliar with the Society of St. Pius X, sometimes called SSPX, which has since incurred excommunication from the Catholic Church.
On July 1, 2026, SSPX illicitly consecrated four new bishops without authorization from the Holy See, despite a warning from Pope Leo XIV, leading the Vatican to declare the group in formal schism with the Catholic Church.
The subject of the FBI investigation appeared to have an interest in SSPX, documents released in the congressional investigation suggested, and agents were seeking to understand the group and its relationship to the Catholic Church, not that the SSPX itself was under investigation.
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