EWTN News portal reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has fired several agents connected to a 2023 memo targeting “radical-traditionalist” Catholics in Virginia. The memo, which proposed surveillance and infiltration of Catholic communities, was withdrawn after public outcry but reveals a systematic pattern of state-sponsored persecution against faithful Catholics who refuse to submit to the conciliar revolution. This incident exposes the fundamental hostility of secular powers toward authentic Catholic faith and practice.
The Machinery of Persecution: State Surveillance of the Faithful
The leaked FBI memo from February 2023 detailed plans for “trip wire or source development” among Catholic communities at “traditional Catholic houses of worship.” This language — drawn directly from the lexicon of counterintelligence operations — reveals that the federal government views faithful Catholics not as citizens exercising religious liberty, but as potential extremists requiring infiltration and monitoring. The bureau’s own terminology betrays its animus: those who adhere to the unchanging traditions of the Catholic faith are categorized alongside violent radicals, their devotion to the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the sacraments deemed suspicious by the surveillance state.
The scope of this operation extended far beyond a single field office. Despite FBI claims that the memo was an isolated product of the Richmond office, a 2025 report revealed that multiple field offices collaborated on its production and that it was distributed to over 1,000 FBI employees nationwide. This was not the rogue action of a few overzealous agents but a coordinated federal effort to identify, monitor, and neutralize Catholic communities that maintain pre-conciliar traditions. The systematic nature of this persecution mirrors the tactics employed by totalitarian regimes throughout history against the Church.
The Theological Roots of Persecution: Christ the King Versus the Totalitarian State
The persecution of faithful Catholics by secular authorities is not merely a political phenomenon but a theological inevitability. As Pope Pius XI taught in his encyclical Quas Primas (1925), the reign of Christ the King extends over all nations and all aspects of human society: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The FBI’s targeting of Catholics who profess this truth reveals the fundamental incompatibility between the Kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of this world.
The modern secular state, built upon the errors condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), cannot tolerate the public profession of Catholic truth. Error 39 of the Syllabus condemns the proposition that “the State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits.” The FBI’s surveillance of Catholic communities flows directly from this error: the state that recognizes no authority above itself must necessarily view the Church’s claim to independence from secular control as a threat to its totalizing power. As Pius XI warned, “when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed, because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed.”
The Conciliar Sect’s Complicity in Persecution
While the FBI’s memo targeted “traditionalist” Catholics, the conciliar establishment has remained conspicuously silent in the face of this persecution. The structures occupying the Vatican — themselves products of the modernist revolution condemned by Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) and Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) — have consistently failed to defend the faithful against state aggression. This silence is not accidental but symptomatic of the conciar sect’s fundamental alignment with the spirit of the age.
The post-conciliar authorities have themselves adopted the language of “extremism” and “radicalism” to describe faithful Catholics who refuse to accept the innovations of the Second Vatican Council. The same bureaucratic mentality that produced the FBI’s memo animates the conciliar establishment’s own efforts to suppress the Traditional Latin Mass and marginalize those who adhere to the unchanging faith. The “traditionalist” label, deployed by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities, serves to delegitimize authentic Catholicism and justify persecution — whether through state surveillance or canonical sanctions.
Saint Pius X warned in Lamentabili that the modernists “aim at such a development of dogmas as appears to be their corruption” (Proposition 1). The conciliar sect’s willingness to see faithful Catholics persecuted by the state, rather than defend the deposit of faith against the errors of modernism, reveals its true character as an instrument of the very forces it claims to oppose. The persecution of “traditionalist” Catholics by the FBI is, in a sense, the logical fruit of the conciliar revolution’s accommodation with the world.
The Witness of the Persecuted: Faithfulness Unto Death
The FBI’s memo specifically targeted Catholics who maintain “traditional” practices — that is, those who continue to profess and practice the faith as it was handed down from the Apostles, through the Fathers, and by the unchanging Magisterium. These faithful souls, who gather around the Traditional Latin Mass and the sacraments as they were always administered, represent the true continuity of the Catholic Church. Their persecution by the state is not a mark of shame but of honor: “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake” (Matthew 5:11).
The conciliar sect, by contrast, has largely escaped state persecution precisely because it poses no threat to the prevailing order. Its “reformed” liturgy, its embrace of religious liberty and ecumenism, its accommodation with the errors condemned in the Syllabus of Errors — all of these make it a comfortable partner for the secular state. The FBI does not investigate communities that have abandoned the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass for a “memorial meal,” that have replaced the Church’s missionary mandate with interfaith dialogue, or that have substituted the social gospel for the preaching of Christ the King. Such communities are no threat to the established disorder.
The Deeper Pattern: From Persecution to Apostasy
The FBI’s targeting of faithful Catholics must be understood within the broader context of the Church’s crisis. The conciliar revolution, initiated by John XXIII and carried forward by his successors, has produced a neo-church fundamentally at odds with the Catholic faith. This neo-church, having embraced the errors of modernism — the “synthesis of all errors” according to Saint Pius X — has become an instrument of the very forces that seek to destroy authentic Catholicism.
The persecution of “traditionalist” Catholics by the state is complemented by the conciliar sect’s own internal persecution of those who refuse to accept its innovations. The suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass, the marginalization of faithful priests and religious, the imposition of modernist catechesis — all of these represent the conciliar sect’s efforts to eliminate the last remnants of authentic Catholicism within its structures. The FBI’s memo is merely the external manifestation of a persecution that has been ongoing within the conciliar establishment for decades.
As the Defense of Sedevacantism demonstrates, a manifest heretic cannot be the Roman Pontiff. The conciliar “popes,” having embraced and propagated heresy, have lost their authority ipso facto. The faithful are not bound to submit to their authority or to participate in their modernist innovations. Rather, they are bound to profess and practice the unchanging faith, even at the cost of persecution — whether from the state or from the conciliar sect.
Conclusion: The Remnant Endures
The FBI’s persecution of faithful Catholics, while alarming, is ultimately a sign of the conciliar sect’s failure. The neo-church, for all its institutional power, cannot extinguish the faith of those who remain loyal to the unchanging Tradition. The faithful who gather around the Traditional Latin Mass, who receive the sacraments as they were always administered, who profess the fullness of Catholic truth without compromise — these are the true Church, the remnant that endures while the conciar establishment crumbles under the weight of its own apostasy.
Let the faithful take courage from the words of Saint Pius X: “The Church is an enemy of the progress of natural and theological sciences” (Proposition 57 of Lamentabili) — not because she opposes truth, but because she opposes the corruption of truth by modernist error. The FBI’s memo, far from intimidating the faithful, should serve as a reminder that the spirit of persecution is the spirit of the world, while the spirit of the Church is the spirit of Christ the King, whose kingdom shall have no end.
The persecution of “traditionalist” Catholics by the FBI is not a cause for despair but for hope. It confirms that the faithful are on the right path — the path of the saints, the martyrs, and the confessors who have always been persecuted by the world. Let us pray for those who suffer persecution, for those who persecute them, and for the conversion of all to the unchanging truth of the Catholic faith. Ad maiorem Dei gloriam.
Source:
FBI reportedly fires agents in connection with memo on 'radical-traditionalist' Catholics (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 06.06.2026