The memo, sometimes called the Richmond Catholic Memo or the "Richmond Domain Perspective," drew on Southern Poverty Law Center publications and foreign intelligence material without verifying their reliability, according to the report. Before the public ever saw it, the document had been circulated to more than 1,000 FBI employees nationwide, records obtained by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) show. It became public in February 2023 after Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI special agent, leaked it.
The report states that agents opened assessments on two Catholic priests named in connection with the memo, examining their travel and contacts. One was surveilled by agents from the FBI's Boston Field Office at an airport; Customs and Border Protection agents interviewed him twice and searched his phone. The FBI found no link between either priest and criminal activity or violent extremism. Investigators also found that analysts kept revising the memo even after FBI headquarters had ordered it deleted.
FBI Director Kash Patel, who pledged during his January 2025 confirmation hearing to investigate the matter, dismissed five intelligence analysts tied to the memo's production on June 5. The Weaponization Working Group's report says the personnel most responsible for the document are no longer employed by the bureau.
When the State Watches the Sanctuary
Set the acronyms aside for a moment, and look at what actually happened: a man who had done nothing but wear a collar and say the Mass was followed to an airport, stopped, and had his phone searched, on the suspicion that his faith made him dangerous. That is not a policy debate. That is a government treating devotion to Christ as a warning sign. Whatever comes of the personnel changes and the committee hearings, the deeper matter belongs before the Lord, because it touches something older than any federal agency: the ancient habit of the world to regard the faithful as a threat.
Scripture never promised the believer immunity from suspicion. The Lord told His own disciples plainly that the world would hate them because it hated Him first. The early church was watched, questioned, hauled before councils, and told to keep quiet about the name of Jesus. Peter's answer to that pressure has never gone out of date:
"Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men." (Acts 5:29)
That is not a slogan for defiance. It is the settled posture of a soul that has already decided who it belongs to. A government has the right, even the duty, to investigate real threats to the peace. But no field office, however well-meaning, has the authority to declare that kneeling before the altar, believing what the church has believed for two thousand years, is itself evidence of malice. When that line gets crossed, the church does not need to riot or rage. It needs to keep doing what it was doing before anyone noticed: praying, preaching, feeding the poor, burying the dead, baptizing the newborn.
My friend, if you have ever felt the world's suspicion for holding fast to what the Bible teaches, take heart. You are in good company. The apostles were watched too, and they did not trim the gospel to ease the pressure. Jesus said it Himself, and there is no verse that fits this hour better:
"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)
A blessing, He called it. Not because the reviling feels good, but because it proves whose side you are actually standing on. The bureaucrats will write their reports, and some of them will even be honest reports, as this one appears to be. But the church's confidence was never supposed to rest on a government's good behavior. It rests on a risen Christ who told His people, before any of this began, that they would be hated for His name's sake — and that He would be with them regardless.