Papist terrorist threat uncovered

The future of the Free World, or at least its Leader, the US, is in safe hands. In a startling coup of investigative brilliance, the FBI has identified the principal source of terrorist threat in the country.

You may think that it’s mostly Muslims who fly big planes into tall buildings, blow up public transport, randomly mow down pedestrians and drive SUVs through crowds.

That only shows how antediluvian your notions are, and I’m man enough to admit mine aren’t any more up to date. To my shame, I too thought that the stock battle cry of a terrorist was most likely to be ‘Allahu Akbar!’.

Well, let me tell you, you have another think coming, and so do I. For the real terrorists aren’t necessarily going to scream Allahu Akbar as they explode their suicide vests. They are at least as likely to shout Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.

I owe this insight to an FBI investigation, and I’m pleased the Bureau displays utmost vigilance in protecting the Free World from heinous crimes. The target of the investigation was conservative Catholics in general, and especially those who prefer Latin to vernacular as their liturgical language.

Members of this group, according to an internal memo, could be identified by the rosary beads they carry. That made me consider the logistic problem of putting enough explosive inside the beads to cause serious damage. The task looked impossible, but with my characteristic humility I had to admit my pyrotechnic expertise was limited.

The Bureau’s office in Richmond, VA, took the lead, mounting spying operations on RTCs (Radical-Traditionalist Catholics, in its nomenclature). Once the group was assigned its own initials, one knew the investigation was in full swing.

Agents were sent out to spy on Catholics as they were worshipping in their churches. The spies’ task was to report on any suspicious activities and also to recruit snitches within the congregations.

The memo circulated within the Richmond field office accused such Catholics of “adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.” It especially highlighted Catholic hostility to “abortion rights.”

A few months later the country got tangible proof of the insidious activities of the RTCs. By the looks of it, they must have penetrated the US Supreme Court, coercing it to overthrow Roe vs Wade and deal a blow to ‘abortion rights’.

Moreover, that decision brought into question the very idea that a woman has a natural right to abortion. If that’s not crypto-terrorism, I don’t know what is, and I’m sure an RTC trace will eventually be uncovered.

Now, it’s only one man’s experience, but I have several champions of the Latin Mass among my friends (that’s hardly surprising because I’m one such myself; birds of a feather and all that). True enough, on the issue of abortion they share the terrorist views of the US Supreme Court, although none of them has ever been tempted to toss a fire bomb into an abortion clinic.

They also oppose unlimited immigration of cultural aliens, but one would be hard-pressed to detect a particular Catholic bias in that stand. Nor has a single one of them ever advocated solving the migrant problem by terrorist means.

There isn’t a single anti-Semite in the lot, and their attitude to LGBTQ is circumscribed by the ecumenical Christian dictum of “love the sinner, hate the sin”. None of them is a white supremacist; in fact, some of them aren’t even wholly white.

I have to stipulate that none of the RTCs I know personally is an American, and certainly not a Virginian. Making allowances for national variances and also for the limited nature of one’s own experience, I’m prepared to believe that the group that so excited the passions of Richmond’s Feds includes some nasty people who dislike Jews, immigrants and ethnic minorities.

Yet when I lived in the States, I met many people who felt that way, and not a single one of them was a Catholic. Most of them were atheists, and some belonged to various Protestant sects. However, the FBI would quickly run out of agents if it decided to investigate all atheists and Protestants as potential terrorists, even if it only limited the search to those guilty of hostile barroom invective.

If those Catholics who defy the recommendation (not an order) of the Second Vatican Council and insist on celebrating the traditional Latin Mass have one thing in common, it’s not propensity for terrorism. They are all conservatives.

Since conservatism is a character trait rather than an ideology, it affects every aspect of behaviour and convictions. Five gets you ten – nay, ten thousand – that a man conservative in his religion is also conservative in his politics, social views and even tastes in art.

Could it be that conservatism as such is seen by American security services as potential terrorism? When all is said and done, agencies like the CIA or the FBI are instruments of government policy. That turns into a potential target for investigation any group opposed to most things the US government is doing.

Since US government policies are mostly anti-conservative (the US is by no means unique in that respect), all conservative groups are automatically suspect. And conservative Catholics especially so.

Historically, the anti-Catholic bias has been strong in America. After all, the country was first settled by Protestant dissenters who hated apostolic confessions, especially Catholicism. That hostility seeped into politics: Catholic worship was illegal in 11 of the first 13 American colonies, and Catholic proselytism was punishable by death.

The Founders, with one or two exceptions, detested Catholicism. There was only one Catholic among the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence, and there have been only two Catholics among the 45 US presidents, with neither, especially Joe Biden, known for his piety.

I wouldn’t be surprised if anti-Catholic sentiments, overlapping with anti-conservative ones, played a role in the FBI investigation. Yet, to the country’s credit, when the news of it broke last year, a scandal ensued.

Christopher A. Wren, FBI Director, was dragged over the coals of the House Judiciary Committee, and he put it all down to excessive local zeal. It was “a single product by a single field office,” he explained. However, new evidence shows that traditional Catholics were targeted across the whole of the United States.

To emphasise the ideological constituent of the campaign, The Atlantic magazine, your quintessential ‘liberal’ publication, published an article whose title reflects characteristic liberal moderation: How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol. The article was tastefully illustrated with bullet holes forming the shape of a rosary.

I’ll leave my American readers to decide how all this tallies with the First Amendment. Myself, I’m just amazed that even our atheist world continues to play the religious card. I suppose ancestral resentments are too good a weapon to discard in the all-out war on conservatism.